and fashions them into its own unique essence in an effort to reflect a particular experience of the HOLY. In learning and living with our faith, Christians, like other people, have to learn and value the specificity of our own tradition. It gives us our ongoing character and provides the building materials with which, under the guidance of the SPIRIT, we create our future. Even elements in our tradition that no longer have living force are still part of our collective memory and therefore of who we are. They live on as powerful metaphors and symbols even now. And the roots of our identity, without doubt, are in ancient Israel.
The religious rites of ancient Israel were largely centered on sacrifice and the altar where it took place. Given what we have said about meeting the TRANSCENDENT at the boundaries of human life, it is not difficult to see why the ritual killing of an animal might effectively symbolize the encounter with GOD. We do not have to find these rites to our own liking in order to grasp their potential power. Probably they seemed quite natural to farmers and pastoralists like the early Hebrews. In their world, human life depended in part on the life and death of animals, a process with which they were directly involved.
The Israelite tradition was of two minds about the altar, the place of sacrifice. On the one hand, the nomadic element in the tradition militated against a fixed, localized sanctuary. This element continued to be evident in the rule that the altar must be built of unaltered stones, which were not reshaped for the purpose with human instruments (Deuteronomy 27:6). In other words, it was the sort of altar one could build anywhere in the stony pastures of Canaan. On the other hand, by the time the documents of the Old Testament were reduced to writing, most Israelites were settled farmers and strongly attached to their local “high place” and to the great pilgrimage shrines such as Shiloh, Dan, Bethel, Beersheba, and, above all, Jerusalem.
The more nomadic strand of Israel’s traditions probably did not place much reliance on a separate order of sacred priests, since a small traveling band could not afford to take them along as it moved from one pasture to another. Nomads might make use of the settled sanctuaries that lay along their path; but in the main, the elders of the nomadic group were their own religious experts. The settled farmers of Israel, however, could create settled sanctuaries with more elaborate religious rites. With that practice, an important niche for the priest of religion appeared. The high place of a small village, to be sure, might still make do with the wisdom of the village elders or the expertise of an occasional visitor—like Samuel when he came to Bethlehem in search of David (1 Samuel 16:1–5). If the village grew to be a town, however, it could support its own resident priest. A great pilgrimage center could do better yet, eventually supporting a whole corps of priests in its sanctuary. In due time, sacrificial worship was limited, at least in theory, to a single temple—the royal sanctuary in Jerusalem, with a very large body of religious officials.
While some of the older documents in the scriptures of Israel reveal the gradual development of this priestly efflorescence, documents that lay out the priestly role in detail, such as Leviticus, are relatively late. They reflect the highly developed religion of the Jerusalem Temple. For these texts, Jerusalem and its one Temple were GOD’S residence on earth, the place where GOD’S name dwelt. Here the HOLY comes dangerously close to being collapsed into the sacred place of religion. There was still an awareness that one could not control the HOLY through the rites of religion. Yet to worship at the Temple was at least the religious equivalent of approaching GOD. The worshiper had to purge the self of all uncleanness and to leave the profane world behind in order to draw near. The only thing to bring along was the sacrifice, and it had to be of the very best that the profane world could offer, an unblemished specimen of an animal considered clean for human consumption-along with lesser offerings of flour, oil, and wine.48
The priest met the worshiper at the Temple, not so much to kill the sacrifice—the usual rule seems to have been that the worshiper did the slaughtering—as to offer it or consecrate it by splashing some of its blood around the altar and burning the assigned portions of the flesh. These actions bridged the gap, as it were, between the worshiper’s profane status and the sacredness of the sanctuary, and so brought the worshiper symbolically into contact with GOD.49 One of the ways of bridging this gap was that the worshiper gave the priest certain parts of the sacrificial animal. In one sense, this was a fee for the priest’s specialized service. In another sense, what went to the priest also served to consecrate the sacrifice, for the priest was a part of the sacred more than of the profane sphere.50
Israelite priests, accordingly, lived under various restrictions designed to separate them from the profane world that might defile them. They had to be male. (Women were particularly prone to impurity, in the Israelite view, because of menstruation.)51 They had to be from a single tribe, that of Levi. Those of the first rank had to be from a single line of descent in that tribe, the house of Aaron. They had to be very certain to eat no unclean food. They had to maintain their purity in order to avoid eating the sacred gifts in an inappropriate state. They could marry only the purest of pure Israelite women and take no chances on the legitimacy of their offspring. They were not to mourn for any but their closest blood relatives, not even for their own wives, since contact with the dead rendered one impure. Even those who enjoyed correct descent could not serve at the altar if they had any physical imperfection.52
This stress on purity fits with what we have already said about the nature of the worship in which these priests served. They took part in a ritual focused at a particular place, a place whose sacredness imaged the transcendence of GOD. By the time Leviticus reached its final form, it was taken for granted by most Israelites that there must be only one sanctuary for sacrificial worship in the land of Israel and perhaps in the whole world. This reemphasized the singularity of the Temple and its remoteness from the profane sphere. Even a person who lived in the very shadow of the one Temple had a long way to go in traveling from the everyday world at the foot of Mount Zion to the sacred sphere at its summit.53
The priests were indispensable to anyone who wished to make this journey. For one thing, they dared to enter into the innermost court of the Temple, where no layperson could safely go. One of them, on one day of the year, even entered the innermost chamber (Leviticus 16). That their identity and their daily life lay within the Temple and that they maintained a high level of purity authorized them to move through the sacred precincts with relative freedom. In addition, since they knew the parameters of safe behavior, they could instruct the outsider in matters that were beyond his or her profane knowledge. In the sacred world, the wisdom of the profane seemed of little use.
The work of priests, however, was not limited to the Temple and its rites. If the sacred drew people to itself, it also reached out to shape the life of the profane world. We are apt to think of the offering of sacrifice as the priest’s principal job—and there is a great deal on this topic in the scriptures of Israel. But another major aspect of the priest’s work was to give instruction in the right way to live. The Hebrew word for such instruction is torah, often (but perhaps misleadingly) translated “Law.” It means direction for the kind of life that, even in the profane world, would accord with the sacredness of the Temple. Not that the same degree of sacredness would be required (or even possible) in the profane world, but that the ideal of daily life should stand in relation to what the sanctuary represented.
This extension of sacredness into the profane world took place primarily through the observance of purity. The network of purity connected Israelite people to their sanctuary through the very substance of the profane world. What they ate or avoided eating, what they wore, how they planted their fields, how they cleansed themselves after sexual intercourse, how they dealt with the dead or with lepers—all these served to connect them with the sacredness centered in the Temple. Purity also served to set Israel apart from the far more profane world of “the nations,” the Gentiles, who lacked even the most basic connection with the sacred center of Israelite religion. It was the priest, originally, who taught these things.
The sacramental priests of ancient Israel thus had a pivotal role in the religious life of the people as a whole. This did not mean that their priesthood simply
