In this society, primary horizontal relationships concerned the neighbor (Exod. 21:14; 22:7–8, 10–14, 26–27). As the Holiness Code puts it, “You should love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). In the Israelite legal system a neighbor was a fellow Israelite, not necessarily one living nearby. Distinguished from the neighbor was the stranger or (resident) alien, not a full member of the community but one who nevertheless also had rights, including that of rest on the Sabbath. In the laws concerning aliens (and concerning slaves in other collections), repeated reference is made to the Israelites’ experience in Egypt: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the soul of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 23:9). The implicit principle here is that of imitation of God: the Israelites are to remember their experience in Egypt and not only have empathy for those in similar situations but also to treat them as God had treated the Israelites. So, the Holiness Code also commands, “You shall love the alien as yourself” (Lev. 19:34).
The prophets emphasize this obligation to less powerful members of society: the resident alien, the poor, and those without a male protector, the widow and the fatherless—the usual translation “orphan” obscures the patriarchal social structure: in biblical law an orphan is technically a child without a male parent.
A possible offset to the prevailing patriarchy is the status of the mother, as the mention of “father and mother” (in Exod. 21:15, 17) implies. In this patriarchal milieu we would not be surprised if the text simply said, “Whoever strikes his father shall be put to death,” but it includes the mother as well. A parallel law in the Code of Hammurapi offers an interesting contrast: “If a son should strike his father, they shall cut off his hand.”1 Here only the father is mentioned, not the mother—but the penalty is less severe!
After the laws have been given, the Israelites ratify the “book of the covenant” (Exod. 24:7—hence the designation Covenant Code), and their acceptance of its terms is solemnized with a blood ritual. But what precisely is a covenant?
Covenant and Decalogue
Covenant is one of the central themes of biblical tradition, so important that it gives its name to the two parts of the Bible in the Christian canon, the “Old Covenant” (for that is what “testament” means), and the New. The Hebrew word for covenant, berit, occurs nearly three hundred times in the Bible. It is essentially a legal term, meaning “contract,” and is used for various formal agreements concerning international relations, slavery, and marriage. When the biblical writers use the term covenant to describe the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, they have these analogues in mind: thus, God is understood as Israel’s king, its suzerain, and worshipping other gods is a kind of treason or disloyalty. Likewise, God is Israel’s owner—the Israelites, collectively, are his slaves, required to obey his commands. And, in an analogy used especially by the prophets, God is Israel’s husband, and as in a marriage, this is an exclusive relationship, so that worshipping other gods is like adultery. Importantly, although various types of contracts are known from the ancient Near East, there is no nonbiblical use of this legal model to characterize the relationship between a deity and a people.
God makes covenants with several individuals and groups in the Bible, including those with Noah and his offspring, Abraham and his offspring, and, later, with King David and his dynasty. The most important, however, is the covenant between God and Israel at Mount Sinai.
The text of this contract or covenant is the most famous of the several ancient Israelite law codes or collections: the Ten Commandments or the Decalogue, the latter being a more accurate translation of what the Hebrew Bible calls the “ten words” (Deut. 4:13). The two tablets on which the Decalogue was written were stored in the ark of the covenant.
The Ten Commandments
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a statue, or any image of what is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing sons for the iniquity of fathers, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will notacquit anyone who misuses his name.
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or your alien inside your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not kidnap.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. (Exod. 20:2–17)
This version of the Decalogue in the preceding box is that found in Exodus 20. But there are two other versions of the Decalogue in the Bible. A second is in Deuteronomy 5, in the context of a lengthy speech given by Moses just before his death, as the Israelites are poised to enter the Promised Land. In that speech Moses reviews the events of the preceding forty years of wandering, from the Exodus onward, and reminds the Israelites of the laws that they had been given by God. Those laws, however, are not always identical to the ones found earlier in Exodus, and there are about twenty, mostly minor, differences between the version of the Decalogue in Exodus and that in Deuteronomy. The most significant concerns the motivation for keeping the Sabbath. In Deuteronomy it is humanitarian—“so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 5:14–15), whereas in Exodus it is in imitation of the divine rest after creation—“for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day” (Exod. 20:11).
