Early Israel

Early Israel offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-century Documentary Hypothesis.

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