Ishay Rosen-Zvi is a gifted scholar of rabbinic religion and thought. His latest book on what was once called “the evil inclination,” the yeẓer har‘a, is an ambitious revision of previous research. I follow Rosen-Zvi's own excellent summary of his findings, found at the end of the book, in the coming lines.
The dominant, almost exclusive, early usage of the term in tannaitic literature is found in the literature of the school of Rabbi Yishmael and has no binary counterpart, e.g. yeẓer tov, the so-called “good inclination.” The term's function is to supply an account for man's sinfulness. It is the yeẓer har‘a that causes a person to sin. In a brief final chapter, Rosen-Zvi also shows that the term is used almost exclusively regarding males but there is room to posit that the sages saw females as also possessing a yeẓer har‘a (110). Along with the determination that the yeẓer har‘a was born and bred in the school of R. Yishamel, Rosen-Zvi's other major contributions are: 1) locating the growing identification of the yeẓer har‘a with sexual drives in the later strata of the Babylonian Talmud, especially the stam; and 2) moving our perception of the term from the psychological realm to the demonological, whence the title of the book.
All of the above is accomplished in a rich but terse prose exposition, spanning 110 pages of text and 90 pages of footnotes. Rosen-Zvi traces the term yeẓer and its modifiers from its biblical origins, through Second Temple literature, especially Qumran, where yeẓer har‘a makes it first appearance as a term (45–48), and on to rabbinic literature. Throughout, Rosen-Zvi makes good use of early Christian and late antique thought, primarily to buttress his argument that the yeẓer har‘a is a demonic being, distinct from one's self, and not an integral part of one's psyche (132). He makes good critical usage of the extensive previous bibliography on the yetzer, two monographs, and many additional scholarly analyses in book chapters and articles on ancillary topics (4). The argument of the book is clear, concise and convincing, avails itself of modern theoretical literature (e.g., 212 n. 5). Rosen-Zvi mines philological studies to enrich the treatment of his many sources, and generally provides felicitous English translations and reformulations of the texts.
I would like to engage the author's thesis that the yeẓer har‘a is “demonic desire,” that is “the demonic-yet-fully-internalized” and a “source of human sinfulness” (43). How different, one might ask, is an anthropology of a fully internalized demon from the psychologizing readings that Rosen-Zvi eschews (84–86)? Rosen-Zvi admits that it was only in amoraic sources that the yeẓer was invested with “new… powers” and became “increasingly demonic” (37). One might have expected a more nuanced portrayal of this trajectory of demonization akin to Rosen-Zvi's vivid portrayal of the development of the sexual aspect of the yeẓer har‘a in the various layers of the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, B. Sukkah 50b–52a, “the longest, most developed sugya on the yeẓer in all of rabbinic literature,” in which the representation of the yeẓer as a demonic being is fully realized, is analyzed summarily in but two paragraphs. Rosen- Zvi reports that Reish Lakish, a leading Palestinian amora of the late third century, is quoted only in the Bavli (Bava Batra 16a, reference accidentally omitted) as stating that the Angel of Death, Satan, and the yeẓer har‘a are one and the same, thus approaching “the cosmic demonic figures prevailing in the Second Temple literature” (79). Since another statement by Reish Lakish mentioned on the previous page (78) invokes the duality of yeẓer tov and ra, it might have been interesting to compare the two positions. (See also Rosen-Zvi, The Rite that was Not (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008) [Heb.] 28 n. 38.)
Though Rosen-Zvi briefly rehearses the genesis and history of the term yeẓer (its biblical roots, where in combination with “lev” it leads to evil [Genesis 6: 5 and 8:21]) and yeẓer har‘a (which first appears in Qumran, an innovation), there is no sustained effort to compare and contrast the term with Greek equivalents such as thumos and orgé, which are briefly alluded to at the end of chapter 1 (34; 151–152 n97–100. So, for example, in a chapter of the pseudo-Clementine homilies adduced by Rosen-Zvi to demonstrate the work of demons, the demons promote in the human souls desire (enthumeiseis) for things that they (evidently the demons) want. It would seem that the desire in the human is not to be identified with the demons themselves but are a product of the demons’ intervention or influence on humans.
Rosen-Zvi's chapter on the amoraic yeẓer is replete with insightful readings of the sources and he traces the demonization of the yeẓer with a steady hand. See especially his new and persuasive reading of the relationship of soul and yeẓer in the well-known dialogue between R. Judah the Patriarch and Antoninus; he concludes there that “while both soul and yeẓer are believed to enter humans at early stages in their lives, there is a clear ontological hierarchy between them” (71).
In sum, this is a fine work whose main shortcoming is its brevity. The work was preceded by a series of vorstudien, but this fascinating study would have benefited by a more leisurely exposition. It is definitely a major contribution to our understanding of rabbinic anthropology and provides a new perspective on the problem of evil in rabbinic literature. It is recommended reading for graduate courses in religion and Judaica and for those who want to understand rabbinic thought in its late antique context.
