For more in the review panel on Reed Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena, click here.
I am grateful to all four respondents for their generous engagement with my book. Before providing responses to their comments, I would like to summarize what I see as the primary contributions of the work. These thoughts will provide a foundation for my responses to the contributors.
In Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, I argue that possession and other spirit phenomena can be identified in the literature of ancient Israel and early Judaism, provided that biblical scholars change the dominant paradigms that we use for recognizing the literary constructions of these religious experiences. Four contributions stand out.
First, Unfamiliar Selves invites biblical studies to engage in broader discussions in the study of religion through comparison of our primary texts with ethnographic work on spirit possession practices across the world today. While several biblical scholars before me have indeed utilized comparative evidence from so-called possession studies, the most influential of these works are quite dated, and the relevant social scientific methods have since progressed considerably. In particular, the most notable existing studies of spirit possession in biblical literature that seek to employ anthropological and ethnographic resources are rooted in approaches from the previous century that have been criticized as “instrumental” (i.e., framing possession as a social tool for accomplishing something else). In contrast, I engage more recent studies that emphasize a variety of non-instrumental aspects of contemporary spirit possession practice including its functions as a system of communication, as a site of negotiation for individual and communal identity, and as a reflection of non-historiographical record keeping.
A second notable contribution of Unfamiliar Selves is that it reorients the discussion of spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible away from mapping mythologies of spirits, demons, angels, etc. and instead towards addressing constructions of human subjectivity in accounts of spirit possession. Accordingly, Unfamiliar Selves contributes to broader discussions in the study of religion concerning notions of the self and agency as well as articulations of embodiment and materiality in religious experience.
Third, in Unfamiliar Selves I employ both a comparative religious framework with a global reach as well as a careful philological method, the latter of which is more typical of conventional approaches in biblical studies. In this way, Unfamiliar Selves resituates biblical studies out of its traditionally parochial position in the academy and more comfortably in the broader study of religion.
Fourth, Unfamiliar Selves charts a route for critical scholars of the Hebrew Bible (and especially Christian scholars of the Old Testament) to avoid antisemitic and anti-Jewish readings of pre-Christian, Jewish spirit texts. Most previous biblical studies on these themes have treated spirit phenomena in the Hebrew Bible and in early Judaism as anti-pneumatic and/or as manifesting only primitive forms of spirituality, which then reach their telos in the New Testament or early Christianity. Unfamiliar Selves not only refutes these harmful trends but also demonstrates how these problematic assumptions can be present even in studies conducted outside of Christian confessional frameworks.
Rather than responding to each of my respondents in turn, my remarks below are organized topically since many of their comments are related.
First, I want to start with a few comments on method and terminology. On this point, Dr. Jokiranta makes an important distinction and asks an essential question: Why “possession”? Certainly, over the last few decades scholars have found terms like “ecstasy” or “trance” to be helpful replacements for “possession” because these terms can refer to an observable set of human behaviors. A label like altered state of consciousness (ASC) is useful in this way as well because it has the added benefit of being used cross-disciplinarily. As Drs Jokiranta and Nissinen point out (and I might add also that it is in the older work of Erika Bourguignon) in contrast, “possession” is a culturally constructed theory about how something like trance or ecstasy occurs. It is an explanation for something that, by definition, has no material evidence, and thus it is one that might be contested by other theories.
To be clear, I agree with Dr. Jokiranta that this is an essential distinction and if I had used the term “possession” in the book without attention to that methodological crux, it would have been a serious oversight. However, I believe that I do use behavior-describing words like ecstasy and trance appropriately and widely in the book. It is true that I do not use the acronym ASC very often. This is primarily because I am conscious of a postcolonial critique leveled at ASC and other related terms by some critical theorists: They point out that referring to some states of mind as “altered” or “atypical” risks normalizing those mental states most valued and refined in Western societies and conversely denigrating those that might be considered ordinary in other societies.[1]
The primary reason that I use “possession” not every time but regularly throughout the book is that, truly, what I am most interested in are precisely those cultural theories about ecstasy, trance, etc. and not just the behaviors themselves. Crucially, I want to be mindful of both the cultural theories about spirit phenomena that we read about in the Hebrew Bible and those that we as interpreters bring in our reading. This is why I am careful to say, “possession and other spirit phenomena,” in the title; I do not think that “possession” is always the best way to describe such theories when we encounter them. Sometimes spirit collaboration, confluence, consultation, etc. are more accurate. For similar reasons, most of the ethnographers and cultural anthropologists with whom I engage continue strategic use of the term “possession” in their work as well, though they also recognize its limitations.
