For more in the review panel on Reed Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena, click here.

The author of this book is clear about his motivation: not to leave the study of “spirit phenomena” only to New Testament studies but to open up the study of the spirit in the Hebrew traditions. This is commendable. Yet, the panelists raised questions as to what extent the project may lean towards certain Christian conceptualizations. The title promises unfamiliar selves—but the Hebrew spirit language expresses as much aspects of the familiar (living) self, extended self, or desired/undesired self. Further, the term possession may not be the best suited to Hebrew emic conceptualizations.

Why Possession?

Possession is an intrusive term and I am not quite sure why it was chosen for the book. The language of altered state of consciousness has been around in biblical studies for quite some time (e.g., Pilch 2011). In my view, it functions as an analytical category that does not draw from popular modern understanding of spirit possession (e.g., as “unexpected and regrettable,” p. 6), and I was surprised for Carlson to dismiss it so briefly. For terminology, I wish to quote my colleague Martti Nissinen (2017, 172):

The words trance and ecstasy, the meanings of which largely overlap in scholarly language, refer to “forms of behavior deviating from what is normal in the wakeful state and possessing specific cultural significance, typical features being an altered grasp of reality and the self-concept, with the intensity of change ranging from slight modifications to a complete loss of consciousness.” Of the same behavior, also the word possession can be used, but whereas trance/ecstasy refers to the psycho-physiological state of the performer, possession is a “cultural theory that explains how contact takes place between the supernatural and natural worlds”; that is, an explanation of the ecstasy as a state of being possessed by an external, usually superhuman, agent.

In this view, possession is one cultural theory of altered state of consciousness—possession is not the concept the ancient Hebrew writers use and thus may cause unwanted connotations.

Conceptual Metaphors in Spirit Language

In analyzing the spirit language, Carlson recognizes well the significance of metonymy (Ch. 3 and 4): agency, emotions, and dispositions are typically conceptualized in terms of body parts, of which ruah is one among many. The Hebrew ruah is part of the self, life-force received from God, and seat of human will (Lauha 1983). As “an internal wind” (Lilly 2016), ruah may be the health-giving force or it may be ruined and be linked to illnesses. Using human body and its experiences to speak and understand the world around us is the very basis of our conceptual thinking (Kövecses 2010).

The particular use of ruah needs to studied in each case and in each language. Languages are different. My mother tongue Finnish is a good example of the multivalence of the spirit language: “henki” is used at least in eleven ways, from a person’s life, breath, wind, to soul, spirituality, atmosphere, inspiration, ghost or demon, and so on (https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/henki?searchMode=all). To die is to lose one’s henki or be let go of one’s henki (”menettää henkensä/päästä hengestään”). Henki is closely connecting to hengitys, breathing/breath.

In her recent book, Carol Newsom (2022, 36‒47) identifies various “cultural models” to understand spirit language (in my view, these are conceptual metaphors that underlie language). She present a distinction between wind-substance in a container and wind-force-against-object. Breathwind-in-container explains the use of basic animation and life of a person; the breath is gathered up when a person dies (close but not identical to the Finnish conceptualization). Wind-against-object explains the external, charismatic divine and human co-agency, which concern special human beings, such as judges, kings, and prophets.

Carlson presents his own but related distinction between abiding spirit and migrating spirit. He notes the rough difference between the Hebrew prepositions ב and על: the preposition ב is used for spirits abiding in a person (like in a container), the preposition על for spirits causing charismatic leadership. This is indeed the case, and also causes challenges to modern Bible translators. How to translate, for example, Judg 14:6 וַתִּצְלַח עָלָיו רוּחַ יְהוָה, “The spirit of YHWH rushed on him (Samson),” or Judg 16:20 יְהוָה סָר מֵעָלָיו, “YHWH had turned from above him.” The container model, which is akin to the modern possession model (“to be possessed by spirit”), is tempting, but does not quite suit these expressions. If we do not want to give an impression that something entered Samson’s body, do we give the impression that something just hovered over his head? And when Samson loses YHWH, do we say YHWH left from him, from above him, or just left him? In addition to these, Judges testify also to other conceptual metaphors: Judg 6:34 וְרוּחַ יְהוָה לָבְשָׁה אֶת־גִּדְעוֹן, “The spirit of YHWH clothed Gideon.”

Carlson, as well as Newsom, notes that not all expressions are explained by the two above mentioned models. First, Newsom refers to 1 Kings 22 where the spirit enters the prophets’ minds, deceiving them—this is closer to the container metaphor but the container is specifically person’s cognitive organs. Secondly, persons who are full of extraordinary wisdom are filled with spirit (Newsom 2022, 45). Carlson discusses the language of being filled with a spirit under his “abiding spirit” model and in my view rightly notes how the emphasis is on being filled—the fullness—rather than the move of the spirit itself (103). This brings forward the important observation that abiding spirits are also dynamic: they and their fullness may vary, depending on the strength of the body, the state of mind, and abilities (104). Also, “pouring out spirit on someone” (119) is yet another metaphor, perhaps more to do with contagious contact than wind-force?

