Steve Cook was kind enough to respond to my post on Ezekiel and the Levites. Steve just made full professor at Virginia Theological Seminary and would be a great addition to the biblioblogging world. (I am trying to convince him to start a blog and have even offered him space on bluecord.org.)  I wanted to address several of the points he made.

First, Steve asked why I thought H pictures everyone as equally holy. The answer is, I don’t. H certainly has gradations in holiness, as can be seen from the setting up of the camp in Numbers 2-4. But the question in the P level of the Numbers 16-17 story is not whether the 250 chiefs are holy enough; the question is whether they are holy at all. P simply has holy and not holy, and this is the issue in the story of the chiefs. The chiefs made the claim that everyone is holy (Num.16:3), and Moses says that the test of the censers will show who is holy (Num.16:7). Numbers 16:35 seems to indicate that the chiefs are not holy, while Aaron is. If this layer were H, the issue would not be whether the chiefs were holy, but whether they were holy enough.

Second, I think we are back to the issue of the event to which Ezekiel 44 refers. I agree with Steve that Ezekiel is reading the Priestly layer in Numbers. But I don’t think Ezekiel 44 refers back to the event in the wilderness. Instead, I think the event to which Ezekiel 44 alludes is the abomination and idolatry that led to the defilement of the temple prior to 597 BCE. This is what is pictured in Ezekiel 8. The Levites are not mentioned there, but in Ezekiel 44 the main problem is the worship of the people, worship in which the Levites were complicit while the Zadokites were not. I agree that this has little or nothing to do with Josiah’s reform, but in my view Ezekiel is demoting the Levites for participating in this.

To be sure, Ezekiel is interpreting this idolatry through the lens of the P layer in Numbers 16-17. But Ezekiel 44 says that the Levites ministered to the people in front of their idols. This hardly seems a reference to Numbers 16-17. But if the Levites were leading worship when the people went astray prior to 597 BCE, this makes sense. And if Ezekiel was already reading a text in which the Levites were supposed to be servants and not full priests, then why does he seem to demote them in 44:9-14?

Steve says that he is pretty sure he solved this in his JBL article in 1995. It may be that he has. Steve is the expert on Ezekiel. While I have been working on H for a while, I only jumped into Ezekiel while I was staying at Steve’s house. It may be that he turns out to be right, in which case I will gladly concede the point.

That is one of the wonderful things about Open Source Scholarship ™ . Instead of having to wait until our ideas are completely worked out and we publish them in a paper, we can try them out on our blogs and have others critique them. This makes for more enjoyable scholarship, since we interact in almost real time instead of through journal articles that appear months or years apart Plus, our students get to see how we go about doing our research and making judgments. And, our students get to see us change our mind if someone convinces us we are wrong. In our current political and social culture, where people are often entrenched in their ideas and never admit they are wrong, that might not be a bad thing for them to see.

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