What Is It Like to Be a Psalmist? Unintentional Sin and Moral Agency in the Psalter *

1. On Bats and Psalmists

In his article ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel argues that reductionistic accounts of the mind–body problem neglect the subjective experience of consciousness. ¹ ‘Consciousness’, Nagel writes, ‘makes the mind–body problem really intractable’. ² He continues: ‘Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon’ that ‘occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us’, ³ and yet, ‘no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism’. ⁴ To be a bat, for example, is to be like something, and merely imagining what it might be like for me to be a bat (for example) does not elucidate that being. ⁵ Fundamentally, then, ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. ⁶ This something, for Nagel, is ‘the subjective character of experience’. ⁷ Reductionistic accounts overlook this aspect of mental phenomena.

At this point, we are back to the mind–body problem—what David Chalmers calls ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. ⁸ Just as we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, so also some super-intelligent bat or Martian—or even a cognitive scientist operating purely from an objective perspective—could not know what it is like to be a human, what it is like to have our subjective experience(s), which is to say what it is like to have human consciousness. ⁹

I will not address the large problem of consciousness here. Instead, I take up a small slice of the problem—namely, that of will or agency—and even more specifically unintentional wrongdoing. I do so with reference to a few tantalizing verses from the Psalter. I want to ask, first, à la Nagel, what is it like to be a psalmist (at least on this matter)? Second, with reference to Carol Newsom's recent work on the moral self in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism, ¹⁰ I want to situate this particular instance of ‘psalmic being’ amidst other ways of being in ancient Israel and the ancient Near East. I begin with a foray into the problem of philosophical zombies (§2) before turning to the pertinent texts from the Psalms (§3). I conclude by relating this material to Newsom's work (§4).

2. Philosophical Zombies ≈ Ancient Near Eastern ‘Agents’ (Like the Psalmist)?

Not unlike Nagel's questions regarding what it might like to be a bat, the philosophical zombie (or p-zombie) is a thought experiment designed to illustrate the problem of consciousness. A p-zombie is a hypothetical entity that is exactly like a normal human being in every conceivable way, except that it lacks conscious experience. P-zombies look and act like us. If we asked them if they enjoyed dinner, they would say it was delicious, but, lacking consciousness they would not, in fact, have subjectively experienced the food at all. In Chalmers’ terms: ‘There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.' ¹¹

Some philosophers argue that p-zombies are not logically possible. If such an entity existed and was like us in every conceivable way, then by definition that entity would have consciousness just like we do. There can be no such thing as a p-zombie, therefore, and so the problem of consciousness is one that brain science will, with enough time, solve. This is a physicalist or materialist approach; Daniel Dennett belongs to this side of the debate. ¹²

Others assert that p-zombies are logically possible. There is, in fact, a real difference between a conscious person and a p-zombie. ¹³ Hence, consciousness cannot be explained simply by physical realities. This is (at some level at least) an anti-functionalist approach. Concerned that the other camp is overly reductionist, these researchers offer a perspective which, while also materialist at some level, nevertheless tries to be non-reductive. David Chalmers belongs to this school of thought, ¹⁴ as, to some degree, does Nagel, though in point of fact the latter does not believe p-zombies are logically possible. ¹⁵

This very brief foray into the p-zombie debate is pertinent to the present study for two reasons. The first is that will, volition, and intention are key aspects of consciousness. To consider only the etymological side of things, the English word ‘consciousness’ (and its derivatives) comes from Latin con-, ‘with’, and the verb scire, ‘to know’. To be ‘conscious’, therefore, is to know something, and the something that is known is often the self, its actions, or states—things done, in this respect, ‘with knowledge’ (i.e. con-sci-ously). That would include actions or states that are bad or wrong in some way. Indeed, the very first definition of the English adjective ‘conscious’ (attested in 1573) is ‘Having awareness of one's own wrongdoing, affected by a feeling of guilt’. ¹⁶

The second reason is closely related to the first. If p-zombies are logically possible and lack consciousness, they would presumably also lack intention, volition, and will. This has direct bearing on the issue of moral agency in the Hebrew Bible in at least two ways. On the one hand, the interface between wrongdoing and intention is often discussed in the Hebrew Bible—especially in legal texts—precisely in terms of ‘not knowing’, which is to say without consciousness (e.g. ‭תעד ילבב‬, ‘without knowledge’, Deut. 4.42; 19.4; Josh. 20.3, 5; cf. ‭תואר אלב‬, Num. 35.23). Consciousness is thus an important legal subject—at least with reference to the determination of punishment—and the acting subjects are, ultimately, not zombies because they normally act with volition and intent. On the other hand, many scholarly reconstructions of ancient Near Eastern hamartiologies seem to require a kind of human agent not entirely unlike a p-zombie—one that lacked consciousness, knowledge, and intention—at least when it comes to much wrongdoing, but that was nevertheless held accountable for its acts by a host of petty gods (or a petty Yahweh). Borrowing language from Dennett, we might call this the ‘Ancient Near Eastern Zombic Hunch’, ¹⁷ and define it as the scholarly belief that ancient Near Eastern peoples—Israelites included—were often devoid of intention when it came to wrongdoing and culpability; or, at least, that their intention did not ultimately matter when it came to culpability scenarios, at least as far as the gods were concerned.

