Facing Our Past
Biblical scholarship as archaeo-psychology sheds light on the development of moral and religious awareness. We can either run from it or learn from it.
Published: November 11, 2015
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
See Farber’s credo in the Afterword to his essay, “Avraham Avinu is My Father.”
For a discussion of the assumptions employed by “ancient interpreters” as opposed to “modern biblical scholars,” see James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible (Free Press, 2007), Preliminaries.
Editor’s Note: I got it from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (also found in his essay, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through.”) Freud came up with it from playing object permanence games with his nephew Ernst (the game is called Fort-Da in German). It can also be found in Selma Fraiberg’s excellent parenting book, The Magic Years, pp. 81-83. ZIF
http://rebmottle.com/who-wrote-the-bible-does-it-matter/ August 14, 2015. Recorded for the recently discontinued English language radio station, The Voice of Israel. Transcription mine.
Here I use the term archaeo-psychology to refer to the study of ancient psychological attitudes using the biblical texts and related archaeological data. This overlaps somewhat with the field of Cognitive Archaeology (the study of how ancient societies thought based on their material culture) but not with that of Psychoarchaeology (the psychological effects of archaeology).
James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible (Free Press, 2007), Ch. 33, end.
