Were the Hebrew prophets Axial Age philosophers? (original) (raw)

Having surveyed the geographic and demographic landscape of sixth-century Palestine and Mesopotamia in my book, Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, I'd like to offer a different perspective. Let's pull back from what is by any reckoning a tiny plot of real estate (with an outsized impact on world events over succeeding millennia) to a more global view of the social trauma of 587 BCE. The Babylonian Exile event falls squarely into an epoch that big-picture thinkers of a certain persuasion refer to as the Axial Age. This was a loosely defined time period in which figures as diverse as the Buddha, Confucius, Mencius, Plato, Aristotle, and the compilers of the core Hindu scriptures were generating ideas that came to define the now-existing world religions. These same seeds of thought, gradually fertilized and mutated by experiences that arose out of the messy collisions of human history, eventually produced "modern" thought. The concept was used most influentially by the Karl Jaspers, who included the Hebrew prophets in his pantheon of Axial Age thinkers. Though the concept of the Axial Age is attributed to Jaspers, a German philosopher writing in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, its core idea was first formulated by a French scholar in the late 18th century. The paradigm was elaborated and extended by various thinkers of the 19th and 20th century, including Jakob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Alfred Weber. Though subject to extensive critiques and modifications, the notion of a decisive shift in the way humans understand themselves and the cosmos, sometime in the middle of the first millennium BCE, continues to intrigue scholars from multiple disciplines. Whatever other characteristics of human consciousness were developed during the Axial Age, the central one was critical self-reflection. By that we mean the ability to step back from one's individual or collective circumstances, as the member of a family or community, and to assess these circumstances with a certain objective distance.