Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (review)

"This book sets out to reexamine modern scholarly approaches to ancient Judaism's temple cult. In part I we will evaluate current scholarship on purity and sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible. In part II we will evaluate scholarship concerning ancient Jewish views of the temple cult in Jerusalem. The common denominator of parts I and II—and the thesis of this book—is the claim that scholarly understandings of Jewish cultic matters have been unduly influenced by various contemporary biases, religious and cultural" (3). In other words, instead of investigating the topic systematically in his own right, Klawans reviews other peoples' available scholarship on the stated theme, Temple sacrifice in Judaism, and mostly passes his opinion on their work. The result is a protracted research report only occasionally enlivened by engagement with the contemporary theological issues that Klawans thinks motivate judgments on ancient artifacts.

That yields a glib, incoherent, opinionated, supercilious, and above all, tedious, account of what Klawans thinks about scholars' results concerning a great many topics of sacrifice and Temple as represented in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinic literature, the Gospels, and other parts of the New Testament: all together yielding something called simply Judaism. While an overriding thesis that contemporary theology and politics shapes the reading of the ancient data surfaces here and there, the shank of the book is simply a survey of scholarship on diverse representations of a topic, which is to say, notes for the book that the author has not (yet) written. Since I concur with his opinion that sacrifice and the Temple formed "a powerful source of meaning and symbolism" for some of the Judaisms of antiquity, especially Rabbinic Judaism, I hope that Klawans will write a coherent and well-argued book to make his point. But that is not the book at hand, which covers "a large body of literature, composed over a long span of time," on which account "the argument will have to unfold gradually" (4)—if at all. Rather than an argument on behalf of a proposition on Temple and sacrifice, Klawans assembles bits and pieces of topical interest. When, in a moment, readers compare the two climactic chapters of the book, they will see the incoherence of the book as a whole.

The chapters of part I, "purity and sacrifice in biblical Israel" are these: (1) sacrifice and purity, the twisted fortunes of related ritual structures; (2) the sacrificial process of ancient Israel; (3) rethinking the prophetic critique. Part II, the Second Temple, symbolism, and supersessionism, covers these subjects: (4) Temple as cosmos or temple in the cosmos, priests, purity, sacrifice, and angels (sources are mainly in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament); (5) sinful people, impure priests, and inadequate structures, the Temple as defiled and rejected (sources as mainly the Dead Sea library); (6) the purity of the second temple in Rabbinic literature; and (7) the last supper, the Temple incident, and the "spiritualization" of sacrifice in the New Testament. The "conclusion" does not draw conclusions but simply summarizes the seven chapters and highlights what the author has already told us. There are seventy-five pages of notes, a spotty bibliography, and indices.

What has gone wrong is that Klawans does not characterize the various systems that impart cogency to the contents of the respective documents that he surveys. Therefore, he establishes no setting for the interpretation of the data in its documentary and systemic context. Rather, the author's pursuit of a single topic in a variety of writings without placing the various treatments of his topic into the coherent but discrete contexts defined by those disparate writings, yields concordance-scholarship: what X says about this, what Y says about that, as though X = Y. Thus, he is left to tell us about a theme that runs through diverse writings that themselves do not cohere, thus...