Torah Posting: אמר
This parashah begins by considering a juicy tension between the kinds of ritual purity requirements we’ve been learning about for a while and the one thing that matters more to Jewish people than all of that: family.
We have already learned that priests are not to touch or share space with dead bodies, for it would interfere with their duties. And this parashah is about to go into even more detail about the kinds of precautions the priests must take. But first, a leniency is given: for a close relative — a parent, a sibling, a child — a priest may incur the impurity of touching their body if they die. We’ve seen how seriously the Torah takes this kind of impurity for anyone involved in altar service, much less the priests themselves. It is noteworthy to observe that it takes the bond of family even more seriously.
Still, after that come some fairly strict behavioral and purity rules for members of the hereditary priesthood.
No shaving of any part of the head. No making gashes in their flesh (a foreign practice). No marrying sex workers or divorcées (hrrrrmmmmm). If a priest’s daughter goes into sex work, she must be burned to death (hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm).
Let’s stop here for a second, actually. In fact, let’s go back one book to the very beginning of the establishment of the Mishkan and the priesthood in the first place. In the commentary on Parashat Tetzaveh, I pulled together the several references I had made thus far to the documentary hypothesis, the theory of several discrete authorial voices in the Torah that belie its historical nature as a composite. That was a good place to bring it back up because, to me, the Priestly (P) voice is by far the most noticeable, and it really kicks in once, you know, there’s a priesthood.
The Torah’s Priestly voice is very judgmental and strident, and it’s also awfully specific, and to me it has always smacked of a priesthood that is establishing itself as an authority within the existing mythic body of a people. So I bring it up here again to suggest that there is a voice of human authority and control trying to assert itself here in these high-falutin’ misogynistic precepts for priests.
But something I don’t say enough, perhaps, as I enjoy the looks on people’s faces when I assert that the Torah is a composite, is that this does not mean the Torah as a received text is not a unity. It definitely matters how it could have come together over time, and what the contributions to the lineage of particular authors and redactors at particular times were, but it matters just as much that this is the Torah as it is, and the creation story of the Jewish people contains all of these voices.
All I’m saying is, let’s not give the Priestly voice all the authority here. But as long as we’re understanding the priesthood, we clearly should take into account what the priests (hypothetically) said about themselves.
The high priest has stricter rules. No uncovering the head (interesting in light of how the Torah specifies that for the high priest, whereas the “modern” practice is for all Jewish men* to cover their heads). The high priest cannot share space with a dead body, even a parent. One strange line seems to suggest he cannot leave the sanctuary at all, but Ibn Ezra writes that this may have meant that he is not to leave for any profane purpose, only to fulfill his duties. And, just to top off the misogynistic priestly rules section, while other priests may marry a woman whois not a sex worker or divorcée, the high priest may only marry a virgin of his own tribe.
By way of another “And God spoke to Mosheh” segue, Mosheh is then given instructions he must impart to his brother, Aharon, the first high priest, about physical qualifications for the priesthood.
If a descendant of Aharon is born with a physical defect, such as a sensory or motor disability, or even breaks a bone (or has his testes crushed), he is disqualified to offer altar service. As a father of a child who was born with cataracts, which I assume counts as a “תבלל בעינו” (“a growth in his eye”), this section is particularly galling, but not only is she female, we are not hereditary kohanim, so we’ll not be considering her ritually inferior around here. These sons may eat the offerings in the sacred precinct, as is part of being in the priestly family, but they cannot approach the altar.
The next chapter turns to the donations made to the priesthood and the rules around those. No priest is allowed to partake of the offerings while ritually impure. The many regular conditions and events that would cause such a thing are repeated. The procedure for purifying is to wash in water, and then he can eat after the sun sets.
No layperson nor employee or servant of a priest may eat of the sacred donations, but a wholly owned person (slave) or person born into his household may. This is about defining the boundaries of the hereditariness of the priesthood, I reckon. A daughter of a priest who marries a layperson may no longer eat of the sacred donations(, because this part was written by priests, and such a daughter would no longer be priestly property). If she is widowed or divorced and has no children, she may return to her father’s ownership and then eat of it again.
If a layperson eats of the sacred donations unwittingly, they have to pay the priests for it with a 20% premium (lol come on). But the text — i.e. God — then sternly states that the priests are responsible to not let this happen.
Then God turns to the offered animals themselves, which must be without blemish or imperfection. There are exceptions for certain lower-severity freewill offerings, but not for the most solemn ones.
