A Kingdom of Priests

Ancestry and Merit in Ancient Judaism

Martha Himmelfarb

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812202274
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19: 6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests?Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including the Book of Watchers, the Book of Jubilees, legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel—a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.

Chapter 1
Priest and Scribe

Ancestry and Professional Skill in the Book of the Watchers, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and Aramaic Levi

Of all the institutions of the period of the monarchy, the temple proved the longest lived. The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., but by 515 a new temple had replaced it, and the Judean priesthood was restored, more or less, to its old tasks.¹ Monarchy and prophecy, or at least prophecy in the style of the prophets who gave their names to biblical books, did not prove as resilient. No Davidic king ever again reigned in Jerusalem.² While prophecy flourished during the period of the exile (Ezekiel; 2 Isaiah), the beginning of the return (Zechariah 1-8; Haggai; 3 Isaiah), and even beyond (Zechariah 9-14; Malachi), it had more or less disappeared by the end of the Persian period. The prophets we glimpse later in Josephus’s contemptuous descriptions are wonder-workers or leaders of penitential movements preparing for the imminent end.³ The crucial factor in this change was probably not the demise of the monarchy—after all, as I have just noted, prophecy continued to flourish through the exile and into the period of the return—but the emergence under the Persians of a new institution, the Torah. This written constitution had been anticipated by the publication of Deuteronomy in the reign of Josiah toward the end of the monarchy, but with the demise of the monarchy, the text achieved a new type of authority. And because of the support of the Persian rulers, this authority was practical as well as theoretical.

The authority of a written text required a new type of religious functionary: the skilled interpreter of the text. Ezra is the first such “scribe [sōpēr] skilled in the Torah of Moses” (Ezra 7:6) known to us, but he was certainly not the last.⁴ “Scribe” is a profession; to become a scribe skilled in the Torah of Moses required intelligence and education, and, as ben Sira indicates centuries later, education required wealth (Sir 38:24). Still, to be a scribe did not require particular ancestry. The profession was open to any Jewish man of requisite intelligence and sufficient means to undertake the education.

The potential for tension between priests, the hereditary guardians of tradition, and such learned custodians of the Torah was quickly realized. In his memoir, Nehemiah recounts a series of reforms he enacted that trod on the toes of the high priest Eliashib and his family (Nehemiah 13). Nehemiah is never called “scribe,” and his profile is rather different from what one would expect of a scribe: he is a high official of the Persian court who uses his access to the king to become governor of Judah. Yet to justify his reforms Nehemiah invokes not his authority as Persian governor but the authority of the “book of Moses” (Neh 13:1). It is not clear whether Nehemiah has in mind here the Torah more or less as we know it or the Book of Deuteronomy alone, the only portion of the Torah that claims to be a book written by Moses (Deuteronomy 31), since the passage from the book of Moses on which Nehemiah relies appears in Deuteronomy (Deut 23:4-6). In either case, the written text allowed Nehemiah to trump the claim of the traditions passed on from priestly father to priestly son that Eliashib and his grandson surely would have flung back at him, a layman meddling in a sphere that from their point of view belonged to descendants of Aaron alone. Had Nehemiah not been the representative of the Persian crown as well as a careful reader of Deuteronomy, the dispute would surely have been resolved in Eliashib’s favor, no matter what the text said. Yet the existence of the text allows Nehemiah to refer to a source of authority that might persuade his contemporaries even as the power of his office compelled them to accept his decision.

