Blue Cord

In Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World, as well as in several other articles and books I have read, some scholars have argued for a pre-exilic dating of H (meaning the Holiness layer to the Pentateuch, not just the Holiness Code). Some, such as Knohl and Milgrom¹, do this with H specifically, while others do it without distinguishing between H and P. While I have presented positive arguments for a post-exilic dating of H elsewhere, I wanted to discuss some of the difficulties with a pre-exilic date in this entry.

If H is dated to the pre-exilic period, it would have to be dated before, during, or after the reign of Josiah. I will take each of these in turn.

It would be difficult to see how H could be pre-Josiah. Josiah’s reforms assume that all the Levites are priests (Deut.18:1-8; 21:5; 24:8). Since H does not allow Levites to serve as priests but only as servants in the temple, H could not have been in force before the reforms. Unless Deuteronomy is arguing that Levites should be promoted to full priesthood (which does not seem to be the case), H must come from the time during or after the reforms.

If H is from the time of the reforms or immediately afterwards, it could be seen as the priestly response to the Deuteronomic reforms. This is certainly possible. With the king requiring that the Levites be allowed to serve at the temple, the regular priesthood could have responded by allowing the Levites to serve at the temple but only in a second class role. The problem with this is that H does not seem to call for centralization of worship.² If the Jerusalem priests were going along with allowing Levites to serve in the temple, it is odd that they would not also have gone along with centralization, especially since it worked in their favor. Of course, with my idea of H in the post-exilic period, I will need to explore the idea of non-centralized worship in that period as well.

All in all, it seems unlikely that H would have come before Josiah’s reforms in 621 BCE, although it is possible that the come immediately afterwards. To my mind, however, the linguistic evidence points to a late exilic or early post-exilic period, and the stress on holiness seems to be a response to the profanation of the temple which Ezekiel and his school saw as leading to the exile. This aspect of H appears to be the priestly class’s way of preventing such profanation in the future.

1. Israel Knohl, Santuary of Silence (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994), 209; Jacob Milgrom, “Priestly (”P”) Source,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol.5, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992): 459. [back]
2. Jacob Milgrom, “Does H Advocate the Centralization of Worship?” JSOT 88 (2000): 59-76. [back]

I am on vacation now on an island in Maine. What do I do when I am on vacation? The same thing I do while at work, except I do it on a beach. Admittedly, I was the only guy on the beach reading a symposium book with a highlighter in hand, but I never claimed I wasn’t a geek. But now I am a geek with a decent sun tan.

I have been reading Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World, an SBL symposium book.¹ It has several good article’s on the history of the priesthood, so I thought I would comment on them here. The first is by Iain M. Duguid. ²

Duguid reconstructs the priesthood in the pre-exilic, the exilic, and the post-exilic period. This post will deal with his treatment of the pre-exilic priesthood. He reconstructs the priesthood primarily on the basis of Deut.33:8-10, although he also tosses in some other passages as well. He gives the following job description for priests in this period:

• Using the Urim and Thummim for determination of God’s will.
• Teaching God’s laws.
• Drawing the boundary between holy and common.
• Officiating at the offerings and sacrifices at the sanctuaries.
• Overseeing the sanctuaries.
• Providing for the supply, storage, cleaning, repair, and security of the sanctuaries, a task he sees as falling on the Levites.
• Advising the king.

Several of these are tasks that are clearly assigned to the priesthood in the pre-exilic period. The use of the Urim and Thummim is attested in a number of sources, as is officiating over sacrifices. And they certainly served as the overseers of the sanctuaries and as advisors to the king.

I have a problem with his reconstruction of other responsibilities. While drawing the boundaries between holy and common was probably a part of their job, it was a part that became much more important in the post-exilic period with the work of the Holiness school. Duguid does not distinguish between P and H, and he dates all of P to the pre-exilic period. As I have indicated elsewhere, I think H is post-exilic. Since much of the stress on the differentiation between holy and common begins with Ezekiel (Ezek.22:26, 42:20, 44:23) and continues with the Holiness school (Lev.10:10-11, almost identical wording as Ezekiel), this is something for which there is scant evidence in the pre-exilic period. The priests surely taught the people the difference between clean and unclean (see the P material in Lev.11), but it became much more important after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

I also question his assigning the labor of the temple to the Levites. As I have argued before, the demotion of Levites to second class status was done by Ezekiel (Ezek.44:9-14) and codified by H (Num.16-18). This distinction is not found in P, and other pre-exilic texts show Levites working as full priests (Judg.17-18). Deuteronomy also seems to view them this way, although the question of their status in Deuteronomy is difficult.

This brings me to my final point. Duguid takes Deuteronomy as his starting point for the priesthood in the pre-exilic period. This seems a highly questionable method. Deuteronomy, after all, is a reform document. It sought to change the way the priesthood operated, including the centralization of all worship in Jerusalem. It does not seem to reflect the way things actually were in the pre-exilic era except for a few short periods such as the rule Josiah and possibly that of Hezekiah. Otherwise, it was a minority opinion. It seems better to me to base the view of the priesthood in the pre-exilic period on priestly text, although even these sometimes reflect the way things should be instead of the way things actually were.

1. Stephen L. Cook and Corrine L. Patton, eds., Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World: Wrestling with a Tiered Reality, SBL Symposium Series 31 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.) [back]
2. Iain M. Duguid, “Putting Priests in their Place: Ezekiel’s Contribution to the History of the Old Testament Priesthood,” Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World, 43-59. [back]

I have a new section of Bluecord.org set up and ready to go. This is the resources section. It is divided into two parts. One is a collection of links to solid biblical scholarship on the web. This is intended primarily for students. I added this resource because I want to allow my students to research on the web but don’t want them using some of the really bad biblical studies sites that are out there. This way, I know they will most likely get reliable information.

The other resource section is a repository for documents. I have divided this into three areas: syllabi, Power Point presentations, and handouts. Here, scholars can upload their own documents that they think others will find useful, as well as peruse the resources other scholars have contributed. I hope this will be a way for us to see how other people have approached the teaching of different subjects in biblical studies. And the handout pages will keep us from having to reinvent the wheel. The Power Point presentations will also be a handy resource for people who are wanting to do personal Bible study or teaching at a church or synagogue.

If you would like to download any of these resources, you may do so without registering. If you would like to upload resources — and I hope you will! — you will need to register on the front page of Blue Cord. Registration is free, of course, and it just provides a way for me to keep track of who is contributing material. Please note that registration for bluecord.org is different than registration for the Blue Cord Bible Dictionary.

If people who are not scholars upload nonsense, I reserve the right to delete it. Also, please make sure that you do not upload materials on which you do not hold the copyright. This is particularly important for the images in Power Point presentations. It would be helpful as well if you could indicate the level for which the course is intended (undergraduate, graduate) and where you have taught it.

I have gotten the ball rolling with the Power Point presentations from my undergraduate Intro to the Old Testament class. In addition, there are some syllabi from several undergraduate classes. I welcome any feed back on these resources, and I look forward to seeing your contributions as well.

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.

The next Biblical Studies Blog Carnival has arrived, and it is being hosted by H.H. Hardy at DailyHebrew.com.  Be sure to check it out for the best that the biblioblogosphere had to offer in June.