Early Israel: Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis

Early Israeloffers 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.