Introduction
The interpretation of biblical law has posed a persistent challenge for Christian readers. It shapes the teachings of Christ in the gospels, frames Paul’s letters, threads through the narratives of Acts, and weaves into the warp and woof of Christian theological writings from the second century onward. The question of the law persists in contemporary Catholic biblical scholarship especially for scholars seeking a kind of synthesis between traditional and historical-critical modes of interpretation.
Recently, Scott Hahn has revived and reconfigured an old explanation. The bulk of the Pentateuchal law, in Hahn’s view, should be understood both as a punishment for specific sins of the people of Israel and as a degradation of an originally more intimate relationship between Israel and God. Hahn makes this argument most comprehensively in Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises.Footnote 1 For Hahn, the apostasy of the golden calf (Exod 32) marks a decisive breach in the covenant that fundamentally alters the nature of Israelite religion. Prior to the golden calf, in Hahn’s account, Israel’s priesthood is made up of the firstborn sons of every family.Footnote 2 After the golden calf, God agrees to spare Israel and restore the covenant but institutes the levitical priesthood (sic) as a punishment and a form of remediation.
Though the covenant is restored in Exod 34, the restoration is only partial and the former intimacy between God and Israel is never fully recovered. For Hahn, this is just the first instance of a larger pattern. The addition of law always follows sin and entails a lesser form of covenant relationship: “Not only are laws added with each of Israel’s prevarications, but they represent significant downward adjustments in the level of covenant amity between God and his people.”Footnote 3 As Hahn makes clear elsewhere, the entire sacrificial cult described in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers is a response to the golden calf and does not reflect God’s original plan for Israel: “The calf episode in Ex 32 was a pivotal event that made necessary what Yahweh never desired for his people in the first place—a sanctuary cult of continuous animal sacrifice. It was this act of apostasy that called forth an entire body of sacrificial laws and liturgies (Exodus, Leviticus).”Footnote 4 Through Hahn’s influence, this reading of the priestly law has become fairly widespread in the world of American Catholic theology. Hahn himself repeats the basic claim that the priestly law is a response to the golden calf in numerous publications with various target audiences, including popular works, devotional literature, and materials for middle/high school curriculum.Footnote 5 The idea has also been promoted and advanced by other authors, including John Bergsma and Brant Pitre in their A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament, a reference work aimed at seminarians, college students, clergy, teachers of Scripture, and any other Catholic interested in this literature.Footnote 6 They reproduce each of Hahn’s main points regarding the transfer of the priesthood from the firstborn to the Levites as a result of the golden calf, and they contrast the “light and direct” covenant that preceded the golden calf with the downgraded “burdened and mediated” covenant that followed.Footnote 7 A variety of other popular and academic works repeat the basic idea that the law in both its priestly and in its deuteronomic forms responds to the golden calf and other sins of the wilderness period.Footnote 8
This approach to the Pentateuch provides a ready answer to the age-old question of how Christians should interpret the law: apart from the Decalogue, the law in its entirety is a punitive response to the golden calf and later sins. Hahn sees this view as entailed in Paul’s statement: “Why then was the law? It was added because of transgressions” (Gal 3:19).Footnote 9 But Hahn’s answer to this important hermeneutical question is untenable. The Pentateuch does not present the law, especially not the priestly law, its priesthood, and the entire sanctuary/sacrificial economy, as a punitive response to the golden calf. A literary reading of the final form of the narrative shows that the priestly law does not entail a reduction in the level of “covenant amity” but is rather a gift from YHWH that enables a new and unprecedented form of religious intimacy between Israel and its God. What the priestly law promises is nothing less than the presence of God among his people.
These considerations bring us back to the critical question of how contemporary Christians ought to read the laws of the Pentateuch. Within the Catholic tradition, Dei Verbum provides a starting place. Interpretations of Dei Verbum vary, but Gregory Vall has plausibly argued that the hermeneutical outlook of §12 entails a synthesis of modern and traditional approaches to Scripture.Footnote 10 After Vatican II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger became a vocal and prominent advocate for this synthesis and argued that it would require “taking advantage of the strengths of both” traditional and modern approaches, while also always remaining “cognizant of the shortcomings of both.”Footnote 11 Historical critical methods have their place in elucidating the voices of sacred Scripture in their original contexts. At the same time, for a Christian reading to be Christian would seem to require (or at least to allow) the incorporation of both the New Testament and the subsequent reception of the Jewish scriptures by Christian interpreters. Though beset with challenges, we find this synthetic approach to be a productive way forward for articulating a contemporary Catholic theological reading of Scripture. A hermeneutical synthesis applied to the laws of the Pentateuch would need to make use of the best of traditional and modern approaches, identify and avoid the pitfalls of both, and relate the text’s contextual meanings to their later recontextualizations in Christian tradition. Our rejection of Hahn’s reading of the priestly law entails also a rejection of particular claims of both patristic and modern critical interpretation that he has brought forward. Our synthesis involves identifying ways that the biases of both approaches have obscured a canonical reading of the priestly law in its Pentateuchal context. In rejecting Hahn’s overtly negative interpretation of the Pentateuch’s priestly legislation, we propose a reading that does justice to the ways the text portrays the surpassing goodness of the law. The priestly laws do not present “downward adjustments in the level of covenant amity”Footnote 12 or something “Yahweh never desired for his people.”Footnote 13 They present rather a step into greater covenant intimacy and an ongoing encounter with the presence of the God who would one day “tabernacle among us” (John 1:14).
Patristic and Modern Precedents
Hahn’s reading of the law was not born in a vacuum. It has a history that reaches back to significant strands of thought in both the patristic and modern periods.Footnote 14 In the early-second century, a theological tradition emerged in which Christians defended their own use of the Hebrew Bible against Greco-Roman, Marcionite, gnostic, Christian Judaizing, and Jewish opponents by claiming that the Jews had disastrously misinterpreted their own Scripture.Footnote 15 These non-Jewish Christians often argued that the Jewish hermeneutical failure was rooted in their inherent carnality and hard-heartedness, which rendered them as a people constitutionally unable to interpret the Scriptures. This tradition, referred to by convention as adversus Iudaeos, “against the Jews,” was forged in the polemical context of the second century but became a dominant interpretive model in the third and fourth centuries.Footnote 16 This anti-Judaism represents a particular blind spot that led some early Christian interpreters to misread the Hebrew Bible—especially the laws of the Pentateuch.Footnote 17 In forging a hermeneutical synthesis, we ought to critique this anti-Jewish bias as a shortcoming in the patristic approach.Footnote 18
A. Barnabas
As Paula Fredriksen points out, the golden calf apostasy was “the prime example in adversus Iudaeos traditions of Israel’s intrinsic religious instability and of their abiding attraction to idols.”Footnote 19 This tradition tended to depict the Pentateuch’s laws as a response to the golden calf and an accommodation to Israel’s inherent sinfulness. The first to interpret the golden calf in this way seems to be the Epistle of Barnabas, which depicts it as an unrepaired breach of the covenant. J. Christopher Edwards notes, “according to Barn., the decisive moment in Israel’s history does not come with the rejection of Jesus, as it does in other early Christian literature, but with the prior Sinai incident. The rejection of Jesus did not cause Israel to lose the covenant because they already lost it at Sinai.”Footnote 20
Barnabas arrives at his interpretation both by privileging the prophetic critique of various aspects of Torah observance and the prophetic prediction of the Messiah and by interpreting such laws and practices exclusively by what later Christian authors would call the spiritual or allegorical sense. His depiction of the golden calf apostasy as a decisive and irreparable breach between God and Israel represents an important element in the adversus Iudaeos tradition. While he does not describe the post-golden calf law as remedial per se, later second-century apologists would advance this corollary.