Some (rudimentary) rights and dignities are established for animals to be offered. A newborn animal must be allowed seven days with its mother before it can be offered. No animal shall be slaughtered on the same day as its young.
The final commandment of this section about offerings is that thanksgiving offerings must be eaten on the same day, and none of it shall be left over. God then signs off this part with some of the customary seriousness about God’s holy name and bringing the people out of Egypt for all this.
In chapter 23, we get the most succinct summary yet of the Biblically commanded sacred times. I often take the repetition of such information to be further documentary hypothesis evidence, but clearly it also has a mnemonic effect, and each repetition of such critical commandments takes a somewhat different angle. To me, if you were to direct someone to a single location to learn when all the holidays and whatnot are, this would be that section, because it is listed in year order, even though some of these festivals are not established yet because the people have not reached the Holy Land.
The first two are already observed and have been discussed at length. First is Shabbat, clearly, every seven days. Then the Full Moon of the first month is Passover.
Here and elsewhere in the Torah, the first month means “of spring,” because that is how time was reckoned in the ancient Mesopotamian world, but eventually other ways of counting the months and years would be overlaid in Jewish practice. The Jewish calendar year you’re used to seeing (5784 as of this writing) is reckoned from Rosh Hashanah (“Head of the Year”), in late summer, which is listed below, but it’s not called that here. It’s not called anything special yet, in fact. But by virtue of it being the New Moon of the month of Yom Kippur, it comes to be reckoned as the beginning of the religious year, as opposed to the lunisolar or agricultural year, or many of the other “new years” in Jewish culture, some of which originate many centuries later.
The whole festival of Passover is laid out, with a holy day on the first day, then seven days of festival offerings, then another holy day at the end.
The next observance in the year does not apply until the people have reached the Holy Land and can offer up its agricultural fruits. Meal offerings and a schedule for counting seven weeks from Passover are declared, and on the 50th day is the holy day of Shavu’ot (Weeks), which is also not named here, but its name is pretty self-explanatory. At the end of the description of Shavu’ot, God enters a reminder not to reap all the way to the edges of the field but rather to leave them for the poor and the stranger.
After that, in what is reckoned here as the 7th month, the timing is given for what we now call Rosh Hashanah, which the Torah simply says to observe by resting from labor, blowing loud blasts (on the shofar), and bringing offerings. Then the 10th day of that month is Yom Kippur, they day of Atonement, whose priestly rituals we have seen at length, and the punishment for not observing it is severe.
Then, five days later, on the Full Moon of the seventh month is the festival of Sukkot (Booths), which follows the same schedule as Passover: one holy day, seven days of festival offerings, another holy day at the end. Sukkot has new observances, though. There are four species of native plants to be gathered together into a sort of wand that is used ritually (it is now called a lulav), and everyone shall build and dwell in semi-exposed booths in the fields throughout the festival, rather than in their homes, which God says here is to remember the temporary dwellings in which the people lived when they came out of Mitzrayim.
Following the holiday section, instructions for lighting the lamps and placing the bread of display are given once more, which provides a multi-sensory reminder of the actual environment of these sacred observances.
The parashah ends with our first practical test case in a while, an actual narrative event as opposed to a legal download from on high. It’s the case of a man whose mother was a daughter of Yisra’el and whose father was Egyptian. His mother is named: Shlomit bat Dibri, of the tribe of Dan. A fight breaks out between this man and another son of Yisra’el, and the half-Israelite man pronounces the Holy Name blasphemously during the fight. He is brought before Mosheh and placed in custody until God renders a verdict.
God speaks to Mosheh saying, take the blasphemer outside the camp, let all who heard him profane the Name lay their hands upon his head, and then let the leaders of the community stone him to death. Then tell the people that this shall be the punishment for anyone who does this thing. If a person kills any human being — “כל-נפש אדם,” any earthling soul — that person shall be killed. If a person kills an animal, they shall make restitution for it: “נפש תחת נפש,” soul for soul. If a person maims another person, what was done shall be done in return — break for break, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. This is a very strict form of law, but all this seems like preface for the real point of the story, which is that the same law applied to a half-Israelite as it would to a full one, and in 24:22, it’s stated explicitly: There shall be one moral standard for stranger and citizen alike.
Then the parashah ends with the carrying out of this verdict; the blasphemer is stoned to death.
Pretty rough parashah overall, though at least there are some beautiful ritual parts in there to mix it up. Overall, what’s happening here is important. The legal transmission taking place here is expanding from the laws for a family to the laws of a tribe of tribes to the laws of a diverse and complex nation, which this people aspires to be.
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