This article considers Joshua Cohen’s 2015
The last decade has witnessed several high profile, big-budget biblical adaptations, ranging from various genres, forms, and approaches. For example, in 2004 Mel Gibson directed
Cohen’s retelling of the Numbers narrative arguably speaks to the nearly universal attempt to recast and understand religious and cultural myths within a contemporary context. More specifically, however, the impulse to retell the Hebrew Scriptures seems to be central to the Jewish American cultural experience. Jonathan Safran Foer, another Jewish American writer, argues that the Haggadah, a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder, is more than just a written instructional guide, claiming:
Though it means “the telling”, the Haggadah does not merely tell a story: it is our book of living memory. It is not enough to retell the story: we must make the most radical leap of empathy into it. “In every generation a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt”, the Haggadah tells us. (
Cohen, too, recounts the move out of Egypt into the wilderness and ‘make[s] the most radical leap of empathy into it’ as he envisions the narrative unfolding within his contemporary technological and postmodern world.
Within Cohen’s novel, Joshua speaks directly to this impulse to read one’s own situation as reflective of the same experiences found within Biblical texts or narratives. Joshua believes the reason that his failing marriage has survived so long depends on ‘that unshakable Jew belief in continuity, narrative, plot…to commiserate through recitation: the flight into Egypt, plagues, flight out of Egypt, desert, and plagues—a travail so repeated without manumission that it becomes its own travail, and that tradition is earned’ (
Focusing on Cohen’s Jewish heritage, this article will approach the novel as an adaptation of the biblical Numbers.
This article offers a unique scholarly contribution to the examination of how contemporary novelists approach and recast religious texts. As such, it represents one of the first critical studies of Cohen’s fiction, specifically of the
Before examining the thematic similarities between the biblical Numbers and Cohen’s novel, I will briefly consider their similar forms. As a postmodern novel, Cohen’s work is a compilation of multiple genres, both real and fictional. The novel uses images of clay ‘jar girls’ (
In part, the mixed-genre of
While the traditional view holds that Moses wrote a unified narrative of Numbers, critical scholarship, especially higher criticism growing out of Julius Wellhausen’s nineteenth-century work, has long called this claim into question (see
On the one hand, the traditional theory affirms the many and basic unifying features of the book, which are anchored in the person of Moses. It seems too difficult to deny his role in the origin of the book. On the other hand, a great deal of evidence suggests a long period of transmission for some materials in the book. Most of the book presupposes a time later than the conquest, and particularly materials from ch. 22 on point to time significantly later. (
According to Ashley and other critics, Numbers has a relatively unified structure that points back to a single source, but some of the passages seem distinct and part of a later biblical tradition. Terence E. Fretheim remarks on the mixed-genre of Numbers: ‘The complex character of Numbers is evident in the genres it includes: lists, itineraries, statutes, ritual and priestly prescriptions, poetic oracles, songs, wilderness stories, and even a well-known benediction’ (
Besides adopting structures and forms common in the biblical Numbers, Cohen’s novel relies on themes and narratives that Cohen sees as central to the biblical text. One of Cohen’s primary concerns is the pattern of wandering. In a 2015 interview with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Cohen explains the significance behind the novel’s title. Describing Numbers’ Hebrew title, Cohen states, ‘The Hebrew
Wandering in the wilderness or the desert is clearly significant in the biblical Numbers. Angered by the Israelites’ rebellion and threats against Joshua and Caleb, God pronounces judgement on the Israelites. Initially, God threatens to completely annihilate the Israelites and start a new nation with Moses: ‘I will strike them with pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they’ (
As in the biblical account, Cohen’s narrative traces characters who physically wander, from different cities and different countries. Joshua seems to wander throughout the novel, from New York City, where he lives, to Palo Alto and Dubai, where he begins ghostwriting for Principal. Joshua is only one of many characters who wander around the world. Principal’s interviews recall a wandering around the globe, ranging from ‘Two days in Berlin, two days in Moscow-Skolkovo, two days in Seoul-Teheran-ro. With Dubai and Paris and London, enough’ (