B. Justin Martyr
Christians who repudiated both Jewish practice of the law and Marcion’s rejection of the Jewish Scriptures faced a hermeneutical challenge in holding these scriptures together with the New Testament. The challenge was especially acute in the interpretation of the Pentateuchal law, which these Christians held to be Scripture but did not practice. Early Christians used several strategies to undermine Jewish adherence to Torah, including the two already seen in Barnabas: amplifying the prophetic critique of ritual practice and interpreting the meaning of the laws via allegory instead of carnally. Carnal as an antonym of allegorical features in Justin Martyr’s Dialogus cum Tryphone (Justin, Dial. 14), where he also repeatedly makes the claim that the law in its entirety, including Sabbath observance and circumcision, serves to correct the inherent sinfulness of the Jews (Justin, Dial. 18–22, 27).Footnote 21 The golden calf is the poster case for Jewish idolatry that gives rise to the need for a corrective system of rites and laws including the institution of sacrifices: “The same can be said of Abraham and his descendants down to the time of Moses, when your people showed itself wicked and ungrateful to God by molding a golden calf as an idol in the desert. Therefore, God, adapting his laws to that weak people, ordered you to offer sacrifices to his name, in order to save you from idolatry” (Justin, Dial. 19.5–6).Footnote 22
For Justin, the similarity between bloody ancient Mediterranean rites and Pentateuchal sacrifices was no accident; the Jewish rites imitated polytheistic worship in order to accommodate a people perversely attracted to it.Footnote 23 In responding to Marcion and Valentinus, who rejected the Hebrew Bible for its supposed carnality and adjacency to ancient Mediterranean polytheism, Justin adopts the inherent anti-Judaism of his opponents but shifts it from the text to the people:Footnote 24 “Thus, as your sinfulness was the reason why God first issued those precepts, so now because of your enslavement to sin, or rather your greater inclination to it, by means of the same precepts, he calls you to remember and know him. But you are a ruthless, stupid, blind, and lame people, children in whom there is no faith” (Justin, Dial. 27.4).Footnote 25
Justin’s critique extends to the temple itself, which, like sacrifice, was instituted exclusively as a response to sin and capitulation to Israel’s love of idolatry:
Thus, your sacrifices are not acceptable to God, nor were you first commanded to offer them because of God’s need of them, but because of your sins. The same can be said of the temple, which you refer to as the Temple in Jerusalem. God called it his house or court, not as if he needed a house or a court, but because, by uniting yourselves to him in that place, you might abstain from the worship of idols. (Justin, Dial. 22.11)Footnote 26
C. Irenaeus
Irenaeus’s emphasis on reading Scripture as expressing a divine pedagogy would prove a more promising hermeneutical approach to the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.Footnote 27 At the same time, Irenaeus replicates elements of the adversus Iudaeos tradition and seems to provide a basic blueprint for key elements of Hahn’s interpretation.Footnote 28 Like Hahn, Irenaeus argues that a simpler portion of the law was God’s first intention (for Irenaeus, as for Hahn, only the Ten Commandments). He also writes that the golden calf proved the necessity of the priestly laws, that Ezek 20:25–26’s “bad laws” refers to some portion of the Mosaic law (for Irenaeus, everything but the Ten Commandments; for Hahn and some of his contemporaries, the Deuteronomic CovenantFootnote 29), and that this punitive response is connected to the sending of an angel to accompany Israel (Adv. haer 4.15.1). Irenaeus repeatedly refers to the Mosaic law as “discipline” and a “yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1) given in response to their desire to return to Egypt and to be slaves instead of free (Adv. haer. 4.15.1).Footnote 30 On the other hand, Irenaeus views some aspects of the law as foreshadowing things to come and as a type of “school” teaching heavenly things by earthly symbols, preserving a more positive Pauline image of the law (Gal 3:24) not always found in later works such as the Didascalia Apostolorum, which Hahn also cites in support of his view.Footnote 31
These second-century fathers were blazing trails in uncharted territory and laid important groundwork for subsequent generations. The notion of a divine pedagogy stands at the heart of Dei Verbum’s description of the Hebrew Bible (see DV §15), and, as Henri de Lubac and others have argued, the allegorical reading of the Hebrew Bible would ultimately develop into an indispensable part of the Church’s hermeneutical tradition.Footnote 32 These fathers, however, also bequeathed to subsequent generations a tradition of polemical anti-Judaism so pervasive that the term “Jew” would eventually function as a negative code-word for the worst kinds of religious tendencies, often even used as an accusation in intra-Christian struggles.Footnote 33 When orthodox Christianity eventually gained political power, this adversus Iudaeos tradition would bear fruit in various ways, including the loss of the special status of Judaism, limitations placed on Jewish participation in public life, and attempts to suppress Jewish practice.Footnote 34 This anti-Jewish bias represents one of the shortcomings of the early patristic reading of the law that a contemporary synthesis must identify and eschew.Footnote 35
D. Modern Higher Criticism: Spinoza and Wellhausen
Though Hahn’s reading has roots in the adversus Iudaeos tradition, it also has affinity with the later reformulations of these interpretations in the modern period. Spinoza, in particular, claims that the Aaronide priesthood was a punitive response to the golden calf apostasy. He writes:
So as to understand these words and the cause of the destruction of the state, one should note that the original intention was to entrust the sacred ministry to the first-born, and not to the Levites (see Numbers 8.17). But after everyone but the Levites had worshiped the golden calf, the first-born were rejected and declared unclean and the Levites chosen in their place (Deuteronomy 10.8). The more I ponder this, the more I must exclaim, in Tacitus’ words, that at that time “God did not wish to save them but to punish them,” Nor can I sufficiently express my amazement that there was so much anger in the divine mind, that He should actually make laws (which are normally designed to protect the honour, safety and security of all the people) to avenge himself and punish them, and thus the laws seemed to be not laws (i.e., a protection for the people) but penalties and punishments. (Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 27.26)Footnote 36
For Spinoza, the idea that Israel’s original priesthood was relegated to the firstborn until the golden calf was already a traditional part of Jewish interpretation.Footnote 37 Spinoza diverges from Jewish tradition, however, and sides with Christian polemicists in depicting the golden calf episode and its resulting priesthood and sacrifices as a punishment that irreparably damaged Israelite religion and that ultimately proved to be a root cause of the downfall of the Hebrew Commonwealth.Footnote 38 Spinoza presents his interpretation as theologically neutral, but, as Jeffrey L. Morrow argues, it reflects his own Enlightenment bias against priesthood as an institution and supports his anti-clerical politics, which are directed not only against his own native Judaism, but also against Catholicism and Dutch Calvinism.Footnote 39
