Image from www.christianbooks.co.za
[This picks up from the first post: MUST READ: SINAI & ZION – 1, by Jon D. Levenson, featuring Chapter 1 where he presents an interesting perspective on how to read and understand the biblical record of what Israel experienced on the mountain of Sinai. It cannot be read as ‘history’ per se, but more as a pattern for Divine Revelation that continues beyond that ‘moment’ on Sinai:
“history in the modern sense is not the goal of the Sinai narratives: they present the Sinaitic experience as disclosing the essential, normative relationship of YHWH to his people Israel.”
Book Reviewer FrKurt Messick well explains the book in a nutshell:
Levenson uses the two traditional stereotypical topics that Christians tend to use toward the Hebrew texts, namely,
*the Law (Torah)
*and Temple,
and recasts these – tracing —
*a Sinai tradition (law, or, more particularly for Levenson, Covenant )
*and a Zion tradition (Temple),
—he works through scriptural implications by means of historical and theological methods.
Levenson sees two of the primary building-blocks of ancient Israel’s culture and religion being mountain traditions –
*the mountain of Sinai, and
*the mountain of Zion
(Levenson also sees the crisis of Exile and restoration as important, but puts this beyond the scope of this volume).
Our goal for sharing our MUST READ resources is to encourage readers to move towards MUST HAVE. The book is downloadable as ebook from amazon.com. Reformatting and highlights added.—ADMIN1.]
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Image from thetorah.com
Whatever the experience of the people Israel on Mount Sinai was, it was so overwhelming that the texts about it seem to be groping for an adequate metaphor through which to convey the awesomeness of the event.
For example, in the description in Exodus 19:16-22, the first verse seems to describe a hurricane—thunder, lightning, a mysterious cloud. But v 18 presents an image more like that of a volcano—smoke and fire on the mountain, like the fire of a furnace. Both verses mention quaking, the quaking of the people before this momentous sight (v 16) and the quaking of the mountain itself (v 18), which is no more secure than the people against the descent of YHWH, the God of Israel.
Fear pervades the spectacle, a fear that infects nature as much as humanity. At the same time, the sight exerts an eerie appeal, which tempts the people to “break through” to him, he will “break out” against them (v 22). Even the priests, who have been singled out—or will be, as the received text has it, a few chapters later—to minister in the presence of God, must submit to special rites of sanctification if they are to survive the Sinaitic experience.
In other words, we see here two contrasting movements.
- The first speaks of an intersection between the lives of God and of Israel.
The two meet at Mount Sinai.
Moses, the representative of Israel,
ascends the mountain onto which
YHWH has descended.
- The second movement, however, speaks of a barrier between God and Israel, which if transgressed, will turn the moment of destiny into one of disaster.
Only Moses may ascend.
Even the priests are in jeopardy
until they have renewed their sanctity.
It is as though God beckons with one hand and repels with the other.
The twofold quality of the experience narrated in these verses has been explored by the theologian and historian of religion, Rudolf Otto. As is well known, Otto defined “the holy” by the words mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a Latin expression that admits of no good English equivalent, but which we can render as “a fearsome and fascinating mystery.” It is just such an ambivalent sense of mystery that pervades the account of the theophany, the apparition of God, that was believed to have occurred on Mount Sinai.
The Sinaitic experience is here presented as simultaneously supremely relevant to human experience and distant from it and foreign to it. In its quality of indivisible charm and threat, it is eminently exotic, lying outside the boundaries of what is familiar.
What really happened on Mount Sinai?
The honest historian must answer that we can say almost nothing in reply to this question.
- We do not know even the location of the mountain.
- Its identification with Jebel Musa, on which a Christian monastery stands today, is relatively recent and open to doubt.
- In fact, some streams of biblical tradition know the mountain by a different name, Horeb, and we cannot affirm with any confidence that the two sets of tradition, that of Sinai and that of Horeb, derive from the same event and were not welded together in the centuries of retelling the stories.
