Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism

Abstract

The great sage and scribe Jesus Ben Sira was, for the most part, a writer in confident control of his message, one who seldom engaged in direct polemics with other points of view. On occasion, however, his irritation with claims that he finds wrong-headed comes sharply into view. One of these moments is in ch. 15 of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, where the sage stoutly objects to those who—as he charac terizes them—claim that it is God's fault that they have sinned. In response, Ben Sira mounts a vigorous defense of the Deuteronomic view of moral agency, in which persons have free will and the unimpeded capacity to choose between life and death (Sir 15:15-17). is difficult to know who Ben Sira's opponents actually were, because it is unlikely that he gives a fair representation of their position in the whiny words he attributes to them, It was the Lord's doing that I fell away.... was he who led me astray (15:11-12). In some ways the position sounds closest to the moral anthropology articulated three hundred years later in the book of 4 Ezra. There Ezra sharply questions the model of free human agency and attributes the moral failure of the vast majority of persons to the evil heart with which humans were created, and which God did not act to remove or correct. While we do not know if the argument that Ezra makes had already been developed by contempo raries of Ben Sira, ample evidence exists for the emergence of a variety of often startling alternatives to the Deuteronomic model of moral agency in various strands of Second Temple Jewish literature. Curiously, although interest in models of moral psychology has been lively in NT studies, especially as focused on the figure of Paul, this topic has been rather neglected by Hebrew Bible and Second Temple scholars, though a revival of inter est in biblical anthropology in general—especially among German-speaking schol ars—suggests that interest in this subject may be rising.1 In other disciplines, the