What were the socio-religious functions of worship and ritual within ancient Israel? How did worship affect and form Israelite society, and vice versa? To ask this question is not to reduce worship to a mere social phenomenon, lacking, for example, theological witness or spiritual efficacy. Rather, it is to recognize that Israelite worship had a social context and, among its several other roles, had significant social effects. It expressed and buttressed the shared values and convictions of the community of YHWH, or, better, of specific Yahwistic groups. It publicly embodied religious orientations and habits. It enacted the traditions and teachings of the societal authority or segment that authorized and choreographed it. Participants in Israelite worship publicly acknowledged the worldview and attendant lifestyle communicated as social meaning by the proceedings.
Rituals and worship do not have singular, fixed meanings across societies, or even within a single society such as ancient Israel. Rather, worship will convey different meanings and perform varying social functions depending on the group hosting it and that group’s specific theological stream of tradition. As David Janzen (2004: 6) writes, “What rituals say depends on the contexts in which they speak. Sacrifices performed in different social groups can communicate very different kinds of social meanings.” The socio-religious function of worship certainly varies among the major divisions of the Israelite priesthood, the Levites, the Zadokites, and the Aaronides, as we shall see.
The socio-religious aims of Israelite worship were varied and included basic constructive functions, such as fulfillment of religious obligations or ideals, satisfaction of the spiritual and emotional needs of the practitioners, strengthening of social bonds, and social and moral education. Consider four examples (1–4) of how Israelite worship functioned.
1. Praying lament psalms before priests, worshipers verbalized a rapid change of mood, which attested to a move, facilitated by worship, beyond suffering to an experience of re-attachment to God (e.g., Pss 6:8; 13:5–6; 28:6). Abruptly emerging from the depths of suffering, the worshiper declared to God, “You have answered me!” (Ps 22:21 NET).
2. Reciting an entrance liturgy while penetrating temple precincts, worshipers received and embraced an ideally righteous character (Pss 15; 24). Here, Rappaport (1999, 125) is quite right that more than merely declaring the nature of social and moral goods, ritual actually brings them into being. Thus, for example, more than just declaring the character of a knight, the act of dubbing transforms a man into a knight.
3. Collective worship in Israel aimed to renew people’s lives as covenant vassals of God, living in interrelationship. Asaph Psalm 50, for example, aims to inspire reverence as pilgrims renew the Sinai covenant each fall (see Judg 21:19; 1 Kgs 8:2; Hos 9:5). Verse 3 hearkens back to the descent of God atop a quaking Mount Sinai (Exod 19:18), a lapping, devouring fire (Deut 5:25; Mic 1:4). Reciting the psalm, pilgrims experience the numinous and learn the fear of God (Exod 20:20; Deut 4:10; 5:29), which, in biblical parlance, means integrity in relationships—social ethics (Gen 20:11; 42:18).
4. The more one reads the biblical laments, the more convinced one becomes that they are preoccupied with societal violence, with the scapegoating mob as uncannily vicious, even demonic (Pss 69:14–15; 140:1–5; 141:9). As theorist René Girard (d. 2015) would put it, the mob aims to purge the community of evil and secure its own advantage (see Pss 31:18; 41:7–8; 59:12; 69:4; 94:21). In response, the biblical laments demythologize the intoxicating power of scapegoating. First, these psalms reveal that the victims of mob violence are arbitrarily chosen, innocent victims (see e.g., Pss 17:1–5; 31:14; 41:12; 59:3–4; 86:2). Second, the biblical laments completely shift sympathy away from the majority attitude and toward the victim. Those praying and hearing the psalms experience the reality of scapegoating violence through the victim’s perspective (e.g., Pss 6:6–7; 41:5–9; 57:4–6; 69:19–21; 102:3–11; 109:22–25). These prayers demystify the mesmerizing power of scapegoating by ungagging the voice of the victim.
In addition to such positive functions as just sampled, scripture’s authors also document what they view as grossly “misguided” uses and effects of ritual. They attest to worship that functioned mainly to numb consciences and cover up injustice. Thus, Amos 2:8 sears with rage at worshipers: “At their religious festivals, they lounge in clothing their debtors put up as security. In the house of their gods, they drink wine bought with unjust fines” (NLT). Faced with such complacent, self-satisfied worship, Amos 5:21 quotes God stating, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.”
Complicating matters further, across cultures worship and politics are often intertangled. In the Shang Dynasty in China, for example, the order and schedule of sacrifices tended to communicate and justify the order of the Shang political bureaucracy (Janzen 2004, 86). Sacrificial worship communicated and justified daily Chinese life. In other cases, rulers have consciously exploited and altered worship specifically to further personal and political ends. In moves that short-circuit any ideal theological witness and efficacy, worship has been coopted by ideological forces with specific tendentious goals. Israel too certainly saw this sort of political and ideological appropriation of worship and ritual.
