Episode 333: Nathan MacDonald - The Messy History of the Priesthood
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Nathan MacDonald about the origins of Israel’s priesthood, the role of the Levites, and why the Bible’s accounts of priests are far more complex than they first appear. They explore how biblical texts often function less as straightforward historical records and more as theological interpretations that seek to explain, shape, and reconcile Israel’s traditions. Together, they invite listeners to reconsider familiar assumptions about the priesthood, the development of the Torah, and how the Bible constructs meaning through its ongoing conversation with its own past.
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about how the role of priest changes in our Bible with Nathan MacDonald.
Jared: Nathan teaches at the University of Cambridge, which will become obvious as we talk, because you often hear us talk about the historical, critical study of the Bible, not what does the Bible have to say about priests, but what can we do when we look at what the Bible has to say about priests, and maybe lift the hood up a little bit and see what's going on underneath. And this is a masterclass in doing that.
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what does the Bible say? It doesn't always clear things up, it makes things more complicated, so let's dive into this.
Nathan: The Biblical texts often do not provide us a straightforward window onto ancient Israel.
It's not like somebody's gone with a video camera around ancient Israel and videoed everything so we can go, "Oh, that's really what happened." Rather, what we're happening is a very, very complex relationship between description and construction. The writers are not only telling us something of their world, but they are also telling us what they would like the world to be like.
Pete: Nathan, it's great to have you on our podcast.
Nathan: Lovely to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Pete: Yeah, it's been a long time coming too, but I've admired your work for a long time, so I'm very happy to have you here. And we're gonna talk about probably the most exciting topic in the entire Bible, priests.
'Cause everybody wants to know about them, right?
Nathan: Oh, well, I like to think so.
Pete: Yeah, you'd like to think so, wouldn't you? You would. But that's 'cause you're interested in them. You would. That's the academic problem, right? But, I mean, I think once you see how the sausage is made, though, from a biblical and historical point of view, it gets really interesting.
Like, who are the priests, where do they come from, and stuff like that. And many people probably just have the idea, well, they've always sort of been there, they sacrifice and do things like that. But, maybe we can begin by just, you know, helping us understand, what did priests actually do in everyday life in Israel, as far as we can tell?
Nathan: I think we might start by saying that probably in their everyday life, they're doing what a lot of ordinary Israelites are doing, which is that they are farming the land and doing ordinary tasks. And, being a priest is not an employment in the way that we would think of an employment as something that sort of takes you nine to five every day of the week.
It's certainly at the beginning of Israel's history, is something that, perhaps a leader in the community or the head of the family is going to do on behalf of the rest of their family or on the part of the community. So we really shouldn't be understanding this as a job in the way that we would think of a job.
There's a nice little verse in 1 Samuel 2 where the prophet says of Eli and his family, "I chose him," that is Eli the priest, "out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest." What does that involve? Well, it means to grow up on my altar, that is to make sacrifices, to burn incense before God as a pleasing offering to Him, and to wear an ephod before me.
And that's another aspect many people might not think of in relation to the priest, but the priest is also somebody who can make oracular judgments. By that, I mean that they are a conduit for the divine will. If you want to know a piece of information or if you’re worried about something, you might go to the priest, and the priest is a mouthpiece for God.
One of the ways that this is done in the Old Testament is through oracular devices. Probably the most famous of those is the Urim and Thummim, which are probably two kinds of lots, and the priest would draw it out of a bag, and it would give you a yes or no answer.
Jared: Hmm.
Nathan: And so we find various places, for example, when David is at Keilah. He's fleeing from Saul, and there is this sort of question-and-answer where David asks various questions of God, and he gets essentially what are kind of like yes and no answers.
And so presumably, David has gone to the priest, he's consulting the priest, he wants to find out something, and he asks him some questions And the priest gives him a yes or no answer. In this case, uh, David is concerned that Saul is gonna come up to Keilah, and if Saul comes up to Keilah, that the men of Keilah are gonna hand him over.
