Levenson JR Temple and World

The Temple and the World
Author(s): Jon D. Levenson

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 275-298
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202664 .
Accessed: 17/05/2014 16:14
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of Religion.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Jon D. Levenson/ Universityof Chicago
For Ben-Zion Gold, on the occasion of

his sixtieth birthday, Prov. 16:23
Although the Temple in Jerusalem has rarely been the subject of

biblical theology, it often has been its target. For example, Bernhard
W. Anderson, in his still widely used textbook, contrasts the Temple
unfavorably with the Ark: "The Ark, however, was one of the few
points of contact with Israel'sMosaic heritage. By contrast, the Temple
-designed by Phoenician (that is, Canaanite) architects-represented
the invasion of Canaanite culture right into the center of Israel's life
and worship. Any conservative Israelite who cherished the faith of his
fathers must have been shocked by Solomon's bold imitation of foreign
ways."' In short, the Temple was a foreign body propelled into an
Israel hitherto pure. John Bright, whose History of Israel has been a
major influence in the field for twenty years and through three editions,
is only slightly more forgiving. "We may," he writes, "take it as certain
that, at least in official circles, these features were given a Yahwistic
rationale and made to serve as symbols of YHWH's cosmic domain.
The Temple cult, whatever it borrowed, remained essentially Israelite
in character."2 Bright's grudging acceptance of the
possibility that
YHWHism and the Temple might be made compatible clashes with a
recent statement by George E. Mendenhall, in whose mind the entire
'Jerusalem regime... became a most typical Syro-Hittite pagan king-
dom."3 We see here that, whatever the nuance or the
degree, three of
the most influential members of the senior generation of Old Testa-
ment scholars in America find in the Temple of Solomon a notorious
lapse on the part of Israel into the culture that surrounds it, in other
I Bernhard W. Anderson,
Understanding the Old Testament(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1957), p. 146.
2
John Bright, A History of Israel, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), p. 218. The
context is the traditions about the mountain of the gods.
(For personal reasons I have devocalized
the tetragrammaton throughout, even in expressions in which it
originally appeared with
vowels.)
3 E. "The
George Mendenhall, Monarchy," Interpretation29, no. 2 (April 1975): 166.
? 1984 by The University of Chicago. All
rights reserved. 0022-4189/84/6403-0001$01.00
275

The Journal of Religion
words, a contaminant which Israel could absorb only with difficulty, if

at all. The Temple is a negative model, the pole to be rejected or sub-
ordinated if authenticity is to endure.
A step forward occurred in 1975, with the publication of Paul D.
Hanson's programmatic study of the early years of the Second Temple
period, The Dawn of Apocalyptic, for therein Hanson demonstrates an
awareness, as refreshing as it is rare, of the inadequacy of this univocal
preference for other streams in Israelite tradition over the Temple. In
fact, he expresses the "hope that the theological solution of the problem
of a schism between the Temple party and those they have excluded
will not be found in endorsement of the theological position of one of
the parties in the struggle and the condemnation of the other. We have
sought to make heroes of neither visionaries nor hierocrats."4 As the
terms "visionaries" and "hierocrats" suggest, however, Hanson's even-
handedness does not imply neutrality in his evaluation of these two
positions. In fact, he characterizes the hierocrats, that is, the Temple
party, as "very exclusive, and even intolerant,"5 and he identifies them
with Karl Mannheim's "ideological" mentality:6 "The ruling classes,
because of their vested interest in the institutional structures of the
immediate past, construct a program for restoration on the basis of
those recently disrupted structures so as to preserve their position of
supremacy. The alienated and oppressed classes look to the more
distant past for models... and readily adhere to prophetic figures call-
ing for revolutionary change on the basis of such archaic models."7
Although alienation and oppression are painful, from a moral point of
view, it is surely better to be among those suffering these conditions
than among those inflicting them. Hanson's interpretation of the moral
situation of the immediate post-Exilic era clearly promotes sympathy
with the visionaries, who are oppressed, and indicts their hierocratic
4 Paul D. Hanson, TheDawn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 410.

5 Ibid., p. 227.
6 Ibid.,
p. 213.
7 Ibid., p. 212. What Hanson does not
contemplate is that the advocates of revolution are also
acting out of self-interest. The effort to determine legitimacy between parties in a historical
dispute is not likely to be advanced on the basis of a subjectivejudgment that one side was self-
interested and the other pure and altruistic in motivation. Critical scholarship has tended, in an
utterly uncritical way, to credit the self-concept of the prophets while debunking that of the priest-
hood. In this, Hanson follows Julius Wellhausen, who wrote of the Zadokite polemic of Ezek.
44:6-16 that the author "merelydrapes the logic of facts with a mantle of morality"(Prolegomena to
the Historyof AncientIsrael [Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973], p. 124). For all that he is
conventionally accused of idealism, Wellhausen is here as materialistic as any liberation
theologian: the priestly morality is an epiphenomenon on the fact of self-interest. The
identification of conservatism with self-interest or even hypocrisy, although it is at least as old as
the Gospel accounts of Jesus' problems with the Pharisees, is today likely to persuade only the
converted.
276

oppressors. His difference with the senior scholars whom I have quoted
lies in his insistence that the anti-Temple perspective is incomplete.
What it lacks is "responsibility to the realm of history and politics," a
pragmatic and realistic stance which can be found in the hierocratic
perspective and in a classical prophet like Isaiah, who "comes close to
the ideal" because "in his prophecy vision was integrated into politics,"8
as was not the case with the protoapocalyptic and apocalyptic seers
whose works Hanson associates with the visionary group. Thus,
Hanson's unwillingness to endorse either position in the dichotomy
does not indicate a willingness to exonerate the characteristic activities
of the post-Exilic Temple priesthood: oppression, intolerance, the
infliction of alienation, the pursuit of self-interest, and the quest for
supremacy. Instead, he wants the visionary perspective implemented
realistically. Blessed are the alienated and the oppressed, for they shall
inherit the earth, if only they are as wise as serpents and as innocent as
doves.
At first glance, Hanson's position appears to be the opposite of that
of Anderson, Bright, and Mendenhall. He sees the Temple as the baili-
wick of exclusivistic reactionaries, whereas they see it as a dangerous
innovation that results from excessive openness toward foreign culture.
In fact, the contradiction disappears when we recall that they are writ-
ing of the early years of the First Temple, whereas Hanson treats the
Second Temple period. It is not unusual for a daring innovation that
shocks old-timers to turn into the sacred cow of an encrusted establish-
ment, guarded by jealous bureaucrats. The graduated income tax and
Social Security are examples familiar to any American. What Hanson
shares with his seniors is a tendency to find in the Temple a model for
the alternative to authentic Israelite religion, a model which, to be
sure, has one redeeming virtue, its "responsibility to the realm of
history and politics." This is no small virtue, but to say that the "hiero-
crats" had it is like saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time.
The statement does not raise our opinion of those of whom it is made -
do we want effective oppressors?-.although it does slightly lower our
opinion of everyone else. The fact remains that, after Hanson has
striven to give the Temple party its due, his ideal is still an eighth-
century prophet and not Leviticus or even Ezekiel.
What links Hanson with Anderson, Bright, and Mendenhall is the
assumption that the carriers of authentic YHWHism were the prophets.
In fact, there is probably no statement more generally true of studies of
Old Testament theology and the history of the religion of Israel than
this: they judge harshly anything that deviates from prophetic-
8 Hanson, p. 410.
277

