The Divine Symphony: the Bible's many voices

Chapter Two - The Uniqueness of the Priestly Torah

9 CHAPTER TWO The Uniqueness of the Priestly Torah T HE PRIESTLY FAITH IS UNIQUE WITHIN THE BIBLE. ONLY IN the Priestly Torah do we find a systematic avoidance of the attribution of any physical dimensions to God and of almost any action of God, save the act of commanding . The Priestly thinkers attained an astounding level of abstraction and sublimity. That such a conception develops at the early stages of Israelite monotheism, long before the rise of Greek philosophy, is indeed startling. The course of Israelite religion is not—as so many writers in the nineteenth century claimed—an incremental evolution from the primitive, coarse, and opaque to the pure and the refined. Rather, it can be argued that the purest and most refined elements appeared right at an early stage. The Priestly Torah is a luminous, sublime flash that appears on the stage of the history of Israel’s faith from its antiquity. Research on other cultures has shown that indeed literary and religious creativity can sometimes attain its peak of glory at the very dawn of a new culture.1 The Priestly conception is scattered over four of the five books of the Torah. Parts of it are in Genesis, including the 10 first chapter, which tells the story of Creation. Other parts are in Exodus, especially the second half of Exodus, which deals with the Tabernacle. Still other parts are in the first half of Leviticus and in various chapters of Numbers.2 After gathering together the different chapters that belong to the Priestly writings , we can properly appreciate the profundity and the originality of the work composed by the priests of Israel. In my book The Sanctuary of Silence I have argued that the Priestly Torah, or P, as it is usually designated by Bible scholars , was written by the priesthood of Jerusalem in the period of the Israelite monarchy, sometime beween the founding of the Solomonic Temple in Jerusalem (circa 950 B.C.E.) and the middle of the eighth century B.C.E.3 The establishment of Solomon’s Temple created a new situation in the Israelite cult. For the first time, a royal sanctuary was erected. The priesthood retreated behind the Temple walls and avoided taking part in the life of the people and society. In the traditions about the period before Solomon, we hear of priests who were involved in political and governmental activity.4 For instance , the priests supported David in the time of the rebellion of Absalom5 and were involved in court politics in the last days of David.6 But after Solomon ascended the throne, we no longer hear of priests involved in the affairs of the kingdom , with but one exception.7 Even the traditional roles of the priesthood in war time, the inquiry of the Urim and Thummim before going out to the battle8 and the carrying of the ark to the battlefield,9 are no longer mentioned during or after the reign of Solomon.10 I see this retreat as an expression of the Priestly Torah’s wish to maintain a separation between its own internal world and the surrounding world. Just as priests stop participating in military campaigns, they also do not participate in the legal system. In other strata of the Bible, we find mentions of the priests serving as the judges of the people.11 But according to the Priestly Torah, the priests have nothing to do with either teaching or the civil judiciary. THE DIVINE SYMPHONY 11 We may assume that the establishment of the “King’s Temple ” of Jerusalem and the creation of a closed, elitist Priestly class dependent on the royal court are essential features leading to the development of the Priestly Torah. It is these elitist Priestly circles that generated the ideology of a faith that is completely detached from social, national, or material needs.In this way, the Priestly Torah reflects the literary activity of a closed literary elite. Scholars have noted that there is a great literary similarity between the Priestly rules in the Torah and between the Priestly writings and cult of the Hittites. This similarity is seen both in the literary form of the texts and in the details of the rituals.12 There are hints in the Bible that the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem prior to David were of Hittite origin .13 It is thus reasonable to assume that the priests...