A third version of the Decalogue is found in Exodus 34:11–26. According to the narrative, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai to find the Israelites cavorting around the golden calf, he was so angry that he smashed the two tablets on which God had written the Decalogue. So, after punishing some of the perpetrators, Moses had to go back up the mountain for a replacement set. But this version is a very different set of “ten words” (Exod. 34:28), entirely concerned with proper and improper worship, which is why scholars refer to it as the Ritual Decalogue.
There were thus several versions of the Ten Commandments used in ancient Israel at various times and in various places, and, wishing to preserve them despite their inconsistencies, the editors of the Bible took advantage of the plot to include the Ritual Decalogue. These different versions are another illustration of how various sources are incorporated into the final version of the Bible. Even the version found in Exodus 20 has its own literary history: it starts off with Yahweh speaking in the first person, but then shifts to the third person after the first two commandments, probably because of later expansions.
Like the Covenant Code, the Decalogue originated in an agricultural and essentially patriarchal society. Addressed to individual adult males, who preside over a household comprising wife, sons and daughters, slaves, livestock, and resident aliens, the Decalogue only hints at a slightly higher status for women with the mention of “father and mother” (Exod. 20:12). The frequent modern appeal to the Ten Commandments as a timeless moral code blithely ignores its original context and some of the questionable values it incor
porates.
The Decalogue divides naturally into two parts, which specify the Israelites’ obligations to God and to each other. The first part begins by requiring the worship of Yahweh alone. This prohibition of worshipping other gods is not strictly monotheistic—in fact, the commandment presumes that other gods exist but prohibits the Israelites from worshipping them. Moreover, that worship is to be different from the ways in which other people worship their deities: there are to be no representations of God, or for that matter of any other divine, human, or animal form, and the sacred personal name of God, Yahweh, is not to be used in magic, sorcery, or other unlawful ways, for Yahweh is not a deity who can be localized or controlled. And finally, and somewhat mysteriously because there are no good parallels to the Sabbath elsewhere in the ancient Near East, the Israelites are to observe the seventh day of each week as a solemn day of rest.
The second part of the Decalogue details the obligations of Israelite males toward their fellow Israelites, that is, their “neighbors.” Parents are to be honored even in old age, and a man’s life, his marriage, his person, his legal standing, and his property must be scrupulously respected. If they abide by these rules, then their “days will be long in the land that Yahweh … is giving” them (Exod. 20:12). This covenant, then, is conditional: continued possession of the land and prosperity in it depend upon observance of the terms of the agreement.
Biblical writers do not distinguish obligations to God from those to members of the community. Whereas we might separate religious obligations from criminal and civil law, the Decalogue, and biblical laws in general, do not do so. All of the commandments were divinely given, and so violation of any of them was an offense against God, who was their author and also the creator of the community that had pledged itself to him. Put mythologically, the “tablets … were written with the finger of God” (Exod. 31:18).
Appropriately, then, many sections of the various legal collections described have to do not only with strictly legal matters but also with religious obligations, including detailed prescriptions for various rituals, such as different kinds of sacrifices and the observance of holy days. The intermingling of these two categories is another illustration of the considerable overlap between sacred and secular—or rather, the lack of distinction between them.
Chapter 7
“Festivals of the Lord”: ritual in ancient Israel
Someone with the ambition to read the Bible in its entirety often starts at the beginning, in Genesis, and moves along without much difficulty until the second half of the book of Exodus. At that point the reader may become bogged down and abandon the project because of the numbing details of the many divinely given regulations concerning sacred objects, holy days, priests, sacrifices, and matters such as cleanness and uncleanness.
Such details are present partly because priests were responsible for the final form of the first five books of the Bible, the Torah. Not surprisingly, the ancient priests meticulously, even lovingly, catalogued a bewildering variety of specifics, setting down for posterity both a record of religious rituals practiced in Israel at different times and also an idealized version of how they wanted them to be carried out in the future.
But details concerning religious observance, both public and private, are not restricted to the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Throughout the Bible, there are references to various rituals and festivals. Every society has such stylized actions and ceremonies that mark moments perceived as important.