Deuteronomic perspectives. This tendency has not been helpful in

advancing our understanding of the Temple, for although the Temple
is important in the consciousness of some prophets (e.g., Isaiah 6),
most of the prophetic literature comes from a situation of polemic in
which the prophet identifies the cult with hypocrisy and injustice (e.g.,
Isa. 1:10-17). Similarly, although Deuteronomy gives the Temple a
breathtaking centrality which it had theretofore lacked, the hortatory
tone of the book and its lack (relative to the Tetrateuch) of detailed
cultic norms have encouraged the perception that it is an anti-Temple
work. Whether this perception is correct is not the issue here. My
point, rather, is that the dominant preference for the prophets and
Deuteronomic tradition has contributed to the negative stereotype
which the Temple fills in so much of the literature, popular and scholarly
alike. In theological terms, this establishment of an inner-biblical norm
by which to judge other parts of the Bible is what is called a "canon
within the canon." It is not my purpose here to develop a constructive
theological critique of this procedure. Instead, I want to show that in
this particular instance the "canon within the canon" links up, first,
with certain Protestant tendencies and, second, with a kindred bias
toward cultural purism, to yield a position which is indefensible.
The assumption that Anderson, Bright, and Mendenhall all make is
that the covenant idea, so treasured, according to them, by the prophets,
is ancient and therefore authentic. The Temple is new and therefore a
fall from the purity of the pristine covenant community.9 It represents
a novel factor which is at best lawful, but certainly not helpful. The
presupposition here is one familiar from the Reformation: the pristine
community is the norm and all efforts to change or add to that norm are
inadmissible. On this presupposition, Solomon's Temple is as legiti-
mate as Tetzel's indulgences in the mind of Martin Luther. The prob-
lem with this is that it assumes, in an uncritical way, that the defensible
part of the Scripture, in effect, dropped one day fully formed from
heaven. Thus, YHWHism was always coterminous with covenant. In
short, this effort to equate the pristine with the normative comes
parlously close to the idea that God did indeed cut a covenant with
Israel, represented by Moses, on Mount Sinai. The hermeneutical
tenet biases the historical reconstruction toward some rather conserva-
tive conclusions, without which the entire theology would have to be
drastically revised. If, for example, we were to accept the argument of
Lothar Perlitt that covenant theology entered Israel only at the time of
9 The idea is
nicely stated in R. E. Clements, God and Temple (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965),
p. 88: "The temple had not easily been assimilated by this YHWHistic faith, with its tradition of
the covenant on Mount Sinai"; see also pp. 86-87.
278

Deuteronomy,10 then we should be obligated to see this most esteemed

norm as itself an innovation and therefore illicit! The tendency of biblical
scholarship in the last several decades has been to call into doubt the idea
of a pristine nugget of faith immune to the processes of tradition or at
least still recoverable after they have worked their mischief. It is in this
tendency that John A. Miles, Jr., sees a confirmation of the first half of
Montesquieu's dictum that "the Catholic religion will destroy the
Protestant religion, and then Catholics will become Protestant":
If by the Catholic religion, one understands that form of Christianity that set
human authority, the church, over scriptural authority, then it is plain how
the Catholic religion has now destroyed the Protestant religion. The Protes-
tant principle of sola Scriptura,
"by Scripturealone,"that led to the modern crit-
ical study of Scripturehas now concluded that what lies behind the biblical text
at every point is not a revelatory event but a believing community. Those
ancient editors, those ancient redactors, those ancient canonizers- they were,
after all, a very human authority. That the criticalmethods that sought to exalt
Scripture have ended by exalting these editorial nobodies, these ancient ano-
nymities, is in archetypalterms a victory for Catholicismover Protestantism.
If we assume what in Miles's typology is a Catholic position, that the
community is sovereign over its normative literature, whether written
or oral, then we can view the Temple theology as YHWHism at a later
stage, or at least at another stage than that of the pure covenantal faith
of the classical prophets, but hardly as a fall from pristine orthodoxy. 12
All of this, of course, grants a point I shall later challenge, that the
Temple was a foreign body largely unrelated, at least initially, to the
rest of Israelite religion.
If the tendency of critical scholarship to emphasize tradition over the
notion of primal revelation is embraced, then the Temple in Jerusalem
can no longer be disallowed because of its tenth-century origin. Our
citations from Anderson, Bright, and Mendenhall show, however, that
another point of attack appears together with this issue of chronology.
10 Lothar Perlitt,
Bundestheologieim alien Testament, Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum alten
und neuen Testament 36 (Neukirchener-Vluyn: Neukirchen, 1969).
' John A. Miles, Jr., "Radical Editing: Redaktionsgeschichteand the Aesthetic of Willed Con-
fusion," in Traditions in Transformation,ed. Baruch Halpern and Jon D. Levenson (Winona Lake,
Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1981), p. 28.
12 The Protestant
principle was well stated by Roger McAfee Brown when he wrote that the
Reformers believed "the church . . was on a most unpromising detour that might never return to
the main road"( The Spirit of Protestantism[New York: Oxford University Press, 1965], p. 16). This
belief in a pristine era that has been lost but can yet be recovered follows, of course, certain
tendencies in Scripture itself. It is interesting, however, that the Hebrew Bible in its totality is
ambivalent about the notion of a Golden Age. Compare, e.g., the view of the wilderness period in
Jer. 2:2-3 with that in Deut. 9:6-7. The issue is not whether there are biblical precedents for the
operative principle but whether the study of history tends to support the view of the Bible that
results from the application of that principle.
279

It is that the Temple is a foreign import. Anderson calls it an "invasion

of Canaanite culture."'3 Norman Gottwald goes further: he terms it a
"Canaanite-Yahwistic hybrid."'4 Here the assumption is that anything
Israel shares comfortably with its neighbors cannot be authentic to it,
but is, instead, an impurity to be rejected. The real religion of Israel
has nothing in common with and owes nothing to what Mendenhall
calls the "pagan" cultures. I doubt that this argument from cultural
purism is different in motivation from the position that I have just
critiqued. The other one spoke chronologically, this one speaks more
geographically, but the two share a perspective which identifies innova-
tion with inauthenticity. In fact, the underlying operation in both
instances is theological, an effort, in Brevard Childs's words, "to cor-
relate patterns of cultural distinctiveness with differences between reve-
lation and nonrevelation."15 Both Childs and James Barr have attacked
this position forcefully.16 Their point that the method is essentially
apologetic stands, but it should be noted that here again, the theologian
or historian of religion must ignore a burgeoning body of philological
data in order to continue his use of this approach. For what major insti-
tution was there in ancient Israel for which cross-cultural analogues
and even sources have not been found? Mendenhall's own work roots
covenant in "paganism."'7 The Mari letters establish deep Mesopo-
tamian connections with prophecy in Israel. 8 The discoveries at Ugarit
show that Israel took over the name 'El ("God") and even many of his
attributes from Canaanites.19 The revelation at Sinai has been fruit-
fully compared with a theophany of Baal.20 The list could go on and
13 Anderson, p. 146.
14
Norman K. Gottwald, A Light to the Nations (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 208.
15 Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1970), p. 77.
16 Ibid., pp. 70-77; James Barr, Old and New in
Interpretation(New York: Harper & Row,
1966), pp. 34-64, esp. p. 63. The underlying confusion is between the critical and the confes-
sional study of the Bible. The determination of the cultural affinities of an item in ancient Israelite
religion lies within the domain of historico-critical investigation. The determination of the legiti-
macy or acceptability of the item is a confessional judgment. The expectation that historical
investigation will yield, or at least bolster, faith is, alas, still alive and well, especially in America,
and it infects many areas of study. SeeJon D. Levenson, "The Davidic Covenant and Its Modern
Interpreters," Catholic Biblical Quarterly41, no. 2 (April 1979): 214.
17
George E. Mendenhall, "Ancient Oriental and Biblical Law," Biblical Archeologist 17, no. 2
(May 1954): 26-46, and "Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition," Biblical Archeologist 17, no. 3
(September 1954): 50-76. Both essays are reprinted in The Biblical Archeologist Reader 3, ed.
E. F. Campbell and D. N. Freedman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1970).
18 See Robert R. Wilson,
Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1980), pp. 89-134.
19 See G. W. Ahlstrom, Aspects of Syncretismin Israelite Religion, Horae Soederblominae 5 (Lund:
Gleerup, 1963), p. 13: "This phenomenon [i.e., the absence of polemic against 'El and 'El 'Ely6n
is Israel] we regard as an indication of the identification of El and YHWH and as forming a
natural basis for a syncretism between Canaanite and Israelite religion."
20 See Norman C. Habel, YHWH versus Baal
(New York: A. B. Bookman, 1964), pp. 73-84;
280

