Recent tools and findings from the cognitive sciences illuminate religious thought and behaviour in ancient Israel and the Bible. Primarily intended for scholars of the Bible and religion, it is also relevant to cognitive scientists, researchers, and graduate students interested in the intersection of cognition and culture.

"In this book, Brett Maiden employs the tools, research, and theories from the cognitive science of religion to explore religious thought and behavior in ancient Israel. His study focuses on a key set of distinctions between intuitive and reflective types of cognitive processing, implicit and explicit concepts, and cognitively optimal and costly religious traditions. Through a series of case studies, Maiden examines a range of topics including popular and official religion, Deuteronomic theology, hybrid monsters in ancient iconography, divine cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical idol polemics, and the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. The range of media, including ancient texts, art, and archaeological data from ancient Israel, as well theoretical perspectives demonstrates how a dialogue between biblical scholars and cognitive researchers can be fostered"--

In this book, Brett Maiden employs the tools, research, and theories from the cognitive science of religion to explore religious thought and behavior in ancient Israel. His study focuses on a key set of distinctions between intuitive and reflective types of cognitive processing, implicit and explicit concepts, and cognitively optimal and costly religious traditions. Through a series of case studies, Maiden examines a range of topics including popular and official religion, Deuteronomic theology, hybrid monsters in ancient iconography, divine cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical idol polemics, and the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. The range of media, including ancient texts, art, and archaeological data from ancient Israel, as well theoretical perspectives demonstrates how a dialogue between biblical scholars and cognitive researchers can be fostered.

The cognitive science of religion that has emerged over the last twenty years is a multidisciplinary field that often challenges established theories in anthropology and comparative religion. This new approach raises many questions for biblical studies as well. What are the cross-cultural cognitive mechanisms which explain the transmission of biblical texts? How did the local and particular cultural traditions of ancient Israel and early Christianity develop? What does the embodied and socially embedded nature of the human mind imply for the exegesis of biblical texts? "Mind, Morality and Magic" draws on a range of approaches to the study of the human mind - including memory studies, computer modeling, cognitive theories of ritual, social cognition, evolutionary psychology, biology of emotions, and research on religious experience. The volume explores how cognitive approaches to religion can shed light on classical concerns in biblical scholarship - such as the transmission of traditions, ritual and magic, and ethics - as well as uncover new questions and offer new methodologies.

Cognitive Perspectives on Israelite Identity breaks new ground in the study of ethnic identity in the ancient world through the articulation of an explicitly cognitive perspective. In presenting a view of ethnicity as an epistemological rather than an ontological entity, this work seeks to correct the pronounced tendency towards 'analytical groupism' in the academic literature. Challenging what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'our primary inclination to think the world in a substantialist manner,' this study seeks to break with the vernacular categories and 'commonsense primordialisms' encoded within the Biblical texts, whilst at the same time accounting for their tenacious hold on our social and political imagination. It is the recognition of the performative and reifying potential of these categories of ethno-political practice that disqualifies their appropriation as categories of social analysis.

The apparent absence of secrecy in Israelite religion in early antiquity, in contrast with the Greek mystery schools and the pervasive, structural secrecy of Egypt, is the dissertation's opening problem. the study posits that the First Temple priests crafted a "disaster-proof" transmission of their initiatory lore to future generations. Faced with a Derridean dilemma, they made "the secret" public yet without revealing it. the treasured esoteric knowledge was embedded within the Pentateuch as a "second-channel," noetic narrative called the Sod ("secret") by the study, via systemic and systematic use of advanced literary means, especially figuration. the compilers' intentional act originating from hyletic, mysterium tremendum encounters with a supernatural agent, YHWH, who signifies unprecedented transitivity, resulted in an intensional text of singular complexity. the study demonstrates that the J and E strands constitute priestly esoteric matter par excellence, while traditional priestly sections are their exoteric material. Using a transdisciplinary approach based on emergence and complex systems dynamics, the study develops the Pentateuchal theoretical model by constructing and mapping relevant contexts into demonstrata. the Pentateuch emerges as a multipurpose entity comprising a multilevel, multicode, multicontext, multi-addressee, multimessage textual production. Engaging (1) Husserl's noetic-noematic-hyletic phenomenological framework; (2) semiotic signifier-signified-referent aspects; (3) Jakobson's factors/functions of literary texts; and (4) Habermas's "communicative actions," the study proposes (i) manifold discursive planes; (ii) multiple contexts, grounds, semantic fields; (iii) inferential "continuums," domains guiding textual data derivation and constraining data analysis; and (iv) methodology using interrogative "inferential coordinates" and a custom-developed "noetic-literary" method. An ongoing, "oscillating" narrative metalepsis is observed, a consequence of parallel narratives colliding and periodically warping the narrative integrity of one or the other channel. the dissertation effectively opens a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism that is akin to the "center," or "organizing principle," of biblical theology. the Sod is exoterically discordant vis-a-vis the rabbinical project and incongruent with it esoterically. the study's results are falsifiable, and their validity is attested. the interdisciplinary study, situated in religious and literary studies, intersects with phenomenology; epistemology; linguistic anthropology; anthropology and psychology of religion; classicism; Egyptology; semiotics; cognitive science; communication studies; mysticism; biblical studies; and consciousness studies.

Encapsulating as it does research that has been undertaken on the sociological, anthropological and political aspects of the history of ancient Israel, this important book is designed to follow in the tradition of works in the series sponsored by The Society for Old Testament Study which began with the publication of The People and the Book in 1925. The World of Ancient Israel is especially concerned to explore in greater depth than comparable studies the areas and degrees of overlap between approaches to the subject of Old Testament research adopted by scholars and students of theology and the social sciences. Increasing numbers of scholars have recognised the valuable insights that can be gained from a cross-disciplinary approach, and it is becoming clear that the early biblical traditions about the formation of the Israelite state must be examined in the light of comparative anthropology if useful historical conclusions are to be drawn from them.