According to the Deuteronomistic Historian, politics was Jeroboam I’s motive in establishing an independent northern worship: “If these people go up to offer sacrifices in the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem, their loyalty could shift to their former master, King Rehoboam of Judah” (1 Kgs 12:26–27 NET). Further, his iconography of golden calves (1 Kgs 12:28–29), which conveniently doubled as both divine pedestals (cf. Jer 52:20) and Canaanite deities (Hos 8:5–6), was likely a brilliant political move aiming to secure the allegiance of both Yahwistic and Canaanite elements of his population. In 2 Chr 13:8, Judah’s king claims Jeroboam even used the calves to back up his military might.
Even the great reformer, Josiah, was not above harmonizing Deuteronomic standards of worship and the interests of the crown. He entangled himself in Jerusalem’s worship and capped his reforms with a heavy-handed supervision of a centralized Passover (2 Kgs 23:21–23). Deuteronomy never authorizes any such royal power play.
Numerous data combine to show that over time Israel experienced a society-wide clash of ritual systems. As society centralized and monarchy solidified, a traditional, Yahwistic, lineage-based ritual system conflicted with an emerging consolidating state-based system. Power struggles erupted between advocates of old and new systems of worship and ritual. Here, vying worship systems reflected competing social structures.
It was not just that the traditional ritual functionaries personally resented their loss of status. Also at issue was the loss to society of valued, traditional cult ideals and features. New state cults can undermine the norm of lineage continuity among priests. They also tend to disrupt a society’s traditional lines of ritual solidarity, and they vitiate the unifying and mediating role of traditional priesthoods. In Israel, the proponents of the older decentralized, “tribal” system, who opposed these statist developments, included the Asaphites, Hosea and his supporters, as well as Jeremiah, Baruch, and their circle.
New state-based, centralized forms of worship seemed to progressive elements of Israelite society to possess multiple assets for dealing with rising social pressures, such as population growth, limitations on trade possibilities, and external political and military threats. They provided a political ritual that had a centralizing appeal, they provided psychological reassurance to the populace, and they provided judicial resources with a much wider jurisdiction than lineage-based systems.
Through exercising these types of social functions, innovative, nonlineage-based religious and ritual adaptation helped to integrate the disparate segments of a growing Israelite society, and allowed that society to expand without fission. In the process, the adaptation had the side effect of eroding covenantal social supports, vested in protocols of kinship unity and land tenure, and buttressing the political power of the emerging monarchic leadership. The following sections supply some examples.
Worship and ritual appear frequently in the Hebrew Scriptures, but in texts varying widely in nature, content, and setting. Texts differing in genre, provenance, and outlook prescribe or describe worship. Numerous legal texts in the Torah, of broadly differing provenance, legislate forms, implements, and protocols of worship. Narrative texts of the Torah and Former Prophets picture Israel’s ancestors building altars; the exodus generation worshiping in the Sinai wilderness; kings presiding at temple ceremonies; and a host of other royal, judicial, ceremonial, and other actions within sacral precincts.
Using any of these texts to reconstruct Israelite worship and society is complex. The calf debacle of Exodus 32, for example, which at first appears to be about the Mosaic era, actually represents a critique of the royal cult established by Jeroboam I. The echo of 1 Kgs 12:28 in Exod 32:4 strongly suggests that Jeroboam’s two calves of Bethel and Dan are in view: “These are your gods, O Israel” (Cook 2004, 251–255). In fact, the polemics of Exodus 32’s narrative represent the very store of tradition inspiring the anti-calf battle that Hosea and his Levitical supporters waged in the eighth century bce.
Once one begins to trace Hosea’s trenchant Yahwism back behind the eighth century bce to the earlier Elohist-source (hereafter E) account in Exodus 32, and much earlier still, the contours of a longstanding socio-religious struggle with Canaanite polytheistic worship begin to emerge. In an extensive 2004 study, The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism, I showed that commonplace scholarly conjectures about a gradual, evolutionary emergence of an exclusivist, covenant-based worship of YHWH are wrongheaded. Mythological polytheism was not superseded only at the time of the sixth-century bce exile, nor did Israel even only outgrow it through breakthroughs at King Josiah’s seventh-century reforms, when the book of Deuteronomy first appeared. Rather we must reckon with an ancient and venerable pedigree to the worship values of Hosea, the Asaph psalms, and E.
The polytheistic fertility worship against which the writers of E and Hosea reacted had likely intensified with the entrenchment of monarchy in Israel. Ethnographic study confirms that pressures toward societal centralization and a concentration on fertility rites often appear hand in hand (Cook 1999, 158). The monarchic cult with its sexualized focus on fertility offered social mechanisms, including centrally administered fertility rituals and centrally administered judicial mediation of disputes over arable land, that must have been very popular to Israel’s agrarian populace (Netting 1972, 241).
Despite the fatal flaws of any unilinear, evolutionary approach to Israelite religion, interpreters of worship and society in ancient Israel must still reckon with significant change taking place through Israelite cultic history. Worship and society in Israel changed radically through the rise of the Jerusalem temple, through the northern kingdom’s establishment of competing worship practices (1 Kgs 12:25–33), through the disenfranchisement of priestly groups (1 Kgs 2:26–27; 12:31; 13:33; 2 Kgs 17:32; 2 Chr 11:15; 13:9), through the great centralization programs of King Hezekiah and King Josiah (2 Kgs 18:1–12; 23), and through the destruction of the temple in 586 bce. This partial list of socio-religious changes and upheavals is, of course, quite incomplete.
