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by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Excerpted from
Ancient Science Future Science: Finis Gloria
Mundi: The Living Fourth Way
from
TheCassiopaeaExperiment
Website
At the time of fall of the Northern kingdom in 722 BC, many of the
refugees from Israel (who could be considered members of the other
“ten tribes” if one wishes to look at it that way), fled south into
the rural hill country of Judah. Apparently, among them, were the
priest-prophets of Shiloh - the enemies of Jezebel who felt that
their king had been corrupted by a woman - bringing their E document
with them. It was at this point that E was joined to J – probably by
a member of the Aaronic priesthood in Jerusalem, as part of
King
Hezekiah’s program to consolidate his power.
Taking advantage of the situation presented to him – the destruction
of Israel, the acquiring of some of the population and its priests -
Hezekiah decided he wanted to unify the population and centralize
everything. He was going to be the new “David.” He was going to
unite all the people into one, and part of his unification plan
obviously included the psychological unity of religion. The lesson
of Omri’s tolerance for different groups and their beliefs was
obviously lost on Hezekiah. Either that, or he was well and truly
under the control of the priesthood.
This was the important moment in which the P document was created
and the division of priestly status was established, with the Aaronite priests taking the higher position and the
Shiloh priests -
the alleged descendants of Moses - reduced to a servile status,
which they did not like one bit. The P document was the Aaronic
priesthood’s editorial gloss of the combined JE document. Even
though they were unable to dispose of the stories in J and E (the
common property of the people), which reflected a hostile view of
Yahweh, history, and particularly of Aaron, they utilized them in
clever ways that laid the foundation for the later full and final
imposition of the controls of Yahweh. The P document sought to
glorify Yahweh over the other gods that were an integral part of the
original stories, and it would naturally have edited out any
praiseworthy mention of them, though, as noted, the stories
themselves could not be dispensed with.
The writer of P was someone who knew the texts of J and E. The
P
text was not just similar to J and E, nor was it just a lot of
doublets from J and E, it was written following J and E to stand, as
it’s own version of those stories. It was clearly written to be
presented in place of J and E, and that it is likely that J and E
were suppressed at the time of the presentation of P.
Not only did P open with a creation story and a flood story like J
and E, it went on to the major matters of the Abrahamic covenant,
the exodus from Egypt, and the covenant at Sinai. It refers to all
kinds of specific things that appear in the J/E text. There are more
than twenty-five cases of parallel accounts that were obviously not
intended to have been combined with J and E, as was done by a later
redactor. What’s more, though the similarities are blatant, the
differences are even more telling. The question we need to ask is
this: why did the author of P think that it was necessary to write a
new version when he obviously had J and E to hand?
First of all, we need to consider what is said in J and E that is
significantly different from P. The peoples of the northern kingdom
had a long tradition of descent from Moses himself. Their documents
cast Aaron in a very bad light as the priest of the Golden Calf and
whose sister, Miriam, was stricken with disease because she
criticized the wife of Moses. The northern kingdom, apparently, did
not worship a god who demanded sacrifices. The northern kingdom
beliefs emphasized prophets chosen by the gods, rather than a
bloodline priesthood.
In the purest sense, the creation of this part of the text was
primarily political just as the creation of the Christian theology
was primarily political. Both were designed to emphasize those
things that would make the subjects of the kingdom amenable to
control and domination.
Hezekiah undertook the elimination of all forms of religious
practice other than sanctioned worship at the Temple in Jerusalem.
Rigid religious control was instituted which meant that all the
places of worship of other gods, and even Yahweh, outside of the
Temple had to be destroyed. These worship sites were called “high
places.” They were eliminated and centralized religion under the
control of the Levites in Jerusalem became the law in secular terms.
In fact, the law of Yahweh became the law of the land. As noted, the
Levites in charge at that time were the Aaronid Levites.
In order to understand the implications of this, one needs to
understand what was being done at these “high places” and why. The
function of sacrifice in the Middle Eastern world was not just the
senseless killing of an animal; it was, for the most part, a ritual
killing of the animal for food, and part of it was offered to any of
a number of gods. The point was, if man wanted to eat meat, he had
to understand it as a taking of life, and such an act was sacred, to
be performed in a prescribed manner by an appointed person, a
priest, who also received a portion.
