Stream and Sequence: Canaan and 'Israel/Judah'

It is hard, in fact, impossible, to think of any other explanation than that of the eonic effect, for what is bequeathed to us by the redactors of the Old Testament, who, incidentally, lived long after the events they purported to describe. It is the eonic ‘smoking gun’, for behind its account, however we reconstruct historical incidents from its account, lies an implicit straddling of the period -900 to -600, with a particular intensity in the period between -750 and afterward, an eonic Bull’s eye, and indirect evidence that stands on its own irregardless of the complete facts.

In A History of Prophecy in Israel, Joseph Blenkinsopp calls the sixth century B.C. one of the great turning points in human history and describes the period as ‘between the old order and the new’, noting the concordant symphony of religious evolution in Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Judaism, with its sudden and intense white streak of prophets. Blenkinsopp grapples with the history of Israelite prophecy, the period from Amos to Second Isaiah preceded by a primitive phase, and a later ‘drying up’, that his account hopes to ‘straighten out’.[i] In Exile and Restoration, Peter Ackroyd notes the synchronous phenomenon:

It has long been realized that the sixth century BC was an epoch in which a variety of important events took place, not only within the more limited field of Old Testament history, nor even within the confines of near Eastern civilization, but throughout the world. It is the century of Confucius, of Zoroaster, of Buddha. It is also the century of the Ionian philosophers. For the biblical scholar it is the century of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Deutero-Isaiah…[ii]

‘It has long been realized …’ But the implications are little considered by theologians unsure how to deal with the phenomenon of parallelism. This is an era that is almost by definition interpreted in terms of the foundations of our traditions, and entailed as a period of exclusive interest against all others, although if we look closely we will notice its resemblance not only to our modern period, but also to the period of the birth of civilization itself. The sudden appearance of new civilizations from trickling streams and runway cultures at a smaller scale morphing precipitously as they cross the period from -900 to -600 should be the clue to seeing that something is happening in a purely periodic fashion, and that the explosion of ‘axial’ valuation is simply the mystery of cyclicity and progressive creativity, not of revelation.

All of these theological accounts, so distracted by the apparatus of transcendentalism, seem to have lost the simplest of explanations behind the basic phenomenon, a small Canaanite kingdom giving birth to the core ‘kingdom of God’ concept (not quite its later meaning) as a righteous society in relation to national liberation in a field of empire and domination, and internal divisions of class. Does this sound familiar? How will we exempt modern revolution from such transcendental glamour?

The concern of the Prophet s for social justice, their appearance, timing, and marginality, is the eonic context that drives the future to historicize the sacred in the inherent enigma of evolutionary emergentism, a spectral variant of the basic freedom dynamic, cast between the Greek version, and the Indian.

2. Through the veil of the myths of the Old Testament, some obvious facts emerge, of the influence of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian diffusion fields, e.g. the diffusion field of Egypt and the transparent tales of interaction, in the Mosaic myths. We see an obvious case resembling the Mycenaean, a sequence field dependency in the period, to whatever degree mythical, of David, Solomon, etc… This period tends to throw us off track since it is like the Iliadic tales of the Greeks, passing into tribal epic.

3. The t-stream intersecting with eonic sequence, and a camel stop in Canaan is transformed into a core oikoumene generator.

4. By -400 the new tradition has crystallized and like a cloud ready to produce a thunderstorm (new downfield mideonic religions) is moving toward the greater field of civilizations falling apart and reforming in the transition from Assyria to the Roman Empire.

As noted, our Axial spectrum stretches efficiently across the whole of Eurasia. There is perhaps more than we have indicated. But we can espy the strategy and select a core emergent field from each area, Rome to China, and thus do what our eonic system does. So our middle transition here is really the whole zone of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian diffusion fields left over from the prior cycle. Yet it is a fact that the tiny world of the Israelites moves to resolve the crisis of civilization in the Middle East.