Certainly, the cult centralization program of Deuteronomy was particularly momentous. The legitimacy of multiple shrines to YHWH was widely assumed before the reforms of King Josiah. Mount Ebal was perhaps an early Iron Age site of pilgrimage. Similar altar structures may exist at Giloh (Iron I) and at Horbat Radam (a small Iron II site). Beer-sheba had an altar from the late tenth to the early eighth century bce. Royal shrines of the Jerusalem establishment were located at Arad (ninth to eighth centuries bce) and Lachish (late tenth to eighth centuries bce). King Solomon sacrificed at Gibeon (1 Kgs 3:4). Elijah does not hesitate to repair and use an “altar of the Lord” installed on Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18:30). Other biblical texts assuming the legitimacy of multiple places of sacrifice include Judg 6:24–27; 13:15–20; 1 Sam 7:17; 10:5, 13.
A further challenge for the historical and sociological study of Israelite worship is grappling with textual claims about transcendent reality, belief in which Israelite worship presupposes. Readers of scripture encounter history-like, quotidian descriptions of worship (2 Kgs 23:21–23; 2 Chr 35:1–19) but also many stories of worship including the supernatural (Lev 10:1–3; 1 Kgs 8:10–11; 13:1–5). The worship contest on Carmel includes divine fire falling from heaven (1 Kgs 18:38–39). In the commissioning of Isaiah 6, the prophet Isaiah is shocked to discover temple iconography bursting alive within priestly ritual. The eschatological prophecy of Isa 2:2–3 and Mic 4:1–2 anticipates the temple mount towering over all earth’s mountains. The utopian vision of Ezekiel 40–48 includes lethal vestments, which laity must not contact (Ezek 42:14; 44:19).
Worship texts within scripture can puzzle and frustrate exegetes, since the purposes and symbolism of worship that they (usually only partially) describe are often obscure or complex. Why are the trees of Zechariah’s temple garden of the myrtle variety (Zech 1:8, 10)? The text does not say, but the symbolism likely relates to the feast of booths, a celebration of God’s cosmic rule (see Zech 14:16). The feast required trees of dense foliage for booth construction (Lev 23:40). A more significant crux interpretum, which scholars continue to debate, is the significance of the worshiper laying a hand on a sacrificial animal’s head (Lev 1:4). Is the worshiper merely signaling that his animal’s turn is next, or is he claiming a vicarious participation in its sacrifice (cf. Isa 53:4)? If the latter, the ritual action would fit the conclusion about sacrifice of E. E. Evans-Pritchard: “What one consecrates and sacrifices is always oneself” (Carter 2003, 201).
A related crux concerns the vexed question of the role of sacrificial blood. How do we interpret the blood rites of Leviticus? A glance at this difficult question reveals the complexity of key parts of Israel’s worship. On the one hand, sacrificial expiation in Leviticus entails a “sacramental” battle of death with life. What wins the battle is “the blood, as life” (Lev 17:11 NJPS). On the other hand, the purification offering blood “carries” not just life but also impurity/death (Gane 2005, 173–174).
In a complex, dual symbolism, the blood gains holiness from the altar (Lev 6:27a) but at the same time it gains defilement from the offerer (Lev 6:27b) as it removes impurity or evil from him or her. That is why a garment soiled with sacrificial blood must have the stain of sin washed out in a sacred place (Lev 6:27b). So too, that is why sacrificial blood is never symbolically dabbed on the offerer of a sacrifice. The blood is understood to already heal offerers by bearing their defilement (Gane 2005, 175).
Clearly, biblical texts’ perspectives on worship may be far from simple, straightforward, and obvious. Some of the most challenging texts about worship are those exhibiting dialogic tensions. Psalm 49:11, for example, speaks of rites invoking dead spirits (Smith 1993, 107). Even the wealthy must die, it states, leaving only their names behind as a means of their cultic invocation. Verse 15, however, juxtaposes a radically different postmortem destiny (Johnston 2013, 76). The psalmist anticipates a ransom from Sheol, contrasting a soul’s dependence on veneration with a direct fellowship with God.
Contrastive perspectives on worship can approach contradiction. In Ps 51:16, God has “no delight in sacrifice,” but v. 19 looks ahead to a time when God will “delight” in them. So too, Hos 6:6 at first appears anti-ritual, but texts such as Hos 12:4 show that the prophet approved of YHWH’s traditional, pre-monarchic cult (see Cook 2004, 242–243). Indeed, the comparative syntax of the second line of Hos 6:6 (cf. 1 Sam 15:22) betrays the issue to be one of priorities. Rather than dismissing sacrifice altogether, God merely declares that “I want you to know me more than I want burnt offerings” (NLT).