Thus, the effect of this ruling was that, if people wanted to have
lamb for dinner, you could no longer perform the sacrifice at home
or in a local “high place.” You had to haul your sheep to Jerusalem
where there was a conclave of Levites. This, of course, meant
putting a lot of economic control and power into the hands of a very
few people. At the same time, the Aaronid Levites who were writing
the text of this new Torah made sure to add in specific sacrifices
to Yahweh over and above the simple ritualized killing of their
dinner. This ensured the enrichment of the priesthood at the expense
of the people.
Nevertheless, this very point of seeking to centralize religion at
that moment in time, and the writing of the P document, leads to one
of the important clues regarding the alleged existence of the
Temple
of Solomon in Jerusalem.
You see, one of the central controversies about the Bible in terms
of researching the internal evidence of the documents in order to
determine who wrote what and when, has been the period from which
the P document originated. It has been long accepted that J and E
came from the earlier period - from the two kingdoms of Judah and
Israel (8th and 9th centuries BC). It is almost universally accepted
that D was written in the time of Josiah (mid to late 5th century
BC), as we will see further on. But, figuring out who wrote the P
document has been a very difficult job. And, the fact is, P is the
largest of the sources, being the size of the other three put
together.
The P document includes the creation story in the first chapter of
Genesis. It includes the cosmic version of the flood story, the
version in which the windows of the heavens and the fountains of the
deep are opened to flood the world. It has the stories of Abraham,
Jacob, the exodus, and the journey through the wilderness, most of
which are doublets of stories in J and E. It also contains a
tremendous body of law, covering about thirty chapters of Exodus and
Numbers and ALL of the book of Leviticus. So, this is a significant
question here that we cannot gloss over lightly!
In 1833, Eduard Reuss gave a lecture to his students in
Strassburg.
In this lecture, he stated that the biblical prophets do not refer
to the Priestly law; they do not quote the P part of the Bible, nor
do they give any impression that they are even familiar with it.
From this observation, Reuss concluded that the law was later than
the prophets.[1] Of course, Reuss was afraid to say this in public
and waited forty-six years before publishing a monograph on the
subject in 1879. At this point, one of his braver students had
already taken the idea even further, publishing his own paper on the
matter.
This student was Karl Graf. Being convinced by Reuss that the law
was later than the prophets, he began to search the text for clues.
It was already accepted that D was written after J and E, and that
this was in the time of Josiah, so Graf assumed a priori that P must
have been written after that time, during the period of the Second
Temple. This was part of the view that was synthesized later by Wellhausen, claiming that the elaborate legal and ritual system, the
centralization of the priesthood, were later developments in the
lives of the Israelites at the end of the biblical period.
There was one serious problem with this view that P was written by a
member of the post exile priesthood: a Temple is never mentioned
once in the P document. In P, Yahweh never commands Moses to tell
the people to build a Temple. There is not one law in P that
requires the presence of a Temple. What is more, even though P talks
about the Ark of the Covenant, an altar, cherubs, the Urim and
Thummim, and other sacred accoutrements of worship, there is not a
single solitary reference to a Temple.[2]
Graf’s solution to the problem of the missing Temple was that the
Temple was mentioned repeatedly as the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle
was the tent of meeting that Moses erected in the desert to house
the Ark of the Covenant. It is mentioned in the E document only
three times and in J and D it is not mentioned at all. P, on the
other hand, mentions it over two hundred times! What is more, P
gives elaborate details on its materials and construction and the
laws relating to it. It is a regular feature of the stories in P;
all assemblies of the people take place at the Tabernacle. In short,
the Tabernacle is essential to P.
So, Graf’s solution was that the Tabernacle never existed, that it
was a fiction made up during the Second Temple period because the
writer wanted to establish a law code that was in the interests of
the Temple priests and needed the antiquity and authority of Moses
to validate the Temple as a replacement of the Tabernacle.
