Any careful reader of the Torah will notice that sacrifice is not all about priests. First, the instructions for sacrifice in Lev 1-5 give the non-priestly offerant an active role in the process, calling for the Israelite who brings the sacrifice to slaughter the sacrificial animal at the entrance to the tabernacle and to cut it into the pieces that will be laid on the altar (e.g., Lev 1:6, 12). (For reasons I do not understand, many translations, including NJPS, RSV, NRSV, and Jacob Milgrom in the Anchor Bible, do their best to obscure this point, turning the Hebrew’s active verbs for those actions into the passive.) The point at which the instructions call for the priests to take over is when the altar comes into play: it is priests who dispose of the blood produced in the slaughter and who see to the burning of the parts of the animal (e.g., Lev 1:5-9, 11-13).
Many modern readers feel that the Torah tells them more than they want to know about sacrifice, but for all their detail, the instructions don’t tell you everything you need to know to offer a sacrifice—and ancient readers certainly felt this, as the many attempts to fill the gaps in the literature of the Second Temple period and the rabbinic era demonstrate. For example, there is no clear guidance in the Torah about the order in which the animal parts should be placed on the altar. It is possible that list of Lev 1:8 is intended as a model for priests to follow, but it is not labeled as such. It is also possible that the order doesn’t matter, although such lack of concern is certainly not typical of P. Or, to offer a second example: the Torah is very clear about the necessity of lighting and maintaining a fire on the altar (Lev 1:7), but what kind of wood is to be used, and where does it come from? Both the literature of the Second Temple period (e.g., Neh 10:35, 13:31; Jub 21:12-14) and the Mishnah (m. Ta‘an. 4:5) worry about these questions.
The point I’m trying to make is that P’s laws of sacrifice are hardly a handbook intended to provide a young priest with everything he needs to know to do his job. Rather, they appear to be outward-facing (if you’ll forgive the jargon), a priestly mission statement (to use another piece of jargon), directed at the people of Israel as a whole. This was my view before reading Liane Feldman’s impressive book, The Story of Sacrifice, and it’s also the view of a number of scholars whose work focuses on P or Leviticus (see, e.g., James Watts, Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus: From Sacrifice to Scripture [2007]). But Feldman has made an important contribution that deepens and strengthens this understanding. By taking seriously the narrative presentation of the laws of sacrifice and giving careful attention to the narrative form, Feldman shows how P opens the tabernacle and the world of sacrifice to all Israel in ways that go far beyond those I’ve just indicated.
By distinguishing between Israelites as implied readers and Israelites as characters in the narrative, Feldman draws our attention to the way the narrative allows the reader to be present with Moses as God reveals the laws of sacrifice so that the Israelite-readers know those laws before Moses has time to repeat them, as commanded by God, to the Israelites-characters.
By allowing the reader of this story to share the perspective of its central prophetic character, the story grants them direct access to the divine commands…. Far from being an exclusive instruction manual for the priests, Yahweh’s extended speeches invite the reader into the inner circles of the cult and explain its workings to them first, even before Aaron and his sons are ordained as priests. (Story of Sacrifice, 48)
Further, Feldman shows, the character-Israelites too are given some perhaps unexpected privileges by the narrative:
Even while the character-Israelites are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the reader-Israelites, they are still placed in a position of priority over the priests in the structuring of Yahweh’s speeches….with the first, lengthier speech in Lev 1-5 being for the Israelites as a whole, and the second, less complete, speech in Lev 6-7 being for Aaron and his sons. It is worth emphasizing…that…the reader-Israelite remains privy to these instructions….. In other words, the discourse itself subverts the differentiation between priest and lay Israelite that is being constructed in the story world. (Story of Sacrifice, 48)
The very fact of this story’s existence and the narrator’s choice to allow the reader-Israelite to hear and see the internal working of the cult challenges the hegemony of the priesthood and centers the ordinary Israelite in the life of the cult. In many ways, this is a story of the democratization of ideas about religious practice in ancient Israel. (Story of Sacrifice, 198)
Feldman’s attention to P’s narrative thus provides a framework for understanding the significance of details such as the role of non-priests in sacrifice and allows her to make a disciplined and compelling case for P’s inclusion of all Israel in its understanding of the cult.
Let me say a few words about one particularly difficult passage that benefits from Feldman’s approach: the story of Nadav and Avihu (Lev 10). According to Feldman, what Aaron’s sons did wrong was to attempt to gain favor with God for themselves instead of serving in their appointed roles as mediators between God and the people of Israel (Story of Sacrifice, 104-107). This, she suggests, is the point of God’s words in Lev 10:3 as reported by Moses to Aaron, which she translates as follows: “I will be sanctified by those near to me, but before all of the people I will be present” (Story of Sacrifice, 104). One innovative move here is to translate the vav of ve‘al as “but” rather than “and,” as it is usually translated (e.g., NJPS, RSV, NRSV, Milgrom). To my mind, this move reflects a compelling understanding of a passage that has been a longstanding challenge to interpreters. Feldman’s translation “I will be present” for ’ekaved is also innovative, drawing on P’s use of kavod to designate God’s presence. I find it appealing, though I would have like a little more discussion. But Feldman’s reading of the passage is persuasive even with the more standard understanding of the verb as “be glorified” (RSV) or “gain glory” (NJPS).
Now a word or two about an area in which I would have liked to see a little more discussion. Throughout the book Feldman takes account of scholarly arguments for multiple layers in and editorial additions to the priestly source, but her commitment to the primacy of narratology makes her skeptical of most of them. If a passage makes narrative sense, she is generally prepared to accept it as an original part of P or at least to argue that the editor responsible for adding it was so deeply attuned to the narrative that distinguishing the passage as a separate source doesn’t make much of a difference (Story of Sacrifice, 24-25). Because of the distinctive concerns of the priestly source, she is also prepared to consider “questions of the internal consistency of ritual logic and cultic categories” in the effort to understand the composition history of the text, but she chooses to reject (or at least to “set aside entirely”) “lexical and stylistic criteria” (Story of Sacrifice, 6), an approach that she characterizes as “precisely the opposite” of that of Israel Knohl in The Sanctuary of Silence (Story of Sacrifice, 6n.16).
These issues become particularly relevant in the final chapter of the book, in which Feldman discusses the possibility and practice of the decontamination of the tabernacle in Lev 16 and 17, arguing for continuity between the two chapter on grounds of both “internal legal consistency” and narrative fit (Story of Sacrifice, 191-192; quotation, 191). Since these chapters stand on either side of the seam between P and the Holiness Code according to the standard scholarly view, Feldman’s reading has significant implications for that view of the relationship between P and H, about which she expresses, very briefly, her skepticism (Story of Sacrifice, 192-193). I would have liked to hear more. Indeed, it seems to me that Feldman’s narratological reading would ultimately be enriched even if perhaps complicated, by attention to features such as style and phraseology that have long informed scholarly discussion of the layers of the priestly source, and not only Knohl’s.
Let me conclude with my thanks to Professor Feldman. The Story of Sacrifice offers a powerful demonstration of the potential of a narratological reading to illumine a unit of the Torah usually understood as virtually devoid of narrative, and we are all in her debt for it.