Both Ps 51:16 and Hos 6:6 employ the powerful Hebrew rhetorical technique of dialectical negation. This stylistic device embraces the more profound of two truths in tension (see the same technique in Pss 40:6–8; 50:9, 14; Gen 45:8 [cf. Gen 50:20]). Neither Ps 51:16 nor Hos 6:6 oppose sacrifice per se. Rather, they decry the formalism and distorted view of God too often characterizing ritual activity at Israelite shrines.
Often, readers find the prophets’ treatments of worship generally difficult to interpret and to square with other scriptures. The impassioned negative oracles of Amos or Hosea, which decry contemporary sacral institutions and rituals, do not fit the world of Pentateuchal priestly materials and their authoritative worship dictates. In fact, prophetic texts of crisis show that drastic contingencies or covenant ruptures could grind normal Israelite worship proceedings to a halt. Joel 1:14, for example, attests to a point when standard worship, which maintained social stability, became irrelevant and impossible. Stability was shattered. Prophetic redirection of worship and society was requisite.
Nineteenth-century critics (e.g., Bernhard Duhm), influenced by Herder, Romanticism, and liberal Protestantism, contrasted what they saw as the ethical genius of the prophets with the stale ritualism of cultic worship. As Blenkinsopp (1996, 17) puts it, for modernist critics “a highly distinctive prophetic religion, at once spiritual and ethical . . . contrasted with the magical and materialistic propensities of popular and priestly religion centered on the sacrificial cult.” With time, archeological and form-critical discovery, along with new social-scientific analyses, pushed research on prophecy beyond such anti-liturgical presuppositions. Yet as late as the 1960s, scholars such as J. P. Hyatt and C. F. Whitley still argued that the prophets totally opposed cultic worship.
Against Hyatt and Whitley, the prophets hardly opposed institutional worship and ritual per se. As Zevit (2004, 208) aptly notes:
[The prophets of Israel] expressed no principled objections to the cult . . . An argument could be made that for many of the prophets the temple cult was conceived as a graceful gift from YHWH to Israel and that conception clarifies their statements. Isaiah and Micah contains a vision of the temple to which nations stream (Isa 2:2–3; Mic 4:1–2). Jeremiah declared in the temple: “Improve your ways and I will cause you to dwell in this place” (Jer 7:3). The postexilic prophets certainly seem concerned that the cult not only functioned, but functioned well. (Hag 1:7–8; Mal 1:6–2:9)
Several canonical prophets actually held cultic office, including Joel, Zechariah, Malachi, and Habakkuk. Haggai’s book evinces thoroughgoing prophet-priest cooperation. Ezekiel, a priest of Israel’s central Zadokite lineage, draws heavily on the priestly, “HS” (Holiness School), texts of the Pentateuch (on HS, see below). At Joel’s center lies a ritual lament at the temple. The text is not liturgy per se, but an instance of a cult prophet’s redirection of worship during a crisis—a sirocco and locust plague.
A temple liturgy lies at the heart of Zechariah’s visions. Zechariah 3 envisions a sacral rite in which Chief Priest Joshua, standing before the heavenly council, receives ritual cleansing from the impurity of exile in Babylonia. One social function of the vision is defending the temple’s altar priests against fellow clerics’ complaints, such as Malachi’s bitter assault some decades later, which imagined them smeared with dung (Mal 2:3). Malachi’s image opposes that of Zechariah 3, which relieves Joshua of his excrement covered clothes (vv. 3–4). Malachi, it must be stressed, had no quarrel with pure temple worship, rightly enacted, which he prophesies will soon resume (Mal 3:3).
The scroll of Habakkuk is built up out of rites, hymnody, and cultic oracles stemming from an official role within a worshiping congregation. The divine commands and revelations in Hab 1:5 direct themselves to a plural audience in the Hebrew. The verbs and pronominal suffixes strongly suggest that Habakkuk first delivered his revelations to a worshiping community. Habakkuk 2:1 and 3:16 attest to the prophet’s expertise in summoning (“incubating”) nocturnal contact with God. They reflect ancient Near East ritual techniques of sleep incubation, which sought revelations through rites at a shrine. The Ugaritic tablets tell how Danil received Baal’s help through sleeping for a vision. A Hittite text (KUB 1.15) describes a nocturnal incubation rite that cures male impotence.
Other priest-prophets, including Hosea and Jeremiah, ministered in eras with functioning state shrines but as Levite members of old clerical kinship networks subsisting outside of the official state cult. (On the Levites’ alienation from the state cult, see 1 Kgs 2:26–27; 12:31; 13:33; 2 Chr 13:9.) Though on the periphery of state worship, they bore traditional ritual traditions and insider knowledge of sacral proceedings. They walked a fine line between critiquing monarchic society and damning it outright, since their lineage-based worship assumptions reflected an entirely different social order.