The ‘Ancient Near Eastern Zombic Hunch’ is widespread, and not without supporting evidence. ¹⁸ And yet, a number of texts in the Hebrew Bible worry precisely about the nature and role of intent in situations involving guilt, sin, and punishment. Most obvious are the laws concerning intentional homicide (Exod. 21.12–14; Num. 35.9–34; Deut. 4.41–43; 19.1–13; Josh. 20.1–9), but a number of cultic texts are not unrelated (cf. the shared vocabulary in Lev. 4.1–6.7; Num. 15.22–29). ¹⁹

These texts comprise a small problem for the ‘Ancient Near Eastern Zombic Hunch’. Even if someone remained liable for their wrongdoing, conscious awareness of their act mattered, if for no other reason than in determining the punishment due. Murder in the first degree was not remediable, whereas involuntary manslaughter was. If the homicide was unintentional, the slayer could flee to a city of asylum and survive; not so if the killing was done with malice aforethought.

So too with the cultic texts. If it did not matter how one did what they did or why they did it, then why worry about or mention intent, especially its lack? Why should these texts explicitly deny conscious awareness, on the one hand, and/or appeal to other categories like ‘mistake’ (√‭גגש/הגש‬), on the other? To be sure, the fact that a guilty party pleads lack of intention could be taken as a ‘zombie defense': ‘I didn't mean to, I didn't realize, I didn't know’, which is to say: ‘I was like a zombie and shouldn't be held accountable’. But even this defense implies that what one does is normally done with awareness or, at the very least, that a human agent can and (usually) does act consciously—that is, with knowledge. The cultic texts aver that such a state of affairs should matter for the divine realm no less than the jurisprudential one. If lack of intent mitigates punishment for homicide, it should also mitigate punishment for sin. This brings us to the Psalms.

3. Zombism in the Psalms?

Unsurprisingly, psalmic hamartiology is varied; ²⁰ the extent to which some psalms claim total righteousness is somewhat surprising, however. To use Newsom's models of moral agency, these confident psalms not only affirm moral agency, they imply the possibility of a perfect agent. ²¹ Gert Kwakkel argues that this trope functions rhetorically to summon God to intervene on the psalmist's behalf; it does not emerge from a bloviated sense of self-righteousness. ²² Regardless, the uber-positive sense of moral agency in these psalms contrasts with the impression one gets from, say, the penitential psalms.

Whatever the case, in many psalms, acknowledgment of sin is something of a ‘second opinion’, since these texts tend to lay the fault for the psalmist's problems resolutely at the Deity's door. ²³ If so, the passages examined below might be called a ‘minority report’ since they are so few in number. They merit attention, however, insofar as (1) they relate to the problem of unintentional sin as evidenced by the lexical links connecting them to legal and cultic texts dealing with the same; and (2) they reveal the rhetorical purposes to which intentional sin might be put.

Fredrik Lindström has engaged the psalmic equivalent of the ‘Ancient Near Eastern Zombic Hunch’. ²⁴ ‘Psalmic Zombism’ posits that when someone did something wrong in ancient Israel, intentionally or otherwise, they invariably suffered some misfortune as a result, usually sickness. But if the sin was ‘removed through forgiveness, propitiation, etc.’, it was ‘assumed that the sickness it…caused must necessarily cease’. ²⁵ To use Lindström's terms, ‘Psalmic Zombism’ is ‘the idea of “Yhwh's pancausality“ in connection with calamities’, ²⁶ and his work refutes such a perspective, particularly the causal link between suffering and sin. ²⁷ I will return to Psalmic Zombism after exploring the three texts that are most pertinent to the problem of unintentional sin. ²⁸