And so he asks these questions. Is Saul gonna come up to Keilah? Yes, he is. Will the men of Keilah hand me over if he does come up? Yes, he will. So then David makes a plan to get out of that town pretty quickly.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: So, those are some of the things that priests do. The priests are also, in other places, seen to be vehicles of God's blessing.
A very nice example of that would be the story of Eli again, but the story of Eli with Hannah. So Hannah goes into the temple at Shiloh. She's, um, she's childless. Uh, she's weeping and praying before God, and Eli asks her what she's doing. He thinks that she's drunk, because she's at the festival.
She then expresses her desire for a child, and Eli offers her a word of comfort and a word of blessing, and then Hannah's mourning is turned into rejoicing because she knows now that God has heard her, and the priest again is a mouthpiece of God offering a blessing and offering her an assurance that she will indeed have a child.
Jared: Well, maybe let's round out a little bit of this foundation around what priests were and what they did. So I wanna introduce these other two terms that we hear a lot about – the Levites and the sons of Zadok– and how do they fit into this idea of a priest? And maybe I'm gonna add into this, if you can go ahead and tack this on, like, where do the priests come from?
So kind of where do they come from, and how do these different groups tie into the idea of a priest?
Nathan: Gosh. I mean, that's about the largest question you could possibly ask.
Jared: Whoa. We’ll, we’ve got some time.
Nathan: Well, we could spend two or three hours on this. I mean, there's so many different parts to break down.
So, you are absolutely right that within the Hebrew Bible, we encounter various names of different groups that are somehow associated with the temple, and not just priests. So we have the Levites. We have the sons of Zadok, often called the Zadokites. We have, uh, a group of figures called the Netinim. We have the descendants of Eli, the Elites.
So we’ve got a number of different groups, and one of the very great challenges- In thinking about the priesthood is trying to understand how these groups might relate to one another-
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Nathan: and, and, and how to construct a kind of coherent history-
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Nathan: across the biblical text.
Pete: Right.
Nathan: Um, the, I mean, the most well-known of these groups is the Levites, um, and that's because they occur in several places throughout the Hebrew Bible.
So they're the group that in many ways we know the most about, and yet on another level, there is a great deal about them that we don't know. We really don't know where they originated from. From a historical perspective rather than from the perspective of how the biblical story is itself made up in the biblical text, but from a historical perspective, probably the earliest reference to the Levites is in the book of Deuteronomy and the Levites are mentioned there alongside other, uh, relatively exposed and poor groups of people. So they're mentioned alongside the widows and the orphans as those to whom the Israelite householder, when he's having his festival meal, should be generous and should invite them along to enjoy the party.
But what do we know before that? Well, we just don't know. We know that their name means something probably to do with being attached. So are these, individuals that have somehow attached themselves to the families, maybe migrant laborers or something like that? We're not sure. So, that's sort of at the beginning of the story.
Now, if we sort of move to the end of the historical period, but many of your listeners will, may well listen to this and kind of go, "Well, we know exactly who the Levites are," because the biblical story as it's now set out now, will trace a story where one of Jacob's sons is called Levi.
He has a tribe descended from him, who become the sacerdotal tribe, the priestly tribe who are in charge of the tabernacle and then later the temple. And from within this tribe, one family is chosen, the family of Aaron, and from that family come the priests. And so in the canonical picture, as we now have it, we have a very clear, rather neat portrayal with the Levites as a sort of second-class clergy that do various relatively menial jobs.
And they, and they serve, and they help the priests who do the main and the most important job of sacrificing and, and also blessing the people. So the biblical picture as we now have it, is a relatively simple and coherent story. But that story, or that division of the priests and the Levites is only found in a number of texts that most scholars regard as fairly late.
