Antiquitopia

For those of you who do not know, my research right now primarily investigates the various ways ancient Jews and Christians bring together holy space and holy time, particularly the Sanctuary and the Sabbath, focusing on priestly traditions or traditions that reflect upon or respond to such traditions (particularly P, H, and Ezekiel; Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice; and Epistle to the Hebrews). Nonetheless, I was struck by the passage in Is. 56:1-8, which, although evincing some general conceptual similarities to P, H, and Ezekiel, takes a different tack in articulating how the Sabbath relates to the Sanctuary by universalizing the relationship. In the priestly framework in the Priestly source of the Pentateuch (including the Holiness Code) and Ezekiel, improper reverence of the Sanctuary and lack of observance of the Sabbath, or their profanation, leads to being cut off from the community. The inverse corollary to this is that proper observance and reverence of the Sabbath and the S...

את־שבתתי תשמרו ומקדשי תיראו אני יהוה (Lev. 19:30; 26:2) For you non-Hebrew readers, this says, "Observe my Sabbaths and venerate my Sanctuary. I am YHWH." Both quotations come from a part of the Pentateuch called the Holiness Code (Lev. 17-26). Some distinctive elements of the Holiness School (which produced the Holiness Code) is God's self assertions, as in this passage: "I am YHWH." And the first-person singular possessive: " my Sabbaths" and " my sanctuary." Moreover, HS tends to give quite an increased reverence for the Sabbath. Taking a look at this passage, as well as how the Sabbath is interwoven in the instructions to build the Tabernacle and the actual building of the Tabernacle (Exod. 31:12-17; 35:1-3; the entire instructions are Exodus 25-31; 35-40), the question arises: "What does the Sabbath have to do with the Sanctuary?" Why bring them together, and, in this case, even seem to privilege the Sabbath over th...

Jonathan Klawans’s Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism responds to evolutionary and supersessionist scholarship that has read sacrifice and the temple as things that were replaced by something better that came along later (Jesus for Christians and prayer for Jews), reading polemics that derive from Hebrews (for Christians) and Maimonides (for Jews) anachronistically back into sources, such as the prophets, the Dead Sea Sectarians, aspects of the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. This book builds upon his earlier work, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Israel , and relies heavily upon the insights of Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger and her more recent analysis in Leviticus as Literature , depicting purity laws, sacrifice, and, with it, the temple as a “symbolic system.” Purity, sacrifice, and the temple are all interrelated: you must have ritual purity to approach the sanctuary to offer a sacrifice. After a fantastic lite...