It has been a pleasure to witness the inception and development of this book from an early stage. The project in this book is very close to my heart, for two reasons. First of all, it is moved by the love of systems, by the quest for order and coherence in what can seem like an array of technical details. It features the joy of re-creating a world from what may seem like dry, boring materials. But second and more important, it makes the forceful claim that seemingly boring, technical details are a powerful literary tool through which cultural agents tell a particular story that is central to their understanding of the world. The book powerfully makes a claim, to which I am likewise very committed in my own work, that when set in a particular context, instructions, procedures, and lists – I will return to lists later – can be read not only as impressive literary accomplishments but also as mines for intellectual history.
This claim is audacious and even defiant since, as Dr. Feldman discusses in the introduction, most scholars prefer to read the instructional-technical materials in the Priestly Code as insertions of self-standing manual that are not part of the greater plot. The common perception is that some priestly technocrat picked up some cookbook-like texts from a shelf in the temple and copied and pasted them into the otherwise compelling story of creation, ancestry, liberation, journey, and settlement. Dr. Feldman commences by describing an interview with Robert Alter in which he confesses to his dislike of sacrificial instructions because he finds them unappealing, non-aesthetic, non “literary” in the traditional sense. This is the view that is rejected in this book, in which Dr. Feldman beautifully demonstrates that the ritual instructions and their performance in Leviticus (and part of Numbers) are in fact an integral part of the narrative and are construed with utmost care for detail. These ostensibly “non-narrative” materials in Leviticus are actually playing a crucial part in the narrative and they are carefully designed to give the greater narrative depth and meaning. To make this point, Dr. Feldman offers a detail-oriented approach for the correspondence between space, time, characters, readers, and narrator in the texts, and makes a highly convincing case that the “non-narrative” parts are in fact narrative. They are not interruptions in the flow of the story, but rather they are the story. Furthermore – and this, I think, is my favorite thing about this book – the book shows that what is often read as repetitive is in fact one-timely: while the literary forms of the instructions lend themselves to a “do the same thing every time” reading, the moment in which the instructions are given in the story is a unique moment that only happened once. And this moment as such is charged with drama of its own. When read through the lens of one-timeliness, the speaking-events in the story are filled with new significance and, I dare say, beauty.
The case made in the book is so compelling that one wonders why it is such an uphill battle to make it. Why is the notion that Leviticus is telling a story, and that the ritual instructions and performances within it play the same part as – to use a trite example – the description of Achilles’s shield – so counterintuitive? I would suggest, and this is the first point I wish to bring to the discussion – that the problem is not just the form but the content. It is not just that these descriptions are “boring” because they describe procedures of repetitive activities and not human drama. Landscape descriptions or family genealogies in modern literature are also not dramatic, and yet nobody questions their inherent role in the story. These priestly materials were relegated to the position of auxiliary manuals imported from some professional libraries because of their content and not just because of their form. These materials in the Pentateuch needed to be explained away because they produce a theological and social vision that is very uncomfortable for modern readers: a God who desires to be served by meat and smoke, who needs to be approached in a particular place, who depends on hierarchical organizations of human servants, who is vulnerable to pollution caused by human bodily vicissitudes – all that is very uncomfortable. If the materials that give flesh and substance to these constructions of the relations between God and Israel are presented as mere manuals that are easily editable out of the “story,” then one can retain the prophetic maxim that sacrifices are a way in which people express their devotion but they “don’t really matter” to God and that all those cultic arrangements were celebrations meant to bring the people together and create social cohesion, but they are not meaningful in and of themselves.
What makes the common move of dismissing the “cultic instructions” and eliminating them from the narrative sequence possible is the fact that those instructions are not given a clear rationale or explanation. On the face of it, the Priestly Code does not make a point of saying why. It only says how. Since the “how” is not imminently meaningful, it is easy to dismiss it as nothing more than priestly busy-work, a set of procedures that are purposefully construed as complicated and elaborated so that the priests can assert their expertise. What Dr. Feldman shows beautifully in the book is that the “how,” when read carefully and in its narrative context, entails the “why”: it just does so through the details and not on top of them.