While characters physically wander through the novel’s world, Cohen’s interest in wandering also bespeaks a textual wandering. In addition to the mixed-genre of the novel, Cohen’s work creates a wandering effect by retaining the fictional Joshua’s unedited notes and drafts for Principal’s biography. Within eleven pages, Joshua writes and rewrites at least five drafts of the biography: ‘Yehoshuah Kohen was a born in the shtetl of Bershad, on the Southern Bug, halfway between the Kieve and Odessa, Russian Empire, presently Ukraine’ (‘Communication is a useful [tool [way] to understand Cohen’s family’ (
For Cohen, wandering takes on a third dimension, not just a textual and physical wandering but a reference to the period of the computer age, a time of freedom from the printed text yet a bondage to digital technology. Cohen writes that his novel ‘encrypts my experience of this transition, from the culture of the book, which I continue to idolize, to an online Zion—a Zion 2.0—that will remain in Beta forever. The forty years of Numbers became 1971 (the microchips) through 2011 (the leaks)’ (
With our turn I hung back, pointlessly because Lisabeth faced fully machineward, screening me from the screen and the keypad, her mouth-breathing fogging the prompts but not her compliance. To both sides other patrons swiped, tapped, scifi luminance and blare, sci-nonfi. The units were teleporters, timemachines. This wasn’t Frankfurt anymore, but Whitehall Street 2002. This was Miri’s bookstore, but in its afterlife as bank, and not even a full service bank, just machined, a Chase, which anytime I visited Aar’s office above it I took command, chase the past forever. This was Achsa knew she stood in, tile, plateglass, she knew what’d happened to her mother’s books, the same thing that’d happened to her mother. They’d gone away and been turned into money. She’d asked how the cash got into the machine and Aar’d asked her back, just guess. Achsa’d said maybe it was printed, like a printer was housed inside each unit. Try again. Maybe it was like a sewer, she’d said, or like with trees, the roots of trees, the money was always just flowing through tubes, which routed it to blossom at locations of customer request. (
In Cohen’s flashback, Achsa realizes that physical books are metaphorically dead, remnants of the past. Achsa’s comical belief that the ATM is ‘like a printer’ or ‘like a sewer’ or ‘like with trees’, further demonstrates her cognitive difficulties processing digital developments. To readers, Achsa, as a young child, seems cute or playfully comical in this moment, as she attempts to understand new technology through her existing perceptual lens. Achsa’s innocent difficulty in understanding the ATM parallels a wider social and cultural anxiety about shifting from print to digital media, or even a wider reluctance to leave the print world behind.
More significant to this article, Achsa’s incident echoes some of the difficulties the Israelites faced as they wandered in the desert. One of the central concerns of Numbers is the difficult transition from enslavement in Egypt to residence in the Promised Land. Fretheim summarizes Numbers as a wilderness narrative about learning to form a new community: ‘As a long-oppressed community, Israel has a deeply ingrained identity as “slaves”. It does not have the resources to move quickly to a “slaves no more” (Lev 26.13) mentality; God must be at work to enable them to “walk erect” once again’ (
If the print world represents a kind of enslavement, the internet becomes a new type of Promised Land. Here, Cohen situates his novel within a contemporary cultural hope in technology: the belief that the technological world offers greater freedom, connectivity, and progress. In his monograph on mysticism and technology, Erik Davis analyzes this cultural hope in digital technology, writing: ‘By the end of the 1980s, cyberspace had become a cultural attraction, sucking an increasingly computerized society forward with the relentless force of a
Drawing on the twentieth-century techno-spiritual beliefs, Cohen’s characters often talk about the internet in terms of religion. Joshua recalls when Moe aligned the internet with Hinduism:
Hinduism had invented the cosmology that had been plagiarized online. The net, the web, just a void and in the void a wilderness, a jungle of hardware sustaining a diversity of software, of sites, of all out of order pages, a pantheon to be selectively engaged, an experience special to each user. Each click was a dedicated worship, an act of mad propitiation that hazarded destruction. (Cohen, 2015: 266)
According to Moe, the internet is like complex and diverse Hindu pantheon, and each click on the internet is like the Hindu act of Bhakti. To use the internet is to worship the divine.