As Jon D. Levenson points out, Spinoza’s negative view of the priesthood is intrinsically linked to the broader trend of anti-Jewish sentiment that led Solomon Schechter to designate “Higher Criticism” as “Higher Anti-Semitism.” In particular, Spinoza articulates a devolutionary model of ancient Israelite religion in which earlier phases are understood as inherently better and later phases are both “more Jewish” and therefore “worse” forms of religion:
Spinoza’s anti-Judaism both recapitulates classical Christian supersessionism and adumbrates an important theme among scholars of Israelite history, and of Old Testament theology, into our own day. In fact, few scholarly models have been more enduring in any field than the degenerative model of ancient Israelite history in biblical studies, with its ideal early period being progressively corrupted by Jewish priests and legists.Footnote 40
Though couched in different terms, this degenerative model is famously central to Julius Wellhausen’s reconstruction of Israelite history. For Wellhausen, the heartfelt, natural religion of early Israel, best and most beautifully expressed in the prophets and in the early patriarchal narratives, is turned cultic, ethical, and abstractly sacramental in the priestly law.Footnote 41 Rather than drawing near to God in interior prayer, Israel reincorporates the very idolatrous practices that the prophets sought to reject. Wellhausen draws on Spinoza in his conclusion: “The great pathologist of Judaism is quite right: In the Mosaic theocracy, cultus has become a pedagogical means of discipline. It is alienated from the heart.”Footnote 42
The Exegetical Impossibilities of the Law as Punishment Approach
Whether or not Hahn is aware of these precedents,Footnote 43 his arguments reproduce the anti-Jewish biases of both early adversus Iudaeos traditions and early modern higher criticism. By arguing that the priestly law arises as a response to Israel’s golden calf apostasy and that it represents a kind of devolution from Israel’s superior earlier forms of religious practice, Hahn achieves a kind of synthesis of ancient and modern approaches—but a synthesis of the shortcomings, not the strengths, of both.
While the anti-Jewish bias inherent in these traditions renders their conclusions about the laws of the Pentateuch inherently suspect, the proposed reading of the priestly law as a punishment for the golden calf also fails on exegetical grounds. A straightforward reading of the Pentateuch unencumbered by these biases does not permit this interpretation.
To see the impossibility of this reading requires retracing its main contours, especially as presented in its fullest form in Hahn’s Kinship by Covenant. Hahn defines his methodological approaches as synchronic and canonical.Footnote 44 He therefore takes the narrative shape of the final form of the Pentateuch, and not its sources, as the object of analysis. This commitment to the canonical form is appropriate for an explicitly Catholic theological reading of the text. We also consider diachronic approaches to Scripture to be necessary and productive for Catholic theology and note that diachronic approaches to the Pentateuch in particular have been put to theological use by some of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, the canonical final form of the text remains an important point of reference for a theological and ecclesial reading that aims at the synthesis called for in Dei Verbum §12. Yet this canonical approach cannot become an invitation to a harmonization that drowns out the unique perspectives of each text.Footnote 46 Rather, a canonical reading “must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture” (Dei Verbum §12). A properly ecclesial exegesis, therefore, should reject interpretive proposals—whether ancient or modern—that fail to account for the content and claims in the text.
A. The Priesthood of the Firstborn?
A key element in the devolutionary model put forward by Hahn, Wellhausen, and Spinoza is the idea that the priesthood of the Levites was preceded by an earlier and religiously superior relation between God and Israel. Drawing from traditional Jewish sources, Hahn and Spinoza both argue that prior to the golden calf, Israel’s priesthood was a matter of family religion in which the firstborn son was accorded the privilege of priesthood.Footnote 47 According to this interpretation, the “young men’’ who offered sacrifices in Exod 24:5 and the priests of Exod 19:22, 24 should be considered the firstborn of the Israelites. Once this idea is established, the combination of Exod 4:22, “Israel is my firstborn son,” with Exod 19:6, “You will be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” leads Hahn to a seemingly inevitable conclusion: it is precisely Israel’s status as firstborn son that makes it a kingdom of priests.Footnote 48
For both Hahn and Spinoza, the priestly privileges of the firstborn are forfeit as punishment for the golden calf apostasy. As a response to that sin, the Levites replace the firstborn sons, and Israel loses—and does not regain—its status as a kingdom of priests.Footnote 49 It is the establishment of this new priesthood that necessitates the establishment of all the priestly legislation that follows in Exod 35–40, Lev 1–27, and portions of Numbers.Footnote 50
Hahn and Spinoza base this claim on Exod 32:26–29. This passage depicts the Levites being ordained due to their willingness to rally to Moses and carry out a violent judgment on their fellow Israelites. Hahn and Spinoza conclude that this scene portrays the replacement of the former priesthood of the firstborn with the tribal priesthood of the Levites. Citing John H. Sailhamer, Hahn casts this replacement as marking the shift from the “patriarchal simplicity of the Covenant Code” to the “complex and restrictive laws of the Code of the Priests.”Footnote 51
The primary problem with this argument is that it has no explicit textual support. The Jewish tradition that sees the priesthood as originally belonging to the firstborn is interesting, and the possibility that this reading reflects a feature of the religious pre-history behind the text cannot be ruled out. Though Hahn claims “canonical evidence” for this idea, his explicit evidence is post-biblical;Footnote 52 no biblical text makes the claim that the priesthood first belonged to the firstborn. Jacob Milgrom advances this idea with an appropriate level of tentativeness: “Thus the Bible may be preserving the memory of the first-born bearing a sacred status; and his replacement by the Levites (Num 3:11–13, 40–51; 8:14–18) may reflect the establishment of a professional priestly class.”Footnote 53 Hahn’s citation of Milgrom eliminates this careful hedging language: “Milgrom comments on how this text preserves ‘the memory of the first-born bearing a sacred status,’ and how ‘his replacement by the Levites (Num 3:11–13, 40–51; 8:14–18)’ signals ‘the establishment of a professional priestly class.’ ”Footnote 54
This selective quotation obscures the nature of Milgrom’s claim and illustrates the problem with Hahn’s argument concerning the firstborn. It is possible, as Milgrom points out, that in Israel’s distant past there was a special sacerdotal prerogative of the firstborn. It is possible that vestiges of this distant memory potentially form part of the background of particular narratives including the description of the Levites as taken by God as a ransom for the firstborn (Num 3:5–13, 40–51).Footnote 55 This possibility, however, never comes to direct expression in the text. It is misleading, therefore, to describe the firstborns’ “consecrated priestly status” as a “fact” and proceed as though it is something that the text openly describes.Footnote 56 By presenting the priesthood of the firstborn as an earlier ideal that was replaced by a harsher and less intimate hierarchical priesthood, Hahn and others negatively color readers’ perception of the entirety of the Pentateuchal priestly law without a hint of the tentative nature of the proposal.
