The Sôd Hypothesis: Phenomenological, Semiotic, Cognitive, and Noetic-Literary Recovery of the Pentateuch's Embedded Inner-Core Mystical Initiation Tradition of Ancient Israelite Cultic Religion

This book is a facsimile reissue, as a single-volume paperback, of the dissertation version of record available as a two-volume hardcover from UMI Dissertation Publishing (ProQuest, 2011). The apparent absence of secrecy (or Sôd in Hebrew) 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. This intentional act originating from mysterium tremendum encounters with a supernatural agent, YHWH, is shown to result in an intensional text of singular complexity (the Pentateuch plus the book of Joshua). The J and E strands, previously seen in scholarship as purely literary and/or semi-historical, are now seen as constituting priestly esoteric matter par excellence, while the traditional priestly sections, in contrast, as exoteric. 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 emerging priestly esoteric system is akin to the "center," or "organizing principle," of biblical theology. The study's results are falsifiable, and their validity is attested.

KEYWORDS:Pentateuch; Torah; Hexateuch; Judaism; Hebrew Bible; Old Testament; ancient Israel; early antiquity; First Temple; Israelite; priesthood; religion; communication; secrecy; initiation; sod; religious experience; cognitive; consciousness; Jewish mysticism; kabbalah; altered states; esoteric; noetic; literary; figuration; nonliteral; phenomenology; intention; intension; hyle; noema; doxa; episteme; poiesis; deixis; semiotic; transitivity; hyponoia; metaphor; allegory; allegoresis; metalepsis; emergence; God; YHWH; Elohim; sublime; categorization; de dicto; de re; tree of knowledge; tree of life; Eden; mysterium tremendum; identity; complex systems