on. My point about cultural purism is twofold. First, the quest for the
distinctive in Israel is a wild-goose chase. The number of unparalleled
elements is shrinking yearly, and one can suspect that if we come into
any substantial body of texts from Israel's most immediate neighbors-
Edom, Moab, and Ammon- it might approach zero.21 This is not to
say that institutions come into Israel unchanged. On the contrary,
nothing changes cultures without changing, an observation as true of
the Temple as of anything else. This brings me to my second point:
those who apply a purist or nativist approach are obliged to overlook
the implications of their method for the parts of the legacy of ancient
Israel of which they approve. For example, I have never heard anyone
attack the eleemosynary ethic, even though it has obvious roots in
Canaan. Was not King Kirta of the Ugaritic epic indicted by his son
for his lack of solicitude for widows, orphans, and the poor?22 Under
nativist assumptions, must we not conclude that the injunction to
uphold widows, orphans, and other oppressed people was "an invasion
of Canaanite culture," "a Canaanite-Yahwistic hybrid"? Or is it the
case that YHWHism never existed without an eleemosynary ethic?
That would be difficult to establish, and if one could establish it, the
implication would be only that there was a smooth continuity from
Canaan to Israel on this point, as in the case of the Temple of
Jerusalem. The crucial fact is that Israel emerged in history. Unlike
Sumerian kingship, it was not lowered from heaven, nor was it an
immediate product of the "big bang." Thus, the critical historian must
assume that every element in Israel has ancestors or at least relatives
among the "pagan" cultures. Put anything Israelite into a time machine
in reverse and you end up with something non-Israelite. Like the con-
trast between early forms and late, that between native forms and for-
eign provides no grounds whatsoever for determining legitimacy. In
having come from elsewhere, the Temple of Solomon is typical of Israel.
We have found in both the theological and the historical study of the
Old Testament a deep-seated aversion to the Temple. When it was built,
it was a shocking innovation and a challenge to the real YHWHism.
During the monarchy, it was the refuge of those who turned a deaf ear
to the prophetic word and sought to evade the claims of covenant.
Frank Moore Cross, CanaaniteMyth and HebrewEpic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1973), pp. 156-69.
21My thinking on this issue was clarified much by discussion with Peter Machinist and by his
(as yet) unpublished paper on the putative distinctiveness of Israel, which he delivered to the
symposium of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Bible Department in the spring of 1981.
22 H. L.
Ginsberg, "The Legend of King Keret," in AncientNearEasternTextsRelatingto theOld
Testament,ed. James B. Pritchard, 3d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p.
149, verses 33-34, 46-50.
281

When it was rebuilt, it was the bailiwick of oppressors commendable

only for their grasp of realpolitik.The most general tendency is to draw
deprecatory theological conclusions from the foreign origins of the
Temple, or at least to exploit its alien beginnings in an effort to impugn
its historical authenticity. Although not all theological discussions of
priestly theology are so negative,23 the dominant impression
one receives from the literature, especially in America, is that the
Temple, its traditions, and its personnel are an embarrassment to those
who wish to present the Old Testament sympathetically. Their
sympathy stops at the foot of a certain hill in Jerusalem.
The great error of the conventional negative approach to the Temple
is its judgment from a very external vantage point, sometimes even a
vantage point which is in a self-consciously polemical relationship with
the Temple. If, however, the Temple traditions are ever to speak intel-
ligibly, they must be allowed to speak for themselves. But this will
happen only when we have devised a language in terms of which the
dumb remains of iconography can become theologically meaningful, in
other words, when we have "cracked their code," and when the litera-
ture of the priestly groups can likewise be read as a reflection of the
meaning of this central, yet enigmatic institution of ancient Israel. It is
in this task that the discipline of biblical theology has failed.
II
One of the salient and pregnant characteristics of the study of biblical

religion in the last several decades has been the influx of scholars whose
intellectual formation lies in anthropological disciplines rather than in
theology or other ecclesiastical areas. Of these newer approaches, the
phenomenological is the most pertinent for the study of temples, as it
has shown as much sympathy for the idea of sacred space as the theo-
logians and historians have shown antipathy. In fact, the dean of
phenomenologists of religion, Mircea Eliade, has developed a whole
group of characteristics of cosmic mountains which he explicitly applies
to Jewish traditions about the Temple Mount. For our purpose, the
two most important of these are the notions that the Temple Mount is
central and that it is primordial (not in the sense of being uncreated,
23 An
unexpected exception is Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1961), 1:98-177. On the literature and realia of the Temple, see Menahem
Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978);
Th. A. Busink, Der Tempel vonJerusalem, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970). On the anti-Semitic
motivations behind the disparagement of Israelite priestly traditions, see Joseph Blenkinsopp,
Prophecyand Canon, University of Notre Dame Center for the Study ofJudaism and Christianity in
Antiquity 3 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 17-23.
282

but of being prior to the creation of everything else and of being

perfectly preserved), or as I prefer to say, "protological." The cosmic
mountain is situated at the center of the world; from it, everything else
takes its bearings.24 In rabbinic literature, as in many of the world's
literatures, this double notion of the central and protological is
expressed in terms of a cosmic navel: "The Holy One created the world
like an embryo. As the embryo proceeds from the navel onwards, so
God began to create the world from its navel onwards and from there it
spread out in different directions."25 And lest there be any doubt as to
where precisely the rabbis located the navel of the world: "The World
was created from Zion."26 Rabbi Eliezer the Great says: 'These are the
generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created on the
day the Lord God made earth and heaven' (Gen. 2:4). The offspring of
heaven were created from heaven, and the offspring of the earth were
created from the earth. But the sages say, both were created from
Zion...as the Bible says, 'From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shone
forth' (Ps. 50:2). This means, from it the beauty of the world was per-
fected."27 These two passages from the Talmudic tractate Yomapresent
Mount Zion as the point from which creation proceeded, in other
words, the one place of a genuinely primordial character in our world.
The following midrash shows that the notion of increasing orders of
centrality can be found even on the mountain itself:
Just as the navel is positioned in the center of a man, thus is the Land of Israel
positioned in the center of the world, as the Bible says, "dwellingat the very
navel of the earth" (Ezek. 38:12), and from it the foundation of the world
proceeds.... And the Temple is in the center of Jerusalem, and the Great
Hall is in the center of the Temple, and the Ark is in the center of the Great
Hall, and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, and beginning with it
the world was put on its foundation.28
In short, the Temple is a visible, tangible token of the act of creation,
the point of origin of the world, the "focus" of the universe.
Is this Jewish idea of the cosmic center only an inheritance from the
rest of the Hellenistic-Roman world, or does it have more ancient
roots? The citation of Ezek. 38:12 in the text above suggests that the
rich symbolic resonance of the Temple in rabbinic times may have
24 Mircea
Eliade, The Sacredand the Profane (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 36-47. On
the specifically Jewish manifestations, see Raphael Patai, Man and Temple (New York: KTAV,
1967).
25 Cited in Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and
History, Bollingen Series
46 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 16.
26 b. Yoma 54b.
27 Ibid.
28
Tanhuma. Kedoshim 10.
283

