Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity

263 Pages·2011·35.92 MB·English

by  Ishay Rosen-Zvi

Demonic Desires
Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity
Ishay Rosen-Zvi
PENN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosen-Zvi, Ishay.
Demonic desires: yetzer hara and the problem of evil in late antiquity I Ishay Rosen-
Zvi. -lsted.
p. cm. - (Divinations: rereading late ancient religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4339-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Yetzer hara (Judaism) 2. Good and evil-Religious aspects-Judaism. I. Title.
II. Series: Divinations.
BJ1406.R6420II
296.3'r6-dc22

Contents
Introduction. The Riddle, or: How Did the Evil
Yetzer Become a Mighty King? I
Chapter 1. "The Torah Spoke Regarding
the Yetzer": Tannaitic Literature 14
Chapter 2. Yetzer and Other Demons: Patristic Parallels 36
Chapter 3. Yetzer at Qumran: Proto-Rabbinic? 44
Chapter 4. Coming of Age: Amoraic Yetzer 65
Chapter 5. Refuting the Yetzer: The Limits
of Rabbinic Discursive Worlds 87
Chapter 6. Sexualizing the Yetzer 102
Chapter 7. Weak Like a Female, Strong Like
a Male: Yetzer and Gender 120
Afterword: Toward a Genealogy of the Rabbinic Subject 127
Notes 135
Bibliography 215
Subject Index 239
Source Index 243
Acknowledgments 255

