Blue Cord

The past two days I have been in Baltimore, using the Johns Hopkins library for the last bit of my research. I have much more that I could do, but it is time for me to head on. Wednesday I am driving to Holy Cross Monastery for a retreat, and after that I will be hooking up with my family again in Albany, NY, for a wedding. We will then drive up to Maine for three weeks of vacation, where I hope I can do some more research and writing.

These two days at JHU were mostly spent writing articles for the New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible. I only have five more articles to go, and those can be written with the resources I have in Lithuania.

I have also been able to synthesize some of my research from VTS and my chats with Steve Cook. Here is what I am thinking at this point:

• The P layer is the first stage in the priestly tradition. In Numbers 16-17, it presents a story of 250 people who rebel against the idea that the priests are holy while the people are not. God consumes with fire the non-priests who offer incense at the tabernacle. This is followed by the contest of Aaron’s rod, which confirms the election of the tribe of Levi to be priests. Knohl assigns this to H, but this layer actually seems to argue against H’s main point that everyone is holy. As Moses says, offer your incense and we will find out who is holy. As it turns out, people not from the tribe of Levi are not holy and are killed. This contrasts with H’s point that all the people are holy (Lev.19 et passim).
• Ezekiel 44:6-16 represents the next stage, when the Levites are demoted for their role in idolatry, while the Zadokites are reaffirmed in their position because they were faithful. Cook is right that Ezekiel is reflecting on Numbers 16-17 here, but it is the P layer of that story that Ezekiel reads. There, the concern is on inappropriate people approaching the tabernacle. Most of the languages parallels that Cook rightly points out are between Ezekiel and the P layer.
• The final stage is H, which edits the P and J layers of Numbers 16-17 and adds Numbers 18. H also adds Korah the Levite as leader of the 250, thereby making them complicit in the wilderness rebellion. In other words, what Ezekiel has done in oracle, H does in narrative. Here, the Levites are made to be a buffer between the people and the tabernacle / temple, so that the people do not incur guilt by encroaching on the sacred. Without this division, it makes no sense for the Levite to be excluded from the tabernacle in Numbers 16-17, only to have their tribal election reaffirmed by the budding of Aaron’s rod. H is aware of Ezekiel’s oracle and incorporates some of the languages into this story, although he does disagree with Ezekiel on some points.

That, then, is the theory I want to explore in my next paper. I hope to be able to get some of that done in Maine, although my research resources will be limited to what I already have and what I can find on the Internet.

Over the next few days, I am going to be experimenting with some new themes. I have decided my old one is too busy and not very inviting. Since I have to tweak each of the themes as I try it out, visitors to the site may get some odd results and unasthetic pages. I apologize in advance for any trouble.

Today was my last day at Virginia Theological Seminary. Tomorrow I will be heading to Baltimore for two days at the Johns Hopkins library.

For these last two nights I am staying with Steve Cook, a friends and fellow Old Testament scholar. We were discussing the Holiness layer in the Pentateuch last night. He has written a good deal in Ezekiel, so we were discussing where Ezekiel stood with relationship to H. Steve agrees that H is pre-exilic, while I think it is post-exilic. He pointed me to Ezekiel 44, which has connections with priestly writings in general and Numbers 16-18 in particular.

In reading those chapters in tandem last night, a great idea occurred to me, so I wrote down some notes on it. When I went to research it today, it turns out the same idea had occurred to Wellhausen in the 19th century, so at least I am in good company. I then read an article by Steve that disproves it. ¹

One of the next topics I may research is the place of Ezekiel with respect to P and H. Since my last paper shows that P is pre-exilic and H is post-exilic, Ezekiel should fall in between. It should be possible to show a development from P –> Ezekiel –> H in respects to several aspects of law and theology. Or, if Steve is correct, then such a straight line would not be seen, and I would need to reconsider.

1. Stephen Cook, “Innerbiblical Interpretation in Ezekiel 44 and the History of Israel’s Priesthood,” JBL 114 (1995):193-208. [back]

Today was spent revising a paper on Deuteronomy and Joshua as a combined document that I am presenting next month, so very little new research was done.  When that was finished, I did some reading in source criticism to pick up on a few little books I hadn’t seen before.

One of the things I have enjoyed about this week is re-reading some of the things written by Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth.  It is amazing to me how insightful some of their material is.  Even when I disagree with them, it is impressive to read the clarity and originality in their thought.  There are many ideas floating around in Pentateuchal studies today that were first suggested by one of them, but quite often we take these ideas so much for granted that we forget someone had to think of it first.  We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

My Old Testament class in seminary was the last class that had to wade through von Rad’s Old Testament Theology, and I am glad I had to do that.  It is a shame that he is no longer studied as regularly as he once was, although I suposed we all must move on sometime.  We would all be lucky if even one of our ideas was an influential as many of his were, even if some of them have now been abandoned.

Surprisingly, I finished the paper on the linguistic evidence for dating the priestly layers in the Pentateuch.  I have to say I was quite amazed at how quickly it went.  I haven’t written a paper this fast since seminary.

As expected, the linguistic data did divide according to the contours of P and H suggested by Knohl.  It seems that P is prior to Ezekiel, which would place it in the pre-exilic period, while H is an intermediate stage between BH and LBH.  This suggests a date in the late exilic or early post-exilic period, and I would think the latter is more likely.

If other scholars who read this blog are interested in reading the paper, I would love to get some critiques.  Given the conference schedule, it will be at least a year before I present this at a conference, but feedback is always appreciated, especially since I will be using this conclusion as I start a book length treatment on the P and H layers in Exodus-Numbers.  Drop me a line if you would like to see the draft.