“Examination of Metatron and the Principal Angelic Figures Within Early Rabbinic Tradition”

The list of papers for the Shalem Center’s conference on philosophical analysis of scripture has been published. I’m 17th of 25 speakers in the alphabetical list, though I don’t know yet what the timetable will be.

The abstract for my paper is below.

An Investigation of Metatron and other principal angel figures within early rabbinic tradition

In this paper I will argue that rabbinic traditions surrounding Metatron and his cognates represent an attempt to clarify the relationship between the appearance or knowledge of God, and God’s essence.

Early rabbinic tradition employed several tools to explain away or mask difficult scriptural anthropomorphisms: the Shekhinah, Memra, the ‘word of God’ and more were all utilized in different contexts and by different groups. The current opinion on Metatron, as expressed in research by Andrei Orlov and Daniel Boyarin is that he represents a tradition within Second Temple Judaism which esteemed a second heavenly power or pseudo-divinity. With deep links to the Enoch tradition and also providing a likely source point for some Christian theology, this binitarian tradition was swiftly challenged by the emerging rabbinate. I will offer a new perspective on the use of a hypostatic entity such as Metatron, and hope to establish that there is an important epistemological principle being debated within rabbinic theology.

The mentions in the Talmud are brief and extremely pithy but seem concerned to reject the independence or authority of Metatron. He is lashed when mistaken for God, and he must not be worshipped – the third Talmudic reference seems more mundane, claiming only that Metatron helps teach Torah to the departed souls of young children.

Daniel Abrams has argued that the story of Abuyah’s heresy is attacking not the elevation of an angel to divine status, but the ousting of that angel from the singular essence of God. Accordingly, it is not the ascribing of divine status to Metatron which is R. Abuya’s heresy, but the separation of the divine essence into two; i.e., the cutting of Metatron from God (thereby making sense of the claim that he “cut the shoots”). There are not two powers in heaven but one, and this one includes Metatron. Although Sanh.38b condemns the worship of Metatron, if we understand Metatron as the embodiment or manifestation of God (the little Yahweh as opposed to the full Yahweh), then the message is that one should not direct worship to this part. This also would be, in effect, “cutting the shoots”. AvZ3b contains a peculiar – though little noticed – comment, to the effect that although one may say it is Metatron who teaches the children, “If you like”, it also “may be said that God did this as well as other things”. One wonders why it would not matter: the text does not say it is either or both of them, but that we could name the agent as one or the other and it would make no difference. The logical conclusion is that this is because they are the same being.

The notion that the principal angel is not in fact an independent being but an element of the single godhead helps to explain some of the figure’s mysterious qualities, including the carrying of the divine name, and the apparent confusion with Yahweh. To quote David Winston on Philo’s logos, it is “the face of God turned toward creation”. (1985:49). The title sar hapannim is usually taken to mean one who stands before the face of god, as Enoch does, but this can also be understood as the the prince who is the presence or face. The integration with God’s Name can be seen to indicate the symbolic function of Metatron: The name of an object points to and represents that object; it indicates it by sharing in its nature. The human in using God’s name has access to Him – for to name something solidifies its presence.

Another way to express this would be as the phenomena-of-God: compressed and made intelligible to finite minds; God in his relation to existence; God-for-man. God is filtered through Metatron’s semi-abstract nature in order to find expression in the corporeal world – to exist within the limits of human consciousness.

This rereading of Metatron as an epistemological principle allows us to place rabbinic theological disputes in the context of long-standing philosophical concerns over the relationship between a thing-in-itself and a phenomenal object.

If objects are to have their own existence independent of the subject, the question as to how they can be perceived or known is crucially important. The object then cannot be identical with what appears in consciousness. But if there is a distinction between appearance and reality, we must ask both what the similarity of the appearance to the object is, and how the object can cause the appearance. The former is particularly troubling as the appearance is vessel for any knowledge of the object itself.

God in some sense can be viewed as the ultimate object – that which exists separately from human subjectivity yet is still able to be known. The debate around the transcendence and immanence of God mirrors the problem of noumenal and phenomenal objects made famous by Kant, and still being debated at the present. Graham Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy’ proposes an ‘intentional object’ which figures as the medium of interaction between any two – otherwise isolated – objects, and bears some curious similarities to the rabbis’ Metatron.

Finally, it seems that Metatron must represent God in human shape precisely because the phenomenal representation of any object adapts itself to the nature of the subject, being drawn through their metaphysical filters. Metatron takes human shape because he is the presentation of God to human beings.

“Philosophical Investigation of the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Midrash”
Location:  The Shalem Center, Jerusalem
Dates:      June 26-30, 2011

Speakers:

1. Rachel Adelman (Harvard Divinity School), “’Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of’: Imagining God’s Body in the Narrative of Redemption”
2. Ira Bedzow (Emory University), “Must we be Satisfied with Modern Jewish Thought or Can There be a Contemporary Jewish Philosophy?”
3. Louis Blond (University of Cape Town), “The Paradox of Perfection Theology”
4. James Diamond (University of Waterloo), “The Biblical Moment of Perception: Angelic Encounter as Metaphysics”
5. Jeremy England (Princeton University), “Staff or Serpent? Expectation and Perception in a World of Laws”
6. Michael Fagenblat (Monash University), “Kabod: Phenomenological Metaphysics in the Hebrew Bible”
7. Lenn Goodman (Vanderbilt University), “God and Israel as Lovers: The Song of Songs”
8. Hannah Hashkes (Shalem Center), “Torah’s Seventy Faces: Rabbinic Hermeneutics and Metaphysics”
9. Yoram Hazony (Shalem Center), “Wrestling With God”
10. Jacob Howland (University of Tulsa), “Cosmos and Philosophy in Plato and the Bible”
11. Dru Johnson (St. Mary’s College), “Phenomenal Theology?: Some Pentateuchal Cautions for Analytic Theology”
12. Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv University), “Radical Negative Theology”
13. Steven Kepnes (Colgate University), “Holy, Holy, Holy:  The Language of the Nature of God in Isaiah”
14. Sam Lebens (Birkbeck College, London; and Yeshivat Torat Yosef Hamivtar, Efrat), “How to Cut a Sentence into Bits: Logic and Law in the Talmud and Beyond”
15. Berel Dov Lerner (Western Galilee College), “Divine Plans and Human Obligations”
16. Joseph Isaac Lifshitz (Shalem Center), “The Judicial Ground of the Talmudic Style of Discussion”
17. Michael Miller (University of Nottingham), “Examination of Metatron and the Principal Angelic Figures Within Early Rabbinic Tradition”
18. Alan Mittleman (Jewish Theological Seminary), “The Problem of Holiness”
19. Dani Rabinowitz & Kelly Clark (Oxford University & Calvin College), “How Did the First Protagonists of Genesis Understand the Nature of God?”
20. Tamar Rudavsky (Ohio State University), “Time and Eternity as reflected in Scripture and Philosophy”
21. Kenneth  Seeskin (Northwestern University), “The Destructiveness of God”
22. Aaron Segal (University of Notre Dame), “Metaphysics Out of the Sources of Halacha or a Halachik Metaphysic?”
23. Josh Weinstein (Shalem Center), “Gone Fishin’, or The Matter, Form and Power of a Leviathan, Civill and Ecclesiasticall”
24. Roslyn Weiss (Lehigh University), “’Kol Tuvi’—The Transcendent God of Goodness”
25. Jacob Wright (Emory University), “Shalem’s ‘Jewish Philosophical Theology’ Project and the Guild of Biblical Studies”