“Evil
Inclination” instead of the Satan in Barkhi Nafshi?
The
thanksgiving hymn Barkhi Nafshi (“Bless, O My Soul”) is one of the fragmentary
works discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QBarkhi Nafshia-e). .
. . one passage in Barkhi Nafshi is relevant to our present discussion of
superhuman beings and human responsibility for sin:
[the
heart of stone] you have [dri]ven with rebukes far from me, and have set a pure
heart in its place. The evil inclination [you] have driven with rebukes [from my
inmost parts] vacat [and the spirit of ho]lines you have set in my
heart. Adulterousness of the eyes you have removed from me, and it gazed upon
[all your ways. This s]tiffness of neck you have sent away from me, and you
have made it into humility. Wrathful anger you have removed [from me, and have
set in my a spirit of lo]ng suffering. Haughtiness of heart and arrogance of
eyes you have for[got]ten to reckon me. [A spirit of deceit you have destroyed]
and a [bro]ken heart you have given me. (4Q436 1 i 10-ii 4).
Eibert
Tigchelaar argues that there is an intertextual relationship between Barkhi
Nafshi and Zech 3. If Tigchelaar is correct, then, intriguingly, Barkhi Nafshi
differs from Zech 3 in that the hymn has yṣr r’, “an evil inclination,”
as the object of God’s rebuke (g’r) rather than hśṭn, “the Satan.”
If Barkhi
Nafshi replaces the Satan with an evil inclination, this raises some
interesting possibilities with regard to the theology of the text. . . . [Sirach
used] yēṣer as a netural concept to refer to the faculty by which a
person is able to choose to do either good or evil. The belief also arose in
early Judaism, based in part on biblical texts such as Gen 6:5 and 8:21, that a
person’s yēṣer could be predisposed toward sin (e.g., 4QInstructionc
[4Q417] 1 ii 12). The substitution of an evil inclination for the Satan in
Barkhi Nafshi could reflect an emphasis in this text on human responsibility for
sin rather than on superhuman responsibility for it. In this case, perhaps the
author is among those Jews who would deny that forces external to humans cause humans
to do evil, but this conclusion probably goes beyond what the evidence of this fragmentary
text allows. (Ryan E. Stokes, Satan: How God’s Executioner Became the Enemy [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2019], 138-39)
Further Reading
Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