B. The Aaronide Priesthood is Promised before the Golden Calf
Overplaying the certainty of a supposed priesthood of the firstborn in Exod 19:22, 24, and 24:5 is the least of the problems faced by Hahn’s account of the law. The bigger and, in our view, insurmountable problem is that, read canonically, the Pentateuch could not be clearer that the Aaronide priesthood was both commanded and promised prior to the golden calf apostasy. Contrary to Hahn, Spinoza, and the general adversus Iudaeos tradition, the Aaronide priesthood and the sacrificial cult it serves simply cannot be a punitive response to the golden calf for the straightforward reason that Exod 25–31, where the instructions for and promise of the priesthood and sacrificial cult first appear, precedes Exod 32, the narrative of the golden calf.
Though likely composed of prior sources, the final form structure of Exod 25–40 presents a readable narrative of promise, sin, and restoration.Footnote 57 After the ritual formalization of the Sinai covenant in Exod 24, Moses returns to the mountain to have another private revelatory encounter with God in which he is shown the pattern of the tabernacle and its appurtenances and receives detailed instructions concerning it (Exod 25–31). In this encounter, God gives Moses instructions for the ark, table, lampstand (25:10–40), the tent of meeting (26:1–37), the altar (27:1–8), the altar of incense (30:1–10), and the recipes for anointing oil (30:22–33) and holy incense (30:34–38). God also commands the daily morning and evening sacrifices (29:38–42) and the daily incense offering (30:7–9). He even commands a yearly purgation of the incense altar (30:10), a reference to and anticipation of the Day of Atonement ritual that will be described in more detail in Lev 16. These chapters also include the lengthy requirements for the construction of the priestly vestments (28:1–43) and an elaborate ritual for the ordination of the priests involving a whole array of sacrifices including the sin offering, burnt offering, and peace offering (29:1–37).
Exodus 25–31 provides instructions and requirements that anticipate more or less the entirety of the priestly legislation to follow including the exclusive mediation of Aaronide priests and instructions for the father to son succession of these priests (29:29–30). The passage comes to a climax in a promise that stands at the very heart of the priestly theology: “And I will meet there with the Israelites, and it will be sanctified by my glory. I will sanctify the tent of meeting, and the altar, and Aaron and his sons I will sanctify to act as priests for me. I will dwell in the midst of the Israelites” (29:43–45a). This promise of the presence of God among his people in the tabernacle, including as it does the whole priestly ritual system with the Aaronide priesthood, represents a high point and culmination of the Pentateuch’s narrative of God’s interaction with his people.Footnote 58 Prior to this, God manifested his presence sporadically. Now his very presence will dwell permanently in the midst of Israel. There may be various ways of thinking about how the Pentateuch imagines the pre-Aaronide priesthood. It is clear, however, that the text presents the sanctuary and the Aaronide priesthood as instituting a new form of previously unprecedented proximity and access to God. Contra the adversus Iudeaos tradition, Spinoza, Wellhausen, Hahn, Pitre and Bergsma, etc., the text presents this new cultic reality as an advance in the intimacy and immediacy of God’s relationship with Israel. The priestly mediation of divine presence is a promise not a punishment.
These instructions and promises are followed by the apostasy of the golden calf, Moses’s successful intercessions on Israel’s behalf, and the restoration of the covenant accompanied by a new revelation of YHWH’s glorious mercy to Moses (Exod 32–34). Following the restoration of the covenant, Exod 35–40 describes in great detail the beginning of the carrying out of the very instructions given in Exod 25–31. It is essential to follow the canonical account as it unfolds. The structure of these chapters can be summarized as follows:
Instructions for the tabernacle, sacrifices, and priesthood (Exod 25–31)
Golden calf apostasy, Mosaic intercession, and restoration of the covenant (Exod 32–34)
Carrying out the instructions given in Exod 25–31 (Exod 35–40)
Within this story, the instructions of Exod 25–31 are a crucial part of God’s original, pre-golden calf Sinai covenant. When Israel breaks the covenant in Exod 32, it is the blessing of God’s own presence in the tabernacle including the mediation of the Aaronide priesthood that comes under threat. As Brevard Childs points out, this narrative structure highlights a correlation between the instructions given in Exod 25–31 and the perverse worship of the golden calf:
If in the instructions of God to Moses (ch. 25ff.) one can see the true will of God for Israel’s worship, in the golden calf one can also see the perversion of worship. . . The present position of the golden calf story appears to make a double point. First, the alternative to true worship is held up as a terrifying threat which undercuts the very ground of Israel’s existence. Secondly, Israel responded to God’s forgiveness (ch. 33) and fulfilled her part to the letter in setting up the worship of God which he commanded. The entrance of the presence of God into the tabernacle assured Israel of God’s continual presence in spite of her great sin of the past.Footnote 59
In seeking the counterfeit divine presence of an idol instead of the presence promised in the tabernacle instructions, the people came close to forfeiting the unique presence of God in the tabernacle as mediated by the Aaronide priests.Footnote 60 As Gary Anderson puts it, the sin of the golden calf “threatens the promise God made to dwell among his people and lead them to the land of Canaan.”Footnote 61
Just how close they came to losing this blessing emerges in Moses’s second intercession on Israel’s behalf. In the first intercession, Moses convinces YHWH not to destroy the people (Exod 32:11–14). YHWH is partially placated, but he is still initially unwilling for his presence to accompany the people: “I will send before you an angel. . ., for I will not go up in your midst for you are a people stiff of neck, lest I consume you on the way” (Exod 33:2–3). Read synchronically with Exod 25–31, the refusal to “go up in your midst” represents a threat to cancel the great promise of Exod 29:45 to “dwell in the midst of the Israelites” in the tabernacle with its Aaronide priests. Borrowing language from Vall, in contrast to the “Plan A” articulated by Exod 25–31, this unwillingness to accompany the people represents the contemplation of a cultic Plan B where the privileges and blessings of the tabernacle and its concomitant Aaronide priesthood are overturned and replaced with an angel rather than the presence of God.Footnote 62 Hahn is initially correct, therefore, to note that “another apparent punitive measure involves God placing Israel under the custodial supervision of an angel (Exod 33:2).”Footnote 63 Unfortunately, Hahn ignores the continuation of this story in the second half of the chapter where Moses rejects this proposed punitive measure and insists on Plan A or nothing at all: “And he said to him, ‘if your presence does not go, do not bring us up from here’ ” (Exod 33:15).Footnote 64 Read in light of the final form structure of Exodus, Moses’s request here can only be understood as a petition that this plan for the tabernacle, the priesthood, and the cultic laws not be canceled.Footnote 65 Unable to resist the request of this potent intercessor, God relents: “Also this word that you have spoken I will do” (Exod 33:17).
