Dissertation leak #3

Section 1.3 – The Academic Lacuna

Although a scholarly study of the Hebrews’ reconfiguration of the non-atoning aspects of Levitical priestly service has yet to be undertaken, a number of academic conversations have developed along related lines. In order to demonstrate the academic lacuna within which this project falls, and in order to show this project’s relationship to those academic conversations, this section will examine four of them.

Section 1.3.1 – Studies of Old Testament Priesthood

Julius Wellhausen, whose research approach set the terms for modern Old Testament criticism, had an animating interest in the Old Testament cult and its religious institutions, and two of his students produced what is still appreciated as a reliable account of the priesthood in Israel. The discussion made its first significant advancements in the light of the new research into Ancient Near Eastern religion and the new discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the middle of the twentieth century. The first of such advancements was Aelred Cody’s seminal 1969 book, A History of Old Testament Priesthood. Cody’s History is often the oldest-cited work in contemporary scholarship on the subject. Notably, the project does not focus on what could be called the Levitical priesthood—in either historical or literary terms—but on the diachronic development of Israel’s various priesthoods over the long course of its history. He organizes his account along the lines of dynastic traditions (e.g. the Aaronide and Zadokite priesthoods) and sociopolitical tensions (e.g. popular, familial religious expression in Shiloh vs. organized, hierarchical religious expression in the Jerusalem establishment). Despite the renewed interest in the biblical cult, in 1991, Gary Anderson and Saul Olyan were still able to say, “the [formidable] study of cult and priesthood of ancient Israel is still very much in its infancy.”

Other scholars have followed these lines of inquiry in their own investigations of Israel’s historical priesthood and, in 2008, SBL opened a program unit called “Priests and Levites in History and Tradition” in order to pursue new interests using interdisciplinary methods, as a number of scholars had begun to attend more critically to points of comparison between Ancient Near Eastern and Israelite religious texts; to competing conceptions of priesthood, as well as to competing priesthoods, within Israel; and to the lines of social power which may have either occasioned or become enshrined in biblical texts. Mark Leuchter and Jeremy Hutton curated a representative collection of these papers which explore issues of kinship, literacy, sexual politics and gendered pace, warfare, mythology, administration, and other components of Israelite life. As the discussion of Israelite priesthood dispersed into various subtopics, it became increasingly difficult to attempt any kind of comprehensive account of the Israelite priesthood, let alone the Levitical priesthood, however the parameters of such a study may be defined. The tentativity with which Leuchter begins one of his own articles illustrates this: “Priesthood in ancient Israel encompassed a very broad spectrum of interests, duties, and spheres of influence, and we may identify a few main categories regarding that spectrum.”

Alongside these critical explorations of what Peter J. Leithart pejoratively calls “the real history of Israel’s priesthood… occluded in the Old Testament text,” other scholars have attempted to construct positive accounts of the literary priesthood, or the priesthood as it is presented in the biblical texts. Leithart identifies two issues that prevent scholarly studies from offering coherent accounts of Old Testament priesthood: historical studies are so committed to the narrative of diachronic development that they rarely attempt to locate the diverse set of priestly duties within an internally coherent framework; theological, or ideological studies are so committed to the internal coherence of the priestly duties that they invent and impose principles and hierarchies foreign to the text. To identify the “central activity” of priestcraft as sacrificial activity or mediation too often reduces priesthood into an artificial scheme. Leithart proposes, and argues, that the Old Testament priest is associated, like so many varieties of the Ancient Near Eastern priest, with the house of the deity—significantly, the house rather than the altar.

Throughout the Old Testament, priests are described as standing: “עָמַד has the literal meaning of ‘stand, stand up’, and ‘stand still’, but it also is used in a variety of metaphorical senses. When it is used metaphorically of the priesthood, however, the spatial significance is never completely absence [sic], so that a priestly ‘standing’ or ‘status’ includes actual physical access to holy space.” This involves the dignity of standing before the deity, standing to serve, standing as an advisor, administration, overseeing the work of the deity’s house. Leithart’s analysis of the Old Testament priesthood resonates with Stewart’s claim that Christian texts began to describe their ministers as ‘priests’ (ῐ̔ερεύς; sacerdos) in conjunction with the beginning of Christian material culture, particularly art and architecture. The historical Christian priesthood emerges, as the Levitical priesthood does in the Tabernacle Narrative, alongside in association with, and in service of sacred space.

Responding both to Leuchter and to Leithart, Michael Morales examines the fundamental analogy between cult and cosmos that both formed the basis and caused the obsolescence of the Levitical priesthood.