So that's the book of Numbers, Ezra, Nehemiah, and the books of Chronicles. There we have this very neat picture being portrayed. But when we look at some of what scholars regard as the earlier texts, whether that's Deuteronomy or the books of Samuel or some of the prophetic books, we're often encountering a much more complicated picture that is somehow difficult to disentangle and difficult to really kind of make sense of how that fits in with the later canonical story that emerges. Uh, um, that poses a particular problem for biblical scholars, um, because that rather neat picture that we find in Numbers, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles in some places seems to have been overlaid and smoothed out some of the portrayals that we find elsewhere, for example, in Samuel. And so scholars are often left with a picture that is sort of somewhat confusing and difficult to disentangle.
Pete: So Nathan, just to give a little more background here, could you help us understand the origins of that neat story that we see in Genesis? Jacob has, one of his sons is Levi, and all the priests, and one of them is Aaron, and he becomes the progenitor of the high priests, and the others are just the Levites.
And that seems to be... Well, I'm trying not to give away what I think is happening here, but it seems to be a rather generous construction of the origin of the priesthood itself in Israel as coming from this one tribe. And my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding is that this is usually taken as evidence that there's priestly influence in the composition of these texts.
Nathan: That point that you make about priestly composition is absolutely true. So if we're thinking about ancient Israel, there are two main contexts where writing and archiving of texts probably happened. One of those is the court, so where we find the royal records, and you think of texts like Deuteronomy or the accounts of the kings in the book of Kings.
And then we have the temple, where a lot of records probably also were generated and kept. And we can think of texts like, parts of Exodus, parts of Leviticus and Numbers, and then several other prophets who are priests. So, yes, there's definitely a priestly hand in here.
In terms of some of the origins of this distinction, this is a complex and fairly contested area, and indeed, Pete, you and I may differ about this. There's definitely a very strong current within American scholarship that sees some of these divisions arising from different families who enjoyed priestly privileges in different parts of Israel or Judah.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: And then ended up sort of contesting with one another, particularly when worship began to be centralized towards Jerusalem by the Judahite kings towards the end of the monarchy. So this is a view that originates, first of all, at the end of the 19th century, with the great German biblical scholar, Julius Wellhausen.
And, he has the idea and kind of connects various biblical texts together in a fascinating and, in many respects, rather compelling way, which is to think that there were priests in various different locations. When Josiah reforms Israelite worship so that worship can only occur in Jerusalem, suddenly all these priests in various other places are redundant.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nathan: They don't have a job anymore. And 2 Kings 23 talks about these as the priests of the high places. Wellhausen connects that with Deuteronomy 18, which talks about the Levites. And he thinks that basically what happened was that the Deuteronomy imagines these now unemployed Levites being allowed to come to Jerusalem and to participate in the worship there, and to behave as priests.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: And, and so this is his theory. And then, essentially what happens is the Jerusalemite priesthood who've enjoyed the benefits of being close to the monarchy really don't like this. And, essentially- ... um, stop this from happening and basically, allow the Levites to sort of be present, but to sort of take a lower role.
Pete: Can I just follow up with something? 'Cause I think this is relevant to what you're saying, if I'm understanding you correctly. Jared mentioned the sons of Zadok, and you mentioned them as well. Is this one of those, like, priestly lines that was in competition perhaps with others?
And, maybe the follow-up question is, who the heck is Zadok?
Nathan: Um, so let's keep going through with Wellhausen, 'cause what you're saying, Pete fits very nicely with that.
Pete: Okay. Okay, good. Thank you.
Nathan: So, Wellhausen is connecting the text of Josiah's reform in 2 Kings with Deuteronomy 18, which talks about Levites and priests, and then also connects that with Ezekiel 44, which, um, Wellhausen thinks is the text where the Zadokite priests, which are the ones that he connects with Jerusalem, basically say, you know, "No, Levites, you can have a subordinate role."
Pete:Mm-hmm.
Nathan: "But because of the things that you've done, the sinful and idolatrous acts that you've done in these other sanctuaries, you cannot have the main priestly role. You'll always have a subordinate role."
