Structure in Lev. 1:3-9

dissertation bits I've been working on

TLDR: It’s interesting that priests help with sacrifice at all. That idea is nearly brand new in the Bible at this point. In order to think about what that means, we’ve got to pay attention what their actual roles are and then think about why they have them.

Here are the first two thousand words of that thought project. I’m going to try to put out another two thousand as I travel to Dallas this week for RADVO. So, that means lots of thoughts this week about what a priest’s job is.

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3.2.1 – The priest and the ʿōlâ (1:1–17)

Whereas the commentary tradition approaches Lev. 1 as a set of instructions for the ʿōlâ, and attends straightaway to the issues with understanding ʿōlâ as a species of sacrifice, this project begins by attending to the surprising interposition of the priest at the scene of a sacrifice. Strictly speaking, this interposition comes as no surprise. The narrator has prepared his readers, at Exod 28:1, 41; 29:1, 44; 30:30; 31:1; 35:19; 39:14; and 40:15, that both Aaron and his sons would be consecrated and vested with new-made holy garments to ‘serve as priests’ (kāhēn) to Yahweh.

What makes the interposition of the priest surprising is that, up until this moment in Torah, sacrifices were always offered alone, either by Israel’s patriarchs or the notable men those patriarchs encountered along the way. Abel offers his bikkurim and Cain offers his minḥâ unassisted (Gen. 4:3–5). Noah builds his own altar and offers ʿōlāh from every species of clean land animal and clean bird as a rēaḥ nîḥoaḥ to Yahweh (8:20). Although he isn’t explicitly described as having made sacrifices there, Abram had built one altar between Bethel and Ai (13:4), and another one at the oaks of Mamre (13:18). Whether or not Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine are understood as sacrifices, he is nowhere described as either assisting or requiring assistance (14:18–20). Jacob offers his own zevaḥ and shares it with his kinsmen (31:54), and he pours out his own drink offering by a pillar he had set up (35:14). Jethro offered an ʿōlāh and zevaḥim for God, the latter of which he shared with Aaron and the elders (Exod. 18:12). Finally, Moses builds an altar at the foot of Mount Sinai (24:4), where a number of ‘young men’ (na’ar) of the sons of Israel offered ʿōlāh and šĕlāmîm (24:5).

Conspicuously, the only man—the only person—described as having assisted another man in offering a sacrifice is Isaac, who assists Abraham in the offering of the ʿōlāh that is narrated at length at Gen. 22:1–14. After splitting the ‘wood of the theʿōlāh’ (hā-ʿăṣē hā-ʿōlāh, Gen. 22:3), he ‘takes’ the hā-ʿăṣē hā-ʿōlāh and ‘lays’ it on Isaac, ‘taking’ in his own ‘hand’ the fire (ʿēš) and the knife (ma’ǎkelet; 22:6). Demonstrating his attention to the procedure for offering the ʿōlāh, Isaac remarks to Abraham that he sees both the ʿēš and the ʿăṣē, but not the animal. After Abraham answers his son, he embarks on a set six of ritual actions: he ‘builds’ the altar, ‘arranges’ the wood, ‘binds’ Iaac, ‘lays’ him on the altar, ‘stretches’ out his hand and ‘takes’ the knife (22:9–10). For this reason, as well as the fact that Isaac is described as building an altar himself at Gen. 26:25, some texts Second Temple portray Isaac as a priest (Jubilees 24:23; Aramaic Levi 4). Isaac’s proto-priestly assistance of Abraham raises two questions of significance. First, readers of Lev. 1 must explain the significance of the Akedah’s ʿōlāh in discerning the significance of the interposition of the priest in Lev. 1. Second, and more literarily immediate, is the nature of the priest’s particular ritual roles.

Previous attempts to do interpret the role of the priest have been limited by the interests of the interpreters. While Wenham notes that the roles are “carefully defined,” he concludes that “the worshiper must undertake the messier tasks associated with sacrifice.” How Wenham decides which tasks are messy, and why manipulating the animal’s blood and arranging its internal organs atop an altar are not ‘the messier tasks,’ he does not explain. What Noth finds in this text is evidence of ‘pre-exilic’ ideology. By comparing Lev. 1:3–9 against more ‘developed’ ritual texts which show the Levites taking over the offeror’s role of skinning the sacrificial animals (cf. 2 Chron. 29:34; Ezek. 44:11), Noth believes he can better date the text. Gerstenberger reflects Noth’s interest in the shifting of the roles over time. He notes that “the participation of the prest, and his exclusive responsibility for the altar rites, emerged slowly, and only over the course of centuries after the establishment of the monarchy and the imperial cult.” Charging forward to the year 515 B.C., which is when he dates the rededication of the temple, he posits that the author ‘emphasizes’ the priests as ‘acting subjects’ in order either to reinforce this priestly hegemony or to exemplify ‘the cooperation of priest and laity.’

