The beautifully balanced blessing that is placed upon the lips of Aaron and his sons for as far as the genealogical eye can see is remarkable on several counts.
First, it appears—at least to the Western reader’s eye—as a clearing in the woods of what can at times seem a very dark literary forest. Indeed, some literary critics find the Aaronic blessing so profoundly dissonant with its surroundings that they venture an origin for it that is far from the cultic and architectural prescriptions of its surroundings.
It may, one imagines, have been the brilliantly polished anchor of some lost liturgy, here placed as a jewel onto a setting that seems tarnished and even tawdry in contrast. Alternatively, it may have shone so brightly that Israel’s writers might have composed a rambling aetiological explication for its aesthetic glory, failing perhaps to measure up to the kernel with which they began.
Probably both kinds of theories judge too harshly the liturgical stuff of the surrounding passages. Equally, both turn a jaundiced eye to what students of Torah have for countless generations found more compelling than tarnished, more worthy than tawdry. Finally, both explanations arguably are intolerant with the genre flexibility of the ancient literature that is in our hands as read it.
On all sides, it is plausible that the scandal that presents itself as impoverished surroundings for a brilliant jewel is a function of our own limitations as readers rather than of rude deficiencies in the text.
The Lord bless you …
Israel’s priests will forever declare these words over the people, hoping against hope that the Lord is indeed listening in and prone to act. If these words fall to the ground as an optimistic priestly monologue or—at best—a one-sided dialogue among worshipping parties, then more is to be lost than a religious vocation that didn’t turn out well.
A people, indeed, will perish.
‘Where’, after all, one of America’s great Southern writers dared to ask as memorably as if he were alive today, ‘are the Hittites’?
Canter Bridge 
Leave a Reply