The occupation of scribe is not an innovation of the Second Temple period. The royal court of Judah employed officials called “scribe” (e.g., 2 Sam 8:17; 20:25; 2 Kings 12:11; 18:18, 37; 19:2) and “recorder” (mazkîr) (e.g., 2 Sam 8:16; 20:24; 1 Kings 4:3; 2 Kings 18:18, 37); in Judah as elsewhere the skills of reading and writing were essential for running the state. But the rather technical skills of these officials took on new significance in the era of Deuteronomy. The promulgation of Deuteronomy naturally elevated the status of reading and writing, the skills of the scribe. Furthermore, the scribe’s role took on political dimensions, for society was now to be governed, at least ideally, on the basis of a text, which inevitably required interpretation. The practical wisdom of statecraft had been the sphere of the ḥākām, the wise advisor, who was apparently a standard figure in the courts of the ancient Near East. Joseph, for example, becomes second in command to Pharaoh by demonstrating that he is even wiser than the resident advisors, “all the magicians of Egypt and its wise men” (Gen 41:8). The demonstration consists of dream interpretation, a type of wisdom that biblical tradition understands as granted by God (Gen 40:8; 41:25, 39). But upon his appointment Joseph immediately takes action to soften the dire effects of the coming famine revealed by his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams, giving evidence of a practical wisdom that the narrative of Genesis presents as his own, not as divinely inspired. Elsewhere we read of the wise men of Pharaoh (Isa 19:11), the wise men of Babylonia (Jer 50:35, 51:57), and the wise men of the Persian court (Esth 1:13). Haman, a vizier like Joseph rather than a king, has his own wise men (Esth 6:13). The tales of Daniel assume a class of royal advisors who serve to interpret dreams and other portents for their king, as Joseph did for Pharaoh, although they are not called wise men.⁵ The Book of Proverbs suggests the presence of such wise men in the Judean royal court: “These also are sayings of the wise” (Prov 24:23), and “These also are proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied” (Prov 25:1).

With the Babylonian conquest, Israelite wise men were out of work, at least on their home territory, for there was no longer a royal court in Jerusalem. The story of Joseph, it is true, provided a model for Jewish wise men serving foreign kings, a model developed in the Book of Daniel, but the fall of the monarchy was a severe blow to the profession of the wise man. Further, with the rise of the written text the understanding of wisdom inevitably underwent a certain redefinition. Daniel is not only, like Joseph, an interpreter of dreams (Daniel 2, 4); he also interprets the writing on the wall (Daniel 5) and is the recipient of an interpretation of a biblical text, the prophecy of Jeremiah that Israel’s exile would endure for seventy years (Daniel 9). Dreams are a medium of divine revelation, just as is the writing on the wall or indeed the Torah. But it is surely not accidental that the Book of Daniel includes the interpretation of written texts as the story of Joseph does not. It is not surprising, then, that in the period of the Second Temple some of the functions once performed by wise men were taken over by scribes. Ezra the scribe serves as an official of the Persian crown. Nehemiah begins his career as the cup bearer of the Persian king, a position that suggests the role of court wise man, and while he is never called a scribe, as we have seen, he justified his reforms by reference to a book. Thus both Ezra and Nehemiah can be seen as examples of the scribe who not only studies the text but also serves rulers.

I have already noted that the Book of Deuteronomy laid the groundwork for Nehemiah’s appeal to the written text in the last half-century before the Babylonian conquest. By placing a text at the center of Israel’s communal life, Deuteronomy inevitably changed the nature of the priesthood both internally and externally. Priests had traditionally derived their authority from their role in the sacrificial cult, the purity laws associated with it, and certain mantic functions of the office. The centralization of the cult that Deuteronomy demanded brought with it radical changes for priests accustomed to serving the Lord outside Jerusalem. But another aspect of the reform had implications even more revolutionary. No longer could priests count on an appeal to the traditional knowledge passed on by father to son through the generations to silence opposition to the way they conducted the affairs of the temple. The significance of this development may not have been immediately obvious. First of all, until the Babylonian conquest the temple remained under the control of the king. It is the power of the king that accounts both for idolatrous worship in the temple at the time of Manasseh and for the implementation of the Deuteronomic reform under Josiah. Only with the disappearance of the king in the Second Temple period do the full implications of the authority of the text become clear.

