Melody D. Knowles, Centrality Practiced. Jerusalem
in the Religious Practices of Yehud and the Diaspora in the Persian Period. Archaeology and Biblical Studies 16 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006). Pp. 192.
Paper, US$24.95. ISBN:1-58983-175-6.
Ralph W. Klein
Christ Seminary-Seminex Professor
of Old Testament
Lutheran
School of Theology at Chicago
The book under review is an
encouraging promise of what the next generation will contribute to our
knowledge of the history, literature, and theology of early Judaism in the
Persian period. The Knowles’ volume,
which was originally her dissertation at Princeton Seminary, looks at God’s
geographical location and the role of the temple in the physical expressions of
the Yahwists of the Persian period in order to see how the centrality of Jerusalem was practiced. The bases of her argument are, on the one hand,
biblical texts—Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Third Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, and
the so-called Psalms of Ascent (120-134)—and, on the other hand, archeology, in
terms both of inscriptions and material finds insofar as they can contribute to
our understanding of these questions.
After an opening chapter in which she defines basic terms and describes
her methodology, including the limitations of the evidence, successive chapters
are devoted to the centralities of animal sacrifice, the use of incense and
figurines, Jerusalem as a pilgrimage center in the Persian period, and paying taxes
and tithes in Jerusalem. A final chapter is entitled The Palimpsest of
Jerusalem’s Centrality.
In the
chapter on animal sacrifice, in many ways the most important and the most
convincing, Knowles takes note of what we do not know and what we do know. She remains undecided whether Joseph
Blenkinsopp is right in proposing that sacrifices were carried on at Bethel
during the exilic period, and it is not clear who used the temple or altar at
Lachish in the Persian period—that is, were these people Yahwists and do they
therefore contribute to our understanding of Israelite worship? The “house of yahu” inscription, dated to the fourth century BCE and
discovered south and west of Yehud, indicates at least that a temple of YHWH
was located in this area. But of course
we do not know what kind of cultic practices were practiced at this temple. Knowles believes that Ezra 4:3 implies that
sacrifice took place in Jerusalem before the exiles came back from Babylon,
and that would seemingly be supported by Jer 41:5: “Eighty
men arrived from Shechem and Shiloh and Samaria, with their beards shaved and
their clothes torn, and their bodies gashed, bringing grain offerings and
incense to present at the temple of the LORD.”
Surprisingly there is no reference in the bibliography to the fine essay
by Douglas Jones in 1963 about the cessation of sacrifice after the destruction
of the temple in 586.
A pair of passages in
Trito-Isaiah (57:5 and 65:3) contain polemics against animal sacrifice outside Jerusalem in locales that
are now unidentifiable (p. 122). One could argue, I suppose, that the polemic
in these passages is not so much about the locale as about the syncretistic
character of these cultic actions. In
Malachi, although worship of the LORD in general transcends the borders of
Yehud (1:11, 14), animal sacrifice is primarily/exclusively localized in the Jerusalem temple. Hence the restrictions on animal sacrifice
outside Jerusalem
became increasingly important within the texts of the Hebrew Bible.
We do know that
animal sacrifice ceased at Elephantine in 407
BCE although
apparently this Jewish colony did practice grain sacrifice and the cultic
burning of incense after that date (just as in Jer 41:5). She agrees with the latest excavator of Mt. Gerizim
that animal sacrifice took place there, due to the mention of a “house of sacrifice” in an inscription in
lapidary Aramaic for which she does not supply a date and because of the large
number of animal bones in the recent excavation.
This
excavation and the recent publications of Ingrid Hjelm have complicated the
assessment of when the definitive split between Samaria
and Jerusalem
took place. Does the Chronicler’s plea for the central
importance of Jerusalem and his more or less
open invitation to the north to rally around the Jerusalem
temple have Gerizim in mind as a contemporary rival to the exclusiveness of Jerusalem? Until the rise of the Hasmonaean state, did
Yehud have any way of enforcing its theological claims in Samaritan territory? This is the question behind the question in
the Knowles dissertation. What authority
did the Jerusalem
temple have, and how was that authority exercised. Neither in her bibliography nor in the text
of the book does she address the challenge of Diana Edelman, who has recently
redated the construction of the temple to the tenure of Nehemiah instead of
515. While this is not the place to discuss Edelman’s
proposal, I wonder how Knowles would have to reframe her argument if the
Edelman hypothesis were true, or is the data gathered by Knowles sufficient to
call Edelman’s proposal into question..
Knowles
does not address the type of worship that was carried on by the Jews in Babylon during and
following the exile. She notes early on
Ezekiel’s reference to God’s functioning “for a little while” or “to some
extent” as a sanctuary there (Ezek 11:16), but does not discuss the meaning of
this except for a reference to a chapter dealing with this question by Andreas
Ruwe. Was animal or grain sacrifice ever
practiced in Babylon,
and if so, when did it stop? Perhaps we
cannot know. If the Elephantine colony
could erect a temple in the “unclean land” of Egypt, could the Babylonian Jewish
community have had some kind of cultic worship?
She also mentions “the place” Casiphia
(Ezra 8:17), but finds this designation too vague to identify this place
as an area for animal sacrifice (p. 30).
Incidentally she errs in stating that Ezra recruited priests from there,
since it was instead Levites and 200 Nethinim that Ezra acquired from this
site.
