The Old Testament_A Very Short Introduction

by Michael D. Coogan

  7. An eighth-century BCE ceramic figurine, about 8.5 inches tall, of a woman playing a drum. It illustrates one way that women participated in worship in ancient Israel.

  The ritual calendar included other observances, each of which has its own history. There were daily offerings, weekly offerings on the Sabbath, and offerings at the appearance of the new moon. As Jewish tradition continued, other holy days were added, such as Hanukkah, at the time of the winter solstice, associated with the rededication of the Temple in the second century BCE after the successful revolt of the Maccabees against Greek rule, and Purim, celebrated in the late winter, probably originally a Babylonian ritual assimilated into Judaism and legitimated in the biblical book of Esther.

  Passover

  The important festival of the Passover, which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt, provides an example of the complicated history of ancient Israelite rituals. In postbiblical Jewish tradition the Passover is celebrated in the home, and that is how it is described in Exodus 12:3–8. But other texts indicate that in some periods the Passover, like the festivals of weeks (Shavuot) and booths (Sukkot), was celebrated at a central location, either a regional shrine or the national temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where pilgrims from all over Israel reportedly came to celebrate the Passover during the reigns of Hezekiah in the late eighth century BCE and Josiah in the late seventh, as well as in the first century CE according to the Gospels of the New Testament and other sources.

  Passover is celebrated for a week in the spring, beginning on the fourteenth day of the first month (Exod. 12:18; Lev. 23:5). A fall new year, in which the first month occurs in the fall, is also attested, which eventually became the Jewish holy day of Rosh Hashanah (literally, “the beginning of the year”). The new year thus seems to have been celebrated in the spring in some periods and in the fall in others.

  The terminology for the spring holy day is revealing. In two very early ritual calendars it is called the “festival of unleavened bread” (Exod. 23:15; 34:18), and in both of these it is listed along with the two other pilgrimage festivals. Like them, the festival of unleavened bread is connected with the agricultural cycle, in this case with the early spring barley harvest. This festival was therefore a farmers’ ritual, who would bring to their local shrine a portion of their crop as an offering. In slightly later texts, it is combined with the holy day called the Passover (Hebrew pesah), as in Leviticus 23:5–6: “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, there shall be a passover offering to the Lord, and on the fifteenth day of the same month is the festival of unleavened bread to the Lord; seven days you shall eat unleavened bread.” The originally separate holy day of Passover featured the slaughter of a young lamb and presumably was a sheep-herders’ ritual.

  The core meaning of the word pesah is probably “protection.” The slaughter of the lamb in the spring was a sacrifice to secure divine protection for flocks and their owners. There is another possible meaning, however, conveniently rendered in English as Passover: because the Israelites smeared the blood of lambs on their door frames, Yahweh passed over their houses when he crossed (that is, passed over) the land of Egypt.

  The second meaning points to how the combined festivals of unleavened bread and Passover became associated with the narrative of the Exodus. Different biblical sources do not, however, connect the festivals with the Exodus in the same ways. While the earliest ritual calendars refer only to the date—“You shall keep the festival of unleavened bread. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month of Abib; for in the month of Abib you came out from Egypt” (Exod. 34:18), another text links more than just the chronology—it is unleavened bread that is eaten because the Israelites left Egypt so quickly that they had no time to let their bread rise (Exod. 12:39). The bread, originally unleavened to keep it pure rather than contaminated with old yeast in the form of starter dough, is called “the bread of affliction—because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste” (Deut. 16:3). Likewise, the sacrifice of the lamb as a substitution for the firstborn, as in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22) and in the Ritual Decalogue (Exod. 34:18–19), is connected with the killing of the firstborn of the Egyptians.

  Thus the festivals of unleavened bread and Passover were originally independent rituals that were joined at a fairly early stage, and both were linked with the narrative of the Exodus. This process of linkage continued in Jewish tradition as the Passover service developed over the ages. For example, the typical modern Passover Seder or meal includes haroset, a blend of fruits, nuts, and spices that represents the mortar the Israelite slaves used when laying bricks, and karpas, green herbs dipped in salt water that recalls their bitter service.

  The same linking of originally seasonal festivals with the Exodus occurs with the other two pilgrimage festivals, those of weeks (Shavuot) and booths (Sukkot). In early biblical texts they are simply agricultural: “You shall observe the festival of weeks, the first fruits of wheat harvest, and the festival of ingathering at the turn of the year” (Exod. 34:22). In postbiblical Jewish tradition the festival of weeks becomes a commemoration of the giving of the law on Mount Sinai; and even before the end of the biblical period the fall harvest festival of ingathering, also called booths, recalls the temporary structures that the Israelites lived in during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus (Lev. 23:42).

  According to Exodus 12:43–49, the Passover observance was limited to circumcised members of the Israelite community. Foreigners and slaves who wished to participate had to have been circumcised. This seems at odds with the understanding of Passover as a family ritual but is consistent with the later development of the Passover as a national pilgrimage festival in which only males participated. To this minimal requirement, the book of Numbers adds another, that of ritual purity, a concept that pervades biblical laws.