Some of these have to do with the human life cycle. Thus, the Bible refers to rituals concerning birth, puberty and marriage, and death. In connection with birth there are naming ceremonies and, in later periods at least, circumcision, although that was likely originally a puberty ritual. The Bible refers repeatedly to marriage, but there are few accounts of actual marriage ceremonies; Psalm 45 is a hymn for a royal wedding. There are accounts of mourning rituals as well, including fasting, symbolic self-mutilation, lamentation, and burial. The Bible gives us only scattered information about such rituals in ancient Israel, presumably because they were performed in the home and the priests who codified the ritual regulations of the Torah were understandably more interested in those rituals in which they themselves played a primary role.
Priests
Most of the rituals described in the Bible are under the charge of various classes of priests. The structure of this inherited male hierarchy changed over the centuries, but one constant is its restriction to the tribe of Levi and, eventually, to one branch of that tribe that traced its ancestry back to Moses’s brother Aaron, who in the Exodus narrative is presented as the first high priest.
These priests were what anthropologists call ritual specialists. Like other professionals, such as prophets and scribes, priests were rigorously trained, and they guarded their expertise jealously. That expertise was wide reaching. Priests were first and foremost responsible for the sacrifices offered by the laity on a daily, seasonal, and occasional basis, sacrifices of which the priests received a share that was their principal means of support. These offerings are described in great detail in the Bible, categorized into different types for different occasions.
Some offerings were made to remedy “uncleanness” or ritual impurity, which could be caused by disease, and so the priests functioned as health care providers as well. Priests were also called upon to resolve legal issues and otherwise to interpret the divine will, especially through their use of divination.
Sacrificial ritual: an example
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the people of Israel, saying: Anyone who would offer to the Lord a sacrifice of well-being must himself bring to the Lord his offering from his sacrifice of well-being. His own hands shall bring the Lord’s offering by fire; he shall bring the fat with the breast, so that the breast may be raised as an elevation offering before the Lord. The priest shall turn the fat into smoke on the altar, but the breast shall belong to Aaron and his sons. And the right thigh from your sacrifices of well-being you shall give to the priest as an offering; the one among the sons of Aaron who offers the blood and fat of the offering of well-being shall have the right thigh for a portion. For I have taken the breast of the elevation offering, and the thigh that is offered, from the people of Israel, from their sacrifices of well-being, and have given them to Aaron the priest and to his sons, as a perpetual due from the Israelites. (Lev. 7:28–34)
The ritual calendar
The three principal religious festivals in ancient Israel were originally regional celebrations, held at a local shrine to which the participants would travel. The Hebrew word used for these festivals literally means “pilgrimage” (hag, a word related to Arabic hajj, used for the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca). They were also linked to the agricultural cycle. In the early spring there was the festival of unleavened bread, which occurred at the time of the harvest of barley that had been planted in the late fall. Another early spring festival, known as the Passover, involved the sacrifice of a newly born lamb. These two festivals came from separate socioeconomic contexts, those of farmers and herders, but were joined at a relatively early stage.
A second festival was the festival of weeks (Hebrew Shavuot), coinciding with the harvest of winter wheat, occurring seven weeks (fifty days) after Passover. This holy day was also called “festival of harvest” (Exod. 23:16) or “first fruits” (Num. 28:26), and is later known as Pentecost, from the Greek word for “fifty.”
Completing the cycle of agricultural festivals was the “festival of ingathering” (Exod. 23:16), which took place at the time of the harvest of grapes, olives, and other fruits in the early fall, in the seventh month. It is also known as the festival of booths (or tabernacles; Hebrew Sukkot), probably because the harvesters, whether members of the household or hired laborers, spent the night in the fields in temporary structures. The Bible also mentions in passing a “day of atonement” (Lev. 23:27–28; 25:9), also observed in the seventh month, apparently a ritual of cleansing to p
repare the sanctuary, the priests, and the community as a whole for the fall harvest festival; as Yom Kippur this holy day becomes much more important in subsequent Jewish tradition.
With this background in mind, let us imagine that we are at a local shrine, where males, if not families, from miles around have gathered to celebrate a successful harvest. As the worshippers approach the shrine, they sing hymns, punctuated by the bleating of sheep and goats that will be sacrificed. They present them to a priest wearing colorful vestments. He burns an incense offering, whose aromatic smoke fills the air and also masks the stench of the animal slaughter that follows. Throughout the ceremony, more hymns are sung, accompanied by all sorts of musical instruments. The mood is joyful, and as the ritual takes place there are sights and sounds and smells that make for a lively, even chaotic scene.
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