Still, though they may not have been able to foresee the ultimate results of their innovations, it hardly escaped the notice of Deuteronomy’s authors that they had undercut the traditional basis of priestly authority. The evidence for their realization lies in their effort to redefine the role of priests. One aspect of the redefinition of the priesthood associates priests with the book of the Torah; the other makes them judicial officials. As part of its program to establish itself as the constitution of the people of Israel, Deuteronomy prescribes that the king himself write a copy of the Torah, that is, Deuteronomy, with all the limitations on his power that it specifies, milipnē hakōhǎnîm halĕwiyīm (Deut 17:18). The meaning of this phrase is not entirely clear;⁶ what is clear is that Deuteronomy uses the phrase to associate the book of the Torah with the priests. The association of priests and text is also expressed in the teaching role Deuteronomy attributes to priests. Moses’ blessing of the tribe of Levi juxtaposes teaching and sacrifice: “They shall teach [yôrû] Jacob thy ordinances, and Israel thy law; they shall put incense before thee, and whole burnt offerings upon thy altar” (Deut 33:10). It even transforms the role of priests in dealing with skin eruptions into teaching: “Take heed, in an attack of leprosy, to be very careful to do according to all that the Levitical priests shall teach [yôrû] you” (Deut 24:8).⁷

While Deuteronomy connects priests with the book of the Torah, it never calls them scribes. The office Deuteronomy adds to the priestly repertoire is the office of judge. As part of its constitution for the Israelite polity, Deuteronomy calls for a judicial system in which cases too difficult to be resolved at the local level can be referred to a central court of appeal (Deut 17:8-13). Priests participate in the upper level of the judicial system together with judges who are not priests, presumably lending some of the prestige of their traditional status to their new roles (Deut 17:9, 12). So too cases involving a malicious witness (Deut 19:16) are to be referred to “the priests and the judges” (Deut 19:17). Deuteronomy even makes a parenthetical reference to the judicial function of priests in the course of delineating their quite different role in the ceremony for ridding a city of guilt for a murder victim found outside the city (Deut 21:5).

Deuteronomy never directly associates priests with wisdom, but it does treat wisdom as a qualification for judges. In the opening chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls how the people accepted his plan to relieve him of some of the burden of their affairs by choosing officials to serve as judges. These officials are described as “wise, understanding, and experienced men” (Deut 1:13) and “wise and experienced men” (Deut 1:15); in contrast, when Moses takes a similar step at the suggestion of his father-in-law in the Book of Exodus, the men are described not as wise but as “able men” (Exod 18:21, 25). Deuteronomy’s condemnation of bribery also associates wisdom with judges: “You shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous” (Deut 16:19). A somewhat different set of associations for wisdom emerges in Moses’ exhortation to Israel to observe the “statutes and ordinances” (Deut 4:5) that he has taught them, “for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’ ” (Deut 4:6). Although Deuteronomy here refers to “statutes and ordinances” rather than the “book of the Torah,” the association of wisdom with ordinances does suggest a connection between wisdom and text. This is a connection that we take for granted, but it is important to remember that the connection is possible only with the emergence of a text at the center of Israel’s life.

The association of priests with the Torah and wisdom does not mean a merging of professions. Not all priests were trained as scribes, and not all priests could offer wise advice. Furthermore, no matter how skilled the scribe or how wise the sage, he could not serve as a priest unless he was a descendant of Aaron. But it is worth dwelling on the fact that the roles of priest and scribe are by no means diametrically opposed. Indeed, as the figure of Ezra himself shows, any theoretical contradiction could be resolved through the combination of priestly heredity and scribal training in a single person: even before identifying Ezra by his profession, as scribe, the Book of Ezra introduces its hero with a lengthy genealogy tracing his line back to Aaron (Ezra 7:1-5). In the hellenistic period Joshua b. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Priest and Scribe
• Chapter 2 Jubilees’ Kingdom of Priests
• Chapter 3 Priesthood and Purity Laws
• Chapter 4 Priesthood and Sectarianism
• Chapter 5 Priesthood and Allegory
• Chapter 6 “The Children of Abraham Your Friend”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments