Blue Cord

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.

Steve Cook kindly responded to my questions, both here and on his blog. I wanted to take up some of the points that he made and respond to them. Please keep in mind that my comments and questions are somewhat preliminary, as this is an issue I am still not sure about myself.

Let me start by agreeing that there seems to be little evidence for the Aaronides coming from Bethel. The golden calf episode in Exodus 32-34 seems to combine a negative view of the Aaronides with a critique of Jeroboam’s religious practices. I doubt that these two elements were originally one. The only hint this story gives us is that the author J / non-P was critical of the Aaronides. Everyone locates J in the south, so it seems more likely to me that this story was meant to critique religious practices in the north while at the same time tweaking the nose of the Aaronides in the south.

Steve then picks up on my mention of the death of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus 10, which he assigns to PT. I might assign this to HS, but that is a minor point. He points out that this leaves room for both an Eleazer line and an Ithamar line, since neither of them is killed. Although this leaves the possibility for an Ithamarite priesthood, I would like to see more evidence for such a line before committing to it. Numbers 3:1-4 is about the only evidence I can find.

As I mentioned before, there is no genealogy for Ithamar anywhere in the OT. Wouldn’t that be a necessity if they were serving as priests, particularly in the postexilic period? I doubt the religious establishment would simply take someone’s word for it that they were an Ithamarite if they wanted to serve at the altar in Jerusalem. It could be argued that there was such a genealogy but that it didn’t get preserved, but that seems to be unlikely, especially if Ithamarites were serving as priests.

I think our main clue to the function of the Ithamarites is in the HS layer in Numbers. Numbers 4:28, 4:33, and 7:8 give Ithamar authority over the Gershonites and Merarites. I would place HS in the postexilic period, while Steve, I believe, places it in the prexilic. To me, this would indicate that the Ithamarites served in the temple as overseers in the postexilic period, but did not function as priests. 1 Chronicles 24 knows of Ithamarites as priests, but only during the time of David. I don’t think it sees them functioning in the postexilic period. (By the way, the HS material dealing with Ithamar is one of the reasons I might assign Leviticus 10 to HS.)

As I have mentioned before, I think by the time we get to the exile, there is no such thing as a non-Zadokite Aaronide who is serving as a priest. You may read my arguments in a previous post.

Steve brings up Joshua 21, which takes us back to the preexilic period. Here I think the situation may be different than that of the postexilic period. Joshua 21:4 gives an allotment of thirteen towns to Aaronides in Judah, Benjamin, and Simeon. No other Levites are given cities in the south. All the rest are in the north. This would seem to indicate that there are no non-Aaronide priests in the south during the late monarchic period, with the possible exception of those who came south following the fall of Samaria. Except during the time of Josiah, I doubt if any of these ever functioned as priests. Was there a distinction between Zadokite and non-Zadokite (i.e., Ithamarite) priests? I am not sure. What is clear to me, however, is that Ezekiel 40-48 does away with all non-Zadokite priests during the exile.

In speaking of Aaronides, Steve goes on to say:

This larger body was responsible for writing literature such as the PT source and 2 Isaiah. It is the group that supported Ezra in his reforms, when the Zadokite leadership of Yehud was proving resistant. This corpus of non-Zadokite, non-Levite priestly literature within the Hebrew Bible would be the primary evidence that I would point to as requiring the hypothesis of an actual Aaronid priesthood over-against the pure Zadokites.

Steve is the expert on 2 Isaiah, so I will leave that aside. He had an excellent paper at last year’s SBL on the two priesthoods, their theology, and the literature they produced. And I am willing to grant that PT may have been written by a larger group than the Zadokites. But PT is preexilic, and our original discussion was on different lines of priests in the postexilic period. I don’t think we can assume that the same lines were necessarily present in both periods. There seem to have been changes, which is what we would expect coming out of the exile.

But I would think we would need to be cautious about assuming the existence of a particular priestly line just because we need someone to have written a particular corpus. That this corpus was written by a group is undeniable. Whether that group was exercising priestly rights in postexilic Judah is another question.

Next post in this series: Postexilic Ithamarites? 

Erhard Blum’s contribution to A Farewell to the Yahwist? is the paper “The Literary Connection between the Books of Genesis and Exodus and the End of the Book of Joshua.” Blum supports the idea that the patriarchal materials were collected in written form and existed separately, originally having no connection with the exodus story. He dates this composition to the exile.

Blum begins his study by focusing of Exodus 3-4. These two chapters, he says, were integrated into an already existing pre-Priestly narrative. This has been recognized for a while, mostly on the basis of the direct continuation of 2:23 in 4:19. Although he rejects the idea that chapter 3 was inserted after P, he thinks chapter 4 was included by a post-P redactor who was influenced by Exodus 6-7. The main purpose of this editing was the inclusion of Aaron. Only in this second section (Exod 4:1-17) can we discern links with the material in Genesis.

Blum then turns his attention to the question of the literary context in which these two stories were placed side by side. For this, he focuses in Genesis 50. This chapter, he says, is part of a larger complex of material that pops up in Exodus 13:19 and Joshua 24:32. He suggests that the patriarchs and the exodus were combined for the first time in a work that reached from Genesis to Joshua (a Hexatuech). He sees reference to this in Joshua 24:26, which speaks of Joshua writing down “all these words in a scroll of the Torah of God.” This Torah of God was, in his opinion, either and expansion to the Torah of Moses or an alternative to it. This idea, he says, leaves no room for a J or E source.

The connections between Genesis and Exodus, he says, are in comprehensible without the Priestly passages. Therefore, the redactional material that combined the patriarchal and exodus traditions in the non-P material did so as part of the act of incorporating these traditions within the Priestly narrative.

Today was the final day of the conference, and my paper was the first one in the morning. It was entitled “From Horeb to Shechem: Deuteronomy and Joshua as a Combined Document.” The paper argues that the earliest stage of the formation of the Pentateuch was the combination of Deuteronomy 4-28* with Joshua 2-11,23 to form a history that led from Egypt (in retrospect from the border of Canaan) through the conquest.

The idea was brilliant. It was so brilliant, in fact, that Norbert Lohfink thought of it twenty years ago. I was informed of this by Rainer Albertz after the paper was finished. This is one of the problems of having access to a research library for only two weeks a year. The article in which he put forth this theory is in ZAW apparently, and the ATLA serials database does not index that journal. Nor did I come across it in my two weeks in the library. So, I presented a paper that puts forth a theory that most Germans knew but few English speaking people did.

While it was somewhat deflating to be told someone else had already thought of it, it is at least comforting to know that I can do original research and come up with some of the same ideas as a great scholar like Lohfink. This means that instead of being submitted for a journal article, I will just turn it into a chapter of a book on source criticism in the Pentateuch (with appropriate footnotes to Lohfink, of course).

If anyone is interested in reading the paper, I will be happy to send you a copy.

I was unable to attend the session in the afternoon, as I needed to get back to Budapest to meet my family. They were coming in from Vienna to see Budapest for a couple of days. If you are interested in hearing about the non-academic part of our time in Austria and Hungary, check our blog Out and About in the coming days for posts on our vacation.

Next year’s EABS meeting will be in Vienna in conjunction with the International SBL.