Canter Bridge

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. Continue Reading »

A burst of light interrupts the rigorous monotony of the priestly manual as Numbers chapter six draws to a close.

The Lord instructs Moses to train Aaron and unseen generations of Aaronide sons to bless Israel by speaking good things to them in the presence of YHWH.

The language of blessing is among the richest of dialects in the biblical material. Its echo lives on in our reference to ‘material blessings’. Even if entire lines of religious kitsch have taken up the word in promotion of trinketry, the notion itself is pervaded by a strenuous application of will to the shaping of human experience. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

Bible readers who care enough for curiosity about the book’s two large ‘testaments’ sometimes sprain hermeneutical ankles on differences between the Old and the New. Indeed, the alignment between them is not always easily discerned, an observation that will seem vastly understated to Jewish readers.

Yet alignment there is, an organic relationship that made the anthology of Christian memoirs, sermons, letters and apocalypse that emerged as a ‘new’ testament compelling to readers since the first and second centuries of the present era.

The pungent aroma of skandalon wafts over those who observe Jesus himself defining the change of times that he believed to have been coming upon humanity in his historical moment. I do not mean ‘scandal’ in its modern sense, but rather an ‘occasion for stumbling’ that is placed before those who walk in a certain direction and proves itself an obstacle to those who will not or cannot in good conscience step over it and continue the journey. Continue Reading »

The severity of Leviticus would break the back of modernist understandings if read seriously. Most of us internalized such a view of the world with our mother’s milk. Individual freedom, the license to choose ‘a’ over ‘b’ without reference to any constraining tradition or community restraint seems as obvious to us as simple math.

The pursuit of happiness needs no explanation, let alone justification.

‘It is’, to quote an observation made banal by sheer repetition, ‘what it is’. Continue Reading »

It is precarious to seek psychological dynamics in a highly processed biblical text like Leviticus. Psychology is alien to its origins and purpose. Moses and Aaron are not presented principally as human beings with hearts pinned to their sleeves, but rather as prototypical Lawgiver/Prophet (Moses) and Priest (Aaron).

Yet only pedantic interpretation would force its gaze from the profound dilemma faced by Aaron in the wake of his sons’ death by divine fire.

Chapter sixteen is marked off as a separate unit by a familiar introduction.

Now the Lord spoke to Moses …

The words that follow are less formulaic, describing as they do a poignant circumstance as the lived context of this word from YHWH:

… after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of the Lord. Continue Reading »

The attempt to codify the Levitical prescriptions according to some logical scheme usually founders on the very arbitrariness of the distinctions enshrined in these complex directives.

When ‘distinguishing’—the word recurs—between clean and unclean, the priests appear to be training Israel in the art of obeying inscrutable instructions delivered to them by the enigmatic deity whom the Psalms would refer to as ‘the One of Sinai’.

It is a most un-modern concept, indeed one that rubs raw the sensitivities of all post-Enlightenment awareness, not least that of Descartes whose radical positioning of the thinking, reasoning, sensing self at the center of reality lives on in a million imitations. Continue Reading »

Jesus responded to an ancient Israelite yearning for vindication among the nations. The nation’s prophets, in their sunnier moods, foresaw a prominence for little Israel that seemed to defy the data and common sense.

What else is there?

A prophet’s vision, it would seem.

Yet Jesus resolutely sided with that version of Israelite expectation that divided humanity between the just and the unjust rather than between Israel and the rest. Part of his enduringly enigmatic message lies in that surefooted combination of Israelite particularity—it was so strong he once turned away a foreign widow by labeling her a ‘dog’—and universal embrace. Continue Reading »