Liane Feldman’s The Story of Sacrifice offers new and important correctives to the standard story about the Priestly Source, which she renames the priestly narrative. The contributions of her book integrate the voice of the law and ritual from the priestly narrative into our thinking about creation, anthropology, as well as law and narrative.
Feldman has written a fresh, poetic, and inspired literary study of the priestly narrative. This narrative is replete with ritual and with a suspended sense of time. Time in this narrative barely moves but the narrative is complex with the intricacies of ritual. Feldman writes with respect to the ritual components:
“they are not simply repurposed older materials; they are essential components of the story and its various elements. To separate the narrative and the ritual components of the priestly narrative is to destroy the internal structure and logic of the story” (p. 5).
She refuses to read the priestly source as derivative or removed from the spirit of the Hebrew Bible, as Wellhausen, among others, suggested. Her hermeneutics of the priestly narrative is dynamic, variegated, and complex. She focuses on the unity of the priestly narrative and argues that this narrative is central and essential to biblical theology.
She gifts her readers with a priestly narrative that is elegant and even sublime in its description. In a really beautiful way, she helps us appreciate the sophistication and elegance of the priestly narrative, not unlike the way Lowth and Herder contributed to the appreciation of biblical poetry as sublime. The narrative of the priestly tradition is complex and intricate, but always with an eye to the ethereal, divine, heavenly, and primordial. The priestly narrative is about time that organizes the cosmos and the earth, but it can also exemplify an earthly time that stands still in order to create and in order to recreate and regenerate. The priestly narrative, Feldman argues, commemorates ritual. This narrativized ritual creates a world of priestly performance that is textualized.
This is not a book about history or the dating of the Priestly source. Neither is it a book that reflects much about the methodological presuppositions of source criticism. We walk away understanding that there is nothing late about P, but neither is there anything particularly early about P. It is a book that celebrates the ongoing production, engagement, and formation of a narrative that is replete with reciprocal engagements between the deity and the people and the leadership, but that also stands still in time (e.g. pp. 108-111 concerning the 8th day of tabernacle inauguration), while it constructs a heaven on earth (e.g. p. 37 where space for the deity is created).
Feldman also advances the well-documented discourse of Robert Cover and many others on nomos and narrative as interrelated aspects of a single text. Feldman’s overarching argument is that nomos and narrative – the law and the ritual - need to be understood as a coherent whole. Thus, according to Feldman, all attempts to undermine the integrity and the centrality of the law (which she often calls ritual) are compromised from the start – they are already biased and don’t give the priestly narrative a fair hearing. Instead, Feldman refuses to decouple ritual and narrative. Rather, it is her claim that the priestly source is a text that focuses on the relationship between ritual instruction and narrative discourse (p. 10). Her insistence on including this priestly narrative into this well-established integration both in legal theory and in ancient Jewish rabbinic texts is profoundly important both for understanding how central the biblical and the “extra” biblical materials are for the formation of the essential beliefs, practices, and liturgical imagination of Judaism.
I want to suggest that Feldman’s argument about textualized ritual resonates elegantly with scripturalised prayer as discussed by Judith Newman, in her magisterial monograph, Praying By the Book. Feldman contributes to a larger framework for ritual (prayer, sacrifice, etc.) that is scripturalised and textualized. So, for example, she writes “the act of writing about ritual creates a new context for its interpretation, and thus potentially changes the symbolism itself” (p. 12). The book seeks to understand the priestly ritual as “world-building” or as part of the creation of the world. In a lovely phrase, she writes: “legal discourse is world-building discourse.”
The three creation stories (Genesis 1, Genesis 9, and Leviticus 16-17) as Feldman argues, in a profound way, create the framework for exile, destruction, restoration, and divine presence again and again on earth. Here I want to suggest that the themes that Liane expresses are exemplified across the priestly narrative but also continue and resurface in many texts, e.g., the Hodayot (imitatio dei), Wisdom of Solomon (creation), Jubilees (nomos and narrative), and 4QInstruction (raz nihyeh). The potential for poiesis – creation – both physical and literary – is instantiated and disseminated through the priestly source. Furthermore, the priestly source brings heaven and earth together through a ritual which is efficacious and transformative for the human being. Feldman’s approach to the priestly narrative is illuminating for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I believe that the Dead Sea Scrolls can reciprocally illuminate the priestly narrative. In this sense, I found tremendous resonances with Feldman’s book for the growth and vitality of Judaism, which is already and always across the Hebrew Bible, but especially in the priestly source. The priestly narrative creates a dynamic story that continues to be told and retold (p. 40).
At the very beginning of her monograph, Feldman opens by referring to two scholars that many might find to be an odd pair: Julius Wellhausen and Robert Alter. At first glance, one might worry that Feldman is conflating anti-Jewish rejection of the law with a post-enlightenment rejection of the mantic and apotropaic tendencies in ancient texts. Feldman does indeed differentiate the two scholars as she challenges both of their expressions of dismissiveness of the priestly source and even their rejection of the law. She refuses Wellhausen’s humiliation of the law and the uncomprehending post-enlightenment rejection of sacrifice. Feldman achieves this critique with much nuance and subtlety. She does not engage directly with their biases, however, against Judaism or against legalism; instead, Feldman courageously and consistently confronts scholarly incomprehension and degradation of the law by taking the high road. She thereby sustains an entire monograph full of delightful detail of ritual, sacrifice, and the law. The book reflects on a priestly commitment to the call to “be holy.” The result is a deep and nuanced engagement with the narrative of the priestly voice, both as it is elevated and celebrated. The story is one of law and narrative as well as one of character analysis and ritual. She never apologizes for the detail, but consistently engages the broader implications for the universal insights of the priestly narrative. She argues these can contribute to our understanding of biblical theology: creation, concepts of deity, anthropology, and the details of blood, sacrifice, and related rituals. So, while Feldman does not write a book about antisemitism or about Spätjudentum, we nevertheless get the message about her correctives to historical-critical analysis of the priestly source.
She demonstrates that the legalistic and ritual details of the priestly source belong as an early and integrated part of the priestly narrative and cannot be decoupled from the larger theological discourses that were privileged as “early” in protestant biblical scholarship. The centrality of creation – which is crystallized in not one, but in three creation narratives through creation, destruction, and rebuilding.
The ongoing shaping, editing, and transmission of the priestly narrative come to be part of the vital and vibrant narrative that is emerging from the second temple period and beyond. Liane Feldman’s corrective is philologically rigorous, poetic, and conceptually rich for the understanding concepts of deity, ritual, and especially holiness (p. 141). In the end, the priestly narrative is dynamic, life-giving, and enormously intricate and elegant.
In conclusion, I want to celebrate this book that teaches us how to love the priestly narrative. Feldman’s reading shows the whole and the parts of this narrative. For Feldman, the priestly narrative is a coherent and integrative work that is formative for ancient Judaism. In Feldman’s hands, the priestly narrative sets the agenda both for the particular and the universal with respect to the conceptual framework for an emerging Judaism, and ultimately a system of rabbinic law that is deeply indebted to the priestly narrative.
Hindy Najman is the Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oriel College, University of Oxford