The Anthropological Model of the «Old Testament Prophets — Shamans»: Basic Ideas and Criticism

Abstract

The article discusses the main ideas of the anthropological model «Old Testament prophets — shamans». The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the inconsistency of the anthropological model and its low heuristic potential. The study presents the main ideas of the authors who are developing this concept: 1) the starting point is the principle of universality of religious experience as such, as well as the universality of the experience of religious specialists (prophets, shamans, and others); 2) common features (based on «family similarities», a number of characteristics are distinguished: mediation, healing, ritual, divination, etc.); 3) the «silence» of biblical texts (due to the limited historical data on the Old Testament prophets, the comparison with shamans is intended to demonstrate a new perspective on the problem of Old Testament prophecy). The article convincingly shows that the ideas of researchers of the anthropological model are groundless. Firstly, the universality of religious experience is only a hypothesis that cannot be confirmed at this stage. Secondly, there is no common understanding of the terms «shaman» and «shamanism» among anthropologists and ethnographers, which makes it impossible to identify a group of religious figures who could be compared with the prophets by objective criteria. Thirdly, a number of other methodological problems complicate this comparison — the historical and religious context, reductionism (simplification of both phenomena to common functions), the problem of sources (the comparison of two interpreted images — textual and anthropological — does not allow to achieve historical reliability of conclusions). The work emphasizes that the entire array of methodological problems associated with the anthropological model does not allow comparing the Old Testament prophets with shamans. The study argues that the heuristic potential of the comparative model «Old Testament prophets — shamans» is extremely scarce, therefore it is necessary to preserve and maintain the differences between these phenomena at the conceptual level.