Blue Cord

Each year when I teach Ezekiel in Intro to Bible, I have the students attempt to draw the vision that Ezekiel sees in chapter 1. My students in the US always do a good job, but the students here in Lithuania produce some great art work. The picture below is the best of the bunch this year. I was done by Viktorija Trofimova, one of my Russian Orthodox students.

I am on vacation now on an island in Maine. What do I do when I am on vacation? The same thing I do while at work, except I do it on a beach. Admittedly, I was the only guy on the beach reading a symposium book with a highlighter in hand, but I never claimed I wasn’t a geek. But now I am a geek with a decent sun tan.

I have been reading Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World, an SBL symposium book.¹ It has several good article’s on the history of the priesthood, so I thought I would comment on them here. The first is by Iain M. Duguid. ²

Duguid reconstructs the priesthood in the pre-exilic, the exilic, and the post-exilic period. This post will deal with his treatment of the pre-exilic priesthood. He reconstructs the priesthood primarily on the basis of Deut.33:8-10, although he also tosses in some other passages as well. He gives the following job description for priests in this period:

• Using the Urim and Thummim for determination of God’s will.
• Teaching God’s laws.
• Drawing the boundary between holy and common.
• Officiating at the offerings and sacrifices at the sanctuaries.
• Overseeing the sanctuaries.
• Providing for the supply, storage, cleaning, repair, and security of the sanctuaries, a task he sees as falling on the Levites.
• Advising the king.

Several of these are tasks that are clearly assigned to the priesthood in the pre-exilic period. The use of the Urim and Thummim is attested in a number of sources, as is officiating over sacrifices. And they certainly served as the overseers of the sanctuaries and as advisors to the king.

I have a problem with his reconstruction of other responsibilities. While drawing the boundaries between holy and common was probably a part of their job, it was a part that became much more important in the post-exilic period with the work of the Holiness school. Duguid does not distinguish between P and H, and he dates all of P to the pre-exilic period. As I have indicated elsewhere, I think H is post-exilic. Since much of the stress on the differentiation between holy and common begins with Ezekiel (Ezek.22:26, 42:20, 44:23) and continues with the Holiness school (Lev.10:10-11, almost identical wording as Ezekiel), this is something for which there is scant evidence in the pre-exilic period. The priests surely taught the people the difference between clean and unclean (see the P material in Lev.11), but it became much more important after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

I also question his assigning the labor of the temple to the Levites. As I have argued before, the demotion of Levites to second class status was done by Ezekiel (Ezek.44:9-14) and codified by H (Num.16-18). This distinction is not found in P, and other pre-exilic texts show Levites working as full priests (Judg.17-18). Deuteronomy also seems to view them this way, although the question of their status in Deuteronomy is difficult.

This brings me to my final point. Duguid takes Deuteronomy as his starting point for the priesthood in the pre-exilic period. This seems a highly questionable method. Deuteronomy, after all, is a reform document. It sought to change the way the priesthood operated, including the centralization of all worship in Jerusalem. It does not seem to reflect the way things actually were in the pre-exilic era except for a few short periods such as the rule Josiah and possibly that of Hezekiah. Otherwise, it was a minority opinion. It seems better to me to base the view of the priesthood in the pre-exilic period on priestly text, although even these sometimes reflect the way things should be instead of the way things actually were.

1. Stephen L. Cook and Corrine L. Patton, eds., Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World: Wrestling with a Tiered Reality, SBL Symposium Series 31 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.) [back]
2. Iain M. Duguid, “Putting Priests in their Place: Ezekiel’s Contribution to the History of the Old Testament Priesthood,” Ezekiel’s Hierarchical World, 43-59. [back]

Steve Cook was kind enough to respond to my post on Ezekiel and the Levites. Steve just made full professor at Virginia Theological Seminary and would be a great addition to the biblioblogging world. (I am trying to convince him to start a blog and have even offered him space on bluecord.org.)  I wanted to address several of the points he made.

First, Steve asked why I thought H pictures everyone as equally holy. The answer is, I don’t. H certainly has gradations in holiness, as can be seen from the setting up of the camp in Numbers 2-4. But the question in the P level of the Numbers 16-17 story is not whether the 250 chiefs are holy enough; the question is whether they are holy at all. P simply has holy and not holy, and this is the issue in the story of the chiefs. The chiefs made the claim that everyone is holy (Num.16:3), and Moses says that the test of the censers will show who is holy (Num.16:7). Numbers 16:35 seems to indicate that the chiefs are not holy, while Aaron is. If this layer were H, the issue would not be whether the chiefs were holy, but whether they were holy enough.

Second, I think we are back to the issue of the event to which Ezekiel 44 refers. I agree with Steve that Ezekiel is reading the Priestly layer in Numbers. But I don’t think Ezekiel 44 refers back to the event in the wilderness. Instead, I think the event to which Ezekiel 44 alludes is the abomination and idolatry that led to the defilement of the temple prior to 597 BCE. This is what is pictured in Ezekiel 8. The Levites are not mentioned there, but in Ezekiel 44 the main problem is the worship of the people, worship in which the Levites were complicit while the Zadokites were not. I agree that this has little or nothing to do with Josiah’s reform, but in my view Ezekiel is demoting the Levites for participating in this.