Thus, Graf decided that the Tabernacle must have been deliberately -
falsely - created so as to pass its authority to the Temple being
rebuilt in the Second Temple period after that Babylonian captivity,
and the transfer of the ark from the Tabernacle to the Temple and
the laws that required the presence of the Tabernacle would now
require the presence of the Temple. Thus he proposed that the
Priestly Tabernacle was a literary and legal fiction created by the
post-exile author of P to support the rebuilt temple of the Second
Temple period.
So, again we notice that along came Wellhausen. Once he had accepted
Reuss’ theory that the law was later than the prophets, and
Graf’s
theory that the Tabernacle was nothing more than the symbol for
the
Temple, he was able to suggest that in the P document that
centralization of religion was not being demanded, as it was during
the time of D, but was understood to already exist. He stated that
the laws and stories of P take centralization for granted.
In the P list of different kinds of sacrifices there is one called a
“sin offering” and one called a “guilt offering.” Such sacrifices
are not mentioned in J, E, or D. Wellhausen reasoned that it was
only logical that sin and guilt offerings should be established
after the exile when the people felt guilty, believing that their
exile was punishment for their sins.
In the P list of holidays, there is a holiday that is known now as
the Fall New Year, or Feast of Tabernacles, followed ten days later
by a Day of Atonement. These holidays are not mentioned in J, E, or
D. And, since these two holidays involve atonement for sin, Wellhausen said that this proved that they were part of the Second
Temple period when Israel was loaded with guilt that their
faithlessness to Yahweh had led to the destruction of the kingdom
and their exile to Babylon.
Another “proof” that was accepted by Wellhausen as demonstration
that P was written after the exile was the “Ezekiel matter." Ezekiel
was an Aaronid priest who was exiled to Babylon (which we will
shortly discuss), and it was there that he wrote his book that bears
his name. The book of Ezekiel is written in a style and language
that is remarkably similar to that of the P document. There are
whole passages in Ezekiel that are nearly word-for word extracts
from P. In Ezekiel, the writer declares that in the future only
certain Levites may be priests. All others are disqualified from the
priesthood because of their past sins. The only Levites who may
function as priests are those who are descendants of Zadok. Zadok
was David’s Aaronid priest. And so, according to Ezekiel, only
Zadokian Aaronid priests are legitimate; all others are excluded.
It is also quite clear in the P document that only Aaronids are
priests in any context. P simply does not recognize the descendants
of Moses (the Shiloh priests) as legitimate. So, Wellhausen decided
that P had to have been written during the days of the Second
Temple, when the Aaronid priests came to power, taking Ezekiel’s
prophecy as their inspiration. At that point in time, the
competition between the priestly families was over. The Aaronids had
won and one of them wrote a “Torah of Moses” that reflected their
victory.
It was a good argument. But as Friedman says:
“it was logical,
coherent, persuasive - and wrong.”[3]
Reuss was wrong from the beginning of the argument because it is
clear that the prophets do quote P, most notable among them being
Jeremiah. The fact is, Jeremiah seemed to fiendishly enjoy playing
with the P document and reversing its language in clever ways.
Jeremiah also can be found to reject the Ark of the Covenant in a
“twist” of the language of the P document. Ezekiel also seems to
know the P document quite well. The reader may wish to refer to
Friedman for the list of comparisons.
In 1982, Avi Hurvitz of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
demonstrated that P is written in an earlier form of Hebrew than
Ezekiel’s work, so Wellhausen’s idea that it had been written after
Ezekiel was dealt another blow. Five other scholars in recent years
have uncovered additional linguistic evidence that most of P is
written in the biblical Hebrew of the days before the exile to
Babylon.
The bottom line is: Reuss was wrong, Graf was wrong, and
Wellhausen
was wrong. But, by being wrong, they ended up highlighting a crucial
bit of evidence for something else altogether: the issue of the
Tabernacle. This Tabernacle brings us face to face with the
question: when was the “first temple”- the famed Temple of Solomon -
in Jerusalem really built, if one was built at all?