While these readers were more interested in locating the set of ritual roles of Lev. 1:3–9 within a ‘slowly emerging’ history of priestly hegemony, other scholars focused instead on the significance of this division of roles as it appears in the final form of Leviticus. The common, virtually uncontested scholarly proposal is that the ritual instructions for offering the ʿōlāh divide neatly into the following seven conceptual components:

1. Presentation (v. 3)

2. Hand-laying (v. 4a)

3. Slaughter (v. 5a)

4. Blood-manipulation (v. 5b)

5. Cutting the animal (v. 6)

6. Washing the animal (v. 9a)

7. Burning the fat (v. 9b)

For these scholars, the usefulness of this conceptual division is that it provides a framework for understanding the subsequent animal offerings (the minḥâ excepted). Neither Rendtorff nor Hartley explore the significance of this sevenfold structure, but Feldman does, even discerning seven (implied) steps in the minḥâ rite. She writes, “These seven stages are more or less present in all types of sacrificial offerings.”

What makes Feldman’s reading of these texts so helpful for this study is its interest in characterisation. In her own words,

Yahweh’s speech in Lev 1–7 is highly patterned, and the structure of the ritual instructions provides a framework for understanding the basic components of sacrifice… This structuring highlights the roles different characters play in the offering of a sacrifice, and paying closer attention to those roles helps define the relationship between Israelites, priests, and Yahweh as they reorient their lives around this new tabernacle structure.

Feldman’s analysis continues promisingly. She observes that it is the lay Israelite offeror who is responsible for the first three ‘stages’ of sacrifice, and that it is not until the fourth, central stage that the priest takes charge. Feldman’s conclusions are a helpful corrective to the suspicious interpretations of readers like Noth and Gerstenberger, who only see in these texts a stage in the process of establishing priestly hegemony. She reads this text in particular—and Leviticus in general—as grounding both ‘the agency of the Irsaelites themselves’ as well as the responsibilities of expert priests.

Yet even this ‘seven stage’ model overlooks how deeply the text itself structures lay-priestly collaboration. In particular, this standard hypothesis fails to account for the distinctive features of the ʿōlāh instructions in the text of Lev. 1:3–9. Even while the concept of ‘sacrifice’ may be divisible into seven discrete stages, the text uses exactly twelve verbs to articulate the ʿōlāh instructions. Even more curiously, the twelve verbs are divided evenly between the offeror and the priest—each party has exactly six responsibilities:

1. The offeror ‘presents’ (yaqriv; v. 3)

2. The offeror ‘lays his hand’ (wĕsāmaḵ; v. 4)

3. The offeror ‘slaughters’ the animal (wĕšāḥaṭ; v. 5a)

4. The priest ‘collects’ the blood (wehiqrîbû; v. 5b)

5. The priest ‘dashes’ the blood (wĕzārĕqû; v. 5b)

6. The offeror ‘skins’ the animal’s body (wĕhipšîṭ; v. 6)

7. The offeror ‘cuts’ the body into pieces (wĕnittaḥ; v. 6)

8. The priest ‘arranges’ the pieces on the altar (wĕʿārĕḵû; v. 7)

9. The priest ‘puts’ fire on the altar (wĕnātĕnû; v. 7)

10. The priest ‘arranges’ wood on the fire (wĕʿārĕḵû; v. 7)

11. The offeror ‘washes’ the entrails and legs (wĕḵibbās; v. 9a)

12. The priest ‘turns into smoke’ all of it (wĕhiqtîr; v. 9b)

This ‘twelve action’ proposal has at least three real strengths. First, it refrains from prematurely interpreting the text. Without evaluating certain tasks as ‘messier’ than others, this ‘twelve action’ proposal simply observes and reports an indisputable phenomenon in the text itself.