Elsewhere, the novel casts the computer in the Abrahamic tradition in which the body is ‘hardware’ and ‘software is God, wandering, doubted, bloodless, able only to describe itself’ (
While Cohen’s characters wander in the desert, free from the print culture, yearning for complete freedom, they realize that their freedom is ultimately a new form of bondage. An excerpt from Joshua’s fictional book captures this tension between freedom and slavery: ‘Diaspora Jews have inherited not a tradition but a rupture. If we were enslaved, it was to fashion; if we were liberated, it was by wandering the deserts between channels; if we fought wars, they were against our own parents; if we had any true enemies, they were ourselves’ (
In an interview, when asked about the Judeo-Christian background of
Omniscience—that’s the Judeo-Christian problem. It relates to sin. A large portion of the world believed for a very long time that God could hear and see absolutely everything. That belief was so strong that not a few modern people, in not a few modern societies, still swear by it—at least I’m told they do. God knows when you’re lying, where you’re lying, and with whom—if you’re jerking off…
The Enlightenment changed things. It scoffed at God’s role, even at His existence, but it kept the church—rather it transferred the church’s power to the state. The individual’s primary legibility, and accountability, was now to a government, which began developing and otherwise acquiring the technology to render it godlike: able to monitor, able to surveil. (
Part of Cohen’s sense of enslavement is the widespread monitoring of internet activities—both by governments and corporations—an activity that Cohen sees as once belonging to God. Internet monitoring seems to diverge distinctly from the biblical account; yet Cohen links internet monitoring to the census that opens the biblical narrative. Numbers opens with God commanding Moses to conduct a census of each tribe: ‘Take a census of the whole congregation of Israelites, according to the number of names, every male individually; from twenty years old and upward, everyone in Israel able to go to war’ (1.1–3). Later, in his anger, God announces: ‘Your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness; and of all your number, included in the census, from twenty years old and upward, who have complained against me, not one of you shall come into the land’ (14.29–30). In an exegesis of Numbers’ opening, Cohen argues that the census, as a form of tracking information, later becomes central to the Israelites’ punishment: ‘God orders Moses to poll the members of each tribe: Moses thinks he’s raising an army, God knows he’s counting the dead. None of the numbered will be allowed to cross the Jordan into Canaan—none will survive to fulfill the Promise of the Land’ (
For
But the tower events were not just online, they were all communications. More sites, more gadgets, more wars…But the serious offline impact of 09/11 was the continual contact, continuous contact, it encouraged. On 09/12 everyone went out and bought phones. The mobiles, the cells. Suddenly, to lose touch was to die and the only prayer left for anyone who felt buried whether under information or debris was for a signal strong enough to let their last words outlive them on voicemail. (
Cellphones become crucial as ‘lifeline[s]’ because, as Cohen writes, ‘to lose touch was to die’.
In the decade following 2001, Tetration expands their surveillance technologies, sometimes for their own purposes, other times for the government’s.
In the novel, this new enslavement often has detrimental effects to mental and physical health. Joshua, in a hotel where he ghostwrites Principal’s biography, laments that the room ‘isn’t quite a hotel. It’s a cemetery for people both deceased and on vacation, who still check in daily with work’ (
In addition to harming reproductive health, digital technology, specifically the internet, with its instant access to others, creates a confused and fragmented sense of the self. Principal represents the alienating loss of self, caused by the internet in Cohen’s world. Joshua begins: ‘You call the person you’re writing “the principal” and mine is basically the internet, the web—that’s how he’s positioned, that’s how he’s converged: the man who helped us invent the thing, rather the man who helped it to invent us, in the process shredding the hell out of the paper I’ve dedicated my life to’ (
Principal is not the only one alienated in
Throughout the novel, Cohen’s multiple levels of layering with his own name, the writer Joshua Cohen, and the CEO Joshua Cohen, draw attention to this confusion and blurring of self. The fictional Joshua reflects: ‘I’ve spent my whole entire virtual experience subordinate to Principal, reloading my name as it became his, reloading it into becoming his—but it’s only now that I can regret my collaboration: the more I clicked on him, the more he became me and I became nobody’ (
The internet gives nearly instant access to others with the same names. Technology has made all of our lives double-stories. We all find our doppelgängers online, people with the same names as us, people who maybe live the lives we would like to live, but most of the time are lives we can be pleased we don’t live. But we are chagrined when we are mistaken for them…Instead of the name being about the quality of a person, we are at a place now where these names are quantified. Who is the Joshua Cohen who is winning the internet? (
The doubling effect of the internet challenges notions of the self, in which one is identified by his or her unique name. Suddenly, the unique Joshua Cohen becomes one of many Joshua Cohens, and the other Joshua Cohens arguably live more attractive and successful lives. Moreover, the doubling effect of the internet advances the breakdown of relationships. According to Cohen, people become reduced to their quantifiable names rather than the ‘quality of a person’. Thus, within Cohen’s novel, the internet is as harmful as it is liberating. Like God, the internet offers a sense of protection; yet, Cohen’s characters find that they are in a cycle of slavery once again. They find themselves constantly monitored and feel alienated from themselves and each other. As in the biblical account, the praises of God or the internet turn to rebellion.