To be sure, Ezekiel is interpreting this idolatry through the lens of the P layer in Numbers 16-17. But Ezekiel 44 says that the Levites ministered to the people in front of their idols. This hardly seems a reference to Numbers 16-17. But if the Levites were leading worship when the people went astray prior to 597 BCE, this makes sense. And if Ezekiel was already reading a text in which the Levites were supposed to be servants and not full priests, then why does he seem to demote them in 44:9-14?

Steve says that he is pretty sure he solved this in his JBL article in 1995. It may be that he has. Steve is the expert on Ezekiel. While I have been working on H for a while, I only jumped into Ezekiel while I was staying at Steve’s house. It may be that he turns out to be right, in which case I will gladly concede the point.

That is one of the wonderful things about Open Source Scholarship ™ . Instead of having to wait until our ideas are completely worked out and we publish them in a paper, we can try them out on our blogs and have others critique them. This makes for more enjoyable scholarship, since we interact in almost real time instead of through journal articles that appear months or years apart Plus, our students get to see how we go about doing our research and making judgments. And, our students get to see us change our mind if someone convinces us we are wrong. In our current political and social culture, where people are often entrenched in their ideas and never admit they are wrong, that might not be a bad thing for them to see.

The past two days I have been in Baltimore, using the Johns Hopkins library for the last bit of my research. I have much more that I could do, but it is time for me to head on. Wednesday I am driving to Holy Cross Monastery for a retreat, and after that I will be hooking up with my family again in Albany, NY, for a wedding. We will then drive up to Maine for three weeks of vacation, where I hope I can do some more research and writing.

These two days at JHU were mostly spent writing articles for the New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible. I only have five more articles to go, and those can be written with the resources I have in Lithuania.

I have also been able to synthesize some of my research from VTS and my chats with Steve Cook. Here is what I am thinking at this point:

• The P layer is the first stage in the priestly tradition. In Numbers 16-17, it presents a story of 250 people who rebel against the idea that the priests are holy while the people are not. God consumes with fire the non-priests who offer incense at the tabernacle. This is followed by the contest of Aaron’s rod, which confirms the election of the tribe of Levi to be priests. Knohl assigns this to H, but this layer actually seems to argue against H’s main point that everyone is holy. As Moses says, offer your incense and we will find out who is holy. As it turns out, people not from the tribe of Levi are not holy and are killed. This contrasts with H’s point that all the people are holy (Lev.19 et passim).
• Ezekiel 44:6-16 represents the next stage, when the Levites are demoted for their role in idolatry, while the Zadokites are reaffirmed in their position because they were faithful. Cook is right that Ezekiel is reflecting on Numbers 16-17 here, but it is the P layer of that story that Ezekiel reads. There, the concern is on inappropriate people approaching the tabernacle. Most of the languages parallels that Cook rightly points out are between Ezekiel and the P layer.
• The final stage is H, which edits the P and J layers of Numbers 16-17 and adds Numbers 18. H also adds Korah the Levite as leader of the 250, thereby making them complicit in the wilderness rebellion. In other words, what Ezekiel has done in oracle, H does in narrative. Here, the Levites are made to be a buffer between the people and the tabernacle / temple, so that the people do not incur guilt by encroaching on the sacred. Without this division, it makes no sense for the Levite to be excluded from the tabernacle in Numbers 16-17, only to have their tribal election reaffirmed by the budding of Aaron’s rod. H is aware of Ezekiel’s oracle and incorporates some of the languages into this story, although he does disagree with Ezekiel on some points.

That, then, is the theory I want to explore in my next paper. I hope to be able to get some of that done in Maine, although my research resources will be limited to what I already have and what I can find on the Internet.

Today was my last day at Virginia Theological Seminary. Tomorrow I will be heading to Baltimore for two days at the Johns Hopkins library.

For these last two nights I am staying with Steve Cook, a friends and fellow Old Testament scholar. We were discussing the Holiness layer in the Pentateuch last night. He has written a good deal in Ezekiel, so we were discussing where Ezekiel stood with relationship to H. Steve agrees that H is pre-exilic, while I think it is post-exilic. He pointed me to Ezekiel 44, which has connections with priestly writings in general and Numbers 16-18 in particular.

In reading those chapters in tandem last night, a great idea occurred to me, so I wrote down some notes on it. When I went to research it today, it turns out the same idea had occurred to Wellhausen in the 19th century, so at least I am in good company. I then read an article by Steve that disproves it. ¹

One of the next topics I may research is the place of Ezekiel with respect to P and H. Since my last paper shows that P is pre-exilic and H is post-exilic, Ezekiel should fall in between. It should be possible to show a development from P –> Ezekiel –> H in respects to several aspects of law and theology. Or, if Steve is correct, then such a straight line would not be seen, and I would need to reconsider.

1. Stephen Cook, “Innerbiblical Interpretation in Ezekiel 44 and the History of Israel’s Priesthood,” JBL 114 (1995):193-208. [back]