CHAPTER 29
This is about the consecration of priests, and on the face
of it, this should be a very boring chapter, but it’s surprisingly vivid
because of how frankly gory and bloody the consecration process is. You don’t just say a few words and get
sprinkled with some water. Oh no – this
is old school Judaism – there will be blood.
Bring a bull and some rams.
And don’t expect them to come out alive. (Well, they don’t really entire alive, but you get the
idea). A bull is to be “slaughtered
before the LORD” at the entrance of the tent of the meeting. Put some blood at the base of the
altar. Take some fat and inner organs –
and burn them at the altar. The Bible
is very precise here – two kidneys, the fat, and the lobe of the liver. Meat, hide, and dung get burnt outside. To be a good priest, you need to have not
only knowledge of the Lord and his laws, but also of animals and their
anatomy. If the whole priest thing
doesn’t work out for you, you can always become a butcher. This job will train you well for it.
Next kill a ram and splash its blood on all sides of the
altar. Then cut it to pieces and burn
all but the inner organs and head. The
other ram you use to put blood on the priest.
Of course. “Some of its blood
you shall take and put on the tip of Aaron’s right ear and on the tips of his
sons’ right ears and on the thumbs of their right hands and on the great toes
of their right feet.” Well, I’m glad to
see with all this blood flowing that they’re not expected to wear shoes they
care about.
These are very different religious rituals from what I’d
imagine occur in just about any current religion.
CHAPTER 30
More logistical matters here. This one notes there should be an altar to burn incense from –
and the chapter concludes that anyone who burns this incense for their own
enjoyment shall be cut off from the people. There’s also a basin to wash
yourself with – because before entering the holies of holies, you aren’t going
to tread in dirt. Oh, and there’s
anointing oil.
Finally (well, it’s actually mid-chapter, but no matter)
there is a census tax. Everyone – by
which it means every adult male – counted in the syllabus must pay a tax. It’s a purely flat tax, which is unusual
given the Bible’s frequent concerns for social justice, but there you go.
CHAPTER 31
This is another generic filler chapter, but at least it’s a
short generic filler chapter. Even
better – it’s the last of these as next up we get Aaron and the Golden
Calf.
But here, there are two things of note. One, the Lord appoints artisans to makes his
stuff. Uri, son of Hur. Hey – Hur! He was the guy on the mountain helping to hold up Moses’ hands way
back during the Battle of the Amalek.
(checks). Yup, there’s Hur, back
in Chapter 17. Apparently his son Uri is quite the handyman. In fact, he’s asked to be a holy
handyman. Not bad.
Second, the Lord makes it very clear that his Sabbath is to
be observed. And he isn’t kidding –
“Whoever desecrates [the Sabbath] shall be put to death. If anyone does work on that day, that person
must be cut off from the people.” OK,
so apparently working on the Sabbath doesn’t qualify as desecrating it as
there’s a different penalty. So I
wonder what it would be then? I suppose
it’s something like openly defying the Lord – something you’re not supposed to
do on any day becomes doubly bad if done on the Sabbath. So don’t do it.
CHAPTER 32
OK, now for a chapter everyone has heard of – the Golden
Calf chapter. Here’s the short version
– Israelites figure Moses is taking too long, so they have Aaron build a golden
calf and then they worship it as the God that delivered them from Egypt. God is cheesed and wants to go all Sodom and
Gomorrah on them, but Moses talks him out of it. Then Moses goes down, gets cheesed, breaks the two tablets, and
has 3,000 killed by the Levites.
Well now, that sure is a memorable bit of action –
especially coming after many chapters of no action. Reading it outright, the most striking thing is how utterly,
utterly feckless the Israelites seem to be.
People – God just put 10 plagues on people he didn’t like. He parted the seas. He literally rains bread upon you to
eat. He has water plop out of a
rock. Can you cut him some slack at
all? So the meeting with Moses is
running a little long. Deal with
it!
They don’t come off good at all. They may be God’s people, but they ain’t done dick to earn
it. OK, so God made a pact with
Abraham, but it seems like keeping his word to Abraham is the only thing the
Israelites have going for them. They
aren’t any more moral than another people – they’re just in the lucky sperm club,
theological division.
