Blue Cord

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]

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? 

A few days ago, Steve Cook posted a piece on the social location of Ezra. Steve suggests that there were three groups of priests in postexilic Yehud: Zadokites, Aaronides, and Levites. I asked Steve a brief question about Ezra and the Holiness School, to which he kindly responded. I wanted to push the conversation a bit farther, though in a slightly different direction.

I am wondering (actually wondering, having not made up my mind) whether these three groups can be isolated and whether all of them actuall existed. Certainly the Levites did, as they are scattered all over 1 and 2 Chronicles. Where the uncertainty creeps in for me is with the Aaronides and Zadokites. That a group that identified itself as the “sons of Zadok” is clear from Ezekiel 40-48. The question is whether they can be separated from the Aaronides.

According to the Pentateuch, Aaron had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. Nadab and Abihu are killed in Leviticus 10, so there is no priestly line descended from them. Eleazar is presented in Numbers as succeeding Aaron as the high priest, so the main priestly line descended from him. But what of Ithamar? It is interesting to note that there is no line given for Ithamar anywhere in the OT. The closest we come is 1 Chronicles 24, which calls Ahimelech the son of Ithamar. This would mean that the Ithamar line was banished to Anathoth by Solomon and therefore ceased to function as priests. This suggests that while in theory there were non-Zadokite priests by the late preexilic period, the reality was that only Zadokites were functioning as priests.

This is further strengthened by the fact that every preist mentioned in Chronicles is listed as coming from Aaron through Zadok. We have no priestly lineage that is not descended from Zadok. In her book Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History, Alice Hunt argues that Chronicles does not make a big deal of Zadok. This is true. In each case, Zadok is simply mentioned without any focus placed on him.

But while this suggests to Hunt that the Zadokites were not important or even existant at the time, to me it suggests that the Zadokites did not need to press their lineage in Chronicles because by that time their position was secure. If it wasn’t, we would expect to see Chronicles at least giving us the lines of other priestly houses, if only to discredit them. The only challengers to the Zadokites in the exilic period were the Levites, and Ezekiel 40-48 and later Numbers 16-18 (Steve would reverse this order) had already taken care of them.

In other words, it seems that there are Zadokites and Aaronides in the postexilic period, but they are the same group.

I am sure Steve has evidence for these groups being separate, and I look forward to hearing it. If anyone else has some ideas one this subject, I encourage them to jump in as well.

Next post in this series: An Ithamarite Priesthood?