Introduction
The Riddle, or: How Did the Evil Yetzer
Become a Mighty King?
Shortly before coming to a close, Ecclesiastes tells us of a small city that was
besieged by a great king. The city was saved by the wisdom of a "poor wise
man," who, however, was forgotten a short while later. Ecclesiastes dryly
comments: "So I observed wisdom is better than valor, but a poor man's wis-
dom is scorned and his words are not heeded" (9:16). This critique of urban
warfare and politics did not seem to interest the rabbis. Although they still
understood these verses as reflecting on the themes of power, wisdom, and
military tactics, for them the narrative was referring to an entirely different
kind of warfare; not one of siege engines and adjutants but rather a form of
combat completely private and internal.l
R. Ammi bar Abba said: What is the meaning of the passage: a little
city, with flw men in it? (Ecc 9:14)
A little cilJ'-is the body;
with flw men in it-these are the limbs;
and to it came a great king, who besieged it-this is the evil yetzer;
and built mighty siege works against it-these are sins.
A poor wise man was in the city (v. 15)-this is the good yetzer;
who saved it with his wisdom-this is repentance and good deeds.
But nobody thought oft hat poor man-for when the evil yetzer
[dominates], the good yetzer is not remembered. (b. Ned 32b)
This passage envisions the individual as a site of conflict that involves con-
trol, repression, and submission, that can best be described using the image of a
city under siege. This use of the public sphere as a metaphor for the private is of
course a commonplace in the Classical and Hellenistic tradition. It goes back
2 Introduction
at least to Plato, who famously portrayed the individual as a microcosm of the
city-state.2 The players in our rabbinic drama, however, are quite different from
the standard Hellenist dramatis personae. While Philo and Paul, to take two fa-
mous examples, present conflicts between soul and body, or mind and desires,
this homily presents a race for control between two tendencies inside the soul
itself: the good yetzer and the evil yetzer.
Several other aspects of this battle are noteworthy. First, the two oppos-
ing powers in this struggle are not symmetrical. The evil yetzer is a "great
king." The good yetzer, though "wise," is a "poor man," who despite his wis-
dom and tactical maneuvering cannot change the basic balance of power.
Second, contrary to prevalent Hellenistic conceptions, the evil yetzer is not
identical to the body; in the parable, the body is the city, the neutral battle-
ground for the two yetzarim. The struggle is between two forces inside the
body, not body and soul.3 Moreover, the evilyetzer is an invader, laying siege
to the body from outside, not an integral part of it. Third, the evil yetzer is
clearly antinomian. It does not attempt to draw the person to questionable
behavior in general, but specifically to sins. Similarly, the good yetzer wages
war by means of "repentance and good deeds." The adversaries in this battle
are not wisdom and passions; they are obedience to God and transgressions.
The asymmetric balance of power between the king and the poor man com-
pels the latter to engage in various stratagems in order to defeat the king and
lift the siege. To the rabbis, this is the picture of a person's struggle against
the evil yetzer, a contest in which all manner of ploys must be implemented,
and yet the balance of power between the great king and the poor man can
never be altered.
This vivid portrayal of the evil yetzer as a dominant, antinomian entity
raises a series of questions. This figure of the yetzer is unparalleled in pre-rab-
binic literature. Even the term ''yetzer (ha}ra" itself appears only a few times be-
fore the rabbis. Who, then, crowned the evil yetzer a "great king," capable of
besieging and even conquering the whole city, and why? How did it acquire
such a central place in rabbinic anthropology? More than anything, what
drives this study is the enigmas posed by the fundamental place of the yetzer
and the powerful demonic traits ascribed to it in the world of the rabbis.
The "good yetzer" is yet another problem. While the term "evil yetzer"
does exist in pre-rabbinic literature (albeit in a very minor fashion), its good
counterpart is virtually unknown outside of rabbinic literature.4 Even in this
homily, the good yetzer is quite pale in comparison to the evil one. What is
the source of the good yetzer, and what is its role in rabbinic anthropology? Is
Introduction 3
the chief adversary of the evil yetzer its good counterpart, or the human
being as a whole? In short: does a person really have one yetzer or two?
It was not always this complicated. The biblical beginnings of the yetzer
are quite modest and hardly foreshadow the glorious career awaiting it. The
root appears in the Hebrew Bible approximately seventy times, usually in
verbal forms, and denotes the creating, fashioning, and designing of objects
(mostly made of clay). Such a fashioning can be ascribed to both humans and
God, and indeed the creation of humanity and of the world at large is described
with verbs derived from this root.5 The noun indicates the result of this
craft: an object or a creature (Hab 2:18). By extension, it also includes the things
created in or by the mind, such as thoughts, devices, and inclinations.6This lat-
ter meaning seems to appear in only six verses, most of which present the
human yetzer or thoughts as natural or even positive (c£ Is 26:3).7
However, two verses in Genesis, ascribed to J by modern biblical scholar-
ship, explicitly present yetzer as evil: "The Lord saw how great man's wickedness
on earth was, and how every plan devised by his mind (1::17 J11::11Vnr.l was
nothing but evil all the time" (Gen 6:5); "The Lord said to himself: Never again
will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man's mind (::17
O'T.t-\;,) are evil from his youth" (8:21). Taken alone, the word yetzer in these two
verses might denote "what is created," and thus they might be read as saying
simply that "every product of the thought of man's mind" is evil. 8 Other verses
(e.g., Deut 31:21 and Ps 103:14), however, indicate a more developed meaning:
human thoughts, plans, imagination, or even dispositions and tendencies.9
Nothing in these two short verses prepares us for the crucial role they
play in post-biblical anthropology, especially in its rabbinic version. We
should be wary of anachronistic over-readings of the biblical yetzer, which
probably denotes no more than "thoughts created by the mind," perhaps
with the additional sense of devices and tendencies. None of the verses treat
yetzer as an entity, let alone an evil one. Even these two famous verses from
Genesis tell us nothing more than that God discovered, to his great dismay,
that the yetzer of the human heart is indeed evil.!O What, then, might ac-
count for this radical transformation from the biblical to the rabbinic yetzer?
From Theodicy to Askesis: Rabbinic Yetzer in Scholarship
Only two studies, an essay and a monograph, are dedicated to rabbinic yetzer.
Frank C. Porter's "The Yeyer Hara: A Study in the Jewish Doctrine of Sin" was
4 Introduction
published in I902,u This extremely erudite work is outdated in much of its
analysis, especially of the pre-rabbinic origins of the yetzer, written half a cen-
tury before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A greater deficiency is the ex-
plicit polemical context of this study. Confronted by scholars who read Pauline
dualistic anthropology against the backdrop of rabbinic discourse of two
yetzarim, Porter insists that the rabbinic yetzer is "genuinely Hebraic [i.e., bibli-
cal] in nature" (97). The rabbinic concept ofy etzarim is a legitimate descendant
of the Bible's monist anthropology. Much of his study is accordingly a refuta-
tion of the scholarly image of the rabbis' dualistic worldview, manifested by
their (alleged) identification of the evil yetzer with the body. The veracity of his
thesis notwithstanding, Porter discusses the issue from a single perspective,
quite narrow and extremely polemical.
Geert H. Cohen Stuart's published dissertation, "The Struggle in Man
between Good and Evil: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Rabbinic Concept
ofYetzer Hara," is the only monograph dedicated to the rabbinic yetzer.12 How-
ever, even this study is largely occupied with pre-rabbinic appearances of
yetzer, as well as related terms and concepts. The book is well informed and
knowledgeable, but the author's attempt to prove his thesis that rabbinic
yetzer is an innovation of the mid-second century causes him to under-read
(and sometimes distort) pre- and early rabbinic material. The last part of the
book, which discusses rabbinic material chronologically, is based solely on
the names of sages cited in the traditions, totally ignoring the compositions
in which they appear. Early and late, Babylonian and Palestinian sources are
conflated. While acknowledging its debt to Cohen Stuart's pioneering work,
the present study offers a significantly different phenomenological and his-
torical account of the material.
The singularity of Cohen Stuart's monograph belies a much wider schol-
arly interest in the yetzer. Rabbinic yetzer is part of almost any discussion of
rabbinic theology, anthropology, nomism, and sexual ethics. Scholars in adja-
cent fields, such as Second Temple literature, treat rabbinic yetzer as a pre-
rabbinic heritage and track all sorts of parallel terms and concepts, while New
Testament scholars cite the yetzer as a parallel to the Pauline concept of "Sin"
residing in the body. Abundance has its price, however. For the most part, rab-
binic yetzer is not analyzed by studies dedicated specifically to this issue but
only in a comparative perspective. More often than not, this leads to a sche-
matic and partial treatment of the yetzer. Scholars tend to pick sources that suit
their thematic interests, and the images of the rabbinic yetzer in these studies
are thus fragmentary and in many cases distorted.