This is the best book I have ever read attempting to coherently explain the history and nature of Western religion as well as man’s relationship to god(s), or in my words whatever stories and beliefs fill the god-shaped hole in our heads. It also provides the best tour I’ve ever taken of the Old Testament, describing the mentality of the people who created it, how the books of the OT were laid down through time, and how Judaism evolved in response to adjacent geopolitical and cultural forces from its henotheist or monolatrist roots to its strict and initially brutal monotheism into its more gentle contemporary rabbinical form.The sense-making lens through with McVeigh does his analysis is based on the work of Julian Jaynes as expounded in his seminal 1976 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." Jaynes’ many fans, including myself, have long been disappointed that his breakthrough work, which he himself admitted contains a lot of speculation, was not aggressively followed up by the next generation of scholars. McVeigh has clearly picked up the baton. One hopes that this might rekindle interest in Jaynes’ theories, not just through things like biblical analysis but through deeper investigations in neurophysiology, anthropology, archeology, linguistics, and psychology.To summarize Jayne’s theory in brief, he believed that conscious interiority, that is the sense that there is a willful “I” living inside your head that authorizes and directs your behavior, is a surprisingly recent development that slowly emerged after the Bronze Age collapse circa 1000 BCE. Prior to that he believed most humans had bicameral mentalities in which they “heard” the voices of their ancestors, gods, and divine rulers in their heads. These voices authorized and directed behavior, a universal mentality that was leveraged through theopolitical consolidation and behavioral reinforcement to create the Early Near East civilizations using god-enforced social stability. Note that no evolution of brain anatomy was required for the transition to modern consciousness. Jaynes believes that the human brain has such a high degree of neuroplasticity that any human infant, ancient or modern, could be acculturated to either bicameralism or conscious interiority depending on the environment in which they are raised.“Fire and brimstone, bellowing prophets, and a good dose of very old-fashioned sermonizing—these are the images the Bible brings to mind for many of us. But this assortment of sacred writings, in particular the OT, is more than a collection of colorful allegories or miracles-and-morals mythology. This book tells a story inspired by examples from the Bible. It begins about several centuries before 1000 BCE, with the premise that at that time people lacked conscious interiority, i.e. that indefinable experience of being subjectively self-aware and able to mentally “see” oneself and plan for the future. Most behavior was habit-determined, prescribed, and routinized.…when confronted with a particularly novel, stressful, or challenging situation that required cautious deliberation, individuals in the Bronze Age heard the guiding “voices” of gods, ancestors, or divine rulers. These “voice-volitions” originated in the right hemisphere (the commanding “god”) and communicated with the left hemisphere (the obeying “person”). In what was ancient Israel, the loss of direct, face-to-face theophanies from Yahweh required new forms of authoritative decision-making.…My working premise is that some books of the OT refer to either late bicameral times (or more precisely the declining days of bicamerality, i.e. several centuries before and after 1000 BCE) or post-bicameral times when expressions of vestigial bicamerality—unsanctioned divination and angry, frothing prophets—haunted the social landscape like ghosts.”McVeigh uses linguistic analysis to track the decline of bicameral god-speak (…and the lord said) and the rise of conscious mind-words as the ratio of the two changed from the oldest books of the Old Testament into the New Testament. He claims that this indicates a transition of the two mentalities, which competed across large stretches of time. It was during this transition time that Judaism became brutally monotheistic, fighting for the hegemony of Yahweh against many competing gods.“as the cult of Yahweh became more and more solidified, competing supernatural entities, such as ancestors, were banished from the spiritual landscape, as well as denied entry into the canonized writings.…Deuteronomy records how the Israelites were ordered to inform on family members who expressed loyalty to other gods. For any individual found worshipping a foreign deity, the Israelites should “Show him no pity or compassion, and do not shield him; but take his life. Let your hand be the first against him to put him to death, and the hand of the rest of the people thereafter. Stone him to death” (Deu 13: 9–11). The Lord seemed so concerned about misleading divine communication that he demanded parents, if they catch their children prophesizing, to exterminate them on the spot (Zec 13: 3–4). How do we account for such behavior? Was this a type of social selection that, though cruel and ethically reprehensible, was an attempt to centralize command and control by murderously casting off those who stood in the way of official neurocultural authorization?”Most interesting was how the remnants of bicamerality came through in the form of prophets and other intermediaries as the voices of the gods fell silent for most people, disappearing altogether in contemporary times except for its manifestation in schizophrenics.“by the eighth century BCE a new breed of holy men emerged along with a significant change in the nature of prophecy. These “prophets” played an important role during times of sociopolitical uncertainty. These possessed an interiorized psychology but could still hear Yahweh’s voice.”Finally, when prophecy met its final demise and the voices of the gods fell silent for everyone, apocalyptic eschatology emerged …“to prepare people for coping with evil in the world so they could hold on until the end times and last things. Deliverance in the next world was the concern, and this salvation will come “outside of history” at the time of a new creation.”Summing it up:“We can postulate a very basic three-stage evolution of theophanies as evidenced in the OT, though I should stress these stages overlap. First, individuals directly heard Yahweh’s voice (perhaps during the misty “patriarchal age”). Eventually, those who heard the authorizing voice were restricted in number in order to mitigate social confusion (e.g. Moses). Second, as the voices became fewer and less clear, individuals would rely on sanctioned (prophets, Urim and Thummim) and unsanctioned (idols, divination) sources for guidance. These indirect theophanies replaced the authorization of God’s voice. The final stage witnessed the written word replace the immediacy of divine manifestation and become a fully sanctioned form of divine communication. Direct theophanies had now been eclipsed by a more efficient means of communication: the written word that enhanced interiorized consciousness.”So, what was left standing as the ultimate source of authority after all this conflict was The Written Word.McVeigh wraps up the book with a perspective that will resonate strongly with secular agnostics and atheists.“The Bible still holds a fascination for many. This is because, no doubt, not a few of us still secretly maintain hope for some divine visitation that will bring with it answers consecrated by an ultimate authorization. This is why we invest present-day spiritual beliefs and behaviors with traces and remnants of our super-religious past.…Though we may be reluctant to admit it, many of us who have left religion behind (as conventionally defined) still have deep in our hearts a burning nostalgia for “big answers.” For many of us, personal salvation and an authorization of sorts is found in the utopianism of politics (whose ideological inanity and misguided adventures in the twentieth century slaughtered more people than all the religious wars of history put together), the soothing balm of psychotherapy and counseling, or perhaps the overwhelming, terrible beauty of the cosmos, whose mysteries drive science, which for many of us has become a great source of spiritual succor in itself.”