Exodus 34 describes the restoration of the covenant with a further revelation of God’s glory to Moses that emphasizes his mercy (Exod 34:1–8) and culminates in the reinscribing of the tablets and the shining glory of Moses’s face.Footnote 66 For Hahn this renewal is in fact a Plan B, not a full restoration but a downgrade. The biblical text, however, points in the opposite direction. Indeed, the structure of these chapters emphasizes that what follows the golden calf is not a further distancing of God and his people, but a full restoration of the covenant via the self-sacrificing intercession of Moses who “stands in the breach” to advocate for Israel (Exod 32:32; cf. Ps 106:23).Footnote 67 This return to Plan A is demonstrated narratively by Exod 35–40, where the instructions given prior to the golden calf are finally carried out. In other words, contra Hahn, Spinoza, and the adversus Iudaeos traditions, the canonical text simply does not present the Aaronide priesthood, the tabernacle, and the sanctuary cult as a response to the golden calf. The canonical text instead presents the golden calf apostasy as threatening the forfeiture of these cultic realities.
Though Hahn’s own method emphasizes the final form of the text and attention to its narrative unfolding, his reading ignores the significance of the narrative structure of Exod 25–40. In some cases, he also fails accurately to describe the content of these texts. In his discussion of the yawning distance between God and Israel caused by the golden calf, for instance, he claims that “it is precisely to bridge this chasm, however, that the instructions in Exod 35–40 (about the tabernacle and Aaron’s priestly garments) are given—at least in part.”Footnote 68 This claim is repeated in his Catholic Bible Dictionary:
Israel’s apostasy with the golden calf at Sinai required a renewal of the covenant–first with Moses alone (Exod 33–34), but then extended to Israel with the command to build a Tabernacle (Exod 35–40). God only then commanded Moses to speak to Israel about the types of sacrifice (burnt, sin, peace) that Aaron and his sons would be instructed to offer on the people’s behalf according to the priestly code (Lev 1–16).Footnote 69
It is remarkable that Hahn describes Exod 35–40 as the command to build the tabernacle since the command to build the tabernacle is given not in Exod 35–40 but in 25–31. Even a cursory reading of Exod 35–40 shows them to be overwhelmingly focused on the carrying out of the commands and instructions that were given before the “chasm” created by the golden calf (Exod 25–31). Needless to say, there is a significant difference between instructions and the carrying out of instructions, between command and obedience.
Hahn’s claim that “God only then [after the golden calf] commanded Moses to speak to Israel about the types of sacrifice (burnt, sin, peace)” is also directly falsified by the biblical text. Not only do the instructions for the altar (Exod 27:1–8) imply the sacrificial economy that will later be explicated in greater detail, but the instructions for the priestly ordination include all the sacrifices that Hahn claims are only commanded after Exod 35: the sin offering (29:14), the burnt offering (29:18), and the peace offering (29:28). Beyond this, the burnt offerings of the daily morning and evening sacrifices are also commanded prior to the golden calf (Exod 29:38–42), as is the sin offering of the Day of Atonement (Exod 30:10).Footnote 70
Hahn only directly addresses the problem that Exod 25–31 poses to his claims in Kinship by Covenant in one endnote: “If the Decalogue is what Moses heard/received from Yahweh at Sinai, before the golden calf episode, then the subsequent laws in Exodus 25–31 and 35–40 may be interpreted as divinely given to Moses because of the golden calf, as provisions which God foresees as soon becoming necessary for Israel.”Footnote 71 In this account, God foresaw that the golden calf would occur and therefore gave punitive laws in response to the golden calf prior to the golden calf. Once again, the problem is that the text contains no hints that readers should take the instructions in Exod 25–31 as anticipating future apostasy. Hahn’s suggestion that it does renders the canonical narrative arrangement irrelevant.
Hahn also raises the possibility that Exod 15–40 is not told in strict chronological order: “the narration of events is intentionally thematic rather than chronological. The repetition of certain features (e.g., priestly clothes and Tabernacle furniture in chs. 25–31 and 35–40) indicates a ‘dischronologized narrative,’ that perhaps extends from ch. 15 all the way to ch. 40.”Footnote 72 In some cases, the text itself does suggest dischronology, as, for example, the report of Jethro visiting Moses at “the mountain of God” (Exod 18:5) before the narrative describes the Israelites’ arrival there (Exod 19:1–2).
Very different is Hahn’s suggestion that the repetition of the priestly vestments and tabernacle furniture in Exod 25–31 and 35–40 is the sort of repetition that might indicate a dischronologized narrative. In this case, there is no basis in the text for positing dischronology. On the level of plot, Exod 25–31 and 35–40 are not repetitions, but completely distinct events in chronological, not thematic, arrangement. Exodus 25–31 describes instructions spoken by God to Moses on the mountain, which logically and chronologically precede the narrative of those instructions being carried out in Exod 35–40. The narrative keeps these events distinct and neither requires nor permits a dischronologized reading.Footnote 73
In our view, the canonical placement of Exod 25–31 prior to Exod 32 presents an insurmountable problem for any argument for the priestly law as a response to the golden calf. All such arguments, whether stemming from the early adversus Iudaeos tradition, modern critical anti-Judaism, or contemporary Catholic biblical theology, fail to do justice to the biblical text’s actual claims.