Jerusalem has been excavated time and again - and with a
particularly intense period of investigation of Bronze and Iron Age
remains in the 1970s and 1980s under the direction of Yigal Shiloh,
of the Hebrew University, at the city of David, the original urban
core of Jerusalem. Surprisingly, as Tel Aviv University
archaeologist David Ussishkin pointed out, fieldwork there and in
other parts of biblical Jerusalem failed to provide significant
evidence for a tenth century occupation. Not only was any sign of
monumental architecture missing, but also so were even simple
pottery sherds. Some scholars have argued that later, massive
building activities in Jerusalem wiped out all signs of the earlier
city. Yet excavations in the city of David revealed impressive finds
from the Middle Bronze Age and from later centuries of the Iron Age
- just not from the tenth century BC. The most optimistic assessment
of this negative evidence is that tenth century Jerusalem was rather
limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill country
village. This … meshes well with the … pattern of the rest of Judah
in the same period, which was composed of only about twenty small
villages and a few thousand inhabitants, many of them wandering
pastoralists..[4]
By the 7th century BC, Jerusalem had finally become a relatively
large city, dominated by a Temple to the God of Israel that served
as the single national shrine. But this was the Second Temple, which
was built as a result of the vision of the “captives” who had
returned from exile in Babylon.
The priesthood that returned from Babylon developed the Bible AS
history in order to bring scattered, war weary people together, to
prove to them that they had experienced a stirring history under the
direct intervention of God. The glorious epic of the united monarchy
was - like the stories of the patriarchs and the sagas of the Exodus
and conquest - a brilliant composition that wove together ancient
heroic tales and legends into a coherent and persuasive prophecy for
the people of Israel in the seventh century BC.
An elaborate theology had been developed in order to validate the
connection between the heirs of the Davidic line and the destiny of
the entire people of Israel. According to this manufactured history,
David was the first to stamp out the abominable influence of "other
gods." David, being devoted and faithful to Yahweh, was assigned the
task of completing the unfinished job of Joshua, which was to
conquer the rest of the Promised Land and establish a glorious
empire over all the vast territories that had been promised to
Abraham! These were, in fact, the political ambitions of the priests
in charge, not accurate history. And so, the glorious tale of David
and Solomon and their marvelous Ark were created to inspire the
masses. We do, of course, think that these stories were based on
more ancient models, but what is clear is that the Great King
Solomon - whoever he might have been originally - was not a king of
Israel or a worshipper of Yahweh.
In searching for a single, clear mention of the existence of a major
temple in Jerusalem during the period in question that can be
verified archaeologically, I have come up empty handed. Even
Finkelstein, quoted above, sort of skips over the issue. He says
that in the 7th century BC, Jerusalem was a “relatively large city
dominated by a Temple to Yahweh." If that were the case, then there
would not have been so much focus in the P document on the
Tabernacle. It seems to have been fairly easy to put words in Moses’
mouth retroactively; that problem hadn’t stumped the priests so far;
so why the big deal about the Tabernacle? They could have slid right
over the Tabernacle problem altogether by having Moses say: “when
you get there, fold up the tent and build a Temple.” For some
reason, that was not an option. This “Tent of Meeting” was clearly
something that the P Document sought to establish as an item of
great significance to the people. For some reason, it had to be
emphasized, and its historical status as the only Tabernacle that
was legitimate obviously needed to be established over and above all
other such “tents.” We find several new things in the P document
that were obviously a new spin being put on something that was so
commonly known and accepted by the people that it required specific
“shaping” to the purposes of the priests.
First of all, we have a new Fall Holiday that was formerly known as
the Feast of Tabernacles. Next, we have a very specific Tabernacle
itself. Finally, we have the ostensible reason for this tabernacle
being the one and only legitimate tabernacle: an object that goes
INSIDE the tabernacle: the Ark of the Covenant!