Pete: Right. Okay.
Nathan: So, what Wellhausen does and what makes it kind of compelling and attractive is these very difficult texts which really don't quite fit into the Levite Aaronite picture, or the Levite priest picture, are kind of tied together by Wellhausen.
Now, you also asked, what about Zadok? So, the sons of Zadok are only mentioned in Ezekiel 40 to 48, and we, we don't otherwise know about them. Um, but they seem to be taking their name from, Zadok, the high priest in David's time. Now, that name Zadok, um, is peculiarly resonant-
Pete: Mm-hmm
Nathan: because it's the same root as the Hebrew word tzedek, righteousness. So, um, so to, so to be a son of Zadok is, is not just to be claiming a descent to, to, to David's high priest, it's also to be making a claim about a certain kind of righteousness, which is being contrasted with the idolatry of the Levites.
Pete: Hmm.
Jared: Can I maybe restructure this? Yeah, I wanna restructure it, and then I wanna hear, because you mentioned Wellhausen, where have we gone since those days in terms of how scholars think about this, and you talked about how there may be a disagreement amongst us.
But, I wanna make sure we're resetting here, because I think this is very interesting, but it may be new for a lot of our listeners. So, we have Josiah's reform, which centralizes worship, right? And we've had some episodes recently about the Deuteronomist and Josiah's reform.
So when that happens, it basically, which I've never thought about how that impacts the priesthood. So you have all these priests who are used to, you know, the high places or just decentralized worship places, are now sort of out of a job, so they're sort of being called into the centralized worship in Jerusalem.
But hey, there's already an established set of priests here who have a job, and they've established some privilege, because they're, you know, rubbing shoulders with the court and with the kings. And so they're sort of like, "Well, how do we maintain our privilege here?" And so there becomes this divide between the Jerusalemite priests, which it sounds like Wellhausen associated with these sons of Zadok, and these, uh, decentralized, sort of, uh, held-at-arm's-length priests, which are associated with the Levites.
And so you have the sort of outcast priests versus the in-group who has been rubbing shoulders with the kings, and that's sort of the story we have so far. So take, and correct me if I got anything wrong, but take that and can you bring it forward to is that still how scholars think about this, or what's been changed, and where's the disagreement?
Nathan: I would say Wellhausen is very influential. He has particularly strong influence in Germany for many decades. And also in American scholarship in a slightly different way, particularly through Frank Moore Cross in Harvard, and various of Cross' students. Cross is very influential because he takes this idea of Welhausen and, and he really applies it across the history of Israel.
And so various shifts in Israelite history and in how Israelite religious history is happening can be explained according to Cross as a result of priests fighting with one another and families conflicting with one another. So this becomes a very influential theory in the United States, one that is not without its problems.
Now, again, let's take a few steps back and just say, the priesthood is an extraordinarily complex problem in the Hebrew Bible.
Jared: Mm-hmm ...
Nathan: Trying to sort of disentangle exactly what's going on. And Cross, like Wellhausen, his contribution to this, is brilliant in providing a slightly negative way of describing it would be, he offers a simple solution to a complex problem.
So we've got a complex problem of how do you explain all these different texts in the Hebrew Bible, and his solution is to explain that we're always having this sort of conflict that's going on between different priestly families as they're sort of rubbing shoulders with one another, trying to increase their own family's power.
And, eventually some of these conflicts run out of energy. They kiss and make up. So therefore, when we're looking at the Hebrew Bible, sometimes if we read between the lines and look for Cross, you can find evidence of this conflict. Sometimes we can't find it because they've agreed with one another.
The problem about some of this is falsifiability. Cross both explains the evidence that he sees. Whenever he sees something, he can explain it as a result of a conflict, and then when he doesn't see it, he can explain that this is the result of them having mended fences and being on good terms again.