And why would they claim the golden calf is the God that
rescued them? You guys just built that
on your own. The footnotes say that the
calf is supposed to represent the Lord to them, but that defies the 10
Commandments – which were given to them back in Chapter 20. The whole thing is absurd and
maddening. What in hell is going on
here?
Well, that’s the thing – there’s a dirty little secret about
this. The entire story is just a
parable of a sort. It has nothing to do
with what happened all those years ago and had everything to do with what
happened later on while the Bible was written.
If you were to flash forward, during the divided kingdom
days, we’ll see another golden calf worshiped by the Hebrew, just as they do here. It was in the divided kingdom days that the
first two of the four main Torah sources were written: J and E. This particular story comes from source E,
which is believed to have been the priests of the northern kingdom of Israel,
which consisted of the 10 tribes.
Off the top of my head, I don’t really know where the golden
calf was in those times – in Judea or Israel.
But if I were a betting man, I’d say Israel. It all fits in, doesn’t it?
Let’s take it from the perspective of author E. He’s a priest living in a time when the
people around him are lapsing into literal idolatry, worshiping this golden
calf. That strikes him as an affront,
but him just saying it’s an affront isn’t just enough. After all, he’s just a
priest. It works much better if you
have Moses himself horrified. So you
put the story back in the past as a religious parable to denounce present
conditions. And you get a really vivid
sense of how much the writer hated that damn calf. Moses has the calf burnt into fire, ground down into powder, then
scattered into water – and then made the people drink it. I’ve heard of making people eat their words,
but here they’re made to drink their calf.
Oh, one other note along these lines: the priests of Israel
were supposedly descended from Moses, and those of Judea from Aaron. Thus you not only get Moses being the hero
(naturally), but also a gratuitous slam on Aaron. First he makes the calf (boo! Hiss!), and then when Moses
confronts him he tries to blame the masses.
Wuss.
A few other things about this chapter. First, it’s one of the great examples of
someone negotiating with God. We saw Aaron do it way back when over Sodom and
Gomorrah, and we saw Moses do it at the burning bush, and now Moses does it
again. When God wants to start over and
make a great nation of Moses (and thus kill all other sons of Abraham), Moses
is there to calm God down. You gave
your word to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel!
The Egyptians will say you took your people out of their land just to
slaughter them – and how will that make you look!
There is one other ghastly bit toward the end. Moses, back with the Israelites, declares,
“Whoever is for the LORD, come to me” and all the tribe of Levi joins him. Then he tells them to take arms, and they
kill 3,000 other Israelites. This is under Moses direct orders, mind you:
“God back and forth through the camp, from gate to gates, and kill your
brothers, your friends, your neighbors!”
Ghastly, isn’t it? That’s
nothing – for their service to the LORD that day – their willingness to kill
thousands of their brothers, friends, and neighbors – they become the
priests. Yeah, they earn the role of
the priestly class because they took up arms against the other Israelites. That’s mind-boggling in its theological implications.
CHAPTER 33
God is still calming down from the infamous calf incident of
the previous chapter. He repeatedly
calls them a stiff-necked people, and he decides it’s best if he doesn’t get
that close to them. He won’t personally
go in their company because “I might consume you on the way.” He kinda wants
them all dead. He repeats this, too:
“Were I to go up in your company, even for a moment, I would destroy you
all.” Jeepers, the boss sure is
pissed.
Moses he likes. In
fact Moses he gives a great honor to – he lets Moses see him. Apparently, a person can’t actually see
God’s face or he’d die right away. (So
I guess previous statements of seeing God’s face – including one in this
chapter in verse 11 – are just metaphors).
But Moses will get a high honor.
God tells Moses to hide in a rock crevice and God will walk past and
Moses can see God from behind.
I wonder what changed from the very early days. God used to walk around Eden and walk with
Enoch, but that was back before the Flood.
Now if anyone even sees his face, they die. That’s quite the difference.
Click here for the next few chapters from Exodus.
Click here for the next few chapters from Exodus.
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