Blue Cord

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]

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.

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?