Blue Cord

When I was a kid, I was one of the first on my block to have a computer.  Actually, I was one of the first in my whole city to have a computer.  My mother worked for Texas Instruments, so early on I got a TI 99/4A.  I learned my first programming language on that computer: BASIC.  When I wrote a program, it had to be stored on a cassette tape.  There was no external drive and certainly no internal one.

My second computer was a Commodore 64, one of the greatest computers ever made.  It is claimed that more Commodore 64s were sold than any other single system, a record that still stands.  It had an external floppy drive that was heavier than most laptops today and held only 64k of memory.  Hard disks were still several years in the future.

Additional software could be bought for both of these computers.  I mostly had games for the TI 99/4A, including a Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator (heaven to my young mind).  But unfortunately (or, as it turns out, quite fortunately), we were still at a stage in our development as a civilization where parents had not become convinced that buying tons of software for their children was de rigeur.  So, if I wanted a computer program, I had to write it myself.

That taught me a lot about computer programming.  I spent hours reading books and learning how to write code.  I would write database programs to keep track of addresses and problem solving programs to do my homework for me.  Of course, writing the program to solve algebra problems and graph geometry equations meant that I needed to understand the problems very well.  And ultimately I did more work than if I had just done the homework myself.  But I also learned a lot more along the way.  When I got to college, I took a class in BASIC, and I ended up learning only one thing that I didn’t know before taking the class.

Microsoft Windows 3.1 brought  all this to an end.  You couldn’t program on Windows.  There was something Kabbalistic about the code that kept out most of us.  And it got worse with Windows 95.  I went from being a programmer to just another front end user.   For years, coding for Windows has been something I have wanted to do, but books on C++ just seemed more complex than I wanted to tackle.

This has changed now.  Actually, it changed years ago with the development of Visual Basic, but somehow I didn’t hear about that.  But I just discovered Visual C# Express, an IDE produced by Microsoft and available for download for free.  It is rare I get giddy over new software these days, but this program has me very excited.  Not only is programming accessible; it is also easy and even fun!  I bought a book to learn C# and the Visual environment, and by the end of the first chapter I had written my own web browser.

Visual C# Express builds on Microsoft’s .NET framework, which makes things a lot easier. They have classes to do common tasks, and you simply have to drag and drop these into the form to make it work in the IDE.

I am very excited about the possibilities that this opens up.  While I don’t see myself writing the next killer application, I do look forward to writing programs for fun.  Who knows — perhaps I can even develop the next great Bible study program.  Any ideas?

In the Book of Common Prayer, Eucharistic Prayer C contains a point in the eucharist where the priest addresses God as “Lord God of our Fathers: God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”¹Â  In order to be inclusive, many priests — including my wife — will add the line, “Lord God of our Mothers: God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachael, and Leah.”

While I am all in favor of this, we are leaving out some people.  Obviously, we cannot name everyone.  Some have argued for Hagar, but Ishmael is not heir to the promise in the same way that Isaac is (Hagar gets a different promise).  We could include Keturah, Abraham’s second wife by whom he had six children, but none of those sons are included in the promise either.  But there are people who are parallel to Sarah, Rebecca, Rachael, and Leah who I feel should be included.

Sarah, of course, is the mother of Isaac, a son in the line of the promise.  Rebecca bears Jacob, the next son of the promise.  Rachael and Leah, of course, bear Jacob’s children who become the twelve tribes.

But it should be noted that Rachael and Leah only bore eight of the tribes.  The other four were carried by Bilhah and Zilpah, the maids of Rachael and Leah (Genesis 30).  While these two women had no say in the matter, they did become the ancestresses of one-third of the tribes of Israel.

Shouldn’t we include them in the list of the women whom God used to bring forth the promise?  Doesn’t their marginal status make an even bigger case for us remembering their contribution?

I have to admit that while I like the theology of this idea, I also get a chuckle out of the thought of having a priest mention these two women in the liturgy and hearing most of the congregation go, “Huh?”