All the references to the Tabernacle in the P document suggest that
this was an object with tremendous historical value because it was
assembled under the direction of Moses himself. The P document
describes it as the sacred shrine that housed the Ark of the
Covenant, the tablets, the Urim and Thummim, and the
cherubs. The P
document tells us that the Tabernacle itself was constructed of
precious wood, gold, brass, wool and linen woven with gold, scarlet,
and purple, and a covering of red leather.
Even though the Tabernacle was supposed to have resided at
Shiloh
with the Ark inside it, (according to the P text), the E document of
the northern kingdom, the domain of the Shiloh priests, never
mentions the ark! According to the E texts, the “Tent of Meeting”
was the most important sign of god’s presence. God was in the tent,
not the ark. And clearly there were many “Tents of Meeting.”
The J document, on the other hand, mentions that the Ark was very
important to the children of Israel as they journeyed to the
Promised Land. In the book of Numbers, the Ark was said to have been
carried in front of the people as they traveled. Another J text
emphasizes the Ark as a military “weapon;” the idea being that it
was impossible to be successful in military matters without it. And
then, of course, in the J text remarks about the Temple of Solomon,
we find that the Ark was the most important object in it. It should
come as no surprise that the Tent of Meeting is never mentioned in
the J document!
Of course, this leads us to a bit of a problem. If the kingdom of
Omri was the mythicized/historicized Jewish Kingdom of Solomon, and
yet they knew of no “ark,” and there is clear evidence that
no
Temple of Solomon ever existed in the kingdom of Judah wherein an
ark could have been lodged prior to the time of Hezekiah, then were
did the idea of the ark come from?
What was the “real” Temple of
Solomon? Well, we will come back to this. For now, we only need to
understand that, via mythicization of history and historicization of
myth, some serious prestidigitation is going on here. Tents that
were formerly used for a particular purpose are now being
eliminated, and the centralization process is beginning by the focus
on one tent, and one tent only. The legitimization of that tent is
based on its use as the “home of the ark,” and a “historical
background” for this use of the tent is being created in the P text.
Whatever the Tent of Meeting was used for in ancient times, and
whatever the ark of the covenant might have been, it is interesting
to note that the overall tenor of the J document - the ark people -
is more balanced in its attitude toward women. The E document, from
the Northern kingdom priests - the tent people - was quite male in
perspective and concentrated on male characters with, essentially no
heroines such as Tamar in Genesis 38. No wonder Jezebel kicked them
out!
Speaking of Jezebel, the second to the last mention of the ark in
the Bible is in 2 Chronicles, 8:11[5] where it is mentioned in
relation to Solomon and his wife, the daughter of Pharaoh.
Solomon brought the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of David
into the house he had built for her, for he said, My wife shall not
dwell in the house of David king of Israel, because the places are
holy to which the ark of the Lord has come.
The next to the last mention of the ark is also in 2 Chronicles,
35:3:
To the Levites who taught all Israel and were holy to the Lord, he
said, Put the holy ark in the house which Solomon son of David, king
of Israel built; it shall no longer be a burden carried on your
shoulders. Now serve the Lord your God and His people Israel.
We will shortly discuss the authorship of the books of Kings, but
let us just say here that the authorship of Chronicles reflects the
language and interests of the Aaronid priests. Most especially, they
extol Hezekiah, which indicates that this was the point in time when
the P text was produced.
The last mention of the ark in the Bible is a sneering “I told you
so” kind of comment by Jeremiah who writes:
And it shall be that when you have multiplied and increased in the
land in those days, says the Lord, they shall no more say, The ark
of the covenant of the Lord. It shall not come to mind, nor shall
they remember it, nor shall they miss or visit it, nor shall it be
repaired or made again.
That is certainly a bizarre dismissal of simply the most
important
item in Jewish history! (At least, according to the Bible.) We will
soon see why Jeremiah had this attitude toward the ark. But, the
point is, he is clearly talking about it in terms that indicate it
had been broken or needed to be “made again.” Almost certainly, this
suggests that the Babylonians destroyed the ark that existed at the
time of the kingdom of Judah along with everything else. What is
strange is the implication that it was not of sufficient value for
them to even cart it off or it would have been mentioned in the
objects that were specifically named as having been taken from the
temple. And for those who might wish to think that the lack of
mention indicates some major secret or conspiracy, allow me to point
out all the many confabulations that exist in the Bible have one
single objective: to inflate the importance of Yahweh. They do this
by using anything and everything as lessons to whip Yahweh’s people
into line. If there was any way whatsoever that the loss of the ark
could have been used to induce guilt, I think it would have been.