I wonder if the continuation or extension of this conceptual metaphor (the degree/measure of spirit) is also the quality of the spirit. Thus when psalmist in Ps 51 asks for a new and right spirit (and a clean heart) and that God’s holy spirit is not taken away from them, the opposite of the health- and success-giving (divine) spirit may not be less spirit or crushed spirit, but the possibility of evil/life-taking spirit. In parallel with the container-filled-with-spirit, there is perhaps the conceptual metaphor of container-filled-with-bad-substance. In this radical language, one’s spirit has to be replaced, not healed or added.

How radical it is, is perhaps a matter of discussion: after all, to be filled with spirit-wind is also a dynamic image, the wind that moves is “renewed” all the time. Thus while I agree on the importance of understanding this language for the shifts in viewing the moral agency and human possibilities of changing it, I think there might be room to further explore the existing metaphors.

Spirit as Other

Carlson speaks of the “spirit as other” when the language “is used to describe an aspect of the self that is nonetheless to some degree distinct” (69) and discusses several relevant examples of evil spirits and metaphors demanding strong change in the self in Second Temple evidence. Yet, here we come to the question if these other parts of the self are unfamiliar or not. Referring to Ps 51 Carlson writes: “…the psalmist has ‘othered’ an aspect of the self to such an excessive degree that is has become unfamiliar” (149). However, the psalmist says to know his sins, confess them, and pleas for deliverance. There is agency in him, and from this angle, the mere plea for renewal is demonstrating his “right” self. Another example of Carlson’s “foreign entity” (70) comes from a passage in the Damascus Document (CD12:2b‒3a): “Every man who preaches apostasy under the dominion of the spirits of Belial shall be judged according to the law relating to those possessed by a ghost or familiar spirit” (trans. Vermes 2004, 143). Person’s agency (but not responsibility!) is here partly transferred to the spirits—whether this is by the other spirit taking over, or by the person letting some part of their agency be uncontrolled and going in the wrong direction. Similarly with the spirit of jealousy (Num 5): it could be conceptualized as an other/non-welcome spirit.

In this context, I asked myself what the reader is meant to learn from the very first ethnographic example of Carlson’s book, the murder in Brookfield in 1981. The judge of this murder case “disallowed demonic possession defense on the grounds that it was unprovable and thus irrelevant” (2). What we are asking in front of the case like this and the Damascus Document is how we conceptualize human moral agency and responsibility and its limits: to what extent humans have free will, and when people can be held accountable for their actions. Then it does not matter if the spirit is from outside or within—what matters are shared rules and legal theory when a person is responsible for their actions and when not. Spirit possession is about morality, as Janice Boddy (2004) argues.

As Carlson indicates with the expression “What has gone into you?,” several states of mind are described via metaphorical expressions as if the person is “out of their mind,” “possessed,” “blindly in love”, “not themselves”—such an altered state of mind equals to the person’s endangered capacity or loss of moral judgment. We may understand criminal actions because of such states, but less seldom we accept criminal actions because of them.

Carlson makes a case for analyzing king Saul’s evil spirit in terms of mental illness, suggesting that “mental health… is a likely factor in Saul’s spirit encounters but that these phenomena alone cannot account completely for the literary presentation of Saul’s spirit experiences” (59). I do not see we have any tools to diagnose Saul on the basis of our modern categories and the literary evidence. The only thing we could do is to see if ancient evidence presents Saul as ill or something else. There surely is a metaphoric basis of conceptualizing disease in terms of unhealthy wind/breath. For example, scholars have explained the contamination from the nephesh of a dead person as contact with the decomposing body and its odor (Newsom 2022, 41). But such links are not modern diagnostic criteria.

Do We Have Possession in Western Culture?

Carlson presents ethnographic examples of spirit phenomena at the beginning of each chapter. Their purpose in the book is not entirely clear. Carlson wishes to identify criteria of spirit possession in cultural anthropology in order to see which biblical texts “qualify” (p. 72) for spirit possession. I think we rather need to compare how the modern conceptualizations of spirit possession are similar or dissimilar to the ones in biblical texts. To put it bluntly: We do not need to see what makes an angel in ethnographic data and how people describe angels in order to see which beings in biblical texts might qualify as angels. Rather, we may compare different angel conceptualizations and narratives.