1. Book of Common Prayer, 372. [back]

Having divided Numbers 1-10 into PT and HS according to content, I now want to go back and check my results with reference to language use. Knohl provides a list of vocabulary that is used by PT verses that used by HS.¹

Before doing that, I want to address Knohl’s idea that all of the material in Numbers dealing with the Levites belongs to an originally separate document that he calls “The Levite Treatise.” Knohl does not provide a strong argument that these were a separate document, but suggests it on the basis of the fact that they deal with the same subject matter. I see little evidence, however, for these chapters circulating independantly prior to being incorporated into Numbers. It would have been a rather odd document. It would be a strange mixture of law and narrative, with the narrative material coming mostly at the end. There are no passages that could have served as an introduction or conclusion. I think it is better to view these chapters as having been written at the time of their inclusion in Numbers.

Turning to the question of language, my assignment of passages agrees in large part with that of Knohl. We do disagree in several passage however.

First are those passages I assign to PT that Knohl views as HS:

• I see 9:15-23 as part of PT, due to its continuation of the chronology of PT. Knohl argues that it should be HS on the basis of the phrase mishkan le’ohel ha’edhuth, which does not occur in PT. This particular phrase is unique to this verse, however, so it does not constitute strong evidence for assigning the passage to HS. ‘ohel ha’edhuth occurs in Number 17:7 in a passage I would assign to PT, so I see no reason to change the assignment of 9:15-23.
• 10:11-12 is assigned by Knohl to HS. It contains the phrase mishkan ha’eduth, which occurs only in HS passages (Exod 38:21; Num 1:50, 53). Although four occurrances of the phrase is hardly conclusive, it does mean that this section should be reconsidered. Perhaps a study of the idea of setting out when the cloud lifts from over the tabernacle would be useful. If such passages are all HS, this would mean that 10:11-12 as well as 9:15-23 should be assigned to HS.

There are no passages that I see as HS that Knohl assigns to PT. We therefore move on to passages that were unclear.

• I marked 2:1-34 as unclear in the previous post. Knohl sees it as HS. The word degel (’standard, flag’) that is used repeatedly in this passage is almost universally recognized as being a loanword from Aramaic. It is used in two other passages in Numbers that are clearly HS (Num 1:52; 10:14, 18, 22, 25). This would imply a postexilic date for these passages, which points clearly to HS.
• 3:40-51 must be assigned to the HS layer. Knohl points out that God only speaks in the first person in HS after the revelation of the divine name in Exodus 6. The expression “I am the LORD” also echos the same expression found throughout Leviticus 17-26.
• Knohl views the repetitions of 7:1-89 as characteristic of HS. The fact that it breaks the narrative chronology of PT also leads him to assign this to HS. I also overlooked in my previous post the fact that the Levites are divided into subgroups, a definite sign of HS.

The linguistic data therefore confirms most of the assignments, although some needed to be rethought. Neither vocabulary nor content can be definitive on its own. Both must work in conjunction in the final analysis.

1. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence, 108-110. [back]

The next question to be addressed is the basis upon which we differentiate between PT and HS. Both Knohl and Milgrom have discussions on this. They mostly do so on the basis of language. Each author uses term that the other doesn’t. In addition, HS tends to be less precise in his use of terminology than PT is.

For this current exercise, however, I want to focus on how each particular text deals with the Levites. In a paper I will be presenting at the New England regional SBL meeting next month, I argue that PT is preexilic while HS is postexilic, or more precisely, PT comes before Exekiel and HS comes after. Since Ezekiel seems to be the first to demote the Levites to second class priests, any text that is written before Ezekiel should see the Levites as equal to the Aaronides, while texts afterwards should view the Levites as second class priests. This is particularly true for the priestly layers in the Pentateuch, as their similarity to Ezekiel has frequently been noted.

For this post, therefore, I want to go through Numbers 1-10 and see which passages should be assigned to PT and HS based on their treatment of the Levites. Also, if a passage seems to presume another passage that has been assigned to HS, that passage will be assigned to HS as well. A few passages will be assigned based on other criteria.

