History through Trauma

History and Counter-History in the Hebrew Bible

Houck-Loomis

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532642111
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Our sacred texts have the potential to become texts of torture or texts of liberation. History through Trauma explores the symbolic function of religious, political, and national symbols that aid in the construction of historical narratives, and the psychological effects of trauma on their creation and dissolution. The Deuteronomic Covenant, paramount in the construction of a biblical history of Israel, is analyzed with regard to Israel's history of exile. What is proffered is the book of Job as a symbolic history of Israel that stands as a counter-history beside the dominant history constructed in the canon's historical books--a counter-history whose function works to re-enliven the symbol of covenant. History through Trauma brings consciousness to the effects of exile on the dominant historical narratives in the Hebrew canon and to the eradicated affective experiences of trauma that surface in counter-texts such as the book of Job. This work offers a valuable new understanding of the impact of trauma on history-making in general--an understanding that brings light to biblical studies, practical theology, pastoral psychology, and psychoanalysis.

1

Introduction

“Our general instinct to seek and learn will, in all reason, set us inquiring into the nature of the instrument with which we search.”

—Plotinus, Enneads IV, 3, 1

What is one to make of the little known though widely referred to traumatic experience of the multitude of exiles Israel underwent at the hands of various surrounding superpowers including Assyria, Egypt, and Babylonia throughout the eighth–sixth centuries BCE? How did history, the process of making a narrative and its repetitious recitation, enable Israel to formulate an identity that structured community living during the traumatic aftermath of the devastating Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE? How did this same history simultaneously disable Israel the ability to acknowledge and integrate the actual harrowing reality of these events that undeniably left their mark on the way in which Israel understood its relationship to the land, the community of God’s people, and Israel’s relationship to other nations?

This study investigates these questions by examining the Covenant in Deuteronomy and its counter-narrative in the book of Job. My inquiry focuses on the psychological effects of trauma on the creation and dissolution of religious, political, and national symbols. My approach draws equally on the methods of historical-critical and ideological biblical criticism and from selected psychoanalytic theory about symbols in order to analyze how individuals and communities construct historical narratives as a way of processing life-shattering circumstances. I show that while the Deuteronomic Covenant—a symbol derived from ancient Near Eastern models—enabled Israel to survive the trauma of exile,1 it also blamed the victimized culture, perpetuating an ideology of guilt and shame. In contrast, I argue that the book of Job counters the ideology of the Deuteronomistic History, which follows the tenets of the Deuteronomic Covenant. Reading the book of Job as a symbolic history of Israel that parallels the Deuteronomistic History reveals how the ancient Israelites maintained these two diverse and seemingly disparate stories. When held together, these two contrasting stories provide an alternative way of interpreting the traumatic events of exile that pollute the landscape of Israel’s history.

The study I present here examines how Israel articulates its own identity, amidst the shifting social and historical contexts of exile, within its officially recognized historical texts and what I consider, its counter-historical texts. By historical texts I am referring to Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. I italicize historical from time to time in order to emphasize the ambiguity of the very category. When referencing the Deuteronomistic History, what I term the national or dominant History the word History will be capitalized. Further arguments regarding the concept of history, historical narratives, and counter-texts are explored in depth throughout this work. Israel’s relationship with God and how the Deuteronomic Covenant shaped and informed this relationship throughout its shifting social context is central to Israel’s identity. Therefore, at the heart of this study, I investigate how God and Israel are identified within the Deuteronomic Covenant as this Covenant was shaped and reshaped throughout the years of oppression and exile. In the context of the prolific rhetoric of Covenantal ideology articulated in the Deuteronomic Covenant read in Deuteronomy and what are accepted by most biblical scholars as the books that include the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings) I proffer that a counter-narrative runs parallel to this structured and dominant narrative. In contrast to a Covenantal relationship between Israel and God a counter-narrative surfaces in later postexilic literature. This counter-narrative that surfaces in the book of Job I call, an Individuated relationship or Individuated religion. These two narratives, the Covenantal and the Individuated, were simultaneously shaped after the events of the Babylonian Exile. The two narratives exist today side-by-side in the Hebrew canon. One does not supersede or erase the other. Instead, they remain together without collapsing into one another. The Covenantal narrative in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History, and the Individuated narrative in the book of Job exist, in a sense, for one another. In their mutual existence, a new symbol arises which allows for the former symbol of the Covenant to be renewed and enlivened in the new symbol found in the character of Job, even after the trauma of exile.