been an inheritance from the Hebrew Bible itself. In fact, another text
in Ezekiel offers the same suggestion: "Thus spoke the Lord YHWH:
This is Jerusalem. In the midst of the nations I have set her, And all
around her are countries" (Ezek. 5:5). The word here translated "in the
midst of" (betok)can have either a general significance ("inside,""amidst")
or a precise one ("in the very center of"), as in Num. 35:5, where the
city stands in the mathematical center (tawek) of the Levitical patri-
mony. The rearrangement of the tribal lands in Ezekiel 48 argues for
the latter interpretation, for there Jerusalem, renamed "YHWH is
there," is put almost in the center of the tribes, whereas, historically,
eleven tribes were to its north and only one to the south.29 In other
words, the utopia in the school of Ezekiel seems to take literally the
assertion of centrality in Ezek. 5:5. If they were correct in their literal
reading, then the translation "navel" for the very rare word tabbulrin
Ezek. 38:12 is most likely. It is thus highly improbable that the word
changed meanings between biblical and rabbinic Hebrew.30
In Josephus, we find the cosmic conception of the Temple in an
enhanced statement: not simply that the shrine is the center, but that it
is a microcosm. Of the tapestry covering the door to the Temple, he
writes: "Nor was this mixture of materials without its mystic meaning:
it typified the universe. For the scarlet seemed emblematical of fire, the
fine linen of the earth, the blue of the air, and the purple of the sea....
On this tapestry was portrayed a panorama of the heavens, the signs of
the Zodiac excepted."31 "In fact,"Josephus tells us regarding the Mosaic
Tabernacle, "every one of these objects is intended to recall and repre-
sent the universe, as [the reader] will find if he will but consent to
examine them without prejudice and with understanding."32 Thus, the
two quarters which all priests were allowed to approach represented the
29 See
Jon D. Levenson, Theologyof theProgramof Restoration of Ezekiel40-48, Harvard Semitic
Monograph Series 10 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976), pp. 116-22.
30 Thus I cannot
accept the arguments against an early origin of the navel idea advanced by
Shmaryahu Talmon, "Tabzur Ha'arezand the Comparative Method" (in Hebrew), Tarbiz 45
(5736/1976): 163-77, and "The Comparative Method in Biblical Interpretation-Principles and
Problems," VetusTestamentum Supplements,Gottingen Congress Volume, 1977 (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1978), pp. 348-51. Note that a recent commentary commends the translation "navel"for the only
other attestation of tabbbur
in the Bible, Judg. 9:37 (Robert G. Boling, Judges, Anchor Bible 6A
[Garden City, N.Y., 1975], p. 179). See Samuel Terrien, "The Omphalos Myth and Hebrew
Religion," VetusTestamentum 20 (1970): 315-38, which, although speculative in places, does bring
together a number of disparate elements in the religion of biblical Israel through reference to the
navel idea. Note also Theodore H. Gaster, Myth, Legend,and Customin the Old Testament (New
York, 1969), 2:428; Michael A. Fishbane, "The Sacred Center: The Symbolic Structure of the
Bible," in Textsand Responses,ed. Michael A. Fishbane and Paul A. Flohr (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1975).
31 Josephus, The Jewish War 3, 7:7, trans. H. St.
J. Thackery, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 403.
32 Ibid.
284

earth and the sea, whereas the third section, the sanctum sanctorum,
into which only God (and the high priest once a year) could enter,
symbolized heaven, where God reigns in solitary majesty. The twelve
loaves of the "bread of the presence" represented the months of the
year. The list goes on. Josephus's point in all this Hellenistic allegory is
that the Temple is an eikon, an image, an epitome of the world. It is not
one of many items in the world. It is the world in nuce, and the world is
the Temple in extenso.
Was the idea of the Temple as a microcosm an innovation of Hellen-
istic Judaism, or is it, too, a legacy of more distant antiquity? Although
few modern scholars would be inclined to follow Jean Danielou in his
endorsement of some details of Josephus's allegory,33 the idea that the
Temple was a representation of cosmic entities has been revived and
from a source remote from rabbinic midrash and Hellenistic allegory.
William Foxwell Albright, the dean of American biblical archaeol-
ogists, argued already four decades ago that a number of aspects of the
Temple of Solomon must be understood as cosmic symbols. For
example, the two free-standing pillars, Boaz and Jachin, "may have
been regarded as the reflection of the columns between which the sun
rose each morning." The copper Sea (yam) "cannot be separated,"
according to Albright, "from the Mesopotamian apsu, employed both as
the name of the subterranean fresh-water ocean ... and as the name of
a basin of holy water erected in the Temple."34 Albright saw the twelve
bulls, arranged in groups of three, supporting the sea, as a representa-
tion of the four seasons.35 The altar in the Temple envisioned in
Ezekiel 40-48, which bears the name heq ha'ares,"bosom of the earth"
(Ezek. 43:13-17), recalls similar terminology in Mesopotamian
inscriptions,36 and the term har'elin the same passage (verse 15) is to be
connected with Akkadian arallu,37 a term for the netherworld, about
which the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary remarks that it was inter alia, a
"cosmic locality opposite of heaven,"38 although we should note, as does
Albright, that the ancient Israelites may have understood this term as
"mountain of God" (har'el), which is a concept no less cosmic.39 Albright
connects the kzyor,upon which Solomon stands in 2 Chron. 6:13 as he
gives his Temple-dedication speech, with Akkadian kiaru, which can
33 Jean Danielou, The Presence God
of (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1959), p. 19.
34 William Foxwell and the Religion Israel
Albright, Archeology of (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1956), p. 148.
35 Ibid.,
p. 150.
36 Ibid., p. 151. See the list in Fishbane, p. 24, n. 43.
37 Ibid.
38 TheAssyrianDictionary(Chicago: Oriental Institute,
1968), 1, pt. 2:226-27.
39 See Richard
J. Clifford, The CosmicMountainin Canaanand the Old Testament,Harvard
Semitic Monographs 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).
285

indicate the earth or a sacred place.40 In addition, we note Carol L.

Meyers's recent interpretation of the Tabernacle lampstand (menora)
as "a cosmic tree," "a symbol that contributed to the assurance of divine
accessibility... [and participated] in the cosmic paradigm."41
Even if some of the philological and archaeological details of such
analyses cannot be sustained, the larger point that the Temple was per-
ceived as a cosmic institution stands. In his response to Albright,
Roland de Vaux was surely correct that "we do not know what symbol-
ism these foreigners [i.e., the Phoenician craftsmen] gave to this plan
or decoration, nor do we know whether the Israelites accepted this
symbolism."42 We do not know because the craftsmen worked in visual
imagery, not in words, and Israel largely continued in the same icono-
graphic, nonverbal tradition. But it is precisely that continuity which
argues against de Vaux's point that "the key [to the Temple lies] not in
myths nor in cosmology, but in Israel's history,"43 for had Israel been
radically demythologized, it never would have built the Temple or
found it and its craftsmen acceptable. How could an institution per-
ceived as alien have come to be defined as the sole licit sanctuary, and
by a reforming, xenophobic king, committed to covenant theology at
that (2 Kings 22-23)? In short, the Temple did possess historical signif-
icance, but the most one can claim is that the historical significance lay
beside and not in place of the old mythic symbols. Archaeology tends to
confirm the ancient and long-ignored notion that the Temple had been
a cosmic institution.
It is my contention that the literary evidence is not quite so lacking as
one would think at first glance. It is, to be sure, muted and implicit
rather than flamboyant and overt, a myth that is perhaps faded, but
hardly dead. Still, there are indications of a literary nature that the
Temple and the world were considered congeneric in the days of the
Hebrew Bible itself. For example, Joseph Blenkinsopp argued in 1977
for a "triadic structure" in the concept of world history in the priestly
source (P) in the Hexateuch. The "creation of the world," the "construc-
tion of the sanctuary," and "the establishment of the sanctuary in the
land and the distribution of the land among the tribes" are all described
40
Albright, pp. 153-54. The Assyrian Dictionary lists two kiuru's, one meaning a "metal
cauldron," of foreign origin, and one meaning "earth," "(sacred) place," of Sumerian origin
([1977], 8:476). It is unlikely that an ancient native speaker-and highly unlikely that someone
on the periphery hearing these Sumerian/Akkadian words-would have the scientific knowledge
to distinguish them (contra Clifford, p. 180, n. 109).
41 Carol L. Meyers, The TabernacleMenorah, American Schools of Oriental Research Disserta-
tion Series 2 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976), p. 180.
42 Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
1965), 2:328.
43 Ibid., p. 329.
286