So that's one problem. But, the other problem is, whether in fact we can use the biblical texts as a straightforward window into Israelite religious history. So do the texts as we read them simply tell us, y- you know, when we meet a group or a named individual, did that group or that named individual actually exist?
Now, for so much of scholarship for the last hundred years has just as- pretty much assumed that one can move fairly straightforwardly, yeah, a bit having to use criticism to a great deal to try and reconstruct this. But, when you get a group mentioned, that they somehow correspond to some group in historical time.
And in reality, that becomes quite complex and difficult. So then they offer a different kind of explanation or a different way of thinking about this problem. I mean, let's go back to this one about Levites and priests. So we've sort of talked about the complex theory. So let's frame this a different way.
Let's look at the Pentateuch. Now, one of the very, very weird things about the Pentateuch, if you're looking for Levites and priests, is that the Book of Leviticus, which takes its name from the Levites, hardly mentions the Levites. I mean, it is the most misnamed book in the Bible, by a long way.
I mean, Genesis does mention Levi as one of the sons of Jacob, but you read Genesis, you read Exodus, and you hardly encounter the Levites at all. One or two places which scholars have rather wondered whether they're sort of late traditions. What you do meet instead is you meet the priests, the priests who have to do sacrifices.
Now, turn now to the book of Deuteronomy, and we get a very different picture. We keep encountering the priests, but they're not called priests, they're just, they're called Levitical priests. So, what happens in between? Well, Numbers, I think one way of looking at the book of Numbers is Numbers is trying to explain, well, how come these priests are also Levitical priests?
And it uses the idea of a Levitical tribe as a way of sort of bridging these two different notions. So that you have the priests as a small part of the tribe of Levi, which then helpfully kind of explains to the reader as they're reading along, they've Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, you only meet priests.
And then Numbers explains, well, actually, these priests are part of the Levitical tribe. So then when you get to Deuteronomy and you realize that they are Levitical priests, you don't kind of go, "Well, that's a bit weird." You kind of go, "Oh, okay, that makes sense. Well, they're all kind of, they're priests, but they're also part of the tribe of Levi.
So they're kind of Levitical priests." That kind of makes sense. But there's another way in which actually, yeah, these things don't quite sort of fit together. Um, and Numbers is really trying to find a way between them, and it does this by creating this distinction between Levites and priests, between the senior clergy and the junior clergy.
Pete: Mm-hmm ...
Nathan: But, until you get to Numbers chapter one, you will have never encountered this idea. Or you will, you'll have encountered it in one or two very, very minor places which are just sort of slightly strange and inexplicable, once in Exodus 32, once in Leviticus 25.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: So that offers this different kind of solution to this problem, which is, um, which is, we might say, a somewhat more kind of textual solution.
And, and this is the problem, that the biblical texts often do not provide us straightforwardly a window onto ancient Israel. It's not like somebody's gone with a video camera around ancient Israel and videoed everything so we can go, "Oh, well, that's really what happened." Rather, what was happening is a very complex relationship between description and construction.
So that the writers are not only telling us something of their world, but they are also telling us what they would like the world to be like, and they're trying to explain certain kind of problems with their text, and they're trying to bring text together coherently so they kind of make sense for their readers.
Pete: In, in what you just said for the past few minutes, there's so much there for people to chew on, I think, and I hope they do. Just the notion, you know, you mentioned Josiah a few times, King Josiah, late seventh century king who, apparently centralized worship. That's how most critical scholars look at this.
Uh, he didn't do anything on his own, according to the Bible, he just found the law. Somebody found the law, one of the prophets found the law in the temple. "Oh, listen, we need to be doing this law that's been here all along." It might be more that this was codified during Josiah's time.
So, the point is that this is a wonderful mirror into the nature of biblical literature, in this case the, the Torah, the Pentateuch, that the installing of priests, which the Book of Exodus apparently talks about, and Leviticus makes great hay from, is part of that constructing of history that ancient writers do. Right?