4. What Is It Like to Be a Psalmist?

Psalmic Zombism is just one instantiation of the Ancient Near Eastern Zombic Hunch, which has often moved analogically from Mesopotamian antecedents to Israelite reflexes. So, for example, in 1936 Geo Widengren wrote: ‘Like the Akkadian, the Israelitic religion was dominated by the doctrine that misfortune and suffering are caused by sin’. ⁵⁰ Karel van der Toorn came to a similar conclusion fifty years later, speaking of ‘[a] common model of interpreting human experience’ in which ‘each personal misfortune gave rise to speculations about the sin of the sufferer’; and of ‘a rigid model of retribution [used] to interpret experiences of adversity’. ⁵¹ In contrast, Lindström has made the most thorough case yet for uncoupling the causal relationship between suffering and sin, at least in the lament psalms. ⁵² In these texts it is simply not the case that some sin has invariably led to the suffering in question. As Patrick Miller notes, ‘one [is] immediately aware that such a connection between calamity and sin is too simple if perceived as a one-to-one correlation… One needs to be careful, however, about throwing the baby out with the bath water in assuming that there is never any connection.' ⁵³

Miller is correct on both counts, but the present investigation of Psalms 19, 90, and 119 sides with Lindström in challenging Psalmic Zombism and the larger Ancient Near Eastern Zombic Hunch. On the one hand, these three psalms, by means of their engagement with the problem of unintentional sin, indicate that there is something accurate about the Zombic Hunch. Insofar as the psalmist must account for unintentional sin with the Deity, one sees that such offense affected the Deity. The Deity may not be petty but is definitely concerned, even with things that do not rise to the level of full knowledge or conscious awareness in the psalmist (Pss. 90.8; 119.21, 118). This has a touch of Zombism about it because the psalmist's willful intent seems irrelevant; it only matters that the act was committed.

On the other hand, the psalmist nevertheless pleads ignorance of these unintentional sins (cf. ‭ןיבי־ימ‬ in Ps. 19.13), and does so in a rhetorically suasive way, as the first in what appears to be a graded list of sins, which, once rectified by the Deity, will produce an innocent psalmist (vv. 13–14. The awareness that there are wrongs that one does unawares leads to the prayer that God keep one from such (Ps. 119.10). In the end, then, the psalmist's acknowledgment of unintentionality—acting without consciousness—distances these psalms from Psalmic Zombism. To be sure, Ps. 119.67 (cf. v. 71) remains, but that verse is something of an outlier with regard to the other passages considered here. It provides further proof that, as Newsom notes, ‘a variety of different and even logically incompatible models could coexist not only within the same community but even within a single text’. ⁵⁴

In closing, it is useful to set the present study into dialogue with Newsom's recent study of the moral self. Three points deserve mention.

(1) First, in terms of Newsom's diagram (see Fig. 1 in the introduction to this issue), ⁵⁵ the moral psychology of the psalms examined here, at least on this particular issue, would seem to place the ‘psalmic self’ on the lower side of the y-axis (vertical), which deals with the locus of control, nearer the internalized pole because the self is not being acted upon by an external agent(s). And yet, insofar as there is a distancing of an important part of the psalmist's self (namely, the intention, will, consciousness) from the wrong that has been done, there is a kind of externalization after all, or what Newsom, depending on the work of Patrick McNamara, calls ‘decentering’ or self-alienation, ⁵⁶ the creation of an ‘executive self’ against which the rest of the self sometimes acts (even if inadvertently). If so, then psalmic selfhood (again, on this matter, via these three psalms) should be placed on the internalized side of the y-axis but nearer the x-axis (horizontal), where the y-axis turns into externalized conceptualizations. ⁵⁷

As for the x-axis, which concerns the nature of control, psalmic selfhood would seem to be placed on the right hand side: the self under control because the self (or some important part of it) has acted without knowledge, against the executive function. And yet, insofar as the ‘entity’ that exerts influence or otherwise controls the self is itself part of the self(!), the placement on the x-axis needs to be very close to the y-axis, where the x-axis turns into the self in control. ⁵⁸

If this is correct, it would suggest that psalmic selfhood is quite near the intersection of the two axes. ⁵⁹ That would indicate that the Psalms, too, instantiate the truth of Newsom's statement that ‘the lived experience of agency includes both control and lack of control, a sense of internal capacity and external restriction’. ⁶⁰ The problem of unintentional sin captures that bind perhaps better than others, though the psalms I have discussed here do not rise to the level of the Two Spirits discourse (1QS 3.13–4.26), which Newsom argues sits precisely at the intersection of the x- and y-axes. ⁶¹

(2) Newsom has identified three elements that ‘form the fundamental grammar of the moral self in the Hebrew Bible: desire, knowledge, and the discipline of submission to external authority’. ⁶² ‘Moral failure generally involves a combination of these three elements’, she continues, ‘though one or another may be stressed’, noting that ‘failure of the understanding or even self-deception’ are particularly common in Proverbs and Jeremiah. ⁶³ Psalmic selfhood, when analyzed via the issue of unintentional sin, would take its place with the latter, even as the psalm texts indicate that the problem of moral failure is not simply one of inaccurate understanding or self-deception but a lack of knowledge—specifically, acting without consciousness.