Thus, in Hos 6:1–3 Hosea has molded a worship song with a genuinely authentic cultic form and style, though meant not for emulation but as a parody of the people’s insufficient worship (Cook 1999, 154–156). The song sounds so acceptable as cultic penitence that a tenacious tradition of interpretation (starting with the LXX) has taken it as agreeable worship. Would that it were so, for an entreaty of God’s favor within a ritual context is precisely what Hos 5:15 stipulates as the genuine requirement of God. Its locution about “seeking the face” of God refers specifically to a liturgical act at a cult site (Pss 24:6; 27:8; 105:4; 1 Chr 16:11; 2 Chr 7:17; see Wagner 1975, 237).
Jeremiah, one “of the priests” of Anathoth (Jer 1:1), is also a cult insider. In Jer 11:3–8, he re-enacts the covenant ceremony of Deut 27:14–26, where a rehearsal of covenantal law is followed by Israel’s affirmation, “Amen.” Differences in expression from Deuteronomy suggest authentic Jeremiah material here, probably dating to after 604 bce, when King Jehoiachim burned the prophet’s scroll. As in Hosea’s era, official state-sponsored worship is here under siege. One might compare how European Carnival rituals sometimes challenged the established church (Janzen 2004, 52). At times, the rituals of Carnival and their ideal vision of society critiqued social morality (Mintz 1997).
Various prophetic passages show Israelites worshiping extravagantly, but with what appear to be numbed souls (Amos 6:6) or treacherous hearts (Ezek 16:20). To Micah’s horror, Judah proposes renewing God’s covenant extravagantly, by sacrificing “thousands of rams,” “ten thousand rivers of olive oil,” and “our firstborn children” (Mic 6:7 NLT). Isaiah 46:1–4 satirizes the heavy lifting entailed in parading around burdensome idols (vv. 1–2). True worship, it counters, means buoyant repose in YHWH. It means letting God bear Israel up, not vice versa—worship as wings (vv. 3–4; cf. Isa 40:31).
In contrast to images of profligate or frenetic worship, other prophetic texts show apathetic, lackadaisical ritual performance within society. Thus, Malachi rebukes his fellow priests for shoddy, defiling rites that degrade God’s special shrine (Mal 1:7), where God’s “name” dwells (Deut 12:11; 16:2, 6). The clerics plead ignorance, but God’s known standards leave them without excuse (Mal 1:8; cf. Deut 15:21). A closed temple, Malachi insists, would be preferable to their lax, grudging service (Mal 1:10).
How do worship and ritual advance morality in society, cultivate virtuous persons, and elevate the ethics of daily social intercourse? To start, worship places people’s daily moral activity in a larger metaphysical and spiritual context. Participation in rites and liturgies helps people reflect on the larger meaning and significance of workaday behavior. Janzen (2004, 37) writes, “Ritual makes everyday life seem not just natural but cosmically justified.” Certainly, Israelite ritual presents morality not as arbitrary, relative, or a mere matter of habit, but as reflecting God’s persistent will and divine character.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Asaphite Psalm 50, which situates an apodictic ethic squarely within a cultic gathering of the faithful (v. 5a) and its attendant sacrificial rituals (vv. 5b, 8). Worship in the psalm presupposes Israel’s binding obligation to certain moral stipulations of a vassal covenant with YHWH. Reciting the obligatory stipulations is central to covenant renewal rites (v. 16). Obeying them, thus upholding covenantal ethics, is a matter of transcendent concern, as v. 5 shows with its reference to Israel sealing God’s pact with sacrifice. In the sermonic, oracular words of vv. 16–21, a temple leader, perhaps a Levite, demands that all Israel put God’s covenant statutes front and center. They are incompatible with evil, stealing, adultery, false witness, and slander.
Noteworthy also in Psalm 50 is the striking theophany of God at the covenant renewal. God’s dramatic appearance and direct proclamations recall the radical divine promise of Exod 20:24 (E). Israel can encounter God through God’s invocation name at those sacred altar-sites that God choses. “In every place where I cause my name to be invoked I will come to you” (NABR). The content of God’s pronouncements leaves no doubt that such direct divine encounters are all about inculcating covenantal lifestyles.
The encounter with God in Psalm 50 underscores that, far from impersonal legalism, covenantal obedience entails Israel’s close involvement with God. In fact, in this tradition, Israel’s worship should ideally aim at aligning Israel with the divine person and character. Thus, in and through the worship experience, ethics should become a veritable matter of imitatio dei. It should become an aspiration to act as God acts, to “walk in all his ways” (Deut 10:12; cf. 11:22). As in Mic 6:8, it is to “walk humbly with your God.” It is to have a “walk”—a relationship—with God of such intimacy that one unconsciously emulates one’s partner. Here we may speak of “ritualized morality,” of an ethically regulated life that is nonetheless free from a preoccupation with laws and rules.
Heschel (1955, 288) poignantly described the Torah’s commandments as acts of communion with God, expressions of togetherness with God. They are a means of aligning with God’s own interests. Deuteronomy 10:17–19 commends the imitation of a God who “is not partial and takes no bribe” (v. 17), who “executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing” (v. 18). The verses insist that this emulation of God’s disinterested love, which extends even to the most unlikely of recipients, must arise from deep within one’s heart and one’s identity.
