Canter Bridge

Modern psychological profiles based on birth order and gender have ancient precedents. The firstborn was and remains a singular preoccupation of many cultures. Perhaps nowhere does the firstborn male fall under particular and sometimes tragic attention than in Israel’s biblical literature.

No living author has written more compellingly of the mysteries in which the biblical first son finds himself enveloped through no choice of his own, unless the grasping of a twin who is second in the birth queue be taken as conscious self-assertion, than Harvard’s Jon Levenson.

In a series of densely packed essays and books that are accessible only to those who arrive with a hunger and thirst to understand Levenson’s complex entree into an already complicated theme, Levenson argues that the sacrifice of a human firstborn male son antedates the biblical permission to substitute an animal.

In any case and whenever this literature is approached with an open mind, the sacrifice of a firstborn answers to the requirement of an awesomely demanding god. Indeed, many moderns of tender conscious would say to an evil deity, the moral side of an argument in which historical scholars refer to YHWH’s ‘daemonic’ presence on the outskirts and occasionally the High Street of Israel’s remembered history.

Just the kind of substitution that is common in literature that claims to express the reality of proximity to YHWH occurs in Leviticus chapter three, where Aaron—having lost his overly adventurous firstborn sons to a divine flame—receives the order to accept the Levites as the firstborn of all Israel. These Levites, an entire tribe of substitute sons, would work alongside Aaron for the ages to come, facilitating the tabernacle cult that was Israel’s lifeline to the Consumer of its firstborn and the Sustainer of all others.

YHWH claims these Levites and assigns them to Aaron.

In this literary moment of consecration to a singular task, one might suppose that the Levitical men respond ‘we do’ to what seems a noble calling. They cannot have any idea of the privilege and the cost that will follow.

One who says ‘I do’ never does, be he prophet, bridegroom, or messiah. It is our way of entrusting ourselves to the particular call of a demanding god, one who both consumes and illuminates with the same divine flame.

One of the earliest Christian writers would not tarry in calling Jesus the monogenes of his father. By this, John and those who followed his apostolic instruction probably did not mean principally ‘only-begotten’, though this language was to enrich the creeds that linger over the biblical material like reflective cloud cover. Rather, the emphasis likely fell on God’s choice of the Nazarene by whom John found himself so particularly beloved.

For this one, too, the status of YHWH’s firstborn would mean both honor and incomprehensible pain. In the Bible, death stalks the firstborn. As does YHWH.