later than
Ben Sira,
already show fully developed notions of warring elements within the human breast. One of the most striking examples is the
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,
a Hellenistic Jewish text dated approximately to sometime in the late second century
B.C.E.
(Kee 1983, 778), where we find the following passage:
|
 | | God has granted two ways to the sons of men, two mind-sets, two lines of action, two models, and two goals. Accordingly, everything is in pairs, the one over against the other.
The two ways are good and evil; concerning them are two dispositions within our breasts that choose between them
. If the soul wants to follow the good way, all of its deeds are done in righteousness and every sin is immediately repented. Contemplating just deeds and rejecting wickedness, the soul overcomes evil and uproots sin. But if the mind is disposed toward evil, all of its deeds are wicked; driving out the good, it accepts the evil and is overmastered by Beliar, who, even when good is undertaken, presses the struggle so as to make the aim of his action into evil, since the devil's storehouse is filled with the venom of the evil spirit.
|
| | (Kee 1983, 817)
|
There is nothing particularly remarkable about the suggestion that God has granted two lines of actions to human beings; this is, after all, no more than a paraphrase of the Torah itself, where God sets before humans life and death and commands them to "choose life" (Deut. 30:15; and see Josh. 24:15 and Jer. 21:814), and indeed, this notion is common to our text and to the
Ben Sira
passage quoted above. But here, this biblical idea is expanded by the notion that the choice between life and death is carried out in the struggle between "two dispositions within our breasts."
7
We see here an entirely different moral psychology from that found in
Ben Sira,
which emphasized a single
yetser
that has the power to choose good or ill (Gammie 1974, 380). This passage is not unique or even unusual in the
Testaments
; there are at least twelve other chapters of this relatively short text in which such a dualist notion of human moral psychology is advancedsometimes quite explicitly, as in the following: "So understand, my children, that two spirits await an opportunity with humanity: the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. In between is the con-
|
| | 7. Accordingly, the references to
The Didache and The Epistle of Barnabas
made by Kee (1983, 816) and Leaney (1966, 48) are entirely irrelevant, for while those documents speak of "Two Ways," they do not speak of "Two Spirits." To be sure, the latter does refer to the Two Ways as being presided over by two angels, but they do not seem at all to be warring for hegemony within the spirit of the individual.
|
|
|