(3) The psalms examined here, along with their implicit moral psychology, can be placed amidst Newsom's three models of the moral self:

The psalms dealing with inadvertent wrongdoing do not belong to Model 3, which indicates that ‘as created, no one possesses moral agency, since the moral faculty is so defective as to produce only guilty actions’. ⁶⁵ Neither can they be placed completely with Model 1, just as they cannot be entirely identified with Model 2. Psalmic selfhood does not affirm moral agency, at least not unambiguously (Model 1). The possibility of unintentional sin indicates that moral agency is impaired in some fashion. At the same time, psalmic selfhood is not quite the same as Model 2a, since, according to Newsom, that model operates with an understanding that what is ‘constitutively impaired in human moral psychology—a wrongful desire…must and can be resisted’. ⁶⁶ In the case of unintentional sin, the problem is not one of wrong desire or certainly not only that. Neither is it the case that the ‭לא תוצמ‬ or the internalization of the ‭הדות‬ is what permits resisting wrong desire; ⁶⁷ Psalms 19 and 119 give prominence to the Torah and its commandments, but not in that exact way, and Psalm 90 does not mention the Torah or its congeners at all. There is impairment in these psalms—in terms of Newsom's fundamental grammar, a deficit in knowledge—but it is not a matter of wrong desire. Further, the notion of submission to external authority, despite the mention of Torah et al. in Psalms 19 and 119, is less about God's law than it is about submission to the supreme theological authority via prayer and confession. By way of comparison, Newsom, quoting CD 2.15, has written of Model 2a that ‘Through knowledge and submission one acquires the moral agency that allows one to “choose what [God] desires and reject what he hates”’. ⁶⁸ A better formulation for the psalms dealing with inadvertent wrongdoing would be: ‘Through knowledge and confession one is restored as a moral agent even if one sometimes chooses what God does not desire and does not reject what he hates’. Psalmic selfhood when considered via the problem of unintentional sin is thus not quite the same as Models 1 or 2a, though it bears similarity to both in some key respects.

The moral psychology of these psalms also indicates that they do not belong entirely to Model 2b because the externalization operative there is often the demonic or ‘some alien force acting within’ a person. Demonic or alien forces are not at work in these psalms, though they do reflect 'important psychological complexity’. ⁶⁹ Another aspect of Model 2b that resonates with these texts is that ‘a person's own desires and flawed perceptions [are] externalized, but in a manner that does not absolve the individual of the moral responsibility to choose’. ⁷⁰ Then again, the ‘externalization’ that happens in these psalms is of a curious, internalized sort.

If the above remarks are accurate, they suggest that the texts examined here fall conceptually between Models 1 and 2a, on the one hand—affirming agency, to a large degree, even while acknowledging impairment—and Models 2a and 2b, on the other—representing a kind of self-alienation or quasi-'externalized’ impairment that is not yet, and in fact is quite far from, the demonic. So, again, the psalmic self in these three psalms may lay very close indeed to the intersection of the x- and y-axes, not entirely unlike 1QS 3.13–4.26. Like the latter, the picture of the psalmic self derived from Psalms 19, 90, and 119 seems to represent ‘the drama of moral conflict as simultaneously internal and external, psychological and cosmological’. ⁷¹ The notion of unintentional sin, then—no less than the Two Spirits discourse, may ‘implicitly [posit] (and, in so doing, [help] to create) an “executive self”, a cognitive function that can perceive both [aspects] and recognize their struggle within’ the psalmist. ⁷²

In sum, the psalmic self, as understood via these three psalms that treat of inadvertent wrongdoing, adds slight but important nuance to Newsom's three models. In so doing, I hope the present study has furthered her project of ‘recovering the subjective experience of selfhood in Jewish antiquity’, at least with regard to sin. ⁷³ I also hope to have shown that Newsom is correct that the ‘birth of subjectivity occurs…in Semitic-speaking Judaism’, ⁷⁴ though I would emphasize that it occurs even earlier than the texts she adduces, if not from the actual date of these three psalms (about which I do not speculate), then from their ancient Near Eastern antecedents that deal with the problem of unintentional sin. ⁷⁵

* * *

What, in the end, is it like to be a psalmist? If Lindström is right, it was not like being a Deuteronomist. ⁷⁶ Similarly, it was not quite like being an instantiation of one of Newsom's three models, since the psalmic way of being seems to straddle several of her categories. Both points are in line with Nagel's observation that the subjective experience of one person—say, a psalmist—is different from and not entirely accessible to others. ⁷⁷ That granted, being a psalmist was like something, à la Nagel, insofar as the psalmists themselves were certainly conscious agents, even when what they were conscious of was precisely their unconsciousness. ⁷⁸ To be a psalmist was definitely like something, then, though it certainly was not like being a bat. I hope the present study shows that neither was it like being a zombie.