The standard account of the yetzer hara, or evil inclination, today focuses attention on destructive sexual desire arising from the lower body, and the need to control and tame it. However, when Rosen-Zvi investigated this concept in rabbinic literature, he found that it represented a different conflict for certain rabbis and schools associated with them, especially Rabbi Ishmael. Prior to its later internalization to the human psyche and the discourse of self-control, the evil yetzer was associated with spiritual powers that tempted humans to sin. Thus one sought to conquer forces that were attacking from inside the person but were not a part of themselves but demonic and cosmic in nature. With Rabbi Ishmael, the demonic began to be internalized.
In addition to comprehensive analysis of the classical rabbinic literature on the evil yetzer, and the changing perceptions of it, Rosen-Zvi traces related developments in early Christian literature, especially within the trajectories of asceticism and monasticism of the Alexandrian tradition (Clement, Origen, Antony, Athanasius, and Evagrius Ponticus). At stake are major topics of anthropological concern, especially whether the impulse toward evil signified by the yetzer arises from outside of humans, or inside but different from themselves, or as an integral part of themselves, and thus, what strategies the rabbis sought to employ, and how those compare or contrast with discourses about the struggles of the soul. Bibliography, indexes.
Nonfiction
Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity
- Review
By
– June 22, 2012
Mark D. Nanos, Ph.D., University of Kansas, is the author of Mysteryof Romans, winner of the 1996 National Jewish Book Award, Charles H. RevsonAward in Jewish-Christian Relations.
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