C. All Priests are Levites, but not all Levites are Priests
Exodus 25–31 describes the mediation of the Aaronide priesthood as part of God’s original design for Israel. What then, should we make of the ordination of the Levites in Exod 32:26–29? Hahn and Pitre/Bergsma take it as given that the Levites are ordained here as priests and therefore must represent a change in the priesthood.Footnote 74 But are they ordained as priests? This question is complex and raises diachronic issues. For the book of Deuteronomy, there is no distinction between “priest” and “Levite,” and so the priests are consistently referred to as the “levitical priests,” which consists of “the whole tribe of Levi” (Deut 18:1 et passim). Yet our attention is here focused on the priestly law contained in Exod 25–31, 35–40, Lev 1–27, and the priestly portions of Numbers. Those passages, by contrast, maintain a sharp and consistent distinction between priest and Levite. While the Aaronide priests are from the tribe of Levi, the majority of Levites are not priests but have a secondary non-priestly function in the tabernacle. The exclusive priestly prerogative of Aaron and his sons is clear both in the instructions for priestly vestments and ordination prior to the golden calf (Exod 28–29) and the narrative of their fulfillment (Exod 39; 40:12–15; Lev 8). Aaron and his sons, and they alone, are to be anointed and consecrated for a perpetual priesthood.
The rest of the Levites occupy a secondary non-priestly status explicitly subordinated to the Aaronide priests (Num 3:6, 9). Within this priestly legislation, the non-priest Levites have two duties. The first is the care and transport of the tabernacle and its furniture (Num 3:21–39; 4:1–33). This is the context in which we do find a connection between the Levites and the firstborn. Asserting his right to the firstborn, God accepts the Levites as substitute: “And as for me, behold, I hereby take the Levites from the midst of the Israelites in place of every firstborn that opens the womb from the Israelites. The Levites will be mine” (Num 3:12). Their ritual of initiation is described in Num 8:5–22 and is as remarkable for what it leaves out as for what it includes. They are cleansed and presented as a “wave-offering,”Footnote 75 thus achieving what Menahem Haran describes as a minor degree of non-cultic sanctity.Footnote 76 Unlike the priests, however, the Levites are not consecrated or anointed. They do not serve at the altar. They do not wear vestments. They neither touch nor look upon the sacred objects under threat of death (Num 4:15, 20). It is Aaron and his sons alone who “are integrated into the concrete, contagious holiness of the tabernacle” and are “separated from the rest of the tribe of Levi, who according to P can never attain priesthood.”Footnote 77 The separation of the Levites from the priests is emphasized in Num 18:3: “They [the Levites] shall keep your service and the service of the entire tent. Only to the holy vessels and to the altar they may not approach, that both they and you [Aaron and his sons] not die.”
The second duty of the Levites is to guard the tabernacle:
But the non-priest who should approach [the sanctuary] shall be put to death. The Israelites will each camp in his own camp and by his own standard according to their hosts. But the Levites will camp around the sanctuary of the testimony that there not be wrath against the congregation of the Israelites, and the Levites will keep the guard of the sanctuary of the testimony. (Num 1:51b–53)Footnote 78
This passage implies that in addition to providing a physical barrier by camping around the tabernacle, the Levites are tasked with putting to death any non-priest who should violate the prohibition on approach.Footnote 79
This violent guard-duty of the non-priestly Levites poses an intriguing connection with the violent ordination of Levites in Exod 32. From a diachronic perspective, we would say that this priestly passage in Num 1 is unaware of the narrative of the levitical ordination in Exod 32:26–29. But from a canonical perspective the connection between these passages is strikingly apt. Due to their violent zeal for God in Exod 32, the tribe of Levi as a whole is promoted from a lay status to a subordinate, non-priestly, cultic status that will require them to zealously and if need be, violently defend the tabernacle from encroachment. The Levites are ordained not to priestly service, but to a secondary non-priestly service the nature of which will then be explained in Num 1, 3–4.Footnote 80 Read canonically, the golden calf does not occasion a change in priesthood but rather the institution of a secondary non-priestly ordained office. If the canonical text describes a change in priesthood after Exod 24, it occurs in Exod 28–30 prior to the golden calf and therefore not as a response or punishment for the specific sins of Israel.
Hahn’s argument that the “levitical priesthood” replaced the familial priesthood of the firstborn requires ignoring the narrative sequence of Exod 25–40. It also requires ignoring the strongly drawn distinction between Levites and priests throughout the priestly literature. In one case, Hahn seems to acknowledge this distinction only to misconstrue it entirely: “In Exod 34, God renews the Sinai covenant that had been ratified earlier (Exod 24). He then extends a new and distinct covenant first to Aaron (Exod 35–40) and then to the Levites (Lev 1–16). This new Levitical covenant will govern all of the congregation of Israel (Lev 17–26).”Footnote 81 While we would not describe Exod 35–40 or Lev 1–16 as new covenants, Hahn is right to distinguish between Aaron and the Levites. The way he distinguishes these groups, however, is hard to explain since Lev 1–16, which he sees as concerned with the Levites in distinction from Aaron, is in fact entirely concerned with Aaron and his sons (Lev 1:8–9 et passim) and their priestly duties. These chapters have nothing to say about the non-Aaronide Levites.
To sum up, we find no way that a synchronic, canonical reading of the text allows Hahn’s most distinctive claim about the priesthood: “The Levitical priesthood arose as a result of Israel’s sin (Exod 32:25–28).”Footnote 82 Not only does the priestly literature sharply distinguish between the Aaronide priesthood and the non-priestly levitical service that is instituted in Exod 32:29, but it does not allow the possibility that the priesthood was the result of Israel’s sin at the golden calf or elsewhere.
Ezekiel 20:25–26 and Galatians 3:19
The Pentateuch itself leaves no room for the view that the priestly laws are a response to the golden calf. A Christian canonical reading, however, might look elsewhere in Scripture for support. In their discussion of the giving of law in response to Israel’s sin, for instance, both Irenaeus (with explicit reference to the golden calf, Adv. haer. 4.15) and Justin Martyr (Dial. 21–22) cite Ezek 20:25–26:Footnote 83 “And indeed I gave them statutes that were not good and commandments by which they could not live. And I defiled them by their gifts when they caused every opener of the womb to pass [through fire] in order that I might make them desolate so that they might know that I am YHWH” (Ezek 20:25–26). This passage raises several difficulties, but it is enough to point out that it is impossible to see Ezekiel as referring here to the priestly law as a punishment for the golden calf apostasy. In context, Ezekiel contrasts the bad laws by which one may not live with the earlier good laws by which one would live, which appear contextually to be especially the keeping of Sabbath and avoidance of idols (Ezek 20:11–13, 16, 21). More broadly, Ezekiel cannot be describing the priestly laws of the Pentateuch as “bad laws” because he elsewhere accepts the goodness and authority of those laws.Footnote 84 Despite the theological difficulties it contains, the best explanation is that Ezekiel’s “bad laws” are referring to child sacrifice. Elsewhere, Ezekiel uses this language of the “causing to pass” (העביר) of an offering exclusively of child sacrifice (Ezek 16:21, 20:31, 23:37). Here, he is either directly citing Exod 22:29 (or its misinterpretation) or referring to an extra-biblical tradition that asserted or assumed that God had commanded child sacrifice.Footnote 85
Another text frequently cited in support of the law as a corrective or punitive response to the sin of the golden calf is Gal 3:19: “Why then was the law? It was added because of transgressions.”Footnote 86 In his interpretation of this passage, Hahn, citing precedents in Irenaeus and the Didascalia Apostolorum, argues that all the laws after the Decalogue were added to the Decalogue as a response to the golden calf.Footnote 87 Since the golden calf is the first narrative that describes law added to law following sin, Hahn attributes this view also to Paul’s reference to law “added because of transgressions.” He claims that since the Decalogue is not “added” to previously existing law, it cannot be said to be “added” to anything. It must, therefore, be excluded from Paul’s claim that the law was added on account of transgressions. But Paul does not claim that the law was added to law on account of transgressions. In the context of his discussion of the covenant between God and Abraham, Paul more likely means that all of the Mosaic law—including the Decalogue, Covenant Code (Exod 21–23), and priestly laws of Exod 25–31—was added to the covenant between Israel and God (cf. Gal 3:17).
