Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

WORSHIP, ISRAELITE

The liturgical life of ancient Israel can be broken down into three main rubrics:

1. Fixed calendrical moments of worship. These include the three great pilgrimage festivals (Exod. 23:14-17; Deut. 16) and other minor and major festivals tied to the calendar (Lev. 23; Num. 28–29).

2. Moments of worship that celebrate great foundational moments in the history of Israel. These include the inauguration of a high priest (Lev. 8) or a king (1 Kgs. 1:32-37), the celebration of the covenant (cf. Josh. 24), and the procession of the ark into the temple (Ps. 24:7-10; Ps. 132).

3. Irregular occasions for worship that pertain to the individual or small clan. These include episodic moments of lamentation (2 Sam. 3:31-35) or celebration (1 Sam. 20:28) as they related to smaller sodalities; and similar irregular occasions for the entire community such as defeat (lamentation, Josh. 7:6) or victory (celebration, 1 Sam. 18:6-8) in battle.

Seasonal Festivals

The seasonal festivals can be further subdivided into two groups: the three major pilgrimage feasts (Exod. 23:14-17; Deut. 16): Unleavened Bread/Passover, Weeks (or as it is sometimes known, Pentecost), and Booths; and the minor calendrical feasts that did not involve such pilgrimage (Lev. 23; Num. 28–29): sabbath, new moon, New Year, and perhaps the Day of Atonement.

Though the Bible fixes quite specifically in which season and month these festivals are to occur, it provides no explicit guide as to how the Israelite months coincided each year with the same season. Clearly, the preexilic calendar, which seemed to function on a lunar basis, had some method of intercalation that prevented these feasts from straying too widely from their seasonal rubrics. Unlike Islam, where festivals can swing across the seasons, in Israel they were stable. This is important to grasp, for already in the early Second Temple period the manner by which one fixed these seasons was hotly contested with two options available: a precise solar calendar or a lunar calendar with periodic yet fixed intercalations of the months so as to achieve calendrical stability.

The three major pilgrimage feasts were linked to key moments in the Israelite agricultural calendar. Unleavened Bread (Deut. 16:1-8) marked the harvest of the first new grain. Nothing leavened was permitted during this feast. The feast lasted seven days and was intimately associated with the festival of Passover. Because of this close association, the Feast of Unleavened Bread was frequently “historicized,” meaning that its agricultural origins were displaced in favor of a symbolic association with the Exodus from Egypt (Deut. 16:3). The Feast of Weeks (Deut. 16:9-12) occurred some seven weeks (50 days, so the term “Pentecost”) afterwards. This festival lasted only a day and received no historical association for most of the biblical period. Its significance was, at origin, purely agricultural. It was a festival honoring the firstfruits, most importantly those of the summer wheat harvest. Over time this festival became associated with the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. This had already taken place in the Priestly source (cf. date given in Exod. 19:1), and the associations grow richer and deeper in the Second Temple period. The Feast of Booths (Deut. 16:13-15) is a seven-day festival like Unleavened Bread and marks the end of the agricultural cycle and the (hoped for) onset of the winter rains. This festival is certainly the most complex of the three. At one level the dwelling in booths represents an agricultural practice of setting up temporary dwellings in the field as the harvest was brought in (cf. Deut. 16:13). Yet because Israel herself lived in such “booths” during her trek from Egypt to Canaan, the festival also sought to re-create that moment (cf. Lev. 23:42-43).

Other Seasonal Celebrations

The moments of sabbath and new moon were known to be occasions of liturgical celebration, though they did not have the force of an all-Israelite pilgrimage festival. Biblical texts which describe sabbath observance are rare, though the laws prescribing its existence are early and widespread. The “rest” experienced on the sabbath day (Gen. 2:2) was often compared to the rest experienced in the temple (Ps. 132:14). In the Holiness code, sabbath observance and respect for temple law are often paired (Lev. 19:30). One can aver that at some deeper level sabbath observance in the private home stood in some sort of analogical relationship to public festivities within the temple. Festivals on the day of the new moon are attested but very briefly.

The celebration of the New Year — known in the Priestly source as “the first day of the seventh month” (Lev. 23:24) — was a major event. Yet our sources are also meager in terms of what exactly happened on that day. Part of the problem concerns just which month was considered the first. The Bible contains conflicting evidence for a spring and fall New Year. The Priestly source favors the fall, yet the calendar of ancient Israel suggests that the “first day of the first month” came in the spring (Nisan). Some scholars have suggested that our knowledge of this festival can be expanded by presuming that the New Year was the occasion for celebrating the institution of kingship, both divine and human. For these scholars, many of the Royal Psalms have their origins in this festival and provide some degree of detail about the liturgical practices on this day.