Here is my breakdown:

• 1:1-47 is probably PT. My reason for assigning it to PT is that is follows the chronology of earlier priestly chapters, and that chronology seems to belong to PT.
• 1:48-54 clearly sees the Levites as having the responsibility of moving the tabernacle. This role equates to the custodial responsibilities over the temple they are given in the postexilic period. This passage is therefore assigned to HS. Noth viewed this passage as a supplement to P.
• 2:1-34. This passage could go either way. It could easily be PT, since it would make sense to arrange the camp prior to setting out on the march. But the passage could be seen to draw on the material in Ezekiel 48, which would make this passage part of HS. A definite decision cannot be made at this time.
• 3:1-13 is HS, due to the fact that the Levites are set up as servants of the Aaronides.
• 3:14-39 is HS. It assigns custodial duties to the Levites, a characteristic of their existence in the postexilic period.
• 3:40-51 is unclear. Its focus on the Levites might suggest HS, but it does not necessarily see them as second class priests.
• 4:1-49 is HS, due to its treatment of the Levites.
• Chapters 5-6 are problematic. They will not be discussed here. They may be later additions that postdate HS.
• 7:1-89 is also problematic. Noth assigned it as a supplement to P. It could be part of PT, since it contains a chronological note that would fit with earlier notes. It could also be a much later insertion. No decision can be made at this time.
• 8:5-26 views the Levites as the servants of Aaron and his sons, so this is clearly HS.
• 9:1-14 could be HS or an even later addition. Noth viewed it as part of the supplements to P.
• 9:15-23 seems to be continuing the PT narrative.
• 10:1-10 is unclear.
• 10:11-12 is PT, due to the chronological note.
• 10:13-28 sees the Levites as custodians of the tabernacle and is therefore HS.

The next step in the research will be to use some of the language data isolated by Knohl and Milgrom to see if they match up with the divisions given above. That will be done in the next post in this series.

>>> Continue to the third post in this series.

As many of my readers know, one of my areas of interest is the two priestsly layers in the Pentateuch. These two layers — known as PT and HS — were first proposed by Israel Knohl in The Sancturary of Silence. I have been working on a compositional history of the book of Numbers, so I thought I would walk through some of the process here. This series will look at Numbers 1-10, with the intention of assigning the passages to PT, HS, or other sources. I will be taking as my starting point the work of Martin Noth, whose divisions have been helpfully laid out in Campbell and O’Brien’s Sources of the Pentateuch.

The first thing I wanted to do is decide what came before and after Numbers 1-10. What is the passage in P that comes before Numbers 1-10 and what passage picks up after that story?

The final chapters of Leviticus are the Holiness Code (17-26), which according to Knohl would not have been part of the original PT layer. Noth assigns 11-16 to late P layers, so they can be excluded as well. This suggests that the P story directly preceeding the census in Numbers 1 would have been the ordination of Aaron and his sons in Leviticus 8-9 (and possibily 10).

This matches well with the chronology of P. In Exodus 40, which would have immediately preceeded Leviticus 8-9, the tabernacle is set up on the first day of the first month of the second year (Exod 40:17). Aaron and his sons would have then been consecrated. Then, on the first day of the second month in the second year, the census would have been taken (Num 1:1).

After the material in Number 1-10, the people would have left Sinai, which they did on the twentieth day of the first month of the second year (Num 10:11-12), immediately after the census. From there, they journyed to the edge of Canaan and sent spies into the land (Num 13ff.)

In other words, after the tabernacle is set up in P, Aaron and his sons are consecrated. This is followed by the census and the departure from Sinai. The chronology in this section is rather tight and leaves little room for expansion. But it is on this thread that the pearls in Numbers 1-10 have been strung.

In the second part of this series, I will look at the material in Numbers 1-10 to determine the basis on which material can be assigned to PT or HS. Stay tuned!

>>> Continue to the second post in this series.