Yhwh Exegetes Torah: How Ezekiel 44:7-9 Bars Foreigners from the Sanctuary

You must not present to Yhwh anything with testicles that are bruised, crushed, torn, or cut off. You must not do this in your own land, nor shall you present from the hand of a foreigner any of these for offering as the food of your God; for their corruption is in them, they have a defect. They will not be acceptable for you.

(Lev 22:24-25)

Say to the rebellious house of Israel, "This is what the sovereign Yhwh says: 'Enough of all your abominations, O house of Israel, when you brought foreigners uncircumcised in heart and flesh to be in my sanctuary to profane it, my house, when you offered my food, the fat and the blood, and you¹ broke my covenant, along with all your abominations. You have not kept charge of my holy things, but have assigned (others/foreigners) to keep charge of my sanctuary for you.' This is what the sovereign Yhwh says, 'No foreigner who is uncircumcised in heart and flesh out of every foreigner who is among the Israelites may enter into my sanctuary.'"

(Ezek 44:6-9)

The "foreigner" in the Hebrew Bible (classification noun בן־נכר and substantive adjective נכרי) is enigmatic. From what land and ethnic origin does a given foreigner come? This question is rarely answered explicitly by the term's biblical contexts. Adding to its elusiveness, this class of persons is portrayed differently in various sociohistorical settings by different biblical texts. Among the postexilic images, Ezekiel and possibly Jeremiah portray foreigners as temple defilers (Ezek 44:7-9; Jer 51:51).² Ezra and Nehemiah fear that a foreigner's presence will disband the community's heritage (Ezra 10; Neh 9:12; 13). By contrast, in Isa 56:1-8 Yhwh grants covenant-keeping foreigners cultic prerogatives in the Jerusalem temple.³ The inclusive foreigner ideology in Isaiah 56 both reflects the language of Torah and moves qualitatively beyond it.⁴ While Isaiah 56 expands abiding Torah traditions to include foreigners in Jerusalem temple worship,⁵ Ezek 44:6-9 expands abiding Torah traditions, albeit alternate ones, to exclude foreigners from Jerusalem temple service. It is not my intention to explain the disparity between Isaiah and Ezekiel and their respective sociohistorical settings.⁶ Instead I consider how, in Ezek 44:7-9, Yhwh reuses and develops Torah terminology and ideology to formulate new legislation for the restored temple community.

Specifically, I propose that Ezek 44:7-9 functions as an inner-biblical exegesis of Lev 22:25. Yhwh infuses the prestigious language of Leviticus with ideology from the broader Torah corpus as an authoritative backing for a new law that barred foreigners from entering the sanctuary. The tradition history and social setting of Ezekiel 40-48 are complex,⁷ but the composition as we encounter it presents Ezekiel the seer's culminating vision of the new temple in cosmogonic imagery (of creation and its ordering).⁸ As a distinct character in this visionary narrative, Yhwh delivers the tirade and priestly prescriptions of Ezek 44:6-31 to Ezekiel for the house of Israel. YHWH'S speech includes both explicit and nuanced exegetical transformations of (his own) antecedent Torah legislation. In this article I explore the inter-textuality of Lev 22:25 and other Torah language in Ezek 44:7-9 by defining my use of terms, providing indicators for the direction of literary influence, and surveying preliminary issues related to the use of Lev 22:25 in Ezek 44:7-9. Then I examine this occurrence of inner-biblical exegesis and conclude with a survey of its rhetorical and theological implications.

I. Defining Terms and Discerning Direction of Influence

Early inner-biblical exegesis entails traditum, or the content of the tradition, and traditio, the subsequent transmission or representation of the traditum.⁹ These terms may apply to early oral periods of Israelite development (traditio-historical criticism) but may be misnomers when used to depict later stages with a "new dynamic of textualization," which is...