Yahweh has a body, but he's still not Baal

 This is an expanded review of Francesca Stavrakopoulou's "God: An Anatomy."

God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a great book in many ways, but a nagging issue, an overemphasis on one talking point, and what I believe is an incorrect interpretation of the Book of Job in the last chapter ultimately cost it a star. I’d rate this 3 1/2 if you let me be precise. (Since we can't do half stars, and the average rating is even higher on Yellow Satan than here, it got 3 stars there, and I reserve the right to downgrade the 4-star here.)

With that, let’s dig in, including the expanded parts.

It’s easy to forget that the God of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)/Christian Old Testament — who continues as God the Father for Trinitarian Christians in the New Testament — has a literal corporeal body. Fundamentalist versions of both Judaism and Christianity of course bury this deeply.

So, too, does “traditional” critical theology. Its Enlightenment basis is as willing to explain away this fact with words such as “allegory” and “anthropomorphizing.”

Wrong move, says Fransesca Stavrakopoulou in “God: An Anatomy.”

Yahweh (she seems to hint at, but doesn’t openly embrace, some version of the Midianite hypothesis) is just as embodied as Baal or Marduk. More importantly, he’s just as masculinely male, complete with penis. As part of this, she notes that “hand” as well as “foot” is often a biblical synonym for “penis,” as in other southwest Arabian religious works. And Yahweh waves his penis. He wields it. He is procreative with it.

And — like Egypt’s Amen but unlike his Mesopotamian god counterparts — sometimes, Yahweh is a solo procreator. No Asherah or other female involved. Besides the Genesis 2-3 creation myth, Stavrakopoulou cites the story of Jeshurun from Deuteronomy, as well as passages from Job and Jeremiah. With Jeshurun being Israel, of course, Yahweh wasn’t literally seen as fathering each individual member of the nation. (OTOH, Dt. 32 reads more like an adoption and nurturing story than a birth story. Sidebar: Reading it with fresh eyes, it’s clearly a story written eons after Israel’s purported escape from Egypt.)

The nagging issue? Probably at least 80 percent of endnotes refer to Bible passages. FOOTnotes — using that word correctly — would have been MUCH more convenient. (In-line citations, common at least in US biblical criticism writings, would have been better yet.) In a certain number of cases, I was familiar with the verse, even in Stavrakopoulou’s translation. But, I couldn’t remember the exact Bible passage. Seriously, this came close to losing the book a star by itself.

And, occasionally, I didn’t totally trust her translation. And, that ties with her perhaps overemphasizing not just feet, but entire legs, as euphemisms for genitals. Specifically, it was Song of Songs 5:10-16 that was a bridge too far for me. My modern translation has verse 15 as “His legs are alabaster pillars,” after verse 14 talks of the lover’s arms. She translates that as “genitals.” (That said, there are far more off the wall takes: That’s not only off the wall, but obviously incorrect, and I’m not prudish, nor de-bodifying. And, that comes from a group of Messianic Christian "Yeshua" nutters who apparently are into such wrong explicitness, and also have a hard-on for Rudolf Otto, among other things.) But at other times, Stavrakopoulou is willing to occasionally going beyond "literal" to "literalistic."

The bigger issue, that I'll hit now, and that relates to the header and to the paragraph immediately above of the original review?

Yahweh is not Baal. Yes, there are parallels. Yes, he was perceived as having a physical body, including genitals. Yes, he was perceived outside the "authoritative" Tanakh as having Asherah as a consort.

But? While he was described as letting Israel a woman be violated, he's not really described as having a metaphorical sexual relationship with her. (I take Song of Songs face value as a human love song. Period.) Nor, on the bits of ostraca etc. that we have talking about him and Asherah, is he described as having a sexual relationship with her. To put it in crude-ish modern terms? Yahweh may have a big swinging dick in terms of toxic masculinity, but he's not portrayed as having a big swinging dick in terms of consorting with Asherah as a consort, let alone chasing other goddesses.

