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Chapter Five - Israel’s Debate over God’s Sanctuary
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71 CHAPTER FIVE Israel’s Debate over God’s Sanctuary T HE CENTER OF HOLINESS IN ANCIENT ISRAEL WAS THE sanctuary, but there were different forms and locations of sanctuaries. In this chapter we deal with the different models of the sanctuary that are to be found in the Torah, starting with the Priestly sanctuary: the Tabernacle. The theological uniqueness of the Priestly Torah is reflected in the special description of its Tabernacle. The outstanding characteristic of this sanctuary is the holy silence within it. In stark contrast to what was common in the temples of the Near East, and indeed to other temples in Israel, the Temple described in the Priestly Torah is a sanctuary of silence. In other temples, it was customary to sing hymns and pray during the sacrifices. In Babylonian, Hittite, and Egyptian texts describing the temple rituals of these lands, we find that when the priests offer sacrifices, burn incense, or light candles, they are accompanied by verbal activity.1 This activity would at times consist of incantations and magical formulas , and, at other times, of prayers requesting some favor from God or hymns describing God’s glory. Surprisingly, the Priestly corpus in the books of Exodus and Leviticus—which 72 contains detailed accounts of most of the Temple ritual—does not mention any form of verbal activity2 that accompanies the ritual. The priest performs his actions in utter silence. Yehezkel Kaufmann, who was the first to call attention to this phenomenon in his book The Religion of Israel,3 provided an additional proof from the Psalms. Many individual psalms are attributed to Levites,4 but there is not a single psalm that is attributed to a priest, nor is there a psalm to be recited during the lighting of the lamps or the burning of incense. Kaufmann thought this phenomenon stemmed from a desire to combat pagan mythology and magic. As one recent scholar describes this view, “Magic was seen as invoking the direct control by human beings of the forces of nature, while religion was the propitiation of these and higher powers.”5 The prayers and the hymns of the pagan temples were viewed as instruments to control nature. According to Kaufmann, the Israelite religion adopted a Sanctuary of Silence6 as a protest against this magical form of speech, or in contradistinction to it. I find this explanation unsatisfactory, for two reasons. First, not every form of temple-centered speech would necessarily be magical. The Psalms contain many prayers and hymns which do not contain the slightest trace of magic or mythology . Instead, they are an expression par excellence of the Israelite belief in the unity of God. Why not take a psalm of this sort and recite it while offering sacrifices or burning incense ? The second difficulty is that there are two exceptional cases in which speech is employed in the Priestly texts, and both are linked to the world of magic.7 The first is the confession that the high priest recites over the scapegoat, before it is sent off to the wilderness: “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israeites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat” (Lev. 16:21).8 Here, the magical element is seen in the transfer of sin to the goat, who deposits the sin in the wilderness, the domain of THE DIVINE SYMPHONY [54.163.62.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:43 GMT) 73 Azazel.9 The second instance is the ceremonial adjuration of the wayward or suspected wayward woman.10 Here the magical element lies in the effect of the “water of bitterness” that the woman must drink. Dissolved into the water are a series of written curses, spoken by the priest;11 in the rite, it is presumed that the imbibing of these potent words by the woman will either confirm or disprove her guilt (Num. 5:19–22). If the Priestly silence is motivated by a fear of pagan magic, we should not expect to find forms of speech in rituals which have magical elements. It would appear that it is not the struggle with paganism and magic that engenders the Sanctuary of Silence. In my opinion, this silence is an expression of the priests’ particular conception of God. According to Priestly theology, the aspect of the divinity signified by the name “YHWH” is above and beyond any form...