in similar, and at times identical, language.44 For our purposes, the

only parallel that needs to be noted is that between the first two, the
creation and the construction of the Tabernacle (see diagram). A bril-
liant article by Moshe Weinfeld in the same year establishes the wider
significance of these correspondences: they are not the invention of P
but the distillate of a long tradition in the ancient Near East, which
binds Temple building and world building. Weinfeld's thesis is that
"the priesthood in Israel actualized by means of the Sabbath the com-
pletion of the acts of creation in the same way that the peoples of the
ancient Near East actualized in their cultic dramas the primordial
event."45 Whereas in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the
Al: 1. The heaven and the earth A2: 2. All work of the Tabernacle,
were finished, and all their array. the Tent of Encounter, was finished.
2. On the seventh day God finished The Israelites had done everything
the work which he had been doing, exactly as YHWH had commanded
and he rested on the seventh day Moses: Thus had they done it.
from all the work he had done. [Exod. 39:32]
[Gen. 2:1-2]
Same as Al When Moses finished the work, the
cloud covered the Tent of
Encounter, and the glory of
YHWH filled the tabernacle.
[Exod. 40:33b-34]
B1: And God saw all that he had B2: And Moses saw all the work and
made and found it very good. And found that they had made it as
there was evening and there was YHWH had commanded. Thus
morning, a sixth day. [Gen. 2:31] had they made it. And Moses
blessed them. [Exod. 39:43]
C1: And God blessed the seventh C2: Same as B2
day and made it sacred, for on it
God had ceased from all the work of
creation which he had done.
[Gen. 2:3]
Dl: Same as C1 D2: You shall take the anointing oil
and anoint the Tabernacle and all
that is in it, and you shall make it
sacred, along with all its furnishings.
It shall be sacred. [Exod. 40:9]
44 Blenkinsopp (n. 23 above), pp. 61-62.

45 Moshe Weinfeld, "Sabbat, Miqdas, Wehamlakat H'," Bet Miqra(5737/1977), p. 188. The
translation is mine. "Primordialevent" is my tentative attempt to distinguish maasehbere'sTt
from
287

construction of the Temple of Marduk, Esagila, crowns and consum-

mates creation, the Sabbath does the same in Israel. Thus, we should
not be surprised to find that the texts describing the creation of the
world and those describing the construction of a shrine are parallel.
The Temple and the world stand in an intimate and intrinsic connec-
tion. The two projects cannot ultimately be distinguished or disen-
gaged. Each recounts how God brought about an environment in
which he can find "rest." According to Exod. 20:11, "He rested
[wayanah] on the seventh day"; Ps. 132:8 calls on him to rise from his
"rest"(menuha), identified as the Ark (verse 6) and the Tabernacle (verse
7).46 The Sabbath and the sanctuary represent the same moment in the
divine life, one of exaltation and regal repose, a moment free of
anxiety. Thus, the account of the construction of the Tabernacle is
punctuated by the injunction to observe the Sabbath in imitationeDei
(Exod. 31:12-17, 35:1-3). The two institutions, each a memorial and,
more than that, an actualization of the aboriginal creative act, are
woven together not in a purposeless, mindless redaction but in a pro-
found and unitive theological statement. Sabbath and sanctuary par-
take of the same reality; they proceed, pari passu, from the same
foundational event, to which they testify and even provide access. In a
cryptic apodictic pronouncement in Leviticus, they appear twice as if
they were formulaic pairs: "My Sabbaths you are to observe/And my
Sanctuary you are to revere: I am YHWH" (Lev. 19:30, 26:2). Hardly
the consequence of the Exile, the emphasis in P on the Sabbath is an
intrinsic element in the Weltanschauungof the Jerusalem priesthood.
I should like to draw attention to two texts that connect the creation
of the world and the construction of the Temple which have not been
remarked before. 1 Kings 6:38b tells us that it took Solomon seven
years to build his Temple. According to 1 Kings 8, he dedicated it
during the Feast of Booths (Sukkot), which occurs in the seventh month
(verse 2) and which, in Deuteronomic tradition, is a festival of seven
days' duration (Deut. 16:13-15). Moreover, the speech in which
Solomon dedicates his shrine, just completed, is structured around
seven petitions (1 Kings 8:31-55).47 Can the significance of the number
ma'dai habbrt'a earlier in the same sentence. Note Weinfeld's references to earlier observations of
the verbal correspondences in Buber, Cassuto, and midrash (pp. 188-89, nn. 2-4). See also
Moshe Weinfeld, "Sabbath, Temple, and the Enthronement of the Lord-the Problem of the Sitz
im Leben of Genesis 1:1-2:3," in Mdlanges bibliqueet orientauxen 'honneurde M. Henri Cazelles, ed. A.
Caquot and M. Delcor, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 212 (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker;
Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981).
46
Weinfeld, "Sabbat, Miqdas, Wehamlakat H'," p. 189. Weinfeld notes that the parallel to Ps.
132:8 in 2 Chron. 6:41 reads legnheka.
47 See Jon D. Levenson, "The Paronomasia of Solomon's Seventh Petition," Hebrew Annual
Review 6 (1982): 131-35.
288

seven in this Temple dedication be coincidence? In light of the argu-

ment on other grounds that Temple building and creation were
thought to be congeneric, this is improbable. It is more likely that the
construction of the Temple is presented here as a parallel to the con-
struction of the world in seven days (Gen. 1:1-2:4). To be sure,
1 Kings 8 is not pure P theology; it is a Deuteronomistic adaptation
and reformation of priestly concepts.48 The Temple, Solomon tells his
audience, is the place in which God's name is to be found (verse 29), a
familiar Deuteronomistic formulation (e.g., Deut. 12:4). On the other
hand, behind this demythologizing or disenchanting theology lurks the
old priestly thinking: "But can God really dwell on earth when heaven
itself, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you? How much less the
Temple I have built!" (1 Kings 8:27). At first glance, this disclaimer
looks like a renunciation of the notion that God is to be found in his
Temple, as a king of flesh and blood is to be found in his palace. It is.
But the proof that the Temple cannot contain God is that even the
uttermost reaches of the heavens cannot contain him. The disclaimer
distinguishes Temple from cosmos only by placing the same limitation
on both. The Temple is less infinite, so to speak, than the world. Since
the latter cannot contain God, a fortiori the former cannot. The dis-
tinction seems to be speaking in the context of a cosmology in which
world and Temple were thought to be comparable.
My second text is the chant of the seraphim in Isaiah's inaugural
oracle. Isaiah witnesses the transformation of glyptic symbols into full
reality; the art of the Temple comes alive. The seraphim proclaim the
glory of YHWH enthroned in his inner sanctum. Their chant is usually
translated: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts: The whole earth is
full of his glory" (Isa. 6:3). The fact, however, that the word for "full,"
melo', is not an adjective but a noun raises the possibility that a more
accurate rendering would be: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts:
The fulness of the whole earth (or, world) is his glory." In cultic con-
texts, the term for "glory" (kabod) has a technical meaning; it is the
divine radiance, or refulgent nimbus, that manifests the presence of
God.49 We have already seen this in Exod. 40:34, where "the cloud cov-
ered the Tent of Encounter and the glory (kebod) of YHWH filled the
Tabernacle" (cf. 1 Kings 8:11). If my translation of Isa. 6:3 is correct,
then the seraphim identify the world in its amplitude with this terminus
technicus of the Temple cult.50 As Isaiah sees the smoke filling the
48 See
Jon D. Levenson, "From Temple to Synagogue: 1 Kings 8," in Halpern and Levenson,
eds. (n. 11 above), pp. 143-66.
49 See Eichrodt (n. 23 above), 2:29-35.
50 I translate mlo' in Isa. 6:3 nominally only in order to highlight the equation of the kabodwith
the cosmos. The conventional adjectival rendering in no way disqualifies the point. The world is
289