Second, this framework does not gloss over the motifs embedded in the ritual procedures. In its attempt to span the five offerings in the Torah of Sacrifice, the ‘seven stage’ hypothesis necessarily abstracts concrete responsibilities as it conceptualises its stages. In so doing, it discards the ‘suggestive words or phrase’ from which Kugel had traced exegetical traditions. The ‘seven stage’ model, for example, leaves behind the priestly role of wĕʿārĕḵû ʿēṣîm ʿal-hāʾēš, or ‘arranging the wood’ in Lev. 1:7. The fact that the responsibility for the wood falls to the priestly helper certainly suggests a relationship to Isaac’s bearing of the wood in the Akedah (Gen. 22:6). If readers are to follow Feldman’s exhortation to ‘pay closer attention’ to each figure’s roles, then repetitions like these must be preserved.

Third, this twelvefold structure is neither the first nor the only twelvefold structure employed in the Sinai Narrative. There is a tendency among readers, even scholarly ones, to assign significance automatically to the sevens and twelves of Scripture. In the words of Peter Leithart, to immediately associate twelvefold action with the twelve tribes of Israel “may be true, but [it] doesn’t tell us much.” Critical of the interpretive habit of moving from concrete instantiations of numbers (e.g. twelve concrete ritual steps) to abstract representations (e.g. Israel), Leithart insists, “The Bible doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t move from body to mind, or from matter to Spirit, or from concrete to abstract. Instead, the Bible connects one body with another—one thing, event, or person to another. We move from one concrete reality toanother, seeing each in the light of the others.”

Exodus 24:4 — Twelve stones

The first concrete instance of the number twelve in the Sinai Narrative comes at Exod. 24:4. Immediately after Moses builds an altar and immediately before the young men of Israel come to offer their ʿōlāh and šĕlāmîm, Moses also ‘builds’ twelve stones. Regardless what they may represent literarily, these twelve stones, the narrator specifies, were built ‘according to’ or ‘for’ (li-) the twelve tribes of Israel in view of the rite of covenant ratification that was about to take place. While no evidence has been presented to suggest the stones served any practical purpose in the ritual, most scholars generally agree that the stones were meant to represent, in some way, all of Israel convened together around the altar to ratify the covenant together. At the very least, it can be observed grammatically that the verb, ‘built,’ assigned to Moses in Exod. 24:4, takes two direct objects, ‘altar’ and ‘stones,’ and that the narrator portrays the altar and the twelve stones as a single building project. But this altar-and-stones is a temporary structure.

The more permanent altar, the one served by the priests in Lev 1:3–9, is called by different names across the Book of Exodus. Its first mention appears when Yahweh gives Moses the building instructions: “You are to make the altar of acacia wood …” (Exod 27:1–8). When Moses relays these instructions to “the whole assembly of the sons of Israel,” he distinguishes this altar not by its materials but by its ritual purpose, calling it the “altar of the ʿōlāh” (mizbēaḥ hā-ʿōlāh; 35:16). By using this term, the narrator associates the altar not with the Levitical cult in general but with the ʿōlāh in particular. He uses this term again in Bezalel’s construction of the mizbēaḥ hā-ʿōlāh (38:1–7), even though he calls it the “bronze altar” (mizbēaḥ hannĕḥōšet) in his summary notices (38:30; 39:39). mizbēaḥ hā-ʿōlāh reappears in Yahweh’s final instructions to Moses (40:6, 10) and in the narrator’s description of Moses’s fulfillment of those commands (40:29).

This reading suggests that the permanent mizbēaḥ hā-ʿōlāh of Exodus 35–40, together with the twelve-action ritual procedure of Leviticus 1:3–9 corresponds to and succeeds the temporary altar-plus-twelve-stones of Exodus 24:4. Where Moses once built a single structure composed of an altar and twelve stones ‘for’ the tribes of Israel at Sinai, these ‘priestly’ texts present a permanent altar whose most fundamental ritual is divided into twelve concrete actions shared evenly between offeror and priest. Whether or not Lev. 1:3–9 establishes seven ‘stages of sacrifice,’ its more fundamental significance is its representation of the Sinai covenant in the rite of the ʿōlāh and its implicit claim that, in offering the ʿōlāh, the offeror and the priest together represent the twelve tribes of Israel.

Numbers 7 — Twelve offerings across twelve days

Exodus 28, 39 — Two sets of six stones

Leviticus 24 — Two rows of six loaves