From what I understand of pre-Islamic North Arab deities (and Midian was Northwest Arabia, and without necessarily buying the "Kenite" part, on etymology, I accept a Midianite origin of Yahweh), we shouldn't see them as being exactly the same as the Fertile Crescent northern Semitic pantheon. The Norse and Celtic pantheons, for example, don't fully map onto the Greco-Roman gods, and in fact the Roman gods and demigods don't fully map onto Greeks ones.

Then, I just don’t agree with her on the “framing” of Job.

Stavrakopoulou claims that Job knows Yahweh is assaulting him. Actually, let's not call the verbal an assault, but just an interrogation.

And, taking the pre-Gettier standard philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Job actually knows bupkis about the physical assault — his loss of family, wealth, etc. Therefore, he does not know he is under assault from the eye of god. (Gettier's hole-poking still has not resulted in a truly better definition.)

Plus, if we are indeed taking Job literally, of course, Yahweh and the Satan have a bet. This isn't even sloughing off evil onto the Satan, contra Stavra, as Yahweh puts limits on what he can do. And, again, as we have it today, it's a bet, not Satan punishing evil.

Interestingly, we're never told the amount of the wager. Is it for the Satan to get a day on the throne of Yahweh, a day with his feet on Yahweh's footstool?

It must also be remembered that the Angel of Yahweh is called a Satan in confronting Balaam in Numbers.

All points to remember. (There is a “Babylonian Job” story from way back, but it doesn’t have the equivalent of a Satan in it at all; no other SW Asian myth parallels Job.) And, Job is too early, likely started, at least, in the 6th century BCE, to have been highly influenced by Zoroastrianism to lead to Satan as a dualist figure. After all, the prose opening talks of him coming before Yahweh along with “the sons of God.” Therefore, the Satan as a figure for "sloughing off" of evil from a non-Calvinist, or non-Second Isaiah Yahweh, doesn't totally ring true.

To be honest, I've yet to find ANY good critical interpretation of Job, especially one that seriously wrestles with the prose intro of the Yahweh-Satan wager on its own terms.

(Related thoughts at this blog post on attempted modern existentialist interpretations of Job with presumed but not likely original shorter endings of the book, with this other person's take also failing because they reject the concept of a divine wager.)

So, all in all, speaking as a semi-academic — master’s degree, knowledge of Biblical languages, etc.? I’d rate this 3 3/4 if you let me be precise.



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'The Illusion of Conscious Will'

 As I said when posting the link to this review of Daniel Wegner's book by that name to Massimo Pigliucci's Facebook group, for people who want to really understand where I stand on volition and free will, this is the starting point.

The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Forget Dennett; start here for discussion of "free will" issues

Update: I have done a second read; the review from it follows, and the initial read's review is below the dotted line.

Daniel Wegner doesn't totally, or perhaps even primarily, disagree with the likes of a Dan Dennett as he talks in a different direction entirely, one that gets out of the Cartesian box that Dennett is still in, despite his rejection of a "Cartesian meaner." (See more on the original review.)

Rather, Wegner seriously means it when he says that conscious will is an illusion. And, along with that, rejects the twosiderism and polarity that posits determinism as the opposite.

He says that to think that is to think wrongly about volition in general. (And, if one accepts that, then one doesn't have to embrace "compatibilism" on free will as the likes of Dennett do [he IS a compatibilist, denials aside] if one doesn't want to brace free will on randomness.)

Rather, that illusion of conscious will is a psychological state, almost an emotion, if you will.

Or, elsewhere, Wegner says it's like producing a probability scan on our own actions; if we think our actions and the psychology behind them affected something the way "we" intended, that's the illusion of conscious will.

Of what good is this? Plenty.

And, here we get back to this illusion being called by Wegner as something like an emotion. By encouraging psychological, emotional, investment in our actions, it promotes a sense of agency. In turn, getting back to Dennett, this squares the circle on his Cartesian meaner probably better than he does himself. The illusion of conscious will, by eventual promotion of agency, promotes the illusion of a meaner. That, in turn, may further promote the illusion of conscious will.