Temple, the seraphim proclaim that the kabodfills the world (verses 3-4).
The world is the manifestation of God as he sits enthroned in his
Temple. The trishagionis a dim adumbration of the rabbinic notion that
the world proceeds from Zion in the same manner that a fetus, in
rabbinic embryology, proceeds from the navel.
The connection between the Sabbath and the Tabernacle was a
matter of great concern to the rabbis. Unlike most modern scholars,
they were curious about why Lev. 19:30 and 26:2 combine observance
of the one and reverence for the other in a single injunction. Lacking
the theory of the brainless redactor which can be invoked to explain
away any inconcinnity, they sought to learn why the sabbatical ordi-
nances twice interrupt the material about the construction of the
Tabernacle (Exod. 31:12-17, 35:1-3). Their answer was that the Sab-
bath is to take precedence over the sanctuary (b. Yeb. 6a), on which all
work was to stop on the seventh day. In fact, it is from the work man-
dated in the construction of the Tabernacle that the rabbis derive the
thirty-nine activities forbidden on the Sabbath (m. Shab. 7:2). It is
unlikely that this particular exegetical operation shows an awareness of
the deep mythical sources of the juxtaposition of the creation and the
sanctuary. Instead, the operative principle may simply be the twelfth of
Rabbi Ishmael's thirteen hermeneutical rules, dibar hallamedme'inyano,
"a thing learned from its context," that is, a law can be inferred from
the matter contiguous with it.51 Weinfeld shows, however, that the
rabbis were aware of the connection between the Sabbath and the
enthronement of God.52 He cites, for example, the Mishnah which
tells us that the Levites recited Psalm 93 on Friday (m. Tam. 7:4), the
psalm which surely binds creation and enthronement most tightly. In
the Septuagint, that psalm is given the superscription eis ten hemerantou
prosabbatou,"for the day before the Sabbath," which may mean Friday
night. A baraitain the name of Rabbi Akiba attributes the recitation of
this psalm on Friday to the fact that then "he finished his work and
reigned as king over them" (b. Ros.Has. 31a). It is interesting that the
rabbinic liturgy prescribes the recitation of Psalm 93 for both Friday
morning and Friday evening, which is the beginning of the Sabbath. In
any event, it is probably no coincidence that this psalm about YHWH's
enthronement in his Temple follows directly the only song explicitly
identified as "for the Sabbath day," Psalm 92. This contiguity suggests
still suffused by the divine radiance that is ostensibly confined to the Temple. What Isaiah beholds
is a moment of the perfect realization of the archetype in the earthly antitype.
Incidentally, the mnlo'
of the earth appears again in association with the Temple in Ps. 24:1 ff.
51 Stfra, introduction.
52 Weinfeld, "Sabbat
Miqdas, Wehamlakat H'," pp. 191-92.
290

that the connection between creation, Temple, and enthronement was

vital when the Psalter was put into its present order, perhaps before
Rabbi Akiba's time, and millennia before Abraham Joshua Heschel
captured the essence of the connection when he wrote that "the seventh
day is like a palace in time with a kingdom for all. It is not a date but an
atmosphere."53
III
We have seen that the connection between world building and Temple
building sheds an intense light on P, on Ezekiel, and on texts that focus
on the Temple explicitly, such as Isaiah 6 and 1 Kings 8. It is not my
claim that there existed only one theology of the Temple or even that all
segments of ancient Israel accepted at any one time the connection
argued here. Rather, I maintain that this complex of ideas, although
most conscious and unqualified in P, still has deep roots in Israelite cul-
ture. This depth of rootage means that even groups who were not
privileged within the Temple show the influence of the equation of the
Temple with the world sub speciecreationis.The prophetic groups, with
whom the sympathies of the modern biblical theologians lie, were not
the bearers of some radically different mode of consciousness from that
of the often execrated Temple party. They are to be located at a
different point within the selfsame culture. To illustrate this, I shall
comment briefly on a few passages in Third Isaiah, for it is this anony-
mous prophet whose oracles have been most persuasively attributed to
a group alienated and excluded from the post-Exilic Temple.54
1. Thus said YHWH:
Observe justice and do what is right,
For my deliverance is about to come,
And my victory to be revealed.
2. Happy is the man who does this,
The person who holds fast to it:
Who observes the Sabbath and does not profane it,
Who guards his hand so that it does no evil.
3. Let not the foreigner say,
Who has attached himself to YHWH;
"YHWH will keep me apart from his people."
And let not the eunuch say,
"I am nothing but a tree that has dried up."
53 Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaningfor Modern Man

(New York: Farrar, Straus, &
Young, 1951), p. 21.
54 Hanson
(n. 4 above), pp. 32-208; on the isolation of a "Third" Isaiah, see pp. 32-46.
291

4. For thus spoke YHWH:

To the eunuchs who observe my Sabbaths,
Who have chosen what pleases me,
And hold tightly to my covenant-
5. To them I grant within my Temple and within my walls
A monument and a name,
One better than sons and daughters:
An everlasting name I grant them
Which shall not be cut off.
6. As for the foreigners who attach themselves to YHWH,
To minister to him and to love the name of YHWH,
And to become his servants,
All who observe the Sabbath and do not profane it,
And hold tightly to my Covenant-
7. These I shall bring to my sacred mountain.
And to them I shall give joy in my House of Prayer.55
[Isa. 56:1-7]
My point about these seven verses is that we see here, in a tight and
integral linkage, the three themes which provided the title of Moshe
Weinfeld's article: Sabbath, Temple, and the enthronement of
YHWH. God is about to come, defeating his enemies and rescuing his
servants. The terms are ones which Weinfeld, in another study, con-
nects with the enthronement of a new king.56 Verse 2 reiterates and
amplifies verse la, except that, in addition, it singles out the Sabbath
for special mention. In fact, as verses 3-7 show, the observance of the
Sabbath is the criterion for admission to the Temple. Foreigners and
eunuchs, whom Deut. 23:2-4 exclude from the cult, are here admitted,
but only on condition of rigorous adherence to the Sabbath. Verses 5
and 7 make clear that the result of satisfying this condition is admit-
tance to the Temple. The Sabbath provides access to the sanctuary.
The nexus is almost as tight as in Lev. 19:30 and 26:2 ("You shall
observe my Sabbath and revere my sanctuary: I am YHWH"). In fact,
the words "my Sabbaths" (sabbetotay,Isa. 56:4) occur elsewhere only in
P and in Ezekiel. T. K. Cheyne remarked that "our prophet... actually
uses P's phrase."57 In fact, the whole clause "who observe my Sabbaths"
('dseryismeru'etsabbetotay)sounds like a reference to those two verses in
55 In verse 5, read lahem for l1 with 1QIsa
56 Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomyand the DeuteronomicSchool (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972), pp. 151-55. On the rituals for the installation of both divine and human kings in Israel,
see now the fine discussion of Baruch Halpern, The Constitution of the Monarchy in Israel, Harvard
Semitic Monographs 25 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 61-109, 125-248.
57 T. K. Cheyne, Introductionto the Book of Isaiah (London: Adam & Charles Black,
1895), p.
312.
292