  Pure and impure

  According to Numbers 9:10–13, those who are unable to celebrate the Passover at the appointed time should do so a month later. Two reasons for such a delay are given: the person is on a journey, or he has touched a corpse. Contact with corpses caused ritual impurity, so much so that a high priest was not permitted to touch the dead, even those in his own family. Much of the legislation found in the books of Leviticus and Numbers has to do with the categories of purity and impurity, often misleadingly translated as “cleanness” and “uncleanness.” These categories constitute two distinct conditions pertaining to persons and also to animals, houses, clothing, and food: purity was a prerequisite for participation or use in ritual, and impurity barred them.

  The origins of the distinction are unclear. Some forms of impurity may reflect an awareness of contagion: a skin disease or an unnatural bodily emission made a person impure, and he or she had to be quarantined until a priest had certified that the person was no longer impure and had made the required offering. Others may have to do with primal taboos, especially concerning sex and death. Seminal emission, menstruation, and childbirth all made a person impure, as did touching a dead person or animal. Other explanations are also possible and not necessarily mutually exclusive.

  Foods were also classified as pure and impure. Diet is one way that a culture differentiates itself from others, and avoiding some foods, such as pork, may have originated in this way. Other prohibitions may be related to a sense of order: a field was not to be sown with different species of seeds, and linen and wool were not to be woven into one fabric.

  The result was an all-encompassing system, over which the priests presided. They determined when a person’s impurity had passed, and they received as payment a share of the sacrifices offered.

  Sacred songs

  Scattered throughout the narrative books of the Bible are dozens of hymns. There are victory hymns, such as that sung by Miriam and the women after the Exodus from Egypt; laments, such as those intoned by David after the deaths of persons close to him; prayers for divine forgiveness
; and other types as well.

  A few hymns found in the narrative books also occur in the book of Psalms, the longest book of the Bible, and so not surprisingly one of the most complex. It is in essence the hymnbook of ancient Israel, containing hymns originally from different shrines and from different times, collected relatively late in the biblical period. There are more than a dozen different types or genres of these hymns, all of which were presumably set to music. The most common is the individual lament, in which a person in difficulty asks for divine assistance, expressing confidence that the prayer will be heard and anticipating the expression of gratitude when it has been. Different components of the genre of the individual lament, such as trust and giving thanks, can become hymns in their own right. There are also communal laments and hymns in praise of Yahweh as creator and as Israel’s king and helper. Because most of the psalms have no specific historical references, they are difficult to date. This accounts for their continuing use in worship by both Jews and Christians over the ages.

  Chapter 8

  Prophets and prophecies

  Many individuals are identified in the Bible as prophets, and some fifteen books of the Bible are named for prophets. In modern English, a prophet is commonly thought of as a person who predicts the future. That is part of the biblical understanding of prophecy but not its primary meaning, which is that prophets were intermediaries between God and humans. Thus, although Moses is not usually described as forecasting the future, he is the biblical prophet par excellence. The same understanding is found in the offshoots of ancient Judaism: in Christianity, both Moses and Jesus are prophets; and in Islam, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad have the same title. These founding prophets were not primarily prognosticators. Rather, they were individuals who relayed divine messages to their followers.

  This meaning is illustrated by a metaphorical use of the term prophet:

  Yahweh said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his land. (Exod. 7:1–2)

  In this analogy, Moses is like God, Aaron is his spokesperson or prophet, and Pharaoh is the audience: the prophet, then, is the go-between. The Greek word from which “prophet” is derived means someone who speaks for someone else, and more specifically an interpreter of a divinely given message.

  Discerning the divine

  For almost everyone in prescientific ages, and for some people even today, many events were understood as caused by the ruling power(s) of the universe. Thus earthquakes, famines, and droughts were not considered natural disasters—rather, they were supernatural, caused by a god or gods. The same explanation was provided for other experiences, including dreams, the movement of the heavenly bodies, and even such apparently random phenomena as the shape of clouds or the pattern of a flock of birds in flight. The interpretation of such phenomena is, appropriately, called divination.

  The book of Ezekiel describes the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar as he prepared to attack Jerusalem in the early sixth century BCE:

  The king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the fork in the two roads, to use divination; he shakes the arrows, he consults the teraphim, he inspects the liver. Into his right hand comes the lot for Jerusalem. (Ezek. 21:21–22)

  Using several methods, Nebuchadrezzar seems to be seeking divine guidance about his military strategy, just as kings of Israel are reported to have consulted God through prophets and other means about the advisability of going into battle. From ancient Mesopotamia come many thousands of clay models of animal livers inscribed with directions for interpreting them. These omen texts, as they are called, explain the phrase “inspecting the liver.” Other types of divination attributed to Nebuchadrezzar are found in the Bible. For example, the prophet Elisha uses arrows to predict a series of royal victories (2 Kings 13:14–19). There are frequent references to the casting of lots, an ancient equivalent of drawing straws or tossing a coin, and to related techniques that made use of the somewhat mysterious objects called the ephod and the teraphim. All forms of divination had a religious dimension, in which Yahweh answered individuals “by dreams, by Urim [dicelike devices associated with the ephod], and by prophets” (1 Sam. 28:6), and casting lots put an end to disputes (Prov. 18:18).

