Liane M. Feldman. The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source. FAT 141. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020.
The pentateuchal Priestly source (P), which occupies much of Genesis through Numbers and briefly reappears at the end of Deuteronomy, tells Israelite history with a particular focus on the protocols of the priesthood and the mechanics of worship. This source is the subject of one of the great comeback stories of academic biblical scholarship. At the outset of the twentieth century, scholars generally regarded P as at best embarrassing, at worst sinister—an intrusion of pedantic, “Jewish” legalism into sublime, “Israelite” spirituality. By the end of the twentieth century, for reasons both intellectual and sociological, the script had flipped. Scholars were celebrating P as one of the richest, most inspired contributions to biblical thought.
Against this backdrop, it is interesting that both the detractors and the defenders have basically agreed about what P is: a practical compendium of ritual—something like a “handbook” written by and for priests. Jacob Milgrom opened his monumental commentary on Leviticus by framing the rehabilitation of P as a matter of showing that ritual could be theologically sophisticated. He did not question that P was indeed defined by ritual. Other positive reappraisals of P have also tended to take it as axiomatic that the merit of P was in the religious system that it constructed—not, as with the Yhwistic (J) or Elohistic (E) sources, in the story that it was telling. There is perhaps no clearer visual representation of this than in Frank Moore Cross’s Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973). Directly under a subheading asking, “Is P a Narrative Source?” Cross stated flatly, “P is not a narrative source.” So much for that!
Liane M. Feldman’s new monograph, The Story of Sacrifice: Ritual and Narrative in the Priestly Source, takes issue with both sides of this polemical tussle. She certainly agrees with those who have reclaimed P as sophisticated and interesting. However, she also criticizes them for ceding too much control to the detractors over the very terms of the debate. Defending P as a handbook of ritual is wrong, she argues, not because P is unworthy of defense but because it is not a handbook of ritual. Instead, it is a story—the “Priestly Narrative,” as she calls it—in which ritual plays a foundational literary role. “The central thesis of this book,” she explains, “is not only that the legal and ritual materials in the Priestly Narrative are thoroughly literary, but that they were composed as literature” (p. 5).
Let me be clear what Feldman does not mean by this. She does not mean simply that P frames ritual stipulations as divine speech within a narrative. This is certainly true, and she acknowledges as much (see, e.g., p. 6). However, her argument is actually much more innovative. P is not ritual in narrative. Instead, it is ritual as narrative. Ritual is not suspended within the story but is integrally interwoven with it, actively advancing features such as plot and character. In effect, there was no meaningful literary difference between “ritual” and “narrative” for P—until modern scholars, shaped by their own historically contingent literary ideals, went looking for one. Understanding exactly how and why ritual plays this role for P is the basic task of this book.
Feldman’s introduction provides the theoretical and methodological groundwork for this project. In contrast to the separation of historical-critical and literary approaches that took root in the field in the second half of the twentieth century, Feldman cogently articulates why the two must go hand in hand. It is true that “literary norms and even referents within a story are conditioned by the sociohistorical context in which a text was written” (p. 4). Yet at the same time, “those referents may or may not have a direct correlation to the physical world(s) outside of the text” (p. 14). Put differently, literature is controlled by the historical and philological realities of the world in which it was composed—without thereby being reducible to those realities. Ancient authors could use literature to make claims that did not correspond to historical reality, but the claims themselves are historical data about how these authors imagined their world. Feldman’s concise account of this compelling approach, which is gaining traction throughout the field, is a tremendous contribution.
What does this framework mean for the study of P in particular? For Feldman, there are two major upshots. The first is that scholars who see Priestly ritual mainly as a means for reconstructing historical Israelite practices are asking the wrong question. “Any theorization about ritual drawn from the biblical texts,” she explains, “must be a theorization about the imagined ritual world of a text, which may or may not bear a resemblance to its historical context” (p. 15). In other words, scholars should ask what these rituals are doing as part of the story. The second upshot is that the internal compositional development of P need not be the premise and primary object of historical-critical analysis. Criteria for the delineation of inner-P redactional strata, such as ritual inconsistency, appear less problematic when they are understood in the context of a narrative than in that of a systematic handbook. Without denying that P underwent redactional development, Feldman argues that most of the stages coherently and consistently develop the narrative that they inherited.
Following the introduction are the four core chapters of the book, each offering a case study in the narrative role of ritual in P. In chapter two, Feldman analyzes how P narratively constructs the setting of its story as it depicts the literal, physical construction of the tabernacle. She shows that many of the features for which P has been maligned, such as repetitiveness and punctiliousness, set the terms of the space in which its ritual drama unfolds. Chapter three moves into the heart of that drama. Discussing three scenes of ritual innovation—Moses’s first sacrifice, Aaron’s first sacrifice, and Nadab’s and Abihu’s impromptu incense offering—Feldman shows that ritual instructions are not merely set forth prescriptively. Instead, they serve to contextualize narrative depictions of specific ritual events that themselves theorize ritual. Chapter four addresses narrative strategies of simultaneity in the chaotic final day of the cultic inauguration. These depictions serve, once again, to construct space—specifically with an eye to delineating boundaries. Feldman builds on this in chapter five, the last main chapter, showing how purification from sin—an iconic feature of P—is intimately related to this narratively constructed space. A brief conclusion summarizes her findings.
