Biblical Hermits

Yesterday's New York Times Book Review includes the following sentence from Charles Graeber’s The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, as quoted in a review by Mimi Swartz:

[He was] a tall, gaunt man with the glandular severity of an Old Testament hermit.

My religious education could be generously described as minimal, but I am not aware of any hermits in the Hebrew Scripture, so I put the question to some more knowledgeable friends. Are there any hermits in the so-called Old Testament (more on naming choices below)?

The first answer came from Rev. Robert Clarke, an Episcopal priest and my occasional coauthor:

Hermits as a religious or spiritual pursuit [are] almost antithetical to Hebrew Scripture.  The tradition and teachings of Judaism almost always point to community life and how the chosen people ought to live in relationship to Y--- and each other.  The hermitical life is led in isolation and away from society.  The word itself means desert dweller and comes from the Greek "ερημίτης."

Having said that, many Christian writings of the solitary life point back to Elias (or Elijah) as having been the first example (1 Kings 17 - 19, and 2 Kings 1 - 2) of a hermit for the Y--- told him to go live under a rock and there he would be fed by ravens.  However even he gathered around him followers, Elisha chief among them, thus again living in community.  There are others, Jacob and even David, but they lived in the desert not to spiritually purify themselves but to escape the wrath of others.

Hermits, then, are Christian in practice, and the concept of an "Old Testament hermit" is a projected anachronism, which is common in both Christian and Jewish literature, as further explained by Marcia Kupfer, a historian of medieval art and the author of Art and Optics in the Hereford Map:

That the Jewish author of the quoted NYT book review thoughtlessly resorted to a verbal image via a typical medieval/Renaissance iconography is unsurprising. Still, it never ceases to amaze me how regularly images from medieval/Renaissance Christian artworks, from ecclesiastical and liturgical settings no less, are reproduced as “illustrations” of biblical scenes or themes in contemporary Jewish publications. The Jewish Review of Books, to which I subscribe, does this constantly; it’s almost an involuntary reflex of the picture editor. And just a couple of days ago, the Times of Israel had a long article on the archaeology of an ancient Judean/Israelite site (8th c BCE), and used as an illustration a scene from the 13th c Morgan Bible of Louis IX (the king famous for his anti-Jewish policies, including the Paris Talmud trial), https://www.timesofisrael.com/biblical-site-tied-to-ark-of-the-covenant-unearthed-at-convent-in-central-israel/.  

So what is going on here culturally? It goes without saying that Christianity has become the default lens through which anything related to “the bible” is imagined, even for Jews. But when it comes to Jewish publications, the picture editors are just clueless, often comically so. No thought whatsoever that an image is anything other than eye-candy, that it belongs to a material, historical context. Ironically, when it comes to “illustrations,” Jewish publications collaborate in Christianizing their readers. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century friars would be so pleased!

The subject of the original quote is a nineteenth century cancer patient, who was no doubt as Graeber described him, but there is no reason to think -- apart from Christian iconography -- that Biblical Jewish figures, whether hermits, prophets or otherwise, were characteristically either gaunt or glandular (whatever that means).

Finally, the very concept of the "Old Testament" is itself Christian. There is only one Bible in Judaism, which ecumenical scholars call the Hebrew Scripture and Jews call the Tanakh.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Graeber's use of "Old Testament hermit," which is an image that easily comes to mind among Americans of all faiths, even if it is ahistorical. It is somewhat more surprising, however, that his editors at Twelve, which is an extremely high quality publishing house, did not catch the anomaly.

[Note: The relevant Wikipedia entry says "Hermits are a part of several sections of Christianity, and the concept is found in other religions as well," followed by a list of alleged Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Jewish hermits. The entry is suspect, however, as it includes the Baal Shem Tov, who founded Hasidic Judaism. He may have sometimes retreated into solitude, but he was no hermit by any standard definition.]

Of course, some hermits have been known to congregate:

 

Comments

[Adam]

If what you're looking for is a "hermit" in the traditional definition of the term, whereby the person has chosen to separate themselves from the world, they are extremely rare in Judaism.

The Baal Shem Tov is a bad example because it was the very essence of Hasidism to interact and engage with the world. I have to disagree with Elijah as an example as well. Elijah's separation was largely driven by the fact that the people to whom he preached his prophecies to, rejected him, and so his separation from them was largely a rejection of the people because they failed to return to God.

Probably the closest you will find is Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai, but he initially separated himself because he was fleeing the Romans. It was only after he left his cave that the story goes that a voice from Heaven told him to return because he looked upon people with disdain.

Traditional Judaism does not believe in fulfillment religiously by separating oneself from the community. In fact, something as basic as daily prayers ares supposed to be done with a group of 10 men. Studying Torah and other sources are recommended as being done with a partner and solo study is actually discouraged. This is why I would have to say "hermits" are not Jewish, at least from a traditional viewpoint.

[Guest]

Adam - mostly well-said just to clarify one point, HaRav Shimon Bar Yochai did not have "disdain" for anyone but when he left the cave and saw people engaged in everyday trivialities (which is correct hevel havalim) he was dissapointed that rather than engage in spriritual uplifting they were involved in the mundane day to day world. That is why he was commanded by God to return for a bit longer to the cave to contemplate and understand. I am no scholar but I think perhaps the message is to turn the everyday into the spiritual to the extent we can do so (and this is a most difficult task but perhaps our reason for existence). The Reward is commensurate with the Difficulty.