Leviticus and especially to Exod. 31:13, a verse which interrupts the

orders about the construction of the Tabernacle: "Nevertheless, you
shall observe my Sabbaths [et-sabbetotaytismoru], for it is a sign between
me and you for all your generations, which makes it known that I am
YHWH, the one who makes you sacred." Given Third Isaiah's empha-
sis on the Covenant (Isa. 56:4, 6), he probably understood "sign" in
Exod. 31:13 as a "sign of the Covenant" (cf. Gen. 9:12, P), in this
instance, the Covenant of Sinai. But it is not just that Sabbath stands
for Covenant by synecdoche. Rather, the special position of the
Sabbath in both P and Third Isaiah follows from its elective affinity
with the Temple. The two signify the same experience.
My second text is Isa. 61:1-2:
1. The spirit of the Lord YHWH is upon me,
Because YHWH has anointed me;
He has sent me to herald good news to the humble,
To bind up those of a broken heart,
To proclaim release to captives.
2. And to open [a way] for prisoners,
To proclaim a year of YHWH's favor,
A day of vindication by our God;
To comfort all who mourn-
The "release" (der6r)which the prophet is to proclaim (liqro') in verse 1
recalls immediately the law of the Jubilee in Lev. 25:10: "You shall
make the fiftieth year sacred and proclaim a release [uqera'temderor]in
the Land for all who dwell upon it. It shall be a Jubilee for you, and
you shall each return to his holding; each of you shall return to his
clan."Julius Lewy established a connection between derorand Akkadian
durdruor andurdru,the remission of debts which a Mesopotamian king
sometimes proclaimed in the year of his accession.58 In that case, the
Israelite Jubilee routinizes the experience of enthronement of the
human king in much the same way the Sabbath routinizes the experi-
ence of divine enthronement at creation. Max Kadushin's term for rab-
binic religion, "normal mysticism,"59 applies nicely to these features of
biblical law as well. Israel has taken the electrifying experience of
enthronement and the reforms that go with it out of the hands of kings
of flesh and blood, and thus out of the realm of politics, and placed it
securely in the area of sacred law, where it becomes regular and pre-
58
Julius Lewy, "The Biblical Institution of DeR6R in Light of Akkadian Documents," Eretz
Israel 5 (1958): 25, 29 (English section).
59 Max Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 5712/1952),
pp. 194-272, and Worship and Ethics (N.p.: Northwestern University Press, 1936), pp. 178-85.
293

dictable (but not secular). By his reference to Leviticus 25, Third

Isaiah is able to depict the glorious reconstruction of the Temple as a
form of enthronement and to associate it once more with sabbatical
traditions. The Jubilee is, after all, the Sabbath of sabbatical years.
Walther Zimmerli suggests that the same notion underlies Ezekiel's
visionary experience of the Temple, which takes place on the tenth day
of "the beginning of the year" (bero6'hasSana).60In Leviticus 25, it is on
that day, Y6m Hakkipparfm, that the ram's horn is sounded to declare
the Jubilee in the fiftieth year (verse 9). Ezekiel has his vision in the
twenty-fifth year of the Exile (of KingJehoiachin), that is, one-half the
way to the release (Ezek. 40:1). It is then that the prophet beholds the
return of the glory (kabod)of YHWH to his Temple and his reenthrone-
ment within Ezek. 43:4, 7), an item that sheds light on P's interpre-
tation of the Exile as a continuous enforced observance of neglected
sabbatical years (Lev. 26:34-35). The symbolic resonance established
through one word in Isa. 61:1 is resounding: Jubilee, Sabbath,
Temple, enthronement, liberation, returning home, atonement. Even
if the immediate social situation is one in which the author of the oracle
protests his disenfranchisement in the Temple, the concepts and their
inner structure are those of the Temple priesthood. The underlying
theology is not at point.
My next example from Third Isaiah is a famous passage:
17. For- look!- I am creating a new heaven and a new earth;
The former ones shall not be remembered,
Nor come to mind.
18. Be glad, then, and rejoice forever and ever
In what I am creating:
For-look! -I am creating Jerusalem as a joy
And her people as a delight.
[Isa. 65:17-18]
In his commentary, Claus Westermann finds these verses perplexing:
We today of course feel that the gulf is too great-announcing a new heaven
and a new earth, and then representing the new salvation as for Jerusalem
alone. The commentaries draw attention to this odd inconsistency. Either v.
17a is the language of exaggeration and the speaker was not conscious of the
60 Walther
Zimmerli, Ezechiel, Biblischer Kommentar altes Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 1967), pp. 995-96, 1018. It is unclear whether this vision occurred in the spring or
the fall, both of which could be considered "the beginning of the year" (see m. Ros. Has. 1:1). The
Ezekielian code lacks a Day of Atonement, although the Septuagint to Ezek. 45:20 puts a cere-
mony of Temple purgation "in the seventh month," without offering a precise date. At all events,
there is no contradiction between the prophet's having his revelation on YomHakkippurim and the
absence of that day from the future order which he then envisions.
294

inconsistency, or else we have to reckon with another possibility, namely, that

through the placing of v. 17a at the beginning and v. 25 at the end, an
announcement of salvation for Jerusalem and Judah has been made into a
description such as we find in apocalyptic. For these two verses at the
beginning are the only two which do not suit the description of a new salvation
for Jerusalem.61
The cure to Westermann's perplexity is to be found on the same page,
for there he recognizes that "heaven and earth" is simply a merism for
"the world." YHWH is creating a new world and a new Temple city. In
light of our argument here and of Eliade's demonstration that temple
and city are easily and well-nigh universally homologized,62 the "odd
inconsistency" disappears and a simple instance of synonymous paral-
lelism takes its place. YHWH is building a new Temple, therefore
creating a new world, and vice versa. In light of Gosta Ahlstrom's
astute argument that Syro-Palestinian temples were meant to be
"heaven and earth,"63 I am led to wonder whether "heaven and earth"
in Isa. 65:17 and elsewhere is not functioning as a name for the Jeru-
salem Temple. The Sumerian parallels are strong. The Temple at
Nippur (and elsewhere) was called Duranki, "bond of heaven and
earth," and in Babylon we find Etemenanki,"the house where the foun-
dation of heaven and earth is."64Perhaps it is not coincidence that the
Hebrew Bible begins with an account of the creation of heaven and
earth by the command of God (Gen. 1:1) and ends with the command
of the God of heaven "to build him a Temple in Jerusalem" (2 Chron.
35:23). It goes from creation (Temple) to Temple (creation) in twenty-
four books.
We come, finally, to a passage which is generally taken to be the
most unequivocal rejection of the Temple in the entire Hebrew Bible:
1. Thus said YHWH;
The heavens are my throne,
And the earth is my footstool:
Where is the Temple you would build for me,
Where is the place where I can find rest?
2. These things my own hand made,
Thus did all of them come into being-oracle of YHWH.
61 Claus
Westermann, Isaiah 40-46. A Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1969), p. 408.
62 Mircea
Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), pp.
373-85. An example isJer. 3:17, in which the "throne of YHWH" is identified not simply with
the ark or with the Temple, but with Jerusalem in toto.
61 G. W.
Ahlstr6m, "Heaven on Earth- at Hazor and Arad," in Religious Syncretismin Antiquity,
ed. B. A. Pearson (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 67-83.
64
Ibid., p. 68.
295