Unsatisfied with their newly gained freedom, the Israelites and Cohen’s characters complain. In the biblical Numbers, God anticipates: ‘This people will begin to prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in their midst, the gods of the land into which they are going; they will forsake me, breaking my covenant that I have made with them’ (31.16). Even before God’s predictions, the Israelites complain about their new freedom: ‘the people complained in the hearing of the Lord about their misfortunates’ (11.1). Along with the Israelites, the rabble, likely a non-Israelite group, similarly joins the complaining and rejects their new freedom, yearning for their previous lives in Egypt: ‘The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at” (11.4–6). Later, the Israelites continue their complaining, wishing: ‘Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword?’ (14.2–3). The rabble and the Israelites reject their new freedom, instead wishing that they had either stayed or died in Egypt.
Like the rabble who attempt to reject God, Cohen’s characters attempt to resist digital technology and the internet. As I have mentioned, the novel opens with a call for resistance: ‘If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands’ (
Although the acts of rebellion against the internet do not directly result in death as a punishment, Cohen clearly invokes the biblical punishment. The close of the novel harkens back to God’s warning in the biblical Numbers. God angrily announces: ‘I will do to you the very things I heard you say: your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness; and all of your number, included in the census, from twenty years old and upward, who have complained against, not one of you shall come into the land…. But as for you your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness’ (14.28–32). After wandering in the wilderness, older generations will not make it to the Promised Land.
Cohen makes God’s threats of death the literal ending of his novel. On the novel’s penultimate page, Principal’s corpse washes ashore: ‘A body was hauled out of the river Ganges, Varanasi, India, 11/19 or 20, apparently’ (
Principal’s multiple deaths additionally echo Moe’s deaths earlier in the novel. Principal recounts: ‘Moe had been found. Just now. Dead. Committed suicide in Canada. Hanged by a belt from Montreal’ (
Moe had liquidated through the mesh. He had vaped himself. The balance of his direct deposit Chase Bank checking account had been transferred and all future payments to it had been set to auto transfer to a savings account registered to the Goa Orphanage of Achievement Trust, Oriental Bank of Commerce, funds that had remained untapped until their seizure by the India Reserve, whose inquiry determined that no such orphanage existed. No images were provided to us and since the Americans refused to take the body from Canada because it was not clear that Vishnu Fernandes [Moe] ever existed, or was Vishnu Vaidya, or was a citizen, he, Mohlone, whoever, was cremated in Montreal. All this according to Kor who brought us the cremation report along with the files of the Vishnus obtained from various Bay Area hospitals pertaining to treatment for dissociative identity, formerly multiple personality disorder, and depression. (
Moe, as one of the central figures who developed Tetration, commits suicide but loses—or disperses—his identity, as well. Instead of remaining located to a single point, Moe vanishes into the mesh, wireless networks consisting of multiple routers and clients. Similarly, the Goa Orphanage of Achievement Trust’s nonexistence points to the internet’s lack of physical ‘place’, which consequentially emphasizes Moe’s lack of a physical, stable identity. As Moe merges with the internet, he becomes a personified wilderness, a place of wandering that, like the internet, exists in no physical space. His body is unidentifiable—neither Moe nor Vishnu Fernandes nor Vishnu Vaidya nor Mohlone. The cremation of Moe’s body further reinforces his disembodied state, remaining no longer as a corpse but a set of ashes. Moe becomes dispersed, as ashes, into the mesh.