Two overarching claims about P emerge from Feldman’s careful analysis. The first, which should be obvious by now, is that we cannot understand Priestly ritual without investigating what it is doing in (and for) the story. Nowhere is this clearer than in Feldman’s discussion of Aaron’s inaugural sacrifice, the strongest case study in the book. Scholars have long seen this sacrifice as a messy redactional insertion because it does not fit other ritual prescriptions. Feldman shows that the inconsistencies in fact tell a story: “Entry into the tabernacle building,” she explains, “requires the priest to be fully ordained, sanctioned, and summoned to enter. At this point in the story, Aaron is none of these” (p. 93). Constrained by these circumstances, Aaron improvises in a manner that responds to one particular moment rather than embodying a normative principle for all time. The ritual prescriptions facilitate this fluidity, driving plot and character development. They are, in other words, part of the story.
Although Feldman shows compellingly what may be gained by reading Priestly ritual as narrative, I wonder whether that requires us to abandon the “handbook” approach just yet. As literarily unsophisticated as this “handbook” reading of P might seem, it does capture an important aspect of how ancient readers appear to have understood this literature. For many Jews in the Second Temple period, the Priestly material in the Pentateuch seems to have served as a practical blueprint for how to worship YHWH properly. Later, as Feldman acknowledges, the rabbis called Leviticus torat kohanim, “the teaching of/for the priests”—a moniker that means, essentially, “priestly handbook.” Ancient Jews surely understood that this material contained narrated events. It is less clear to me that they saw the rituals as an undifferentiated part of those narrated events. It seems telling, for instance, that the ritual sections of P, not its cosmogony or deluge or wilderness narratives, were what generated an entire order of the Mishnah.
Now, even if some ancient Jews read P this way, it does not mean that Bible scholars should too. Nevertheless, I think it calls attention to the possibility that some degree of distinction between “narrative” and “ritual” is more native to P than Feldman claims. She presents her approach as overcoming the ritual-narrative dichotomy. To me it seems more accurate to say that she has reversed its typical dynamic: where most modern scholars have put story in service to ritual, she puts ritual in service to story. There are real hermeneutical benefits to doing so. Yet at the same time, my understanding of ancient readings of P leads me to think that, at the end of the day, the story really does serve the task of setting forth a program of ritual. What would sway me further in Feldman’s direction would be evidence that I am wrong about these ancient readings—that they did not, in fact, share the modern tendency to see a distinction between ritual and narrative. As it would turn out, Feldman’s present research takes up exactly this question. I look forward to reading this work, which, it seems to me, stands not only to develop Feldman’s claims in The Story of Sacrifice but also to bolster them.
Feldman’s second overarching argument is that P constructs an implied Israelite reader who may not be equated with any of the narrative-internal characters, including the priests themselves. The reader is granted knowledge about YHWH, Moses, Aaron, and the cult that lay Israelites and even some soon-to-be priests do not know—or, at least, do not know as early as the reader does. The most concrete example of this is the sanctuary itself, which is off-limits except to priests. Because this is the setting of much of the Priestly Narrative, it means that reader-Israelites are granted a full vantage onto a space in which their ostensible narrative-internal counterparts, the character-Israelites, may not set foot. If P is obsessed with setting up boundaries to the sacred, Feldman argues that it subverts those boundaries as a native effect of its discourse. If she is right about this literary dynamic, it represents a strong challenge to facile equations between P and the historical priesthood.
I am not convinced that Feldman is right. Her notion of a subversive, “democratizing” P is profoundly compelling, and I very much want to buy it. What gives me pause is that her reading depends on an assumption about the implied reader that could easily go the other way. She is certainly correct that “the implied reader [of P] is a mid-first-millennium ancient Israelite” (p. 3). However, from this she extrapolates that the implied reader is any run-of-the-mill mid-first-millennium Israelite. This does not follow. The implied reader could just as well be one of those mid-first-millennium Israelites who was specifically associated with the priesthood. In such a case, P would not in fact be inherently subversive. If Feldman’s interpretation is to be more than just one possible way of reading P—if it is to show that this is how P works as literature—then she would need to make a historical argument that the implied reader was indeed intended to be non-priestly. Unfortunately, there is little evidence with which such an argument may be made. We simply do not know enough about the social setting of biblical texts before the Hellenistic period. As I see it, this poses a problem for Feldman’s efforts to integrate historical-critical and literary-theoretical approaches. Even after P is source-critically extracted, the thorny issues of historicity and authorial/redactional intent do not really go away.
For my part, I am curious whether the Priestly self-subversion that Feldman identifies may instead be appreciated as a consequence of the incorporation of P within the canonical Pentateuch. Put differently, I wonder whether she has credited P with a literary achievement that in fact belongs to the pentateuchal redactors. Patterns of scriptural exegesis in the late Second Temple period seem to indicate that by then, the Pentateuch was more widely accessible. This would only increase throughout history; today, it is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. With this in mind, I would readily agree with a slightly more cautious version of Feldman’s argument: as part of the Pentateuch, yes, P subversively grants non-priests a tantalizing window into the ostensibly guarded cult. Whether P itself does that is a different matter.
Feldman’s new reading of P boldly takes on two of the most entrenched dichotomies in biblical studies: (1) ritual vs. narrative, and (2) literature vs. history. While I do not think that she has fully overcome these dichotomies, she has raised crucial questions about them. This is a far more valuable contribution than neatly packaged, conventional solutions. The Story of Sacrifice charts a course for innovative future work both on P and on broader issues in theory and method in biblical studies. I am grateful to Feldman for inviting us into these conversations through this excellent book.
Ethan Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Villanova University.