- In fact, the expression Mount Horeb occurs only once (Exod 33:6), although two passages speak of “Horeb, the mountain of God.” The other fourteen occurrences of “Horeb” mention no mountain at all. Instead, things tend to happen “at Horeb.”
For example, the incident in which Moses struck the rock to produce water took place “at Horeb” (17:6), some time before Israel arrived at the Sinai Desert (19:1), where the awesome revelation was to take place. In short, although some passages speak of Horeb as the site at which YHWH spoke to Israel in the midst of fire ( Deut 4:15) and proclaimed the terms of the covenant to them (e.g., v 10), we cannot assume that Horeb was always simply synonymous with Sinai. And even if we could make such an assumption, the presence of two names would suggest that we do not have a straightforward and continuous tradition linking us with the putative event, but, instead, a document whose complex literary history makes the recovery of the event well-nigh impossible.
We know nothing about Sinai, but an immense amount about the traditions concerning Sinai. It is the consensus of those who approach these traditions empirically rather than dogmatically that their written form–which is the only way in which we can encounter them today—derives for the most part from periods hundreds of years after the event they purport to record.
In part 2, for example, we shall see that the Sinaitic experience was re-enacted in the Temple at Jerusalem, which was not built until hundreds of years later. Or is it the case that the Sinaitic experience, as portrayed in Exodus, is retrojected from, or at least colored by, the experience of YHWH’s theophany in the Temple? About such issues we can only speculate.
Image from alternativenews.org
It is my contention, however, that the historical question about Sinai, as important as it is in some contexts, misses the point about the significance of this material in the religion of Israel. The Sinaitic experience is not narrated as if it occurred on the level of mere fact. In truth, unbiased historiography of the sort to which modern historians aspire did not exist in biblical times. Instead, biblical historians always enlisted history in the service of a transcendent and therefore metahistorical truth. It is that truth, conveyed to us through historical narrative, whether accurate historically or not, that interests that narrator, not the details, without which modern historians cannot work at all.
What modern historian would tell the story of World War II without ever giving the name of the German Fuhrer? Yet, the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, never tells us the name of the king of Egypt—to the endless vexation of ancient historians—but refers to him by his royal title only, Pharaoh. Similarly, history in the modern sense is not the goal of the Sinai narratives:
they present the Sinaitic experience
as disclosing
the essential, normative relationship of YHWH
to his people Israel.
Sinai was a kind of archetype, a mold into which new experiences could be fit, hundreds of years after the original event, if such there was. That mold served as a source of continuity which enabled new norms to be promulgated with the authority of the old and enabled social change to take place without rupturing the sense of tradition and the continuity of historic identity.
For example, anyone who reads the whole Torah cannot avoid noticing that one sees law-codes separated by blocks of narrative. Soon after the giving of the Ten Commandments, we meet the “Book of the Covenant” (Exod 20:22—23:33); later we see another law-code in Leviticus 17-26, which concludes thus:
These are the laws, rules and instructions, which YHWH established between himself and the Israelites on Mount Sinai by the hand of Moses. (Lev. 26:46)
One would think from this conclusion that the revelation of law was at last over. And yet individual blocks of law come in the very next chapter, in the book of Numbers, and another whole code, the longest in the Bible, will appear in Deuteronomy 12-26.
This Deuteronomic code is most interesting in that it is proclaimed not at Sinai/Horeb, but on the plains of Moab, just before Israel is to dispossess the Canaanites; yet it, too, is presented in the mouth of Moses and as an outgrowth of the revelation of the Ten Commandments (chs. 4; 9-10).
Modern scholars date these various codes to different periods in Israel’s history, all of them post-Mosaic.
What their common ascription to Moses on Sinai
suggests is that the Sinaitic “event” functioned as
the prime pattern through which
Israel could reestablish in every generation
who she was, who she was meant to be.
The experience of Sinai, whatever its historical basis, was perceived as so overwhelming, so charged with meaning, that Israel could not imagine that any truth or commandment from God could have been absent from Sinai.
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