Instead of an orientation on covenantal ethics, an alternate scriptural worship perspective finds its bearings in relation to the temple mount taken as an Eden realm. Here, God’s light and truth, emanating from God’s “holy hill” and “dwelling,” lead and guide worshipers (Ps 43:3) Temple iconography and liturgy, in this orientation, evoke the moral purity of God’s cosmic mountain paradise. Worship from this paradisiacal vantage sees the quotidian world of moral ambiguity fade and a primordial, binary world of good versus evil emerge. Here, prayers sharpen morally in intensity and clarity, with shades of gray washed out in the brilliant, overpowering light of God’s presence on Zion (Ps 37:6).
Sacramentally immersed at an extreme of human awareness, awash in Zion’s splitting moral illumination, audacious claims of moral innocence and jarring, damning imprecations emerge. Hearing such language, modern readers are usually aghast, their sensibilities offended. Here, however, worship takes on an impactful critical edge and striking relevancy over against social sensibility. As Rappaport (1999, 130) observes, worship moves to distance morality from workaday subjectivity and compromise. It converts the ambiguous, unstable grays of life into a yes/no signal (Rappaport 1999, 95). Janzen (2004, 55) states that ritual presents a “right/wrong, yes/no version of the world.”
The world of Eden is more primal than the quotidian world—sharper, more contrastive, even fiercer, at every nearer zone of proximity. Whether positioned on Zion’s ascent (Pss 15; 24:3–4), or merely directing cries for aid up the holy hill (Pss 3:4; 18:6; Jonah 2:4, 7), psalmists’ protestations of innocence ring true as primal, archetypal cadences, voiced in the pure innocence of Eden. “Vindicate me, Lord, because I am innocent, because I am blameless” (Ps. 7:8 NET); “You will find no wickedness in me” (Ps 17:3); “I walk in faithfulness to you” (Ps 26:3); “The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness” (Ps 18:20). So too, the psalmists’ cursing of enemies reflects not vengeance but the sharp, fierce “yes/no signal” of Zion’s piercing illumination: “let your burning anger overtake them” (Ps 69:24); “let his prayer be counted as sin” (Ps 109:7).
Among theological exegetes, perhaps Karl Barth saw best the propriety of the psalmists’ claims of innocence. Barth observed that despite all sure moral failures of Israel, communally and individually, God’s light and God’s calling into righteousness lie upon each of the faithful (CD IV.1.61–63, p. 572). Thus, all moral charges against a psalmist, however valid, are here irrelevant—“God is for Israel and therefore for him.” The “righteousness” he or she claims has nothing to do with worthiness or merit but with what Barth calls Israel’s “Yes” to God’s pardon. Where God’s light and call are accepted, the psalmist must claim nothing other than full innocence. Imputed with God’s alien righteousness, one partakes of the peace of Ps 85:10, which is completely the gift of God.
The worship and ritual programs of the main priestly streams of theological tradition presuppose significantly different meanings, and they aim at notably varying social functions. The principal streams, three in number, find representation in the three major priestly sources of the Pentateuch: D (Deuteronomy and related texts), HS (the Holiness School), and PT (the Priestly Torah). (On the nature of HS and PT, see the summary, with bibliography, in Janzen 2004, 92.) Paralleling this, the same priestly streams distribute themselves among the Bible’s three major prophetic scrolls, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. The three priestly strands and three Major Prophets correlate, creating three pairs of literature. Each pair appears to represent one of the major divisions of the priesthood: the Levites, the Zadokites, and the Aaronides. Some brief forays into these three major theological traditions illustrate the variety in Israelite worship’s social roles.
A Levitical perspective on worship and its social functions appears in texts such as the Asaph psalms, Hosea, Deuteronomy, and Jeremiah. One major purpose of cult and worship for these texts was instruction in torah, that is, what we might call “catechism.” Hosea’s critique of the contemporary state cult in Hos 4:1–10 stresses that a proper ritual service of God must faithfully instruct the people in the knowledge of YHWH’s torah (v. 6). The social background of v. 6 is the traditional association of the Levites with the transmission and authoritative application of Mosaic/Sinaitic law (see Deut 17:10, 18; 31:9; 33:10; 2 Kgs 17:27–28; Mal 2:6–7; consult Cook 1999, 147).
God’s torah binds the people together across lines of gender, property, and even ethnicity. All are included in the worship assembly: “men, women, and children, as well as the aliens residing in your towns” (Deut 31:12). In this context, worship speaks for a relatively inclusive and integrated social structure, a social rhetoric that challenged contemporary hierarchies. The covenantal ties binding the people into a collective whole stretch farther. They reach out not only across all levels of society but also across time. For Deuteronomy, Israel’s solidarity is that of a huge branching genealogical tree, planted on the promised land. All generations—even those that have passed on—are as one.
