This post continues an exploratory question that ended up asking about the extent to which the Old Testament development of priesthood can be used as a contemporary theological resource.

My basic orientation for reading the priestly literature of the Pentateuch comes from the work of Samuel Balentine.  His book The Torah’s Vision of Worship explores the priestly theme of worship from sociological, anthropological, and rhetorical perspectives which are ultimately in the service of theology (I may address the methodological issues in this approach later).  This is a departure from the standard historical-critical approach that dominated the subject until the last few decades.  Balentine is not interested in re-constructing what the possible priestly cult looked like but rather uses his method to understand how the literary corpus we received was developed within its historical context.  His work then is “a study of worship in the Hebrew Bible not of Israelite religion” (33).  This is a study of the final form of the text, as it was developed in its social context, with an eye on “the larger reality that is encoded in the Torah’s vision” (35).

Continue reading “Yielding or Navigating Empire in the Pentateuch; Or Church as Secondary State” →