An Introduction to Biblical Law

William S. Morrow

• Éditeur: Eerdmans
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467447089
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Biblical Studies

Informed, accessible textbook on law collections in the Pentateuch In this book William Morrow surveys four major law collections in Exodus–Deuteronomy and shows how they each enabled the people of Israel to create and sustain a community of faith. Treating biblical law as dynamic systems of thought facilitating ancient Israel's efforts at self-definition, Morrow describes four different social contexts that gave rise to biblical law: (1) Israel at the holy mountain (the Ten Commandments); (2) Israel in the village assembly (Exodus 20: 22–23: 19); (3) Israel in the courts of the Lord (priestly and holiness rules in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers); and (4) Israel in the city (Deuteronomy). Including forthright discussion of such controversial subjects as slavery, revenge, gender inequality, religious intolerance, and contradictions between bodies of biblical law, Morrow's study will help students and other serious readers make sense out of texts in the Pentateuch that are often seen as obscure.

PART FOUR

Israel in the Courts of the Lord

CHAPTER 10

Priestly and Holiness Law: Introduction

Many people resolve to read the Bible from cover to cover, only to find themselves bogged down somewhere in the middle of Leviticus. More than one writer has referred to this material as “scriptural Sominex™”! While the narratives of Genesis and Exodus are gripping, it is hard to see the point of the many different rituals and instructions that make up Leviticus and Numbers. A key problem is that holiness is not a feature of the divine nature that speaks to many modern readers. It is difficult to imagine just how important this concept was in antiquity, including the religion of Israel; but any attempt to study biblical law must reckon with the fact that a large amount of instructional space is given over to examining the experience of the sacred—both as gift and vocation.

This section of the book is called “Israel in the Courts of the Lord” because it proposes to describe a system of law that takes as its central point of reference the tabernacle and the requirements for entering and living in proximity to its various categories of sacred space. The need to nurture healthy relationships with the sacred required sustained reflection on the nature of divine holiness and how to interact with it in life-giving ways.

Israel’s religious thinkers believed that their nation had been set apart from others to be YHWH’s holy people (e.g., Exod 19:6; 22:31; Deut 7:6; 14:21). In fact, as these passages suggest, the motif of holiness is ubiquitous in biblical law. However, it is the subject of sustained reflection in laws associated with Priestly writers (P) and the related Holiness school (H). Their writings are concentrated in (but not limited to) laws and narratives found in Exodus 25–Numbers 36.

This chapter will describe some basic features of Priestly and Holiness law in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Subsequent chapters will draw out various aspects of the thought of P and H. This will include the religious imagination symbolized in the tabernacle (Chapter 11) and the sacrificial system (Chapters 12–15). Chapters 16–17 will show how H extends the concern for holiness to matters of everyday morality beyond those found in P. Some of these chapters may seem fairly technical. To a certain extent, this is unavoidable because P and H can be quite detailed in setting out ritual requirements. Although sacrificial practices are often given fairly brief attention in introductions to the Old Testament, they deserve careful study for two reasons. First, animal sacrifice was an important component of ancient Israelite religion. Second, the use of sacrificial imagery and metaphors in the New Testament makes it advisable to understand the religious system from which they were derived.

This chapter begins with a short discussion of the idea of holiness. It proceeds to discuss why distinctions can be made between P and H and to give a brief account for the origins of these categories of law. Finally, some remarks will address the continuity of Holiness thinking in communities that read the Torah in the first century CE.

Holiness in Priestly Thought

As this introduction is interested in broad descriptions of theology and worldview, some of its discussions do not make rigid distinctions between the outlooks of P and H. In fact, P and H share a characteristic vocabulary and worldview which distinguishes their work from other styles in the Pentateuch.¹ For this reason, the book will use expressions such as “Priestly thought” to refer to ideas commonly shared between Priestly and Holiness law. This can be justified because Holiness law was developed from and dependent on Priestly materials. Where it is necessary to distinguish the two sources, discussion will revert to the abbreviations P and H to refer to these bodies of literature.

