Blue Cord

I thought it was cool when I could instantly send messages to people around the world.

I thought it was cool when I could read the ideas of other biblical scholars minutes after they wrote them.

I thought it was cool when I could call the US from Lithuania using the computer.

But nothing is as cool as video phone calls!

Today I went out and bought two cheap web cams.   My wife and I are currently separated, and I wanted a way to see my kids everyday.  So, I installed the web cams on both computers, and tonight I was able to tell my kids goodnight face to face.  We used the Skype VoIP service to make the call.  The video isn’t exactly high quality, but it is certainly acceptable.

Perhaps I could start a subscription service where people could pay to watch me do biblical scholarship in real time!  That should rake in quite a bit of money!

I feel like George Jetson.  If you will excuse me, I am going to go walk my dog on the treadmill.

For years I have listened to The Police.  I mean the 1980s band, although I also listen to law enforcement officials when they speak to me.  Today I was listening to the album Synchronicity.  While listening to the song Synchronicity I, I decided to check out the lyrics on one of the many lyric archives on the Internet.  I wasn’t quite sure about the lyrics at the end.

What I found, however, was that I had misheard another section of lyrics for years.  I heard the lyrics as:

If we share this nightmare
Then we can dream
Spiritual spooning

This made perfect sense to me.   They had been talking about sharing a dream.  Dreaming is something you do in bed.  So is spooning.  So, sharing a dream could be considered spiritual spooning.  I thought it was a great image.

However, it turns out that the actual lyrics are:

If we share this nightmare
Then we can dream
Spiritus mundi

Spiritus mundi means “spirit of the world.”  Personally, I think this makes less sense than my lyrics.  I could write The Police and tell them they should change it, but the only time they have performed together in the last two decades was at the Grammy Awards earlier this month.

I have submitted the lyrics to kissthisguy.com.  For those of you that don’t know the site, it is a repository of misheard lyrics.  Some of them are quite funny, especially the way people hear the lyrics to Toto’s song Africa.

The Police have some remarkable lyrics, but it takes a while to make sense of them.  When I teach Biblical Interpretation, I have an exercise where the students have to apply interpretation techniques to the song Synchronicity II.  Paying attention to the structure and movement in the song is particularly important.

I grew up Southern Baptist.  I attended the Baptist church until I was 29 and am a product of a Baptist college.  I have great respect for Baptists, particularly their commitment to the authority of Scripture.

Unfortunately, fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1980s and began chasing out everyone who didn’t toe their particular theological line.  Baptist colleges and universities were the worst hit, although in some places entire congregations were kicked out.  In carrying out their theological purge, the fundamentalists abandoned the basic idea of what it means to be Baptist: the freedom of the individual believer within the local congregation.

At that point, I decided to change denominations.  I wanted to belong to a denomination that respected the history of Christianity.  I wanted a community of faith that followed its own rules.  I wanted a church where the two sides worked out their issues instead of splitting over them.  So, I joined the Episcopal church.  Believe, the irony of that decision is not lost on me.

The communique released by the primates is an interesting document.  Some very conservative diocese have been having bishops from other provinces come in to officiate in services.  This is against the canons of the church.  So, the communique sets up a situation in which they are given alternative oversight by someone other than the person elected by the majority.  In case you are not following this, the conservative got rewarded for violating canons.  They were told that what they were doing is wrong, but if they would stop doing it the church would basically set up the same situation but make it legal.

The liberals and moderates, however, who had followed all the rules, were told that they had to stop blessing same sex unions and consecrating gay bishops.  The General Convention of the ECUSA has already agreed to the latter.  The former has never been on the table because it is not an issue that affects the Communion.  But the primates have issued their ultimatum, even though there is nothing in the canons that give the primates that right.  In other words, the liberals and moderates got punished for following the rules.

The reason that the conservatives in the Episcopal church got their way is that the majority of primates agree with them theologically.  But this ignores what makes us Anglican: the fact that we worship together despite differences as long as we accept the creeds of the church.  That is the essence of Anglicanism as established by the Elizabethan Settlement and defended by Richard Hooker.  But the conservatives seem to think that it is alright to ignore Anglican rules and traditions in order to force your theology on someone.  Anglicans have never been held together by a common theology.  We are held together by a common faith.

This means this is the second denomination I have lost to conservatives who want to force others to accept their theology even when it goes against the essence of the denomination.  I have to say, it is getting kinda old.

One the questions in the history of the priesthood is the reference of Ezekiel 44:10, which presents the Levites as going after idols when Israel went astray. On the basis of this sin, Ezekiel states that the Levites must be given a lower status in the cult and may no longer serve at the altar.