I
am not convinced by her conclusion that Zech 5:5-11, the woman in the ephah
pot, means that any kind of worship involving iconographic representations of
the deity in Babylon is unsanctioned and ultimately powerless (p. 38) or again
that it offers a critique of worship outside Jerusalem, that is, of nonsacrificial
worship in Babylon. Carol L. Meyers and Eric
M. Meyers conclude that this vision means that foreign elements brought to Jerusalem must be
thoroughly excised from the place of Yahweh in his restored temple. Perhaps this vision is also an expression of
the semi-independence of Yehud, with the Yehudite God alone residing in the
land. David L. Petersen argues that Jerusalem is being purified and Babylon contaminated in this vision. The Babylonians will fix and venerate this
new cultic object. Evil and impurity
have been collected, and they must be removed from the land. If these commentators are correct, the
discussion of this vision could have been omitted from this chapter.
It
is unclear to me what Sanballat means in Neh 3:34 by asking “Will they
sacrifice?” Knowles takes it to imply
that the community in Yehud was not sacrificing up to this point. H. G. M. Williamson admits the obscurity of
Sanballat’s questions, but translates “Will they commit their cause to God?
Will they simply offer sacrifices?” and believes that Sanballat is ridiculing
the suggestion that God can be cajoled into prospering the work as if by a
magic wand. In general, I believe Knowles could have
given more in-depth exegesis for many of the passages she cites. (I also think that Knowles is unduly
pessimistic about determining what the Chronicler’s source in Kings had to say).
In
her concluding chapter, Knowles notes that the Jerusalem
authorities would have considered sites outside Jerusalem transgressive, whereas those who
worshiped there held them to be honorable.
When did the time come that the Jerusalem
authorities could enforce their point of view and not just criticize
alternative practices?
Chapter
3 addresses the question of the cultic use of incense, noting that
Chronicles condemns the religious
use of aromatics outside Jerusalem
(pp. 55, 62); incense is acceptable only when offered by temple personnel in
the temple itself. Uzziah and Ahaz are condemned for their
inappropriate use of incense, while Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah are commended for
destroying (incense) altars outside Jerusalem. Is the polemic in Chronicles against incense
part of a wider rejection of syncretistic practices? References
in Malachi (1:11, where the deity speaks approvingly about incense offered
among the nations) and Elephantine and the archeological recovery of incense
burners from the Persian period at Tell en Nasbeh, Gezer, and Lachish indicate
that use of incense was engaged in by Yahwists outside of the city. Incense burners have also been found at Samaria and Shechem. A conclusion might be drawn that the
Chronicler’s prohibition of incense-burning outside the temple was not
effective.
Knowles
concludes that the use of images or figurines was forbidden everywhere—both in
the temple and outside the temple. Hence
this neither contributes to nor detracts from her thesis about the practice of
centrality, and perhaps could have been omitted. Or it could have been used to document the
authority of the Jerusalem
temple throughout the community? Or does
the prohibition of images indicate the authority of the Ten Commandments throughout early Judaism?
The
discussion of Pilgrimages is taken up in chapter 4. The returns of exiles from Babylon usher in a future pilgrimage from the
diaspora and the nations in Zech 6:9-15, 8:7-8, 21-23. . Haggai and Third Isaiah foresee the
journeys of nations to the temple bearing rich offerings (Hag 2:6-8; Isa
56:6-7; 60:9, 13). The best part of her argument about pilgrimages to Jerusalem are the
centralized celebrations of booths and unleavened bread in Ezra 3:1-4 (cf. Neh
8:13-18) and Ezra 6:19-22 respectively.
Less convincing to me as pilgrimages are the trips home from Babylon to
Jerusalem reported in Ezra 1-2 and 7-8 (cf. Isa 51:9-11). Knowles notes the presence of Exodus and
pilgrimage motifs in these passages and they surely underscore the importance
of Jerusalem,
but I am reluctant to call these one-way journeys pilgrimages. In the Chronicler’s account of the Passovers
of Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 30) and Josiah (2 Chronicles 35), pilgrims come from
both Judah and Israel to the centralized celebration in Jerusalem. The other evidence adduced by her for
pilgrimage comes from Psalms 120-134, and Knowles calls attention to wording or
editing in these Psalms that could indeed come from the Persian period. It seems to me, however, that the pilgrimages
implied here can hardly be limited to one period.
As
far as taxing and tithing are concerned, Knowles engages in a rare exercise of Literarkritik in distinguishing between
an earlier text in Neh 10:36-38a, describing annual journeys to Jerusalem to
pay tithes, whereas the later layer in Neh 10:38b-40 demonstrates that this
scenario was not practiced and that an alternative solution was designed,
namely, that the Levites collected the tithes locally and transported them to
Jerusalem. She notes a wide variety of
positions on financial support for the cult in literature from the Persian
period. Haggai expects the costs for
reconstructing the temple to come from the community in Yehud, although
additional treasure will come from the nations in the future. In Zechariah the temple is funded by the
returned exiles as well as the diaspora, while in Trito Isaiah it is the future
diaspora and the nations who support the temple. Malachi and Nehemiah report that the local
community alone brings offerings to the temple. While the diaspora and the
nations give some support for rebuilding the temple in Ezra, the cult is
largely supported by the Persian kings.
She finds this unusual and historically doubtful. Chronicles reports lavish and generous gifts
of kings like David, whose example is intended to inspire lay people to be similarly
generous.
The
bottom line: the practice of centrality
was neither univocal nor consistent. I
hope that in future studies Knowles might attend to the question of the
authority of the temple and its regulations—which is somewhat different than
the question of religious practices. If
her interpretation of Gerizim is correct, the Jerusalem
temple lacked authority in Samaria
long before the definitive split and in fact achieved authority only through
the Hasmonean rise to power. Also the
interface between centrality practiced and the authority of Deuteronomy 12 might
be pursued further. Her proposal of a
palimpsest as a model for this period is only partially successful. While centrality was constantly being
rewritten and nuanced, the palimpsest metaphor does not encompass as well the
competing voices that she has so clearly uncovered.