Blue Cord

Steve Cook kindly responded to the points I raised in “An Ithamarite Priesthood.” I think we are mostly in agreement, but I want to address a couple of things he said.

Steve correctly points out that Ezekiel 40:45 still calls the Ithamarites “priests.” The question, then, is how do we define priests. Obviously, the Ithamarites did not have access to the altar, but having altar access is not a sine qua non for priests. So, would Ithamarites have been considered priests in the postexilic period and, if so, how do we define priests in this period? Would a former priestly line that had been reduced to overseers still have been a cohesive enough group to produce parts of the OT?

By the way, my books just arrived from Lithuania, and Blenkinsopp’s Sage, Priest, and Prophet is one of the first ones I want to read. I am sure it has something to say on the definition of priests.

I agree with Steve that the Ithamarites might have felt differently about the matter than Zadokites. But if so, why don’t we have any literature in the OT that offers competing claims to those of the Zadokites? If the Ithamarites did produce parts of the OT, then why no “pro-Ithamarite” passages? In the absence of these, I would be more inclined to think that they accepted the fact that they no longer had claim to function as priests. This could have happened if the Ithamarites were a minor line in the preexilic period and had only a few representatives in the exile.

I am interested in Steve’s reading of Isaiah 66:5 as a Ithamarite complaint. While it is a complaint, I would be interested in hearing why he thinks this is Ithamarite literature. Of course, Steve has more important things to be doing in the next two weeks (and the ones after that), so I hope he doesn’t feel any pressure to respond.

The latest issue of the Review of Biblical Literature has a review of the new Smyth & Helwys commentary on Ezekiel by Margaret Odell. For those who are unfamiliar with this series, it is published by the Baptist press started by the moderates after the Baptist troubles of the 1980s and 1990s. The series is aimed at providing leading biblical scholarship in a way that is accessible to nonspecialists. Translational and text-critical matters are not discussed, while technical footnotes are relegated to the end.

The review, written by Johan Lust, is generally positive, although he takes issue with Odell for not dealing with questions of compositional history. He also points to a few interpretative issues where he differs with her. He finds the section at the end of each chapter devoted to way the text could be preached to be quite good and well connected with her analysis of the text.

Tyler Williams at Codex will want to add this one to his list of commentaries on Ezekiel.

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?

One of the books I picked up at the SBL this year was Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History by Alice Hunt. The book focuses on the evidence (or lack thereof) for a Zadokite priesthood in the preexilic, exilic, and postexilic periods. Given my research on the history of the priesthood, I wanted to offer a review.

Hunt begins by surveying the consensus concerning the Zadokites. The prevailing view is that prior to the time of David, two main priestly lines were active in Israel: Zadok and Abiathar. Both functioned under David, but Abiathar was banished to Anathoth due to his support of Adonijah as king instead of Solomon. This left only the Zadokites in control, and they were the predominant priestly line in Jerusalem until its destruction in 587 BCE. Ezekiel, who was from the Zadokites, promoted the Zadokites as not only the main priests but the only priests, demoting all other Levites to secondary status. This made the Zadokites the only priestly line in the postexilic period up until the time they were replaced by the Hasmoneans.

Hunt surveys the biblical evidence for the Zadokites and find them strangely missing from the preexilic literature. There is a priest named Zadok in the time of David, but none of the priests who are mentioned in DtrH are called Zadokites, even those that clearly are descended from him. In Chronicles, she notes that the emphasis is always on their being descended from Aaron. Zadok is included in that line, but little is made of him. The stress is always on Aaron. The only place where the phrase “sons of Zadok” shows up in the OT is in Ezekiel 40-48, and she places little importance on this material.

She also looks at evidence for the Zadokites in extrabiblical texts, primary Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. She rejects the idea that the Zadokites were fundamental in the founding of Qumran, seeing them as a later addition to the community. In this, she has text critical evidence to support her claim.

Hunt’s review of scholarship comes across as rather preachy. In each instance, she notes that a particular scholar has seen the Zadokites as the predominant priesthood in preexilic times, but says that the scholar has simply assumed it without any evidence. She then moves to another scholar that has seen the Zadokites as the predominant priesthood in preexilic times, but says that this scholar too has simply assumed it without any evidence. It gets very repetitive, and the reader is tempted to skim over that part. In the next section, she takes scholars to task for not paying attention to currents in historical writing, which is odd considering how much has been written about biblical historiography in the last two decades. Reading this section is much like listening to a sermon where the preacher’s point is clear in the first two minutes but has nothing to do with you. The sermon goes on for quite some time.

Given all of her focus on historiography, it is interesting that her own conclusion pays little attention to it. She draws on one work, Gerhard Lenski’s Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, and this forms the basis for her reconstruction of the place of the Zadokites in the Hasmonean period. Nothing is said about the early postexilic period, let alone the preexilic period. Having surveyed the material from the Bible, she then drops it completely, apparently thinking it is of little value.

In the end, the book seems rather incomplete. It provides a summary of scholarship on the Zadokites, but doesn’t really engage it other than to say it rests on presuppositions. What she fails to recognize is that all historical writing is a hermeneutical circle: we read the data, draw up theories to explain the data, and then use those theories to make sense of even more data. While it is fine to criticize the theories, she seems to take scholar to task just for using theories to explain data. But if we say only what the data says, then we are not actually writing history. It is also interesting that in her conclusion she uses a theory to explain the data, and it is a theory drawn from sociology instead of from the textual data. Sociological theory is great and helps us understand the Bible, but she seems to be using it in a rather non-critical way.

In the end, I would like to have seen a few more chapters that explore the idea of the priesthood in preexilic and early postexilic times. Perhaps the Bible does not call them “sons of Zadok,” but so be it. Clearly many of them were descended from Zadok, and this seems to be an important point. If we have a priesthood descended from Zadok, and they are the only ones who can exercise priestly prerogatives in Jerusalem, surely this is important. This is what scholars mean by Zadokites. Is it the same as the Zadokites in the Hasmonean period? Of course not. But Hunt wants to limit the term to that period. Certainly we must recognize the difference between the groups (as well as the connections!), but that is no reason to ignore the evidence that we do have for priests descended from Zadok in the preexilic period.