What seems clear is that a substitute ark was all that existed in
Judah from some point in history. Thus, at the time of the exile,
the loss of this substitute ark was no big deal.
It seems that when the ark was no longer needed as a major item to
legitimize only one Tabernacle, to change the perceptions of the
people, it was dropped as an issue. The idea that it was taken with
the fleeing Jews to Egypt and then to Ethiopia is another red
herring. There are several Arks that claim to be the legitimate
“original.” One of them is at Axxum, in Ethiopia. This item has been
venerated for centuries, housed in a special chapel, and cared for
by a priest whose life is devoted to maintaining the chapel and its
grounds. It seems fairly self-evident that if the Axxum Ark were the
real thing, the Israeli Authorities would stop at nothing to claim
it and retrieve it. Despite many rumors, nothing like this has ever
occurred.
But again, let us remember that even if the ark that was present at
the time of the Babylonian destruction was merely a “representative”
object, it was still based on some real object that existed at some
other point in time and space, and the history had been mythicized,
and then re-historicized. Nevertheless, this deals another blow to
the seekers of the Ark of the Covenant under the Temple of Solomon
in Jerusalem!
Getting back to a First Temple, we note that Finkelstein mentions
that the evidence of the destruction of Jerusalem, as a whole, is
clearly present in the archaeological layers, and it definitely
reveals the violence and thoroughness with which the city was
obliterated from the landscape; but no specific mention of a Temple.
That does not mean that one was not built in Jerusalem somewhere
along the way, Solomon just didn’t build it, and it wasn’t built in
the 10th century BC. And the issue of whether or not a Temple of
Yahweh existed in a precise context at the time of Hezekiah when the
P text was being produced is problematical.
A temple most certainly seems to have existed at the time of the
destruction of the northern kingdom. One clue to this is the
references to Hezekiah "repairing" the Temple as part of his
reforms. Rather than “repairing” the "Temple of Yahweh,” he might
have been repairing and refurbishing a Temple of another god in
Jerusalem, and claiming that it was the “Temple of Solomon,” when in
fact it wasn’t. So, legitimizing the Tabernacle as the temporary
home of the ark, and then transferring that home to a “cleansed”
Temple would have made sense.
The writer of the P document talks about the “Temple of Solomon” and
the items that were kept there, but none of those things were
present in the Second Temple, nor were they considered to be
important. This is another point favoring the writing of the P
document before the Second Temple period. Why would the writer talk
about things that no longer existed as though they did, even if we
have some idea that their claimed existence was a deliberate
displacing of one idea for another? What is more, we have already
noted the astonishing silence of the Bible as to the fate of the Ark
except for that brief and telling remark by Jeremiah.
The Ark had a deadly reputation. Touching it was supposed to have
been lethal. After a battle, 50,000 Philistine soldiers rashly
pitched their camp with the Ark gaping open, and all died in their
sleep. Their King promptly ordered it to be sealed and sent back to
the Israelites. A bearer of the Ark tripped and touched it, and was
instantly killed. Two of Moses’ men peeked inside it and were struck
dead. Moses made sure they were buried in the desert far away from
the camp. Some have argued that this indicated that the Ark was
radioactive or was some sort of technological device. It is a
certainty that, if it had been so powerful an object in military
terms, it would have been mentioned as being used against the
Babylonians. The failure of the ark to prevail against
Nebuchadnezzar, or the carrying away of the ark, mentioned in the
older tales as bringing devastation upon those who dared to touch
it, would have been recounted, if such events had happened. They
didn’t, and weren’t. And that may have been the reason for the
silence about the object afterward. In the final analysis, the only
stories we have of the actual use or presence of a significant
ark-in-action are in the historicized myths or mythicized history
that lead us back to a time long before the exile imposed by the
Assyrians or the carrying away of the people to Babylon. One is even
compelled to wonder about the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by
Hazael. Surely if the Ark had been present there, it would have made
the Omrides invincible militarily. Also, certainly, if Hazael had
taken the Ark, it would have been mentioned somewhere. So much
build-up had been given to the ark, and then destruction fell in
spite of the presence of the ark. What were the priests to say? It
didn’t work, and better to just forget it than have all the people
asking why.