We must remember here that the Old Testament documents postdate the period, and are not clear in what they are describing, and have already forgotten the exact details. It is not our business here to do anything more than lay out the rough boundaries of an enigma. We must suspect the simplest explanation, a transition like the rest. We don’t know exactly what happened, although we know enough to see the prophets appear in a moment of maximum cyclical intensity, along with their parallel brethren.[iii]

In India, we see a city state phenomenon emerge in a way that is reminiscent of Greece, with a religious emergence that will produce the Upanishadic and then the Buddhist and Jain religions in a broad resemblance to Israel, and yet a clear intermediate resemblance to Greece, as the categories of philosophy blend into religion. We must be careful here, due to the lack of detail, to remind ourselves of the demand to produce a relative transform, not just a standard religious account. But this is obvious, although out of focus. Buddhism is one with, yet stands out against, the ‘temporal stream’ or Indian religion. Behind this lies a great sweep of interacting activity stretching across Eurasia, and whose particulars should probably include the Phoenician world of Carthage, the earliest period of the Etruscans and Rome, and the effect created by ‘network’ culture across the Mediterranean, in the rising diaspora to come of the Jews, and the Greek colonization that spreads its influence across a seeded oikoumene.

The era of the Prophets is confusing, in part because we only have the description given by men whose views, frozen in time, are those of the period in question. We have no independent, multiple referents, as we do in the period of Greece . But in each case we have a line of ‘pearl stringers’, the Greek philosophers, the Chinese sages, the Indians of the Upanishadic era. In Israel we see this strange play on prophecy, whose anthropological particulars are not at first clear to us.

Israel is the land beyond the land that disappears into other empires, the land that wins no Battle of Marathon, and yet endures, and is driven to its great bifurcating destiny of the Judaic network, the underground stream that will burrow into every city of the Roman Empire, after which the Christian ‘islam’ that will rise to the crown of kingdom itself, in the great ecumenization, carried forth again in the legacy of Mohammed. It is a field that is conservative, carries the great Temple tradition of the Mesopotamian tradition beyond the turbulent moment of transition. It is a field that is radical, giving birth to the primordial version of the Revolution, as national liberation, redemption, and social equalization, and breaking forth in the figure of Jesus, so carefully covered over with hieratic mythology.

Even as we move to an austere account of the transition, we are forced to step backwards into some part of the deep confusion that always attends consideration of the era of the Prophets. As we summon up the distinct processes of discrete-continuous action, we find by the nature of our terms the era of transition to express potential relative to unrealized futures, which leaves us with a system that gives the impression of anticipatory action. It is most apt, and very apt to induce confusion, that we should see a white streak of prophets cresting on the divide. This was later to produce a great confusion in those, such as the Christians, who considered that this foretold their coming. We can simply fall back on the dynamics of our fundamental unit, to see that our system is moving toward a greater oikoumene, in a subtle play on the idea of the State, as a fulfillment and challenge to this very State. As the case of Christianity and Islam show, the outcome ‘predicted’ was open to multiple realizations. Seeing this as foretold is easily made into a myth. We can understand this if we look at how the modern transition tends to a similar sense of anticipation in its projection of a new future.

Note: A system transform? It is worth comparing the Old Testament core period with the modern transition, starting with the Reformation, and proceeding to the Enlightenment, without confusing the different stages of culture. There is a strong resemblance, but only in overall structure, as a relative transform process. And we should note that we confuse the final outcome of the Old Testament period with the earlier material, vestigial and still embedded in the account, from Canaanite religion, as the later stage is applied backwards anachronistically. In the same, way, but differently transposed, the modern transition, better recorded in its stages, shows the ‘earlier’ under transformation (the Reformation) rapidly turning into something new and different near the divide. Note that the divide period before and during the Exile is the crucial one, in terms of how we see this in retrospect. But here the modern instance seems slightly different, because we artificially divide history into sacred and secular. And the modern ‘re-formation’ leads to a ‘secular’ Enlightenment, as if Athens and Jerusalem were collated. This point seems obscure now, but was clear to Kant’s generation in the German Aüfklarung, as they deftly produced a discourse on Reason in History, now shunted aside by the cultural theme of ‘instrumental rationality’.

Theologians will do everything they can to confuse you here! Secular historians will go to the other extreme, Iron Age economics at work. We have a string of Prophets appearing near a divide, and later redactors putting two and two together. There are almost no reliable texts here, but the situation is improving and a secular age can one day inherit this data as record of evolutionary history of a most remarkable kind. Please note our previous discussion of ‘relative transforms’. The ‘prophet’, witness Zarathustra, existed before our transition. Thus we spawn the strange notion of the ‘eonic determination of the Biblical Prophets’, a statement at first sight almost silly. But upon reflection it makes good sense.

[i] Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, w1983), Chapter V, p. 177, “Between the Old Order and the New”.

[ii] Peter Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), p. 7.

[iii] William Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (Grand Rapids, Michigan:Eerdmans, 2001).