Hahn also claims that the phrase “because of transgressions” requires finding laws that are given in response to specific sins of Israel, but nothing in the context requires this.Footnote 88 The phrase “because of transgressions” is difficult and admits of several possibilities. Craig Keener lists five common interpretations of the phrase in Pauline scholarship, none of which rely on a specific narrative referent for “transgressions” nor view the law as a punishment for sin.Footnote 89 James Dunn argues for a positive reading of the law’s utility in Gal 3:19: it is given “because of transgressions” in the sense of given as a remedy to the general problem of human sinfulness, not a response to the specific sin of the golden calf.Footnote 90 This reading makes good sense of the subordinate clause “until the coming of the seed to whom the promise was made” as a reference to Christ. It also makes sense of Paul’s positive characterization of the law a few verses later: ὁ νóμος παιδαγωγòς ἡμῶν γέγονεν εἰς Xριστóν, “the law had become our guide to Christ” (Gal 3:24).Footnote 91 For Paul, the law with its commands and ritual cult was a necessary and good part of God’s guidance of his people to its ultimate fulfillment in Christ.
Dunn’s reading accords well with Thomas Aquinas’s theological appropriation of the text, which takes Paul’s language in Gal 3:19 as a reference to the general sinfulness of humankind that the law accounts for and responds to. For Thomas, the giving of law that is “added because of transgression” relates not to the golden calf but to the history of humankind more broadly. It is only when humankind loses the ready understanding of the natural law through habitual sin and so are ready to receive divine law that God chooses Abraham; when the promised people are formed, God gives the old law in the fullness of its time. The Mosaic law, even the ceremonial law, is for Thomas not a concession to the ongoing idolatry of Israel nor remedial response to the golden calf but the right ordering of the people of God to Christ by directing their minds to God and withdrawing them from sacrifices to idols.Footnote 92
The Theology of the Priestly Law
Whether advanced by Christian readers ancient or modern, the claim that the priestly laws are a Plan B response to the golden calf fails as a literal reading of the text. There is much from the early fathers that ought to inform a Catholic reading of the law, not least a properly applied allegorical method and the notion of divine pedagogy. What should not be brought forward, however, are claims about the literal meaning of the text that do not hold up to scrutiny, especially insofar as those claims are potentially influenced by anti-Jewish perspectives. On this particular exegetical point, Hahn, Bergsma/Pitre, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Spinoza each fail to do justice to the text’s own narrative claims and structure.
This leads us back to the question of how the fathers might be appropriated in contemporary Catholic interpretation. Any appropriation must recognize that the fathers do not always agree and that even when they do, they can be wrong. Early Christians were not always at their best when writing about their Jewish contemporaries, and modern Catholic exegesis should take pains to avoid perpetuating anti-Jewish bias. It is better to seek out and privilege the significant patristic counter-traditions that provide badly needed course corrections when synthesizing patristic interpretation and modern approaches. As Fredriksen argues, Augustine provides just this kind of course correction for a Christian reading of the Jewish law in his work Contra Faustum Manichaeum. In this work, Faustus’s own strident anti-Judaism and use of both orthodox adversus Iudaeos arguments and heterodox Marcionite arguments became an opportunity for Augustine to rethink the Jewish law and attempt a more positive reading of its literal sense and practice.Footnote 93 Augustine can claim against Faustus, and implicitly against the orthodox adversus Iudaeos tradition, that the law is good: “For the law, which was given through Moses, became grace and truth through Jesus Christ” (Augustine, c. Faust. 22.6).Footnote 94 Not only that, he can claim that the way that the Jews practiced the law did not misconstrue but directly corresponded to divine intention: “These sacrifices were rightly celebrated in that people whose kingdom and priesthood were a prophecy of the king and priest who would come” (Augustine, c. Faust. 22.17).Footnote 95
Most boldly, Augustine affirms the essential goodness of the literal practice of blood sacrifices, a point of particular ridicule and revulsion for both Faustus and the orthodox adversus Iudaeos tradition.Footnote 96 For Augustine, the rites of the Pentateuch were not merely allegories that the Israelites mistakenly took literally. Instead, “the Jews were formerly right in doing those works [the rites]” and erred only later in failing to have faith in Christ at his coming (Augustine, c. Faust. 12.9).Footnote 97 Justin Martyr insisted that blood sacrifices were an accommodation to Israel’s inherent attraction to idolatry (Dial. 19, 22). Augustine inverts the story. The similarities between Israel’s sacrifices and polytheistic rites are not due to a kind of accommodating imitation of idolatrous rites as the adversus Iudaeos tradition maintained. It is rather the ancient Mediterranean sacrifices that are impious imitations of the true worship of the true God. In the sacrifices of the Pentateuch, by contrast “there was found that mystical anointing that prefigured Christ” (Augustine, c. Faust. 20.18).Footnote 98 For Augustine, the literal sacrifices of the Old Covenant were neither degradations of a more pristine form of worship nor accommodations to idolatrous practices. In the very practice of these rites, ancient Israel offered true worship to God in forms that prophesied the sacrifice of Christ (c. Faust. 20.21).