I mean, just riff on that a little bit. I think that's a very important concept for people. There are a lot of the intricate inner workings of, you know, the Sons of Zadok and other possible priests and that's another layer of complexity onto that. But the basic line is that when we read about, you know, the beginning of the high priesthood and priests in Torah, that may not be a historical picture.
Nathan: Yeah, so I mean, one example of how this is working out, that might be really interesting to talk about is the story of Korah in Numbers 16 and 17. Yeah. So in Numbers 16 and 17, we have a story about how Korah, and a group of people with him, they're all Levites, they rebel against Aaron.
The argument that they put forward is, well, kind of like, "Well, what makes you so special?"
Pete: Right.
Nathan: I mean, you know, everybody's holy. So, you know, all Israel is holy. We know this, so what makes you so great? You know, why should you have such a special role? And, the story ends with them going with their incense pans and there's a sort of trial, and they get consumed by fire, and God basically says, you know, "Well, you know, I have chosen Aaron, you know, and all these people are imposters."
When you read that story, I mean, one of the things that sort of strikes you about it is that the arguments that Korah and his followers are using are biblical arguments. They're basically the arguments that have been expressed in Leviticus 17 to 26, an area of the Hebrew Bible as scholars know as the Holiness Code.
And throughout the Holiness Code you get this idea of “be holy as I am holy”. You know, all Israel is holy, and that this instruction is provided to everybody. And that desire for the whole of Israel to be holy sits rather uncomfortably with the earlier part of Leviticus, which has really emphasized that there is one set of people set apart, which is the priests.
The priests are holy, the tabernacle is holy. To be holy is not something you earn or something you can work at, it's something that's bestowed upon you.
So if you are a priest, you're anointed, and then you become holy. And if you're the tabernacle, you're anointed, and then these, what are otherwise just sort of bits of wood and metal and animal skins- they're no longer just simply animal skins.
They now become a place for the presence of God. They become holy. So to become holy in Leviticus 1 to 16 is to be anointed and to be given a special role. Whereas once you get to Leviticus 17 to 26, holiness is something that Israel can work on. It's by the things that it does.
So there is this sort of tension within the Book of Leviticus, and one way of reading the story of Korah is a way of resolving that Korah is, on the one hand, seems like a really good reader of scripture. He reads the holiness code and kind of says, "We are all holy. Be holy as I am holy." You know, we're all on the same level, and the text is really, really clear about excluding that possibility.
Yes, all of Israel is called to holiness, but the text is also going to insist that there are gradations within that. That, you know, just as there is a holy place and the most holy, the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, so also there are, you know, there are ordinary Israelites, then there are Levites above them who are of slightly more holy status, and then there are the priests and the high priests.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: And so what we see in Number 16 to 17 in the story of Korah is actually, as strange as it may seem, a story that is actually doing biblical exegesis for us and is giving us one way of reading scripture that is incorrect, that is Korah's reading, and then the other reading of scripture that the biblical writers want to tell us is the correct one, and that's the reading that Aaron and Moses have, which says, you know, there is a high priest and he has a special role vis-a-vis the rest of Israel.
And, uh, now if we then sort of say, oh, well, you know, let's see if we can kind of try and reconstruct who the Korahites were from the back of the story. There are gonna be some challenges in doing that. This story is not meant to be a window onto what happened in Israel's life.
It is instead trying to interpret scripture and, and, and sort of make sense of certain sort of ideas. So, I mean, what you can see there is running through how I'm trying to explore things is a very different way of looking at the text that I've tried to talk about in relation to Genesis through to Leviticus, and then the role that Numbers is having in relation to Deuteronomy, is seeing how some of these texts are not simply just mirroring ancient Israelite world or a window onto them, but are actually doing, making certain kinds of interpretive moves, and have therefore a much more complicated and challenging relationship-
Pete: Mm-hmm
Nathan: to history as we might think of it.
