(Goyim).22 Just as God is radically separate from all other beings, so too Israel, the holy people grouped around him, must share his holy segregation and live apart from the pagan world. It was an image of the kind of life that some of the exiles were trying to establish for themselves in Babylon.
We do not know whether Ezekiel intended this vision as a blueprint for the earthly Jerusalem. It was clearly utopian: at this point, the city, Temple, and much of the land were in ruins and there seemed no hope that they would ever be rebuilt. Ezekiel’s model could have been designed as a mandala, an object of contemplation. When his mysterious visionary guide shows him this new temple, he does not tell him that this is the way the next Temple must be built. The vision has quite another function:
Son of man, describe this Temple to the House of Israel, to shame them out of their filthy practices. Let them draw up the plan, and if they are ashamed of their behavior, show them the design and plan of the Temple, its exits and entrances, its shape, how all of it is arranged, the entire design and all its principles.23
If they wanted to live in exile as they had in Jerusalem, with Yahweh in their midst, the Judaean exiles had to make themselves into a sacred zone, so to speak. There must be no dangerous fraternizing with the Goyim and no flirting with Marduk and other false gods. The House of Israel must make itself into a house for the God who had chosen to dwell among them. By meditating on this idealized cultic map, the Israelites would learn the nature and meaning of holiness, where every person and object had its place. They must find a center for their lives and a new orientation. It must have been consoling for the exiles, who must frequently have felt marginal in Babylon, to realize that they were closer to the center of reality than their pagan neighbors, who were not even on the map. A displaced people would have found this new description of where they really stood profoundly healing.
We can see a little more clearly what this holy lifestyle involved when we examine the Priestly writings (“P”) that were also begun in exile. P’s work appears throughout the Pentateuch but is especially apparent in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. P rewrote the history of Israel from the priestly perspective, and he has much in common with Ezekiel, who, it will be remembered, was also a priest. When P described the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert and codified the laws that God was supposed to have given them on Mount Sinai, he imagined a similar series of graded zones of holiness. In the heart of the Israelite camp in the wilderness was the Tabernacle, the tent-shrine that housed the Ark of the Covenant and the “glory” of Yahweh. This was the holiest area, and only Aaron, the high priest, was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. The camp was also holy, however, and had to be kept clear of all pollution because of the Presence in its midst. Outside the camp was the godless realm of the desert. Like Ezekiel, P also saw Yahweh as a mobile god. In his portable shrine, he was continually on the move with his people. P never mentioned Jerusalem. This is partly because his narrative ends before the Israelites enter the Promised Land and long before the city was captured by King David. But, unlike the Deuteronomists, P did not seem to have envisaged a special “place” where Yahweh could set his name. In P’s vision, Yahweh has no fixed abode: his “glory” comes and goes and his “place” is with the community. For P, Israel became a people when Yahweh decided to live among them. He believed that this accompanying Presence was as important as the Law: he made Yahweh reveal the plan of his portable Tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai at the same time as he revealed the Torah. Again, P’s was a consoling vision: it assured the exiles that Yahweh could be with his people wherever they were, even in the chaos of exile. Had he not already moved about with them in the desolate wasteland of Sinai?
The priests of Jerusalem had probably always had their own esoteric law: P’s chronicle was an attempt to popularize this and make it available to the laity. Because their old world had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the exiles had to build a new one. The creation was central to P’s vision, but he jettisoned the old combat myths, which were so closely associated with temples and fixed holy places. Instead he concentrated on the essence of those stories: the ordering of chaos to create a cosmos. In P’s creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, Yahweh brings the world into being without fighting a mortal battle with Leviathan, the sea monster. Instead, he peacefully separates one element of the primal tohu vohu from all others. Thus he separates night from day, light from darkness, sea from dry land. Boundaries are set up and each component of the cosmos is given its special place. The same separation and creative ordering can be discerned in the Torah, as described by P. When the Israelites were commanded to separate milk from meat in their diet or the Sabbath from the rest of the week, they were imitating Yahweh’s creative actions at the beginning of time. It was a new type of ritual and imitatio dei which did not require a temple or an elaborate liturgy but could be performed by men and women in the apparently humdrum ordering of their daily lives. By this ritual repetition of the divine creativity, they were building a new world and bringing order to their disrupted and dislocated lives in exile.
Many of the commandments (mitzvoth) are concerned with putting things in their correct place. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown that the beings and objects labeled “unclean” in the priestly code have stepped outside their proper category and invaded a realm that is not their own. “Filth” is something in the wrong place, whether an alien god in Yahweh’s temple or mildew on clothes, something which has left the world of nature and penetrated the realm of human culture. Death is the greatest impurity of all, since it is the most dramatic reminder of the fragility of culture and our inability to control and order the world.24 By living in an ordered cosmos, Israelites would build the kind of world imagined by Ezekiel, centered on the God in their midst. While the Temple had stood in Jerusalem, it had given them access to the sacred. Now the mitzvoth would restore the intimacy that Adam and Eve had enjoyed with Yahweh when he had walked with them in the Garden. By means of the mitzvoth, the exiled Judaeans would create a new holy place which kept the confusion and anomaly of chaos at bay. But P was not simply concerned with ritual purity: crucial to his Holiness Code were the mitzvoth relating to the treatment of other human beings. Alongside the laws about worship and agriculture in the Holy Land are such stern commandments as these:
You must not steal nor deal deceitfully or fraudulently with your neighbor.…
You must not be guilty of unjust verdicts. You must neither be partial to the little man nor overawed by the great.…
You must not slander your own people, and you must not jeopardize your neighbor’s life.
You must not bear hatred for your brother in your heart.…
You must not exact vengeance, nor must you bear a grudge against the children of your people. You must love your neighbor as yourself.25
If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him … You must count him as one of your countrymen and love him as yourself-—for you yourselves were once strangers in Egypt.26
Social justice had always been the concomitant to the devotion to a holy place and to temple ritual: in the Canaanite myths, the Zion cult and the oracles of the prophets. P goes further: there must be not only justice but love, and this compassion must also extend to people who do not belong to the House of Israel. The Goyim might be off Ezekiel’s map of holiness, but they must be included in the ambit of Israel’s love and social concern.
As the memory of the Temple became idealized in exile, the priests acquired a new prestige. Both P and Ezekiel stressed the role of the priesthood in the community. Originally there had been no priestly caste in Israel; David and Solomon had both performed priestly functions. But gradually the Temple service and the interpretation of the Law had been assigned to the tribe of Levi, who were supposed to have