  8. Map of the ancient Near East. Prophets are reported at cities in italics.

  Because the meaning of such experiences and phenomena is often not transparent, in most ancient and many modern societies there have always been men and women recognized by their contemporaries as having special, even divinely given, insight. There is a broad spectrum of activity here, from palm readers, fortune tellers, and psychics to inspired proclaimers of divine messages, or prophets.

  Prophets in particular are attested throughout the ancient Near East in a large number of texts from different periods. These texts, from Mari on the northern Euphrates River in the early second millennium BCE, from Assyria in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and from a scattering of sites in the Levant in both millennia, indicate that the phenomenon of prophecy was widespread. The biblical writers recognized the presence among their neighbors of such individuals, for example Balaam, the northern Mesopotamian seer hired by the king of Moab to curse the Israelites (Num. 22–24), and the prophets of the Canaanite god Baal and his wife the goddess Asherah (1 Kings 18:19). Thus, although prophecy might at first be thought of as an exclusively biblical phenomenon, a revelation from the one true God to specially chosen individuals, even in the Bible that is not the case.

  The fullest picture we get of such individuals, however, is from the Bible, partly because prophets and prophecy were so important for the biblical writers, and presumably for their audiences and ancient Israelite society in general. In the Old Testament, several dozen men and women are named as prophets, and many more are unnamed. As elsewhere in the ancient world, they functioned in a variety of ways. A “seer” or a “man of God” could help find something that had been lost, and alongside prophets the Bible also mentions soothsayers, diviners, augurs, those who cast spells, and those who consult ghosts or spirits. Although many of these activities were banned, some by the religious reform of the Judean king Josiah in the late seventh century BCE, the frequent references to them indicate that they were widespread in ancient Israel.

  An ancient Mesopotamian prophet

  This is an excerpt from a letter from Nur-Sin, an ambassador of Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari on the Euphrates in the eighteenth century BCE:

  A prophet of [the storm god] Adad, lord of Aleppo, came with Abu-halim and spoke to him as follows: “Am I not Adad, lord of Aleppo, who raised you in my lap and restored you to your ancestral throne? I do not demand anything from you. When a wronged man or woman cries out to you, be there and judge their case. This only I have demanded from you. If you do what I have written to you and heed my word, I will give you the land from the rising of the sun to its setting, your land greatly increased.” This is what the prophet of Adad, lord of Aleppo, said in the presence of Abu-halim. My lord should know this.1

  This oracle guaranteeing divine support for the ruler resembles that attributed to the prophet Nathan, when he proclaimed Yahweh’s promise to King David that his descendants would rule forever (2 Sam. 7:4–17).

  Such individuals, like saints, shamans, and mystics in many religions, were sometimes on the margins of society, in part because of their unconventional behavior. In both biblical and nonbiblical sources there are examples of prophets entering ecstatic states prior to delivering their message. When the newly anointed King Saul “prophesied,” he became “another man” (1 Sam. 10:6). Sometimes that ecstatic state was reached by means of music (1 Sam. 10:5; 2 Kings 3:15), and it could involve nakedness (1 Sam. 19:24) or self-mutilation (1 Kings 18:28; Zech. 13:6). Other abnormal behavior is reported, for example, of the prophet Ezekiel, including speechlessness and lying on one side for a long time.

  As
is also true of such persons in other cultures, in the Bible there are legends about prophets’ miraculous abilities. This is especially true of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who are reported to have multiplied food, healed the sick, raised the dead, rendered poison harmless, and even made a lost iron axe head float to the surface after it had sunk in the Jordan River. They could also draw on divine power—calling fire from heaven, or bears from the woods to maul rude boys. Their power continued even after their deaths—Elisha’s bones, for example, restored a corpse to life. Similar miraculous activity is also reported of later prophets, such as Isaiah, who was able to make a shadow cast by the sun reverse direction, and who was also a healer.

  Not all prophets were on the periphery of society. Among the biblical prophets for whom we are given biographical details, Amos was a farmer, and Jeremiah and Ezekiel were priests. Throughout the ancient Near East, including Israel, many prophets were associated with ruling monarchs. Since much of ancient Near Eastern literature is a product of the elite in royal courts, it is difficult to know what percentage of prophets were royal appointees or clients. Some biblical prophets seem to have served as official or semi-official royal advisors, such as Gad, Nathan, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Many are also reported to have been involved in the selection and even the coronation of kings, such as Elijah, Nathan, Ahijah, and probably Isaiah. At the same time, because their authority was viewed as divinely given, they often criticized kings in the name of God.