Jared: What I hear you saying is we have to be careful because a lot of our texts are reflecting on the tradition itself. It's answering questions from within the tradition, not trying to provide a historical window, but simply saying, "Well, this is part of our tradition. These are the things, and this is another strand.
How do these go together? Oh, this may be one way to think of that and then that's what gets sort of put into the text. And so maybe can you say a little bit more about that? But, at some point, this gets placed into the text as it is. Like, at some point, there is Numbers 16 and 17 as a commentary on, and that's the one that sort of gets baptized into the final form that we have now.
What goes into play there? If it's not the window into history, but it is this interpretive struggle over time, but then at some point gets into its final form, what's that process like, and what does it say about what was happening at the time?
Nathan: Oof. Another small question. Thank you.
Jared: Yes. I'm good at the little simple questions.
Nathan: I think we probably need to, I mean, we may need to adjust a little bit our expectations. I mean, we've talked about Josiah, but we may need to be moving our historical horizon perhaps not before the time of the exile, but in fact after the time of the exile.
Jared: Which compared to Josiah, can you just, for people who don't know timeline, maybe can you give some dates in there?
Nathan: So, Josiah is reigning at the end of the seventh century, so in the 620s or so. Um, he's just before Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians and the Judahites are sent into exile.
Um, whereas actually many of these texts and many of these issues are probably being worked out in a later period. So, I mean, we tend to think of Josiah's reform as primarily a religious reform. Its motivations may well have been much more pragmatic and political.
It may be much more about controlling and centralizing power in Jerusalem, uh, particularly in the context of the threat of the earlier period of the Assyrians, and then later the Babylonians. I mean, we can end up with a very simple picture that imagines that Josiah sort of centralizes things for a political purpose, and then from then on, everybody sort of, you know, worship is always centralized in Jerusalem.
In reality, we increasingly know now that in the post-exilic period, there are, um, there are sanctuaries in other places. Most famously, there's a sanctuary in Mount Gerizim, which is the holy site to the Samaritans. There is also a sanctuary in Egypt, in the south of Egypt that we know about called Elephantine.
There is later going to be, in the Hellenistic period, there's gonna be a sanctuary at Leontopolis. Um, there may well have been another sanctuary at Edfu in, in, in Egypt. So we shouldn't imagine there was just one sanctuary and that was the only central sanctuary there was.
Um, and in fact, Jerusalem's significance as the primary sanctuary probably increases during the post-exilic period.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: So, again, we might be best not to be sort of looking back to Josiah and the time before the exile, but actually the time after the exile. And, and a lot of these developments are happening at this point.
Pete: Mm-hmm. And I imagine coming back to the land, um, after the exile maybe drove part of that ideology of, I mean, I like to say make Israel great again. That's a little bit of a trigger here in America to put it that way. But, um, I appreciate what you're saying there, Nathan. The post-exilic period seems to be very, very important for understanding the priesthood and the nature of how priests are talked about in the Bible, and that goes back at least to Wellhausen, right?
And probably before him, I think, a little bit, but, um, this is a, this is an old idea.
Jared: Yeah, and maybe would it be fair, as we end our time here, to talk about... I mean, I, I just wanna reflect on this, because I think it's important- Can you say the importance of understanding... When we're talking about priests, it seems to me that this, uh, that Josiah's reform, for whatever the reasons are, politically motivated, religiously motivated, really was a, an important event in this moment of talking about the function of the priests and how the priests were, were utilized in Israel.
I'm trying to get the relative importance of that, 'cause in one way I hear, well, the text seems to place a lot of importance on that. But also, you have this real life of Israelites behind, kind of coming full circle to what we talked about at the beginning, that I think it's surprising for people to hear, well, the life of a priest, you know, is mostly the life of a typical Israelite, that they just had this role and, and function.
I always, you know, growing up, thought of a priest as a full-time job, and you just sit in the temple, and you wait for people to come, and then you do your thing. So what's the relative importance of this, where it's like that seems to be really disruptive in the tradition that as we find it in the text.
