Early Israel

Early Israel offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-century Documentary Hypothesis. Engaging a dozen-plus modern academic disciplines-from anthropology, biblical studies, Egyptology and semiotics, to linguistics, cognitive poetics and consciousness studies; from religious studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, to mysticism studies, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind-it wrests from the Pentateuch an outline of the heretofore undiscovered ancient Israelite mystical-initiatory tradition of the First Temple priests. The book effectively launches a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism, akin to a "center" or "organizing principle" discussed in biblical theology. The recovered priestly system is discordant vis-à-vis the much-later rabbinical project. This volume appeals to a diverse academic community, from Biblical and Jewish studies to literary studies, religious studies, anthropology, and consciousness studies.

Alex S. Kohav teaches at the Department of Philosophy, Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the editor of two recent anthologies, Mysticism and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Three Pines Press, 2019) and Mysticism and Experience: Twenty-First Century Approaches (Lexington Books, 2020), and a co-editor of A Paradise of Paradoxes: Finite Infinities, the Hebrew God, and Taboo of Knowledge (in preparation). Dr. Kohav is engaged in the long-term project of developing ancient Israelite philosophy-the foundational Hebraic/Jewish metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and ethics of early-antiquity Israel. His forthcoming book, Adam, a Kind of Thinker: Freedom Scales as Selves, Worlds, and Thinking Fields (Hebraic Pluri-Dimensional Perspectives) elaborates an ontology of "worlds" accessible to human beings.

Introduction: The TEXT Part 1: The CONTEXT 1. The God of Moses versus the "One and All" of Egypt: From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the Discriminating Paradigm of Non-Idolatry (Israel) 2. At the Primal Scene of Communication: The Question of Israel's Esoteric Referent 3. On the Notion of the Sôd: YHWH's Garden versus the Rabbinical Orchard Part 2: The METATEXT 4. Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System: Accessing the Torah's Veiled Axis of Communication 5. The Sôd as Poiesis: Probing the Sôd's Poietic-Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics 6. A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch: Israel's Universe of Discourse; a Replica of the Torah; Acquiring an Apposite Research Method Part 3: The URTEXT 7. The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier: Retrieving the Torah within the Scripture 8. Israel's Noematic Signified: Reverse-Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous 9. The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel: Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis Part 4: The CODE-TEXT 10. Externalizing Israel's Ineffable: Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous 11. In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis: The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden's Theater of Ruptured Doxa and Fractured Epistêmê, and Emergence of "Megaphor" 12. Postscript: The HORS-TEXTE