In short, think of one of M.C. Escher's most famous illustrations, that of the two hands drawing each other. There you go. It's a classical, classical illustration of an emergent property. (But, what's emerging is a firmer version of the illusion of conscious will, not the actuality. Likewise, to extend beyond Wegner, I'd say what is emerging is a firmer version of the illusion of personal agency, not the actuality, therefore again getting at the illusion of a "Cartesian" meaner, as well as a free willer.)

As for backing for the idea that conscious will is an illusion? Wegner, a psychology prof at MIT (and an almost exact contemporary of Dennett across Boston at Tufts) looks at various psychological syndromes, fads of the past like mesmerism, modern experimentation with things like dummy hands and so forth, and how, just as humans can be overactive agency imputers, they can also be overactive will imputers.

In short, this is a must-read on the whole subject of free will and volition, and an excellent breaking out of the free will-determinism polarity. It's also a good example of how good psychology can lead to good philosophy.

In my first review, and first reading, of this book, I thought Wegner was arguing with Dennett. I had overlooked the note in the Introduction that Dennett was one of the readers of a rough draft manuscript of this book.

I then thought: maybe they were talking past each other, but I don't think that's even right. Rather, they were talking in different directions.

Another way to think of Wegner is as a V.S. Ramachandran who has moved beyond cognitive science and neuroscience into philosophical issues. A lot of their research strongly overlaps and Wegner cites Ramachandran more than once.

(Side note: Though a contemporary of Dennett's, Wegner sadly died in his early 60s. He surely would have given us at least one more book-length writing in this general area. In my original, shorter review, I note some things he "left on the table" in this book that I hope he would have addressed in a follow-up.)

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Along with that, it's an excellent refutation of the illogic and weak knees of someone like Dan Dennett, as well as seeming to scare the hell out of a lot of amateur readers who perhaps should never be allowed near material like this in the first place.

The title speaks for itself. Wegner then looks at the latest findings in modern neuroscience, along with the latest speculation in cognitive philosophy, and offers up his ideas as to how and why this illusion arose.

And here is where I say he is an excellent refutation to Dennett.

It's been roughly two decades since Dennett came out with his claim that we have no Cartesian Central Meaner at the core of our minds, ie. no homunculus or metaphorical little man serving as the central director of our consciousness.

But, but, but, Dennett refuses to come to the logical conclusion that, if we don't have a Central Meaner, we can't have a Central Willer, either. It's not just a lack of goal to go down this road; in his latest books to touch on free will, it's a willful (nice pun, eh?) rejection of this logical conclusion.

Well, Wegner is not afraid to take the plunge, and does so in convincing fashion, although he does pull back somewhat at the end.

That said, and although I gave this a five-star rating, there's plenty to still study on this issue that Wegner (and Dennett, et al) have not tackled.

1. Is there an Unconscious Willer? After all, as Dennett won't tell you, much of the working of our mind is unconscious or subconscious (and I mean no Deepak Chopra New Ageism by that statement). Isn't it possible, at least, that there is a Central Meaner, or several quasi-Central Meaners, in one or more subconscious brain routines? Of course, these quasi-Meaners would generate quasi-Willers.

2. Again, without getting into New Ageism, dimestore Zen, bogus metaphysics, etc., there's room for Wegner to go further down the path of just what "I" is and is not, without not only a Central Meaner but a Central Willer.

3. Handwringing and gnashing of teeth aside from fundamentalist Christians or people in that general direction (the ones who shouldn't be reading books like this in the first place) where do theories of morals (or aesthetics, for that matter) get grounded with no Central Willer as well as no Central Meaner? Here is where Wegner most pulls his punches in this book when he had the chance to meaningfully explore this from a non-willer perspective.

Folks, we've got enough material here for another book. Hopefully, Wegner, or someone else, is in the process of writing it.

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