But also, in real life, it seems like, well, they still, there were other sanctuaries, and decentralized worship was still happening throughout this time as well.
Nathan: That's, I mean, that's a really helpful question. Josiah's motives may well have been political, but, but he does begin to set and train something that's important.
The move towards, um, a more centralized notion of law and also an, an idea of a centralized sanctuary. Much of that is downstream from Josiah.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: Um, I mean, I'm, I'm sort of reminded of the, the, the book by Oded Lipschits, where, instead of talking about the rise and fall of Jerusalem, or, well, Rome, of course, is the original idea.
Rather than talking about the rise and fall of Jerusalem, he talks about the fall and the rise of Jerusalem.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: That actually in some ways, we might sort of see two crucial moments. One is, yes, Josiah's reform, but Josiah's reform becomes something much more important over time. But also, oddly enough, it's the fall of Jerusalem that actually is the beginnings of its making as a holy city.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: And some of these things are already seeded in the time of Josiah. But, what we see in the stories of 2 Kings in 22 and 23 is that this reform of Josiah, probably over time becomes more and more laden with significance. It becomes eventually the archetypal reform.
Jared: Mm.
Nathan: And the description of what Josiah does, if you sort of compare that to what you see in Deuteronomy, you suddenly realize that actually there's been a very careful alignment of Deuteronomy with 2 Kings 22 and 23.
So that all the very, very bad things that Deuteronomy warns you against, Josiah is portrayed as having got rid of them. And probably that is not quite what happened, but over time, the text has just been added to and embellished in order to make absolutely clear to the reader that this is this archetypal moment.
So the Josianic reform becomes a religious reform and becomes a central event over time. But we must also align that with the political end of the southern kingdom of Judah. But then the way that Jerusalem becomes the center for hope.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Nathan: And then, I mean, partly maybe under the influence of, you know, Judahite exiles who head over to Mesopotamia and then see these huge temple complexes that must have absolutely blown their minds. Some of those ideas and some of those impressions are then, you know, uh, they're probably bringing it back to them, and, you know, this is what is then gonna become important to them about Jerusalem, that Jerusalem is in some ways becoming a kind of Mesopotamian temple and a Mesopotamian temple city. So I would say, yes, absolutely, Josiah is sort of planting a seed, the Josianic reform is planting a seed. But also, the exile is just such a crucial moment for changing the way that Judahite religion and worship is imagined.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Well, Nathan, thank you very much. We need to put a stop to it here. I'm really gonna remember the fall and rise of Jerusalem. That's a great way of putting it. That's a wonderful bumper sticker for getting at some of the complexities here.
Jared: For like four people who would understand what the heck that means.
Pete: I don't understand bumper stickers.
Nathan: I borrowed Oded Lipschits phrase. I can take no credit for it.
Pete: That’s ok. But it's a great phrase. It's a great one. But thank you for being with us and taking the time. I know it's a little bit late there where you are, but, uh, we really appreciate it.
Nathan: Thank you both.
Jared: All right, one last thing. If you made it this far, you're clearly the kind of person who thinks about this stuff more than is probably necessary.
Pete: We say that with love, but you're not alone. We are also those people.
Jared: Community for us folks who do a lot of extra thinking, it's called the Society of Normal People, which, yes, we know is a little ironic given what we just said, but it's a good group, smart and weird in the right ways and not trying to convince anyone of anything.
Pete: Come be weird with us. The link is in the show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Jared: Front slash join. I forgot to put that in.
Pete: And this is, you know, this is just a, um, an enjoyable conversation. A- and, and, you know-
Jared: Well, don't tell him it's enjoyable ...
Pete: No, it is enjoyable.
Jared: He'll decide that for himself.
Pete: I'm going to enjoy it. And Nathan will too.
Jared: This will be an enjoyable conversation, Nathan.
