The Minds of the Bible: Speculations on the Cultural Evolution

The Minds of the Bible: Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness

Two developments in the history of the Bible are deeply related, and not merely coincidental. One is the lamentation of the loss of the experience of hearing Godâ€™s voice. The other is the rise of the language of introspection: an interiorized subjective dialogue with oneself.

In our own time, we are acculturated from infancy on, to understand our mental life as a narratized interior mind-space in which we introspect in a ceaseless conversation with â€œourselves.â€ Our ancestors, however, were acculturated to understand their mental life in terms of obedient responses to auditory prompts, which they projected outwards as the external voice of God. Although these â€œbicameralâ€ people could think and act, they had no awareness of choices or of choosing â€” or of awareness itself.

In 1976, Julian Jaynes proposed that that as recently as 3,000 years ago, human beings were non-introspective. Jaynes claimed that one could trace this cultural transformation over the course of a scant millennium by analyzing the literature of the Hebrew Scriptures (â€œOld Testament,â€ OT). This book tests Jaynesâ€™s assertions by examining the OT text in Hebrew, as seen through the lens of the Documentary Hypothesis and modern critical historical scholarship.

Did the writers of the oldest biblical texts have words in their cultural lexicon to correspond to our words such as â€œmindâ€ or â€œimaginationâ€ or â€œbelief?" Or do the translations into English that employ such mentalistic words (such as the King James Bible) tell us more about the minds of the translators than the minds of the biblical authors?

In sharp contrast to the early OT texts, the later texts of the OT display a lexicon of profound interiority. The writers have become acculturated to experience their mental life as a rich introspective consciousness, full of internal mind-talk and â€œnarratization,â€ and perceiving their own actions as the result, not of obedience to an external voice, but of self-authorized, internal decisions.

This study includes observations about emerging understandings of the neurology of auditory hallucinations, and supports Jaynesâ€™s idea that while the brainâ€™s structure has changed little in three millennia, culture can and will determine whether a childâ€™s mental life is bicameral or introspectively conscious.
Country USA
Manufacturer Julian Jaynes Society
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2013-11-20
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Julian Jaynes Society
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2013-11-20
Format	Kindle eBook

The Minds of the Bible: Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness

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