Moe’s death emphasizes more than the way that the internet moves him beyond a physical location to a ‘no place’. His death reveals a fragmented identity, an embodiment that is spread out over multiple people and based in networks. His dissolution into the mesh, of course, hints at his multiple embodiments. Principal reveals that Moe had been treated for ‘dissociative identity’ or ‘multiple personality disorder’. Moe, who becomes part of the mesh, suffers from a fragmented identity—arguably as the result of his intimate relationship with internet technology. In the final pages of the novel, Cohen emphasizes Moe’s multiple embodiment: ‘Consider this: A dozen Moes crashed Principal’s “medimorial” (meditation memorial) held at the Tetplex, four of them legally named Vishu and one even named Vishu Fernandes’ (
Despite their inclusion of wandering and death, both the biblical and Cohen’s Numbers end with a move, albeit slight, toward hope. In the biblical account, as I have mentioned, God initially plans to annihilate the Israelites, except Moses, but God lessens the punishment, allowing Joshua, Caleb, and the younger generation to live. The end of Numbers looks forward in anticipation of the future and new life, a reminder that the younger generation will make it to the Promised Land. The final chapter once again presents the daughters of Zelophehad, and members of the tribe Manasseh come to Moses, seeking clarification about marriage outside the tribe and property transfer. Moses, after apparently consulting God, determines that the daughters may marry within their own tribe ‘so that no inheritance of the Israelites shall be transferred from one tribe to another’ (36.7). While the closing chapter seemingly moves away from narrative to a legal section, Moses’ legal interpretation still serves a significant narrative function, using questions about marriage and property to emphasize both the continuation of the Israelites and the promise of land.
Many commentators similarly agree that that the last chapter of Numbers is hopeful, pointing to new life. According to Adriane Leveen, the final chapters ends with a promise of preserving culture: ‘That those legal stipulations are concerned with the relationships between a father and his daughters beautifully reinforces the underlying, even haunting force of this narrative of two generations…[and] the preservation and transmission of tradition and collective memory—and the ultimate resolution of that concern in the new generation’ (
Cohen’s novel ends with a confusing and chaotic scene of Principal’s decaying bodies appearing all over the world; this is hardly hopeful. Yet, the final sentence moves toward new life, a new generation raised in the Promised Land of digital technology. The novel ends: ‘The wheel was turning me 40. A child was born in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, whose soul was recognized as his’ (
Still, even in this hopeful vision, Cohen’s novel retains ambiguity. Joshua mentions that the child is born and the ‘soul was recognized as his’ (
In her work on ‘narrative induction’, renowned sociolinguist Charlotte Linde argues that communities make meaning out of their lives and experiences by taking ‘existing set of stories as their own story’ (
Cohen’s layering of the different Joshuas—from the real writer to the fictional writer to the CEO—creates an intended sense of confusion and ambiguity throughout his novel. To avoid such confusion in this article, I will refer to the real writer as Cohen, the fictional writer as Joshua, and the CEO as Principal.
Joshua’s comment is one of many troubling and problematic misogynist comments throughout the novel. I re-emphasize that the misogyny belongs to the character Joshua, not the novelist Cohen. In several interviews, Cohen distances himself from the character Joshua. In Ben Bush’s interview, Cohen casts the novel’s racist and misogynistic rhetoric in terms of the internet: ‘There is this idea that the internet is an unparalleled communication device, a vast library, a global culture—when, of course, it is really a cesspool of porn and rage and race-baiting and the worst sorts of misogynistic and racist rhetoric’ (
While Judaism is my primary focus in this analysis, it is only one of many religious traditions that the novel engages. For example, Cohen’s novel engages Buddhism: ‘The execs were talking Gautama Buddha and the differences between renunciation and moderation but as like they related to diet and exercise, the middle of the Middle Way. The affinities between Buddhism and capitalism’ (
For a discussion about his early and extensive Jewish education and the biblical book of Numbers as a reference point, see Cohen’s interview ‘The Book Show #1416-Joshua Cohen’ (
Cohen’s previous novels were published by small presses;
Here are just some of the many critics who recognize the lack of unity in Numbers. Martin North writes: ‘There can be no question of the unity of the book of Numbers, nor of its originating from the hand of a single author. This is already clear from the confusion and lack of order in its contents. It is also clear from the juxtaposition of quite varied styles and methods of presentation, as well as from the repeated confrontation of factually contradictory concepts in one and the same situation’ (
The association of cloud computing with God should remind us of God appearing ‘in a pillar of cloud’ to the Israelites in Exodus 13:21.
Tetration is a mathematical term, which corresponds well with the high-tech spirit of the novel. Tetra, the prefix meaning ‘four’, is also a nod to the fourth book of the Hebrew Scriptures.
In an interview, Cohen, the author, explains that he, like the fictional Joshua, stayed offline for a section of the novel: ‘I wrote that section, and edited that section, without searching anything up. Information being the enemy of the novel’ (
I would like to thank Dr. Luke Ferretter for his constructive comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.
The author has no competing interests to declare.