Friday, October 22, 2021

Ryan E. Stokes on the "Yetzer Hara" (Evil Inclination/Impulse) Replacing "Satan" in Barkhi Nafshi

  

“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).