A number of scholars have seen this as a reference to Levites participating in the worship at high places prior to the reforms of Josiah. This doesn’t make much sense to me. After all, it was Deuteronomy that argued against worship at high places, and Deuteronomy seems to come from Levitical circles. Besides, Ezekiel does not seem to be particularly influenced by Deuteronomy, and I find it unlikely that he would have approved of Josiah’s reforms. After all, Josiah allowed Levites to be priests in Jerusalem, which would have meant Ezekiel’s priestly group would be forced to share the temple service with others.

Steve Cook did a great deal to further the discussion when he recognized that Ezekiel 44 is making explicit reference to the Levitical rebellion in Numbers 16-18.¹ It seems to me that Ezekiel is reading the situation in late preexilic Judah (c.620-586 BCE) through the lens of Numbers 16-18. The people of Judah are going astray, and the Levites — who have been granted leadership positions by Josiah — are participating in this idolatry. The Zadokites, on the other hand, did not participate in the idolatry (Ezek. 44:15). For more on my thoughts on the relationship between Numbers 16-18 and Ezekiel, see my post from last summer.

While Ezekiel creates the situation that we see in the postexilic period, with Zadokites serving at the altar and other Levites (both Aaronide and non-Aaronide?) serving as temple servants, what I am more interested in at this point is what the situation was before the exile. It seems to me that they had three groups: Levites that had come from the north, Aaronides who had always been in Judah, and Zadokites who are perhaps a subset of Aaronides. The question is, what were the Aaronides doing when Israel went astray?

It is interesting to note that already in Ezekiel the Zadokites are referred to as the “sons of Levi.” What I would like to know is whether Ezekiel was the first to apply this to the Zadokites. Would they have considered themselves Levites prior to the exile? The Levites as a priestly group seem to have very ancient origins, perhaps even going back to the pre-monarchic period. Would it have been necessary for the Zadokites to claim Levitical descendancy in order to be priests? At what point would this have been necessary?

I have to wonder whether the Zadokites came to ascendency because they were the main priestly group that was deported. Jehozadak was a priest taken into exile, and the formation of his name suggests a connection with Zadok. His son Joshua is the first high priest of the exilic period. If those exiled to Babylon were principally from Jerusalem and not the surrounding countryside, this would mean that it was the central priesthood that was exiled. Joshua 21 presents the Aaronides as living in the rest of Judah, and they may have made up only a small part of the priests in exile. The Levites, on the other hand, would have been serving in Jerusalem and some of them would have gone into exile as well. But it is instructive to note that the Chronicler’s history mentions a large amount of Zadokites returning from exile accompanied by a much smaller group of Levites.

If the Zadokites were the predominant group in exile, it is easy to see how they would have gained prominence over those left in Judah. Jeremiah had stated that the exiles in Babylon were the future of Israel, while those left in Judah were the bad fruit (Jer. 24). This could have led the Zadokites to see themselves as the future of the priesthood, especially with Ezekiel saying that they had remained faithful while the other priests had gone astray with Israel.

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

I have been thinking about the Levites in the northern kingdom of Israel and thought I would jot down a few notes.

As I have mentioned before, the list of Levitical cities in Joshua 21 says that the cities for the Aaronides were in Judah while the rest of the Levites had cities in Israel. This passage probably stems from HS and is therefore postexilic, reflecting a period when the Aaronides had been given a Levitical genealogy (if they didn’t have one from the start). But it also seems to recall a preexilic situation in which Levites were centered in Israel. This fits with what seems to be the very old tradition of Dan being a Levite sanctuary (Judg 18).

But although the Levites were active in the north, they were certainly not the only priests who were there. 1 Kings 12:31 indicates that Jeroboam installed priests who were not Levites. This might indicate that the Levites were marginalized, even in Israel. This would explain why DtrH is so negative of Jeroboam, if Deuteronomy originated in Levitical circles in the north (as seems likely). But it would also suggest that Deuteronomy was a minority opinion. It is generally accepted that Deuteronomy was accepted only by a few people in Judah prior to the exile (after which it gained general acceptance), but it may have initially been intended as a critique of the official priesthood in the north as well.

I was reading what Blenkinsopp has to say about the Aaronides, Bethel, and the golden calf episode in Exodus 32-34. Because I disagree with his idea that the Aaronides originated in Bethel, it got me thinking. What group would want to critique both the Aaronides and the practice of golden calves at Dan and Bethel. The obvious answer is the Levites. They had lost their power in the north and did not like the practices instituted by Jeroboam. At the same time, the Aaronides were a rival group.   It is interesting to note that the only mention of Aaron in Deuteronomy is in connection with the golden calf (Deut 9:20). This raises the further question of whether the golden calf story arose prior to the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE or afterwards when the Levites came south. I don’t have an answer to that question yet.