The motivations for observing the various rules and rituals that appear in Priestly thinking arise out of the raw data of religious experience: Israel’s encounter with the holy. Unfortunately, the Torah provides its readers with no definition of what it means by the idea of the holy. One has to read between the lines of both biblical narrative and law to discover how the sacred was conceived by ancient Israel’s intellectuals.²

One important concept wrapped up in the idea of holiness is separateness: YHWH manifests a kind of moral perfection and power that distinguishes him from the created order because he is not subject to the contingencies of death, disease, or sin. Holiness is also a desirable condition; for it is associated with justice, health, and peace—all characteristics of the divine. When people live in harmony with the holy, life prospers and flourishes. Priestly thinking is confident that the Creator wants to live in harmony with the community that divine revelation has called into being, although it is also aware that boundaries between what is of God and what is human need to be carefully negotiated.

According to Priestly thought, conformity to the conditions of holy living is a matter of life and death! This concern merits a considerable amount of attention in P and H. Two problems have to be addressed: one is the ontological difference between the Creator and the creation; the other is the effects of bringing what is unclean, impure, or immoral into contact with the realm of the sacred. As the holy Creator, YHWH was regarded as the source of blessing; but approached in the wrong way his presence could become a curse.

An important contrast can be drawn between P and H in terms of how they approach problems in maintaining good relations with the holy. P is concerned almost exclusively with what goes on in the sanctuary. Therefore, much of P sets out proper rituals for sacrifice or addresses problems connected to maintaining ritual purity. By contrast, H extends the concern for holiness and purity to everyday life. This means that many laws in H have a moral focus, as this form of Holiness thinking is concerned with the proper treatment of the land of Israel and the people of Israel. These differing values are apparent in their conception of holy persons. According to P, only the sanctuary and its priests are holy; but H regards holiness as a vocation for all of the people of Israel.³

Origins

The legal material in Exodus–Numbers reached its canonical form through a lengthy history of composition and editing, so an introductory chapter can only indicate some broad lines of agreement. As noted above, the rules in Exodus 25–Numbers 36 are generally assigned to one of two styles of instruction: P and H. Since scholars debate how to distinguish P from H,⁴ it is most straightforward to account for their differences by focusing on materials where their perspectives predominate. The book of Numbers contains some laws from P sources, but large parts of Numbers belong to H.⁵ Given its admixture of both styles, Numbers will not figure prominently in the discussions that follow. Laws from P dominate in Exodus 25–31 and Leviticus 1–16. Laws from H dominate in Leviticus 17–26.

Older critical scholarship tended to view texts coming from H as prior to P. Since Ezekiel shows a number of influences from H, it was thought that relative dating of both styles could be undertaken on this basis. P materials were regarded as later than H and were largely consigned to the late exilic or postexilic eras. This opinion has now been turned on its head by an extensive amount of scholarship demonstrating that H revises and assumes texts and concepts from P.⁶

The question of relative dating continues to assert itself, however. Many researchers think that the book of Ezekiel represents a good benchmark for discovering the emergence of a distinct school of Holiness thinking.⁷ However, there is also an argument for dating its emergence earlier (see below).⁸ Part of the significance of this debate is that it raises questions about the relationship between the scribal activity that generated laws in the Holiness style and the origins of the book of Deuteronomy. In any event, it now seems clear that H writers had at their disposal P materials. From that perspective, it is plausible that some P materials originated in the preexilic era.

Does that mean that we can be confident that H writers and editors were the ones who brought the materials in Exodus–Numbers into their canonical form? Not so fast! There are indications that writers using the P style played a substantial role in editing the Pentateuch in the postexilic period.⁹ For example, the laws in Leviticus 27 are written in the P style, but they now stand as a supplement to the H materials ending in Leviticus 26.¹⁰ Evidently, there are late P compositions as well as early ones.¹¹ In fact, H materials also have a history of internal revision.¹² So, any at...

Table des matières

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• I. Thinking about Biblical law
• II. Israel at the Holy Mountain
• III. Israel in the Village Assembly
• IV. Israel in the Courts of the Lord
• V. Israel in the City
• Summary Observations
• Further Reading
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Literature