As Dr. Lilly points out in her remarks, I remain cautious in the book of reinforcing Western models for personhood and agency in our readings of ancient texts. There is a risk of this, certainly, when using the term “possession.” But labels that might strike us as more scientific like “ecstasy” or “trance” carry that liability as well—especially when they are used in such a way as to dismiss the material, cultural, and social forces that animate such practices in a society.
Relatedly, Dr. Lambert suggests that in the book I argue for a sort of “pan-universal phenomenon of spirit possession” and in so doing, I reinscribe certain familiar tropes about notions of the self in biblical studies.
To clarify: I do not think that spirit “possession” is a universal human phenomenon. It may be that those phenomena that some cognitive psychologists label “altered states of consciousness” are a near-universal potentiality in human beings, but, as Dr. Jokiranta points out, “possession” is a particular cultural theory about ASCs that may be present in some places but not in others. Nevertheless, experiences theorized as something like possession are widely attested in human religious practice, both in antiquity and today. For this reason, I employ the category “religious experience”—to describe spirit phenomena. This is not a kind of joint world religions ‘group project’ to uncover the numinous or the sacred á la Rudolf Otto. Rather I understand the term as Anne Taves suggests, “experiences deemed religious” or, indeed, phenomena deemed spiritual in the Hebrew Bible.[2] In other words, while we cannot hope to access a person’s individual experiences objectively, we can observe the literary descriptions of those experiences, which have been treated or labeled as such in various settings.
Regarding spirit possession, we must admit that the idea that a human being can be infiltrated and influenced by another force that cannot be easily detected through our common senses is a remarkably tenacious one, which we can find cross culturally today and in antiquity. Given what we know of the spirit-filled world of Second Temple Judaism, I think it not unlikely that we would find some version of those ideas in the literature of that era.
As Dr. Lilly explains, citing Annette Yoshiko Reed’s recent book, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, presentations of spirits (and other supernatural beings) in ancient literature frequently transgress our modern critical categories—especially those of ‘religion’ and ‘science.’ By engaging the spirit phenomena in these texts, I hope to cause some analytical trouble for what Yoshiko Reed calls the “hermeneutical exorcism” that modern scholarship has conducted on these traditions.[3]
This is part of the purpose behind the ethnographic literature that I included in the book. I wanted to show some of the expansive ways that humans can think about spirit matters beyond the familiar pneumatological categories of Christian theology and the sensationalism of popular culture. By including the ethnographic literature, I aimed to mitigate against what Lambert calls reinscribing modern notions of the self onto the Hebrew Bible. I selected some of the examples in the book, for instance, from Cuban espiritismo because they model certain notions of selfhood that are at odds with traditional Western ideas. It may not always be the case that one particular ethnographic case study or another gets us closer to recovering a notion of selfhood in the biblical literature, but it can help defamiliarize us from the notions we assume to be normative.
In this way, I appreciate Dr. Lilly’s invitation to consider how post-colonial perspectives have more to contribute to studies of notions of spirits in biblical and related literature. Western scholars often struggle to engage contemporary religious communities on these themes in part because, from the perspective of modern rationalism, such claims are often readily dismissed in reductive or hegemonic ways. This is especially problematic when we consider that ecstasy, trance, and other spirit phenomena are commonly associated with minoritized faith communities and religious traditions in the Global South. The promise of adopting post-colonial perspectives in studying these materials then is not only that spirited worldviews prevalent in the contemporary global south share significant parallels to those we find in the Hebrew Bible. Post-colonial theory also navigates with more precision the fraught hermeneutical challenge of studying how religious experiences like spirit possession are constructed in many contexts, including the Westernized academy.
I will turn next to my treatment of mental health and spirit phenomena in the Saul cycle. To be clear, I do not want to diagnose Saul with a mental illness or claim that such a task is even possible. I am starting from a much humbler place. We know that combat and violence can affect people deeply for decades and that this is true cross culturally. In my reading of Saul, I follow other specialists in trauma and disability studies who have seen in him someone who could demonstrate how the long-term effects of violence and war were constructed culturally in antiquity. Thus, it is not necessary for us to find it in the text of 1 Samuel the explicit articulation that killing too many Amalekites caused Saul mental and emotional harm. We might comfortably assume that anyone killing any number of Amalekites is potentially traumatic and permanently damaging for that person—as numerous accounts from veterans and survivors of conflict zones can attest. When compared to these stories, what the Hebrew Bible calls “a harmful spirit from the Lord” that torments (e.g., 1 Sam 16:14) and what contemporary mental health professionals call Moral Injury have some remarkable parallels. Put in conversation with a third body of literature, contemporary ethnographic studies on spirit possession practices in parts of the world that have experienced excessive violence, we find that the parallels run even deeper. (For instance, I cite a very tragic study that traces high rates of pathological spirit possession among former child soldiers in Uganda).[4] The point I seek to make then is not a historical-critical claim about the mental health of an ancient figure, Saul, but rather to identify the likely literary reflex of natural, human responses to violence (e.g., PTSD or MI) in the Hebrew Bible.
