Biblical  Psychology

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that ^[a]moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:27-28  NASB

Subdue it – We’re in a fight.  Oh, I don’t mean that Pauline stuff about principalities and powers in heavenly places.  I mean we’re in a fight for survival, here, on this earth.  As Camile Paglia noted, “Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature.  The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith.  But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin.”[1]  Heschel has a similar insight: “Scratch the skin of any person and you come upon sorrow, frustration, unhappiness.”[2]

It’s not surprising that even the original account of the creation of human beings contains hints at this reality.  The Hebrew verb, kābaš, translated here as “subdue,” implies real struggle.  Genesis doesn’t start with living in the perfectly peaceful Garden.  This verse clearly was not written for Adam and the woman.  TWOT notes:

Despite recent interpretations of Gen 1:28 which have tried to make “subdue” mean a responsibility for building up, it is obvious from an overall study of the word’s usage that this is not so. kābaš assumes that the party being subdued is hostile to the subduer, necessitating some sort of coercion if the subduing is to take place. Thus the word connotes “rape” in Est 7:8, or the conquest of the Canaanites in Num 32:22, 29; Josh 18:1; I Chr 22:18. In II Chr 28:10; Neh 5:5; Jer 34:11, 16 it refers to forced servitude.

Therefore “subdue” in Gen 1:28 implies that creation will not do man’s bidding gladly or easily and that man must now bring creation into submission by main strength. It is not to rule man. However, there is a twistedness in humanity which causes us to perform such a task with fierce and destructive delight. Try as we might, we cannot subdue this. But it can be subdued and this is the promise of Mic 7:10, “He will subdue our iniquities.”^[3]

And all of this before the Fall.

What this means is that the yetzer ha’ra is an essential characteristic of being human.  If a theology contends that this element of self-will must be removed in order to free us from sin, then that theology is claiming that our real problem is being human and in order to fix things we must no longer be human.  This was famously inscribed by Pedro Calderón de la Barca: “For man’s greatest sin is to have been born.”  Of course, if the theology claims that we are born sinful, then it follows that the only cure is to be reborn as something other than what we are, and typically that means to replace the ordinary drives that allow us to survive in this hostile world with “spiritual” efforts that prepare us for some other world.

This is not an Hebraic point of view.  According to the Bible (the Hebrew Bible, we must add), yetzer ha’ra and yetzer ha’tov are God’s deliberate design.  They do not go away with conversion.

“Since the yetzer ha-ra is essential for normative human activities, i.e., those activities necessary to assure our survival in the world, we understand it to mean the natural urge that compels us to survive in the world and to bend the forces of material nature to our will; it is the inclination to work for the self.  Conversely, the yetzer ha-tov represents the equally innate inclination to please or to serve another.  Thus, in every instance human beings are presented with a choice between the self (yetzer ha-ra) and the other (yetzer ha-tov).”[4]

“Because the vicissitudes of everyday life can be so overwhelmingly difficult, the yetzer ha-ra must be exercised with ever greater power and, like a muscle, its strength soon grows out of proportion to the strength of the yetzer ha-tov.  With Mussar practice, however, we can reengage our yetzer ha-tov, our desire to serve another before ourselves, without denying the legitimacy of the yetzer ha-ra.”[5]

Moses Hayyim Luzzatto clarifies how these two essential elements of human being must interact if we are to bend the force of the yetzer ha’ra to serve the will of the yetzer ha’tov.  It’s all in the objective.

“ . . . the question we ask ourselves in this meditative process is: ‘How did our success or failure to realize this middah affect the other person?’ not ‘How did this make me feel?’”[6]

The goal of the yetzer ha’tov is service to another, whether that be creation or human beings or God Himself.  This is why Yeshua equated the love of God with the love of the neighbor.  Both serve the same purpose; only the latter is a tangible, social effort.

We arrive at a simple biblical psychological conclusion.  To be human is to serve another, to subdue the potential hostility of opposing relationships by converting the enemy into the neighbor.  The enemy might be the earth itself, another person, or the distant Creator.  Becoming human is breaching those gaps.  And it’s something you can do.

Topical Index: human, subdue, kābaš, enemy, neighbor, yetzer ha’ra, yetzer ha’tov, Genesis 1:27-28

[1] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 1.

[2] Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 146.

^[3] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 951 כָבַשׁ. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 430). Chicago: Moody Press.

[4] Ira F. Stone, “Introduction,” in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. xviii.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. xix.