Written around King Josiah’s time, Deuteronomy’s plan was that Judah would collectively re-actualize the covenant year in and year out at a single central sanctuary of God. The assembly that occurred at Mount Horeb should become a central institution of society (Deut 5:1–4; cf. 23:1–3, 8; 31:12). Periodic “I-Thou” encounters, as a worshiping assembly, are thus to characterize Israel’s life in the promised land. Such encounters challenge and fortify God’s people. Both E and Deuteronomy repeatedly make this point.
Deuteronomy 5:1–5 presents an ideal model for Israel’s “I-Thou” encounters with God. The text transports Israel back around God’s presence at Horeb. Though physically on the east side of the Jordan, in a valley near Beth Peor, they take their place existentially at Horeb, before the blazing mountain of the covenant (cf. Deut 12:7). The torah comes to the people “today” (v. 1), in their hearing (“right now” CEB). Moses’ rhetoric guides Israel viscerally to experience a stance before God’s presence: “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today” (v. 3).
God becomes present to the worship assembly in a deeply personal way, in an encounter that Deut 5:4 describes as “face to face.” The expression cannot be literal, for Israel “saw no form when the Lord spoke . . . at Horeb out of the fire” (Deut 4:15; cf. 4:33; 5:24). Rather, the wording coveys the immediate and profoundly existential character of God’s presence with God’s worshipers (cf. Deut 1:31, 42; 4:7, 37; 6:15). God’s word issues “out of the fire” (Deut 5:4), and, Moses recalls, “You were afraid” (v. 5).
As the “fear” of God washes over the people, it predisposes them for what comes next—the decalogue (Deut 5:6–21). As they acutely feel their profanity and brokenness, they yearn for the means, structures, and disciplines of healing and growth. In their vulnerability, they sense their need for each other, for true mutuality, and they band together as covenant vassals. They open up to instruction in covenantal ethics.
An alternative set of intuitions about worship, oriented on Israel’s sanctification, is associated with the writings of the Holiness School (HS) and Ezekiel, works authored by Zadokite priests. This stream of priestly thinking deeply values the transformative power of close contact with God’s holiness, God’s “otherness.” Human beings never fully possess holiness, but they can feel and receive its sanctifying power. Although transformative, holiness is also dangerously threatening. It is more unnerving than a lightning storm (Ezek 1:4, 13–14), more scorching than fiery coals (Ezek 10:2, 7).
Whereas God’s voice and word are primary in Deuteronomy, Holiness theology understands God to be bodily present to Israel, sanctifying a people arrayed around the divine indwelling. Settling within a single, unique sanctuary, the divine kābôd commits itself to dwell (šākan) amid the tribes of Israel (Exod 25:8; 29:45, 46; Num 5:3; 35:34 all HS; Ezek 37:27; 43:7, 9; cf. Zech 2:10). God’s people emulate the holiness in their midst (see Lev 11:44; 20:7, 26, all HS; Ezek 37:27; 43:9). At the same time, from the midst of Israel, God radiates the divine holiness out to every sector of society. For details, see the HS strand at Exod 31:13; Lev 21:23; Num 5:3; 35:34, and cf. Ezek 37:28. For Ezekiel, the Lord’s intent is to sanctify the entire community of faith as well as the land on which they live. Speaking of God’s people, God proclaims, “I, the Lord, sanctify them” (Ezek 20:12). Just so, in Lev 21:8, God exclaims, “I who sanctify you am holy.”
Worship at the temple must ideally both protect pilgrims from God’s holy and dangerous presence and grant them sanctifying access to it. Thus, Ezek 46:1–15 describes utopian temple worship as involving pilgrim crowds moving north and south across the temple complex, forming a transverse axis cutting across the temple’s east-west sacred spine. The sacred (east-west) axis and the profane (north-south) axis intersect at the inner east-gate threshold, which leads to the central altar. At this crux, Israel bows “before the Lord” (46:3). The sacred axis represents God’s incarnate Presence. The profane axis represents human society. The impact of the intersection at the threshold reverberates along both axes. Deity humbly confronts human society, in all its finitude and chaos. Human involvements bow to God’s sovereignty and actualize their sacred potential.
For the Zadokites, Sabbath observance is another crucial worship emphasis. It is, in fact, a perpetual obligation (Exod 31:16 HS). They teach that the Sabbath is a sign of the holiness with which the Lord sanctifies Israel (Exod 31:13, HS; cf. Ezek 20:12). Here, the holiness of time, just like that of place and people, is structured and graded (see Jenson 2009, 182). The land is a lattice of holiness for HS and for Ezekiel. Hallowing the Sabbath out in the land confirms that the temple’s holiness reaches out everywhere.
A third set of intuitions and presuppositions about worship undergirds the theologies of the Priestly Torah (PT) and Second Isaiah, works authored by Aaronides (Cook 2008). PT and 2 Isaiah propound the virtue of reverence (Ehrfurcht), evoked by a towering, transcendent, sometimes “amoral” deity. Here, worship at the temple is not about drawing God down to earth, engaging God in banal affairs, but about inarticulate awe at God’s loftiness. God does not dwell on earth, or in the temple as in a house, but only makes spectacular, intermittent epiphanies. During such appearances, the “glory of the Lord” reveals God’s presence in fire, light, and smoke (Exod 24:15–18; Lev 10: 2).
