Thread by @JoelBaden

#Exodus 29:19-23

The altar law

A sort of preface to the Covenant Code proper, the first thing YHWH says to Moses is, in canonical terms, perhaps also the most controversial. Sacrifice wherever you wish, build your altars in multiple different ways - that’s confusing!

The only way to make sense of it canonically is to understand it as referring exclusively to the period between the entrance into the land and the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. Which is possible, I suppose, but is sort of a weird thing to say at this point.

In the wilderness, of course, the people are (again, canonically) only to sacrifice at the Tabernacle in the midst of the camp, with its single exclusive very differently-constructed altar. And of course once the Temple is built that’s the sole place of worship.

At least, that’s the canonical claim - we can recognize that the Tabernacle is from P, the centralized Jerusalem Temple worship is from D, and that this altar law is from E - and thus doesn’t in fact have to conform to the ideas of the other two at all.

But this means that what we’ve got here is a record of some part of ancient Israelite society that had no problem with local sanctuaries or even, in theory, private altars (though I think that’s not really what’s being referred to here).

The typical traditional scholarly stance is to read these law codes all chronologically: that E represents the earliest, decentralized Israelite practice, and D the later centralized one. And it’s true that the texts are in that order, E earlier and D later.

But E doesn’t represent some ancient patriarchal-era practice. Multiple local sanctuaries were the norm in Israel for hundreds of years, probably until the exile (or shortly before perhaps). And even after that there were probably some who still held to it.

Three other brief things of note here. 1) The very first law here is the prohibition on making statues of YHWH out of gold or silver. Notice that this isn’t quite the same as what we have at the beginning of the Decalogue. This isn’t about foreign gods at all.

Like the rest of the altar law, it’s about proper worship of YHWH. Which is why, as we’ll see, this law is pretty relevant for our understanding of the story of the golden calf.

2) Note that here, like everywhere outside of the priestly source, there are only two major types of sacrifice: whole burnt offerings and “peace” offerings. One that gets totally consumed on the altar, one that the offeror and the priests get to eat some of.

The non-P sacrificial system is pretty darned simple, and everyone would do well to become more familiar with it than with P’s intrude ritual laws, since it’s this simpler system that explains how sacrifice was understood in literally every text other than P.

3) The other typical thing we see here, that’s often elided either by P or by later interpretation, is that YHWH is understood to actually come to the sanctuary when one brings an offering. This isn’t an omnipresent invisible deity. Someone is cooking dinner and he’s on his way.

It’s clear from elsewhere that at festivals YHWH was understood to actually appear (somehow!) to the gathered worshippers; this is just a minor variation of that idea. Sacrifice summons the deity, and brings divine beneficence. It’s manipulative.

That’s all standard stuff in the ancient world. It’s just not standard in the modern world, and so we tend not to recognize it because we don’t want the beliefs evinced in the Bible to be all that different from our own faith. (But they were.)

This is obviously all meant to refer to Exodus 20:22-26. Typing and counting aren’t my strong suits this week, it turns out.