A Comparative Study of the Ritual of Ordination as Found in Leviticus 8 and Emar 369 (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 604-608 Gerald A. Klingbeil, A Comparative Study of the Ritual of Ordination as Found in Leviticus 8 and Emar 369. Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998, xiv + 679. This massive tome, a revision of the author's 1995 doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Stellenbosch, is a comparative-contrastive study of the ritual of priestly consecration (?p?) and endowment (d>t> hpo) described in Leviticus 8, and a ritual for installing an entu (/»w)-priestess of the Storm God (ana dIM naiu) prescribed by a text from Emar (no. 369, ms. A), a city on the bank of the Euphrates (Tell-Meskene) which flourished between the 14th and 12th centuries bce. The study's stated aims are to "develop a feasible model of understanding ritual in the context of its cultural and religious background" (p. 6), to apply the model to a specific biblical ritual (Leviticus 8), and to compare this ritual with a ritual of similar purpose from a foreign, ancient Near Eastern culture. The author eschews traditional textual and historical-critical analyses of the biblical text which have dominated modern scholarship, and chooses in their stead a "meaningoriented " investigation of the rites themselves based on the philological study of the texts that describe them. He considers a ritual to be a coordinated series of individual symbolic acts. Each act is to be understood as to its particular significance, and the complex ritual performance is to be understood as a combination of all the individual symbols. The individual ritual acts may be analyzed by focusing on aspects of ritual space, ritual time, participants, ritual paraphernalia and materials, and ritual acts and sounds (i.e., the questions of where, when, who, what, and how). The individual acts and the ritual as a whole are to be further regarded in light of how they simultaneously reflect and influence the social framework in which they were practiced. By detailed analysis of all these aspects, which comprises the bulk of the study, Klingbeil shows that the two rituals investigated are rites of passage aimed at turning laymen into priests by removing them from their mundane existence and incorporating them into a sacred framework. At the same time these rituals also serve to establish or enforce social hierarchies and relationships between people and sacred space. A painstaking analysis of the texts' vocabulary, grammatical formulations , and verb :: sentence ratios, and of the rituals' individual aspects, emphasizes the contributions of these separate characteristics to the overall character of the two rituals as rites of passage. Klingbeil has done a service in drawing attention to the actual ritual actions behind the texts that describe them, and especially in revealing the little-known Emar ritual to biblicists. Particularly noteworthy are his attempts to fill gaps in descriptions of the rituals by asking both what actions are described explicitly and what unnamed actions must have been per- KLINGBEIL, RITUAL OF ORDINATION—HOROWITZ605 formed in order for the ritual to have actually been staged. A praiseworthy aspect of Klingbeil's approach is that he places analysis of the rituals individually within their native contexts before their comparison. This procedure avoids the imposition of one on the other and the consequent distortion of both. As a result, Klingbeil is able to point to differences in the societies that produced the respective texts. Some of the most important conclusions gained from this comparison are: first, that ritual anointing was practiced in the area of ancient Israel even before Israel's advent, so anointing priests can no longer be considered a post-exilic invention; additionally, the biblical ritual is an example of multiday rites of passage known from other ancient Near Eastern societies. Although Klingbeil is not much interested in dating the pentateuchal sources and the stages of religious development they reflect, it is certainly significant that the complex ordination ritual practiced at Emar antedates the emergence of Israel, while the parallel biblical ritual, originating in the Priestly source and widely attributed to the Persian period, is far simpler. Unfortunately, the contributions of this book and its potential importance are severely clouded by several technical problems as well as...