Yet to him I look

Who is poor and crushed in spirit
And who is concerned about my word.
[Isa. 66:1-2]
De Vaux interprets this oracle to mean simply, "YHWH has no need of
any Temple."65 But had he accepted the idea of cosmic symbolism,
instead of rejecting it on nativist grounds, he would have seen that the
point of these verses is almost the opposite: YHWH has already built
his Temple, which is the world, "heaven" and "earth." The endurance
of the created order renders its earthly replica, or antitype, super-
fluous. This is anything but the desacralization of space. It is, instead,
the infinite extension of sacred space, the elimination of the "profane,"
that which stands profano, "in front of the Temple." The world in its
fullness is the Temple. The conclusion deduced from this sacral notion
is, to be sure, rationalistic. There is no place in the world for a Temple
to stand and no possibility that men can duplicate the act of creation.
The real Temple, which is the world, is protological and therefore
admits of no historical duplication. In short, the main point of the old
priestly theology, the equation of Temple and world, continues unim-
paired in Third Isaiah. What has broken down is "correspondence
thinking," the notion of an archetype and an antitype that stand in an
intrinsic and intimate relationship. The prophet rebukes his audience
for what Eliade calls "theneedthat man constantlyfeelsto 'realize'archetypes."66
This oracle stands at a point on the spectrum at which archetype and
antitype remain connected, but are no longer simply identical. Here,
the archetype eliminates the antitype-the world overwhelms the
Temple -but only within the parameters of a theology that accepts the
connection. One might say that, whereas P sees the sanctuary as a
world, Third Isaiah sees the world as a sanctuary. The social and
political implications of this difference in nuance are immense.
What these four texts in Third Isaiah demonstrate is that the Temple
theology in question pervades Israelite culture. A prophet who may
well stand in opposition to the Temple-building project of his time (as
Hanson argues of Third Isaiah) still reflects the theology of the Temple
priesthood with whom he is, in that case, grappling. If this theology
was once a foreign import into Israel, it has, nonetheless, metastasized
so widely that no theological surgery can remove it. Prophetic oracles,
too, have roots in sacral ideas and in tangible religious institutions.
The prophets are not to be seen as the conservators of some pristine
system of spiritual worship, divorced from the world picture held by the
65 De Vaux
(n. 42 above), 2:330.
66 Eliade, Patternsin
Religion,p. 385 (his italics).
Comparative
296

rest of Israel. I do not say that there is never any validity to the conven-
tional wisdom about a conflict between prophet and priest. The point,
rather, is that we must avoid the orthodox Marxist mistake of concen-
trating on infrastructure (e.g., class and economic issues) to the exclu-
sion of the superstructure, the cultural heritage shared by all factions of
a society.67 King, prophet, and priest all had more in common with
each other than any of them would have had with the modern world.
IV
The world which the Temple incarnates in a tangible way is not the
world of history but the world of creation, the world not as it is but as it
was meant to be and as it was on the first Sabbath. Jean Danielou cap-
tures the spirit of the protological situation thus: "At the birth of man-
kind, the whole creation, issuing from the hands of God, is holy; the
earthly paradise is nature in a state of grace. The House of God is the
whole cosmos .... The time of the patriarchs still retains something of
this paradisal grace. The Spirit of God still broods upon the waters.
YHWH is not the hidden God, dwelling apart within the tabernacle.
He talks with Noah on familiar terms. His relationship with Abraham
is that of a friend."68 But the availability of God does not continue.
Instead, God withdraws somewhat from the world, in what Lurianic
Qabbalah terms simsum, "contraction." The presence of God is not
diminished but concentrated. The glory that had filled the world now
fills the Tabernacle and its successors, the Temples ofJerusalem.69 The
Temple is the world before the divine contraction, the world in a state
of grace and perfection. No wonder temples in the ancient Near East
sometimes contained a paradisal garden and no wonder that Zion, the
Temple mountain, "perfect in beauty" (Ps. 50:2; Lam. 2:15), was
equated with the Garden of Eden.70 The Temple offers the person who
enters it to worship an opportunity to rise from a fallen world, to par-
67 See David Tracy, BlessedRageforOrder(New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 243-44, esp.
p. 254, n. 28.
68 Danielou
(n. 33 above), pp. 9-10. Cf. Philo, TheSpecialLaws 1, 12:66, trans. F. H. Colson,
Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 137-39: "The
highest, and in the truest sense, the holy temple of God is, as we must believe, the whole
universe, having for its sanctuary the most sacred part of all existence, even heaven, for its native
ornaments the stars, for its priest the angels ....There is also the Temple made by hands."
69 The concept of covenant in P is analogous. Each of the four covenants-those with
Noah,
with Abraham, with Israel, and with Phinehas -involves a subset of the human partner to the
previous covenant. The priestly (perhaps high-priestly) pact with Phinehas (Num. 25:10-13) is
the one of the narrowest scope and the greatest sanctity. See Cross (n. 20 above), pp. 295-300;
Levenson, Theologyof theProgramof Restoration of Ezekiel40-48 (n. 29 above), pp. 144-46.
70 See Levenson, Theologyof theProgram of Restorationof Ezekiel40-48, pp. 25-35; Fishbane, Text
and Texture(New York: Schocken Books, 1979), pp. 111-20.
297

take of the Garden of Eden. The Temple is to space what the Sabbath
is to time, a recollection of the protological dimension bounded by
mundane reality. It is the higher world in which the worshiper charac-
teristically wishes he could dwell forever (Pss. 23:6, 27:4). It is this
dynamic dimension of the Temple, its gracious mechanism for self-
transcendence, which biblical theologians have tended to miss. They
see the mundane institution with its corruption, the pragmatic Temple,
but they have been blind to the almost Platonic idealism of the Temple
as those who worshiped there conceived it, a place into which only
those who have renounced injustice might enter (Psalms 15, 24). The
protestations of innocence that those "entrance liturgies" contain are
expressions, not of self-righteousness, but of self-transcendence, the
wish of the lower person, the historical person, to put on a higher self in
worship, a self that befits the perfect place, the perfect world, to which
he begs admission. The Temple is the moral center of the universe, the
source from which holiness and a terrifying justice radiate. No wonder
a great social critic received his prophetic commission in the Temple
(Isaiah 6) and no wonder the Temple was so central to biblical and
later Jewish utopias (e.g., Ezekiel 40-48), for it represented an ever-
present, spatial model of spiritual fulfillment, alongside Heilsgeschichte
and the promised future of the prophets, which are the temporal
model. But the books of each of the "major"prophets include visions of
the restored Temple.71 Endzeitgleich Urzeit, the canonical shape of these
books seems to say, "eschatology is like protology." The future will see
the ruins of primal perfection overwhelm the fallen world in which they
lie, only ostensibly vanquished.
71 For example, Isa. 44:28; Jer. 33:10-11; Ezekiel 40-48.
298


Levenson JR Temple and World

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Levenson JR Temple and World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Temple and the World

Author(s): Jon D. Levenson

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

For Ben-Zion Gold, on the occasion of

Although the Temple in Jerusalem has rarely been the subject of

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

words, a contaminant which Israel could absorb only with difficulty, if

4 Paul D. Hanson, TheDawn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 410.

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

Deuteronomic perspectives. This tendency has not been helpful in

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

Deuteronomy,10 then we should be obligated to see this most esteemed

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

It is that the Temple is a foreign import. Anderson calls it an "invasion

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

When it was rebuilt, it was the bailiwick of oppressors commendable

One of the salient and pregnant characteristics of the study of biblical

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

but of being prior to the creation of everything else and of being

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

indicate the earth or a sacred place.40 In addition, we note Carol L.

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

in similar, and at times identical, language.44 For our purposes, the

44 Blenkinsopp (n. 23 above), pp. 61-62.

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

construction of the Temple of Marduk, Esagila, crowns and consum-

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

seven in this Temple dedication be coincidence? In light of the argu-

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

that the connection between creation, Temple, and enthronement was

53 Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaningfor Modern Man

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

4. For thus spoke YHWH:

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

Leviticus and especially to Exod. 31:13, a verse which interrupts the

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

dictable (but not secular). By his reference to Leviticus 25, Third

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

inconsistency, or else we have to reckon with another possibility, namely, that

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

Yet to him I look

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

This content downloaded from 24.197.159.144 on Sat, 17 May 2014 16:14:26 PM

You might also like