By Covenantal religion I am referring to the moral and ethical code of conduct explicitly laid out in the Deuteronomic Covenant that ensures land, prosperity, progeny and protection as a reward for obedience, while promising utter destruction and exile from the land as a consequence of Covenantal disobedience. Covenantal religion provided religious and communal structure for Israel during the sixth and fifth centuries, a time when Israel had lost its land and temple and experienced a profound disruption to its religious ideology. A great deal of literature exists within the field of biblical scholarship regarding the Covenant narrative within Deuteronomy and its formulation and reformulation in and throughout exile as a way in which Israel tried to explain this horrific event.

By Individuated religion I am referring to the ability of an individual or a community to grapple with the objective Divine Other outside of his or their subjective experience of this Other, and more importantly outside of the community’s rules and expectations of this Other. Individuated religion is not an individual religion or an internalized religion per se, but rather, a religion that is able to step aside from the cultural ideologies inscribed within its tenets. In doing this, the Individuated (or individuating) religion interrogates and even deconstructs the social and communal symbols of the stated religion. This deconstruction allows the practitioner (within the ancient and modern community) another entry into the religious symbols that, when socially constructed and not individually experienced, merely reflect a particular culture’s god images rather than an experience with what is beyond those images.

Carl Jung speaks of individuation as the life-long journey of an individual in relation to his Self and his culture.2 Jung’s concept of the Self differs from other psychoanalytic notions of the self. He describes the Self as a universal principle, shared by all human beings. The Self, in Jungian thought, is like a different center of gravity that pulls each individual toward it in different ways. It is outside of consciousness though it contains conscious and unconscious contents. The word Self is capitalized in Jungian theory to indicate its objective, universal, and timeless existence as an archetype that is imaged differently within each person’s individual psyche and psychic process and within different myths or fairy tales colored by the cultural elements out of which the story emerges. The Self is not simply within one’s personal conscious or even unconscious personality but something bigger than one’s conscious self; i.e., personal contents. This is the reason for capitalizing the S when referring to Jung’s notion of the Self. An individual on the path of individuation moves into greater relatedness with his whole Self and thus greater and deeper relatedness with others. The term Self is a dense and multivalent concept that is understood differently by varying schools of depth psychology. Throughout this work I refer to the Self, through Jung’s articulation, as the totality of a human personality that includes the conscious field of the ego as well as the vast field of unconscious contents, both personal and collective.3 Jung argues that the ego, while containing the field of consciousness, is only a small portion of the totality of the Self, which includes archetypes of the collective unconscious and one’s own personal unconscious. In Jung’s map of the psyche the unconscious includes personal contents, repressions, and past memories that have slipped from consciousness, as well as collective contents, including archetypal images and historical or biological instincts outside of a personal nature that are shared by all human beings. These concepts will be explained in greater detail following. Marie-Louise von Franz helps articulate Jung’s notion of the Self regarding her analysis of fairy tales saying,

“After working for many years in this field, I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavor to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician’s variations are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic totality of an individual and also, paradoxically, the regulating center of the collective unconscious. Every individual and every nation has its own modes of experiencing this psychic reality.”4

Even though Donald Winnicott rejects Jung’s notion of the Self, calling it a “dead artifact” he too, recognizes the human self as more than the ego, the totality of being, embodied and in relationship.5 Winnicott argues that the self “arrives at a significant relationship between the child and the sum of the identifications which (after enough incorporation and introjection of mental representations) becomes organized in the shape of an internal psychic living reality.”6 Drawing on Jungian analysts’ Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles notion of cultural complexes and Winnicott’s notion of the self as the “sum of identifications,” I will refer to Israel in light of its developing identity as a communal Self throughout this work.7 Both of these notions open the personified, dyadic definitions of Self into cultural and collective experiences of groups.

In light of Jung’s notion of the Self, individuation remains a difficult and sometimes lonely process wherein one develops a new relationship to old norms, socially constructed ideas, and communal symbols. The process involves facing that which the individual has cut off from her consciousness, whatever she believes does not belong to her or is not acceptable; i.e., aggression, hate, desire, power, beauty, longing, the feminine, the masculine, all that she considers evil.8 Facing that which has been dissociated or cut off from consciousness, relegated to the depths of the unconscious, and, as a byproduct, to her enemies be them personal or cultural, she begi...