At this point, the writers of the bible, so close in time to the
events, simply could not get away with that sort of nonsense, and
they didn’t even try. What’s more, it’s clear that they no longer
needed the ark at the time of the Second Temple, so it was simply
allowed to fade into oblivion as a nice story of the grand and
glorious ancestors. Again, I suggest that this was based on some
seed of ancient truth, but figuring out what it was - or is - is not
going to be as simple as the many Ark chasers of the present day
would have us think. One thing seems to be clear: there was no
Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and no Ark of the Covenant inside
whatever temple did exist there. So we can discard the tales of the
Ark in Axxum or the Ark under the Temple being retrieved by the
Templars or the Roman Emperor, Titus.
Nevertheless, the person who wrote P placed a specific Tabernacle,
the Tent of Meeting with Yahweh embodied in the ark, at the center
of Israel’s religious life back as far as Moses, and forever into
the future and this leads to the conclusion: P had to be written
before D, since the laws all through P say that sacrifices and other
ceremonies must take place at the entrance to the Tabernacle and
nowhere else and that this is the law “forever.” It also
demonstrates that the Tabernacle was at the center of worship in
Jerusalem until a temple of some sort was either built or cleansed,
and that this probably occurred at the time of Hezekiah.
Friedman suggests that the Tabernacle was later placed in the Holy
of Holies of a Temple in Jerusalem, under the spread wings of the
“cherubs.” But, as we have seen by now, there is no archaeological
evidence for the existence of a temple of the dimensions of the
Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. So, we are left with the conclusion
that either a smaller temple was was used, or that the Tabernacle, a
tent, was all that there ever was until the Second Temple period.
In the stories of a specifically Jewish King Solomon, who we now
suspect to be Ahab assimilated to an even older archetype, it is
said:
And they brought up the
ark of Yahweh and the Tent of Meeting and
all of the holy implements that were in the Tent.[6]
Josephus, the Jewish historian, also wrote that the Tabernacle was
brought into the Temple, but he is also noted to have obtained his
“mystical interpretation” of the Tabernacle from Philo of
Alexandria. In any event, all of this leads us to ask the question:
what was the activity that transpired in the Tent of Meeting before
it was deliberately designated as the lodging of the ark? Why would
a tent need to be brought into a Temple except for the purpose of
changing its function?
As to the destruction of the “Temple” in Jerusalem, Psalm 74:7 is
quoted to refer to this event saying:
They cast your sanctuary into the fire; they profaned your name’s
Tabernacle to the ground.
However, it is suggested by textual analysis[7] that Psalms 50, and
73 through 83 were composed between 730 and 720 BC for festal
worship at the northern sanctuary in Bethel and accepted with
marginal amendments in Jerusalem thereafter. Thus, either this verse
about the Tabernacle being burned and profaned refers to a prior
event, before the fall of the northern kingdom, or it was added
after the Fall of Jerusalem to the celebratory hymn. In the first
case, it suggests that the Tabernacle that was set up as the
Tabernacle in Jerusalem was merely a creation of that time, or -
again - that there never was a Temple at all prior to the Second
Temple period.
Notes:
[1] Friedman, op. cit., p. 162.
[2] Ibid., p. 163.
[3] Ibid., p. 167.
[4] Finkelstein, op. cit., p. 2001,
[5] Nice numbers for all the esotericists!
[6] The Bible, 1 Kings 8:4; 2 Chronicles 5:5.
[7] Goulder, Michael D., The Psalms of Asaph and the Pentateuch
(Sheffield Academic Press 1997).
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