Augustine’s interpretation of the golden calf incident especially illuminates his rejection of the anti-Judaism of both Faustus the Manichee and his orthodox predecessors. Rather than seeing the golden calf as the paradigmatic act of Israel’s constitutional propensity to idolatry, Augustine interprets the golden calf itself as representing idolaters. The hidden key to the account, according to Augustine, is the strange detail that the Israelites ingested the burnt-up dust of the golden calf (c. Faust. 22.93). In Augustine’s reading, the burning of the calf represents the “fire of divine influence” brought by Christ to the broader world. Israel’s ingesting of the burnt-up dust of the calf represents the admitting of former idolaters into the body of Israel.Footnote 99 Once again, Augustine has flipped the script. The story that in the adversus Iudaeos tradition leads to the degradation of Israel’s worship is read by Augustine as a story prophesying the purification of non-Jewish worship through the coming of Christ. As Fredriksen puts it, “the prophetic significance of the Bible’s report of this incident, [Augustine] insists, lies less with Israel’s condemnation because of idol worship and more with the gentile nations’ redemption, through Israel (from whom sprang the first generation of apostles), from idol worship.”Footnote 100
Though Augustine’s work is not free of some of the tropes of the adversus Iudaeos tradition,Footnote 101 it marks a major course correction that should be adopted and extended by any contemporary reader seeking a synthesis of modern and patristic approaches to the law. As Fredriksen puts it, in striking contrast to the adversus Iudaeos tradition that he was responding to, Augustine simply “did not need to posit an anti-Jewish past to account for the Christian future.”Footnote 102
Augustine’s interpretative innovations had a profound influence on subsequent tradition.Footnote 103 As Matthew Levering points out, Thomas Aquinas in particular picks up on Augustine’s view of the Jewish law in his treatise on the law in the Summa.Footnote 104 Thomas writes, “If justice be taken in the last two ways, it is evident that it was conferred by the precepts of the Law; in so far, to wit, as they disposed men to the justifying grace of Christ, which they also signified, because as Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 24), even the life of that people foretold and foreshadowed Christ” (STh I–II, q. 100, art. 12, corp.).Footnote 105 Thomas will go on to cite Contra Faustum several times in his own extensive treatment of the positive literal pedagogy of the laws of the Pentateuch.Footnote 106 Thomas’s and Augustine’s view of the law can be contrasted both to the adversus Iudaeos tradition and to its more contemporary advocates. The law is neither a tragic penalty for a hopelessly carnal people unable rightly to practice it nor does it represent “downward adjustments in the level of covenant amity.”Footnote 107 Rather, it confers a disposition to justice and its daily practice by Jews “foretold and foreshadowed Christ” (STh I–II, q. 100, art. 12, corp.).
Throughout Thomas’s treatment of the Pentateuchal law in the Summa, he assumes the goodness of the law in its three divisions. The moral law he sees as of a piece with natural law, a noncontroversial point even among those who see the golden calf as all-important. But he also understands juridical laws as reasonable divine revelation and further argues, based on three New Testament texts (Rom 13:8, 1 John 3:17, 1 Tim 6:18), that they “aim at instilling mutual love and charity among human beings.”Footnote 108 He similarly explains the ceremonial law as a vitally important gift of God’s wisdom.Footnote 109
Thomas argues that the law in all its aspects was a good gift of God given as a special grace to Israel to prepare them for Christ. When treating the explicit question of whether the old law is good, he rejects the argument that it is not good but divides “good” into perfect and imperfect good, taking aspects of the law as the latter inasmuch as they aim at a different, surpassing end.Footnote 110 When Thomas treats the ceremonial law, he argues that not only does the ceremonial law point typologically to Christ (ceremonial laws, like narratives, have an allegorical sense), but that every aspect of the ceremonial law also has a literal sense that is already good and part of God’s wise plan to discourage pride and encourage right behavior in the humble.Footnote 111 For this reason, the specifics of the Aaronide sacrificial system are good. He lays out the ways in which the ceremonial law serves a positive formation in conversation with Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, generally agreeing with him on the specific reasonability of the literal sense.Footnote 112
For Thomas, Israel’s ongoing idolatry both in Exod 32 and after, in the wilderness (he cites Amos 5:25–27) does not indicate a loss of an original divine plan, a decrease in intimacy, or a remediation specific to Israel. It indicates rather that God’s wise gift of the law to order all people to Christ was not given to Israel because they merited it but only because of the grace of divine election. The golden calf incident does not mean that the subsequent (or, in fact, prior) laws about the priesthood, tabernacle, and sacrifice are punishments, but that the human heart is weak.Footnote 113
Augustine’s and Thomas’s readings succeed where the adversus Iudaeos tradition fails precisely by giving due weight to the theology of the law embedded in the Pentateuch. Following the lead of Augustine and Thomas, we suggest that a Christian canonical reading of the priestly law proceed not by finding room for the gospel by construing priestly ritual as a diminished form of religious intimacy or a reduction of covenant amity, but rather by attending closely to the priestly law’s own theological vision. At the center of this vision is the notion of the presence of God in the sanctuary, which is articulated as a promise in the course of the pre-golden calf cultic instructions of Exod 25–31: “And I will meet there with the Israelites, and it will be sanctified by my glory. I will sanctify the tent of meeting, and the altar, and Aaron and his sons I will sanctify to act as priests for me. I will dwell in the midst of the Israelites” (Exod 29:43–45a). This promise of presence animates the entirety of the priestly law, whose blessings are predicated on that presence and whose reparative offerings and rituals are oriented towards maintaining it.
The priestly hierarchy is in service of the maintenance of this divine presence and the mitigation of the inherent danger of so potent a holiness. Far from a loss of a previously more intimate access to the divine, the Aaronide priesthood and the sanctuary it serves allows an unprecedented new proximity to God. Prior to the building of the tabernacle, the patriarchs experienced the divine presence only on rare occasions through sporadic and temporary theophanies. Israel encounters it climactically in the Sinai theophany, and what the priestly law contemplates is nothing less than the perpetuation of that Sinai presence in the midst of Israel forever.Footnote 114 This is why the glory of God descends upon the tent of meeting (Exod 40:34–38) and manifests for all the people at the investiture of the priests (Lev 9:23f). As Childs and others have pointed out, far from a Plan B, the reality made possible by the priestly service in the tabernacle represents nothing less than the goal of creation hinted at in Genesis 1.Footnote 115 Readers who erroneously find in these texts some kind of degradation of an otherwise earlier pristine patriarchal religion, or a devolutionary view of ancient Israelite religion, have missed what from a canonical reading has to be understood as a profound moment in history, nothing less than a “climax of creation,” which is all the more powerful for being tied to YHWH’s forgiveness and mercy.Footnote 116 Completely inadequate as a theological reading of the text is Hahn and Mitch’s claim that “the calf episode in Ex 32 was a pivotal event that made necessary what Yahweh never desired for his people in the first place—a sanctuary cult of continuous animal sacrifice.”Footnote 117
Finally, from a Christian perspective, the movement of God from heaven to earth to dwell in a sanctuary among his people serves most profoundly as an important type of the incarnation. It is essential to point out that this presence prefigures the incarnation not merely allegorically and symbolically, but by cultic practice centered on divine presence. For a full canonical Christian reading, the entire priestly system should not be read as a degradation of Israelite religion, but as an experience of divine presence that anticipates the coming of the Word who “became flesh and tabernacled among us” (John 1:14).
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