Worship at its most profound sees God’s people fall prostrate in reverence at the fieriness of God (Lev 9:23–24). Awe before what rises sheer above the self (e.g., Isa 40:22; 55:9) submerges the ego and provokes realization of frailty and mortality. It turns the soul outward from concern with the self to others’ needs, especially the poor and the outcast. Virtue and morality emerge as God’s worshipers repose ever more deeply in the divine mystery, orienting themselves increasingly on others’ humanity and brokenness.
Sacrificial worship in PT links to fiery numinousness. In PT, burnt and purification sacrifices “cover” or “shield” the people from divine otherness (Lev 1:4; 4:20, 26), from divine “wrath” (see Lev 10:2). Sacrificial blood, like the priestly incense of Lev 16:12–13, blocks the numinous from overpowering the human, causing death. Thus, through sacrifices at the temple, “the priest will cover the sin of the community of Israel, and the entire community will be forgiven” (Lev 4:20 VOICE translation).
One social meaning of sacrificial worship, then, is God’s otherness from Israel. Awareness of God’s fiery otherness spreads reverence, a key virtue. Paradoxically, however, another social meaning of sacrifice is Israel’s close interconnection with God. By offering “cover,” sacrifices allow near approach to the divine, supporting Israel’s call to reflect the divine image (Gen 1:26–27). Janzen (2004, 114) correctly states, “Sacrifice acknowledges this fact about the world—Israel has a divine ṣlm [‘image of God’].”
The Aaronides reveal much about their understanding of ritual and sacrifice in the rich poetry of Isa 52:13–53:12. Isaiah 53:10 refers to a specific temple sacrifice providing “reparation” for affronts against God, the reparation offering (Lev 5:14–6:7). Having realized their guilt, those who offer this sacrifice are setting things right, answering for wrongs (Cook 2008, 91). Further, the reparation offering offers absolution and healing for people who feel trapped and despondent (Milgrom 1991, 332–333, 378). It thus fits well the historical and existential situation of the exiled addressees of Isaiah 53.
Isaiah 53 does not concern a temple sacrifice proper, but the death of an ideal Servant of the Lord that evokes ritual and sacrificial language from those who explore its dynamics. The extraordinary quality of the protagonist’s ultimate sacrifice in Isaiah 53 impels such diction. As his trial proceeds, its witnesses discover calm, nonresistant endurance (53:7). They observe a purposeful, determined relinquishing of innocent life (53:10). The Servant “poured out himself to death” (53:12). Absorbed with the numinous, the Servant brims with reverence. He acts in the absence of all self-interest and worldly support structures. Onlookers to the Servant’s ordeal perceive that which does not fit in with regular social patterns of reciprocity and desert. “That which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate” (Isa 52:15).
The work of Rudolf Otto helps us account for the aura of otherness surrounding the Servant’s person and work in Isaiah 53. Otto has shown that intense earthly humility, like that of the Servant, is exactly the flip side or “shadow” of God’s glorious otherness. It is divine glory’s “subjective reflection.” The submergence of the Servant’s ego, his willing sacrifice of his life, is the height of humility. This utterly selfless humility acts as a flawless mirror of God, truly reflecting divine overpoweringness and mystery.
In Isaiah 53, numinousness looms large before those who witness the Servant’s work. Holy otherness crests and washes over them as he dies. In the presence of the Holy, one becomes aware of one’s profanity and scrambles for cover. In the presence of that which dwarfs the ego, one abandons selfishness and awakens to a larger vision of existence. In an atonement offering, the selfishness and brutality in the human soul is cut away, cast off. We can see in Isaiah 53’s poetry how the chorus experiences the Servant’s sacrifice as a death-judgment for the cold, dark aspects of their own inner selves.
Anthropologists and ethnographers have observed a similar amazement and awe at a sacrificial victim occurring across various human cultures. Often, those offering ritual sacrifices perceive that their offerings somehow participate in the purity, sanctity, and blessing of transcendent holiness. The traditional Kandhs people of Orissa, East India, held beliefs about the nature of their human sacrifices that form a case in point (Cook 2008, 98). They honored sacrificial victims, the Meriahs, with extraordinary reverence, treating them as somehow supernatural. Kandhs villagers prized every lock of hair and drop of spit they could collect from the Meriah before his sacrifice.
Edward A. Westermarck, who closely studied this phenomenon, concluded that “a sacrifice is very commonly believed to be endowed with [divine] power.” “[It appears] not as an original quality [of the victim], but in consequence of its contact or communion with the supernatural being to which it is offered” (Carter 2003, 108).
These probes of how worship and ritual function among the Zadokites, Levites, and Aaronides are illustrative of the variety of understandings and purposes of worship within ancient Israel and the Hebrew scriptures. Without a doubt, we must reckon with a great diversity of provenances and streams of tradition behind the many liturgical forms in which Israelites sought and experienced God’s presence and healing.