Out of the Water

There are several ways to interpret the Old Testament: to believe it is literally true; to discount it as folk belief; or take the apologist's path and pick and choose what works for you. But there is another way to interpret these tales. What if the stories were both fact and fiction? What if the people who wrote them had a different kind of mind, a mind like Achilles, who flew into battle at the will of the gods; or a mind like Aeneis, who left his love at his goddess's direction; or even a mind like Moses, whose god appeared to him in a burning bush and commanded his every move?The behavior of these men can be explained by Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind, in which he asserts that the preconscious mind did not function as the modern mind does, but had two disunified chambers that communicated via hallucination. The voice of god spoke to all the epic heroes, as it spoke to Moses. And this is Moses' epic. Out of the Water is a satirical epic in blank verse, the epic of the prophet-king Moses. The story remains true to the tales of of the Hebrew tribe as told in the Old Testament. Except in this epic Moses does not obey the word of God. Instead he follows his bicameral voice, his own mind projected as a hallucination heard from a fiery bush or a grumbling volcano. And just like the Old Testament, Out of the Water is a narrative of war and murder, of faith and devotion, of conquest and failure, a narrative of the legendary journey of the Hebrew people as they wandered the desert in search of the land their god promised to their epic hero, he who from the waters came-Moses.