This book is about minds and religionancient Israelite minds and religion, to be more precise. In the past thirty years or so, a wave of research in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has yielded deep insights into the cognitive foundations of religious belief and behavior. 1 This body of research suggests that religion is not sui generis, but is instead rooted in ordinary features of human cognitive architecture. That is, religion tends to rely upon evolved cognitive mechanisms and, as a result, emerges as an outgrowth of the way human minds operate in general. 2 In this sense, religion is therefore "natural." 3 This book extends these insights by employing current cognitive approaches in order to explore expressions of religious thought and behavior in ancient Iron Age Israel. Although scholarship on Israelite religion has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent yearsinsofar as it makes use of both textual and archaeological data, as well as various social science methodologiescognitive tools have
This paper investigates the psychological mechanisms that underpin Qumran sectarian dualism and its construction of in-group/out-group boundaries. Specifically, evidence from experimental and developmental psychology and cognitive anthropology is used to argue that Serek ha-Yaḥad and the Two Spirits Treatise (1QS 3:13–4:26) reflect a deeply-engrained psychological essentialism wherein non-group members are conceptualized as having inherently different biological essences. This essentialist tendency is easily extended to the social domain in what scholars call the “naturalization” of social groups. After reviewing this literature, the paper examines the Serek and Treatise’s use of kinship terms, the word “spirit,” and language denoting human nature and living species, in order to demonstrate that essentialist intuitions about outsiders provide a foundation for the sect’s dualistic worldview. Importantly, the essentialist thinking in these texts is also firmly grounded in and channeled through the intertextual interpretation of scripture, drawing heavily on the rich creation vocabulary in Genesis 1–3.
This paper examines the demons Pazuzu and Lamaštu from a cognitive science perspective. As hybrid creatures, the iconography of these demons combines an array of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic properties, and is therefore marked by a high degree of conceptual complexity. In a technical sense, they are what cognitive researchers refer to as radically “counterintuitive” representations. However, highly complex religious concepts are difficult in terms of cognitive processing, memory, and transmission, and, as a result, are prone to being spontaneously simplified in structure. Accordingly, there is reason to expect that the material images of Pazuzu and Lamaštu differed from the corresponding mental images of these demons. Specifically, it is argued here that in ancient cognition and memory, the demons would have been represented in a more cognitively optimal manner. This hypothesis is further supported by a detailed consideration of the full repertoire of iconographic and textual sources.
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