Carlson rightly notes that Western models often have a buffered understanding of the self—denying permeability. But this is also changing. To which direction this should take us is another question. Carlson argues for Janice Boddy’s mundane conception of possession (72):

possession widens out from the body and self into other domains of knowledge and experience—other lives, societies, historical moments, levels of cosmos, and religions—catching these up and embodying them… it enables adherents to explore multiple refraction of order and morality; to distill lessons of history; to sift, evaluate and situate external influences; and to respond. Phenomena that we bundle loosely as possession are part of daily experience, not just dramatic ritual. (Boddy, 414)

Reading this quote out of context my first idea was that this is a normal human way of expanding experiences by imagination, literature, art, movies, and so on. Thinking of my life, for example, as consuming American and other TV series, what else am I doing than widening “out from the body and self into other domains of knowledge and experience” and sifting, evaluating and situating external influences? Thus I could object that modern Western cultures “lack popular spirit-possession and trance practices” (72). However, Boddy analyses the ways in which spirit possession appears in contexts of resisting inequalities (e.g., gender inequality) and how spirit possession forms identities and social relations, even across generations. She wishes to pose the question why the Western culture has denied such permeability of the human self, but she never defines what she means by “external powers” that may permeate the self. Carlson is up to something important in raising the issue of porous self. However, I would approach from a different academic framework. Recent cognitive science and moral philosophy talks about relational moral agency (Johnson 2014; Bruin et al. 2018; Nurmi 2023): the self is not isolated and unique but relational—towards non-humans, environment, body, time, space, materiality, and so on. Our cognition, and thus agency, is relational.

Let me take one example. Think of this famous treatise or discourse on the two spirits in Qumran Community Rule 1QS 3‒4 (trans. Hempel 2020):

From the God of knowledge comes everything that is and will be... And He set up two spirits for them so that they may walk in them until the appointed time of His visitation. They are the spirits of truth and injustice. Within a fount of light (originate) the generations of truth and from a well of darkness (stem) the generations of injustice… And because of the angel of darkness all the children of righteousness go astray, and all their sins, their trespasses, their guilt and the wrongdoings of their actions are under his rule in accordance with the divine mysteries until the time determined by Him. And all their sufferings and the times of their distress are caused by the rule of his hostility, and all the spirits of his lot obstruct the children of light. But the God of Israel and the angel of His truth come to the aid of all the children of light. It is He who has created the spirits of light and darkness and He established all actions in accordance with them…. All human generations are governed by these (two spirits). All their deeds are governed by their (two) types according to the proportions of the inheritance of each person for all periods of eternity. (1QS 3:15‒25; 4:15‒16)

Opposite to the view of autonomous self, the self here is very entangled—yet believed to be organized by God all the time. Power does not rest on the individual, not even with the community, but with God and the agents and powers God allows to act, which are mediated to human moral actions. Rather than reading this texts as spirit possession, though, it makes more sense to relate this sort of text to discussions of human agency and selfhood. As Newsom (2022) and others show, these authors were struggling with the fact that their inherited promises of renewed self (e.g., Jeremian heart knowing the law, Ezekielian heart of flesh and spirit) did not answer their experience and moral anxiety. Thus, when we are discovering the relational self, ancient texts may actually be sometimes closer in their conceptualization than a very distinct (and not very lasting) Western idea of self-sufficient, autonomous, free self.

Lastly, I raised the question if spirit possession concerns in Carlson’s view inanimate objects. Qumran Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice are famous for their description of animation of temple structures. Why was this aspect not included in the study of the ancient evidence—it could be seen to be a strong part of popular Western culture (cf. horror films).

Carlson has opened up a rich investigation that goes in many directions—and deserves to be continued. As seen by the many ideas it created, it is a spirited enterprise!

Bibliography

Boddy, Janice. “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 407–34.

Bruin, Leon de, Shaun Gallagher, and Albert Newen. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Hempel, Charlotte. The Community Rules from Qumran. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 183. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020.

Johnson, Mark. Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Kövecses, Zoltán, exercises written by Réka Benczes, Zsuzsanna Bokor, Szilvia Csábi, Orsolya Lazányi, Eszter Nucz. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Lauha, Risto. Psychophysischer Sprachgebrauch im Alten Testament: Eine strukturalsemantische Analyse von lēb, nefeš und rūah. 1: Emotionen. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1983.

Lilly, Ingrid E. “Rȗaḥ Embodied: Job’s Internal Disease from the Perspective of Mesopotamian Medicine.” Pages 323‒36 in Borders: Terminologies, Ideologies, and Performances. Edited by Annette Weissenrieder. WUNT 366. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.

Newsom, Carol A. The Spirit within Me: Self and Agency in Ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Nissinen, Martti. Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Nurmi, Suvielise. Relational Agency and Environmental Ethics: A Journey beyond Humanism as We Know It. Lexington Books, May 2023.

Pilch, John J. Flights of the Soul: Visions, Heavenly Journeys, and Peak Experiences in the Biblical World. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2011.

Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. London: Penguin Books, 2004.