The preference of “how” to “why” as the main mode of discourse is what makes the Priestly Code so relevant to my own work, which focuses primarily on the Mishnah. In general, the Mishnah and the Priestly Code have a lot in common. Not only because the Priestly Code is the largest law code in the Bible and thus serves as infrastructure to much of the Mishnah’s edifice, but also because they share the same modus operandi of what we may call legal/ritual fantasy: imagining a normative world not necessarily as it exists now but as it should exist, and paying closest attention to the most minute details of which the fantasy is made in order to make it real. Both the Priestly Code and the Mishnah, although many people will probably not think of them at all in these terms, are works of imagination. These are works that create worlds from numerous technical details, and those are not worlds that exist as such, but works that express certain religious and social visions, woven from a mixture of real and ideal. And in both the Priestly Code and in the Mishnah, the keyword is process, or better yet: procedure. Human action in the world is proceduralized, broken down into small segments and then recombined in different configurations, and this proceduralization is both the medium and the message.
While the Mishnah, unlike the Priestly Text, is not a “story” and cannot be construed as a narrative, I find that many of Dr. Feldman’s greater insights on the reading of ritual instructions and ritual performances apply beautifully to the Mishnah as well. One of my major takeaways from the book is that the giving of instructions is an event. When individual named sages or anonymous sages in the Mishnah speak, and an external narrator reports “R. Yehoshua said this” or “When Rabbi Akiva was in the market he said that,” this narrator creates a story-world in which the speech-acts of the sages are events, events that create a world – in this case, the world of what came to be known as “the rabbinic movement.” But the ‘rabbinic movement’ is really, when looked at closely, a textual construct made exactly out of speech-events that lay out rules and procedures. Greater attention to the narrated nature of instructions and rulings in the Mishnah allows us to be more sensitive to the constructed nature of this text as a medium through which a certain ethos of Jewish observance is created.
Finally, I wish to point to one particular technical genre that Dr. Feldman engages with beautifully in the book, which I find particularly pertinent to the Mishnah, and this sub-genre is lists. The Priestly Code is notorious for its affection for lists, whether they take the form of genealogy, itinerary, inventory, or geographical survey. The material Dr. Feldman analyzes in the book includes quite a few lists, which she brings to life in beautiful ways. This driest literary form, which seems like a mere enumeration of items one after the other, is shown time and again to be meaningful, both in form and in content. The list of forbidden and permitted animals in Leviticus 11, for example, is an event of categorization which is significant as a marker of transformation in the world. The very fact that new categories of animals are created, and populated, marks a new stage in the relations between God, humanity, and the world. It is not just the content of the ‘bins’ that Leviticus 11 creates (pure, impure, abominable, etc.) but the very notion that such bins exist.
My personal favorite example, to which I admittedly never paid attention before reading the book, is the list of gifts given by the prince of each of the twelve tribes in Numbers chapter 7. This list is so repetitive that I just always skipped over it, but Feldman’s analysis revealed that this list communicates two very important messages that are indeed crucial to the story-world. First, the bringing of gifts itself, which is communicated through this list, is a critical part of the inauguration of the Tent of Meeting (as Feldman convincingly argues). The list creates a dynamic picture of the involvement of the people of Israel as a whole in the inauguration of the tent of meeting, thereby revealing the purpose of the sanctuary vis-à-vis the community in its entirety and not only via-a-vis the priests. It is set to correspond with the scene in Exodus 31, in which the people of Israel willingly contribute their personal possessions for the making of the Tent of Meeting. Second, the fact that each one of the tribes brings exactly the same gifts – despite the tribes’ different sizes – pushes forth an idealized image of egalitarianism and harmony within the community. This list and others like it speak, and if listened to, they reveal a well-crafted theological and social vision.
Robert Belknap distinguished between utilitarian lists on the one hand, which “fulfill a reference function, acting as a resource in which information is ordered so it can be swiftly and easily located,” and literary lists on the other hands, which “convey a specific impression; [their] role is the creation of meaning, rather than merely the storage of it.” Undoubtedly most people would classify the Priestly lists, and likewise Mishnaic lists, are utilitarian and thus will not suppose that such lists “mean” anything. I would argue, however, that Mishnaic lists, particularly very long and elaborate ones, have a very urgent message to communicate: the “impression” that they seek to convey to their readers or listeners is that the rabbinic system of knowledge, or halakhah, encompasses and governs anything and everything that exists. Mishnaic lists are essentially receptacles of abstract rabbinic principles filled with real-world items, thus establishing halakhah as a totalizing way, and indeed as the ultimate way, of seeing, organizing, and understanding the entire world. In addition, every Mishnaic list tells its own story about the world – about family, about nature, about community boundaries, etc. I believe Feldman’s work opens a compelling new direction in the study of ancient Judaism: the literary analysis of lists as media and messages.