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 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.

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?

Because of my interest in the history of the priesthood, I wanted to call attention to Steve Cook’s post on the social location of Ezra. Steve places Ezra in the Aaronid camp. I would love to see Steve expand upon his conception of the different priestly groups in the postexilic period, since this has direct impact on the question of which priestly group(s) are responsible for the final layer of the Pentateuch.

Just to toss one idea out as bait for Steve, it seems to me that Ezra is not among those who edited the final version. The Holiness School has a great openness towards outsiders, as can be seen in the repeated admonition that there should be one law for the Israelite and alien alike. Ezra, on the other hand, is not so open to outsiders, at least when they are getting married to Israelites. Any thoughts on this Steve?