I would like to close by touching on what Dr. Schwartz aptly called the ghost of Christian reading that haunts my book. Not only do I think this is an accurate and concise observation, I think it might also yield yet more fruit if we cultivate it further. One of the things I have learned about spirits from reading the ethnographic literature for this book is that apparently they do not leave you alone even after you diagnose and treat them. Rarely can they be exorcised completely. As Jesus’ cryptic saying in Matthew 12:43–45 suggests, sometimes after you think the spirit is gone, it comes back with seven friends and the eight of them together might cause even more trouble than the one did alone.
Certainly, there have been Christian biblical scholars doing what we might call biblical theology of the Old Testament, who have attempted to exorcize the demon of supersessionism from their work. A prominent strategy has been to attempt to do a biblical theology of the Old Testament in the Protestant tradition, but to do so not necessarily from a Christian perspective (or from a Jewish one for that matter), but from a pluralistic or non-hegemonic position. Yet, as Jon Levenson has shown, such an approach is problematic for several reasons.[5] Among them is this: often, those who take this tack find that their work has become a host to more demons than just the supersessionist one, and sometimes that one comes back too.
So, to return to Dr. Schwartz’s point, if I am unable to exorcise the “specter of Christianity” from my work, might there be some way, as several of the spirit professionals in the ethnographic literature that I cite say, a way to come to an understanding with it? In other words, what is that way that Christian theologians interested in pneumatology should read the Old Testament without denigrating Jews or Judaism?
One idea that I have been thinking about for a while now takes some cues from Luke-Acts. I wonder whether God’s spirit has an underrecognized role in answering that very difficult Christian question: How is it that the gentile church gets entangled in the promises that God made to Israel in the Hebrew Bible? Certainly, there are other theologies of gentile inclusion that we encounter in Christian theology. However, these typically involve complexes that are presented in the Hebrew Bible as the exclusive claim of Israel (for example, covenant or “chosenness”). Another option can be found in the Apostle Paul’s letters, from which some Christian theologians present the idea of faith as a non-particularist avenue for conceiving of gentile inclusion in Israel. Faith in Jesus, it is sometimes argued, can be achieved by anyone, Jew or Gentile. Regardless of what we are to make of that claim and Paul’s arguments in Galatians and Romans, we must admit that the subsequent interpretive history of this idea has shown how quickly harmful supersessionist and anti-Jewish theologies arise when Christian faith is set up as being a superior replacement for Jewish law.
In contrast, I cannot think of an instance in the Hebrew Bible where God’s spirit is presented as an exclusive component of God’s special relationship with Israel. In fact, across the literature of ancient Israel and early Judaism, divine spirit is consistently articulated as being a universal endowment, not just for the nations, but for all of God’s creatures (particularly in the abiding model). This, I think, is part of what the author of Luke-Acts is tapping into in that story in Acts 10 where the first Gentiles are brought into the Jesus movement through a series of spirit phenomena. In particular, I am interested in that moment in vv. 44–48 where Peter and the other Jewish Jesus-followers with him are astonished because they recognize in these Romans a spirit experience they themselves had in the entirely Jewish setting of Pentecost. While the gentiles’ apparent faith and attempts to follow Jewish law are noted in the narrative, it is the spirit experience and not those other things, which triggers the recognition. Peter sees that these gentiles are already entangled with the God of Israel.
The respondents made many more excellent points, not all of which I have the space to address and contemplate here. I can say with complete honesty, however, that this panel has given me yet more to think about on this topic, which has been, for me at least, an unending well of delightful curiosity. In addition to my gratitude to the respondents, let me also add my thanks to the Religious Experience in Antiquity section of the SBL, and especially to Fred Tappenden, for organizing this panel. Finally, I must also express my appreciation to Ancient Jew Review for agreeing to publish this conversation online so that others may benefit from the perspectives of these contributors as much as I have.
[1] See discussion in Reed Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena, Ekstasis 9 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), p. 7 n. 14.
[2] Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8–9.
[3] Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 13.
[4] Carlson, Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible, 41.
[5] Jon D. Levenson, “Is Brueggemann Really a Pluralist,” Harvard Theological Review 93.3 (2000): 265–94.