The Day of Atonement, according to P (Lev. 16), is the most solemn holy day of ancient Israel. Only on this day could the high priest enter the holy of holies and offer incense. It was also the day on which the sins of the entire community were transferred to a goat which was then driven out into the desert, bearing away the sin of the people. According to the final form of P, the date was fixed in the fall and it fell between New Year’s day (or the first day in the seventh month) and Booths. Some have argued that, in origin, this holy day was an occasional rite that was enacted whenever the community believed the temple complex required cleansing from its various impurities. At some latter date this rite of temple cleansing was combined with the practice of personal penance and the day became a fixed rite of general purgation, both of persons and the temple. This fixed day of temple cleansing became known as the Day of Atonement. Our entire knowledge of the rite comes from the very terse laws about the rite in the Pentateuch; the holy day itself was passed over in silence in the books of Samuel and Kings.

Foundational Moments

Some of the most poignant liturgical moments in the Bible are associated with the foundational moments of great institutions (the building of the temple, establishment of the covenant) and with their close relatives: moments when important figures are installed into office (coronation of kings, installation of the high priest).

Priesthood

The rites associated with the priests in general and the high priest in particular revolve around the graded sanctity of the temple environs. One of the major reasons for the institution of the priesthood in Israel is the belief that the presence of the deity in the temple can be the source of both security and danger. Because of the high moral and cultic purity required of those who would draw near to the deity (cf. Pss. 15, 24), Israelite culture took great care in maintaining rigorous control over who was allowed access to the inner localities of the temple. The rites associated with these moments of ordination included anointment with oil, sacrificial cleansing, and adornment with special garments (Lev. 8). The anointment with oil served to mark the high priest as especially holy and entirely given over to the deity. The garments of the priests matched those places within the temple that they were allowed access. The most glorious of the priestly vestments, those put upon the high priest, matched very closely the draperies that adorned the inside of the temple (the holy place and the holy of holies). For it was only the high priest, on the Day of Atonement, who was allowed access to the most sacred room in the entire temple, a moment of great opportunity for the priest and the people he represented, but also a moment of great foreboding if the individual who so entered was not properly prepared. The other priests were vested with garments during a ceremony of installation; these garments matched the fabrics found in those parts of the temple to which they were allowed entry.

Kingship

For kings, the ceremony of installation or coronation was quite different. On this day they too were anointed with oil and vested in ceremonial garb. But in addition, they were frequently renamed and “adopted” by the deity as “a son of God” (cf. Ps. 2:7). This high mythic status was thought to be conferred by the act of anointing with oil on the day of coronation. Some have argued that this moment of coronation, though formally limited to the inauguration of a king to office, was celebrated in a yearly festival devoted to God’s kingship. The evidence for such a celebration comes mainly from other ancient Near Eastern sources and the belief that just such a festival stands behind numerous Psalms which praise the deity as king.

Covenant Renewal

The theme of covenant establishment and covenant renewal no doubt had deep liturgical resonances in ancient Israel. This theme, however, has occasioned considerable debate among scholars as to when such a festival would have had its inception. Some scholars believe that the modeling of Israelite religious identity according to a covenant charter began in the earliest period of Israelite history under Hittite influence, whereas others believe that this influence began much latter, during the Neo-Assyrian period. In any event, it is clear that the book of Deuteronomy in particular, and the Deuteronomic history in general, has imagined that Israel’s worship life was characterized by periodic reflection on her covenantal charter. This is very evident in the words of Moses himself when he charged the Israelites to renew the covenant in Shechem after they had crossed into the Promised Land (Deut. 27). This charge of Moses is not only fulfilled at Shechem, but becomes the subject of a rather long narrative (Josh. 24). This particular episode has given numerous scholars evidence for positing other such covenant renewal ceremonies during the reigns of Israel’s various kings. Perhaps it was a festival similar to this that eventually precipitated into the Feast of Weeks and gave to this festival the Sinaitic identity it came to have in the Second Temple period.

See Ritual.

Bibliography. M. Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1978); I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence (Minneapolis, 1995); H.-J. Kraus, Worship in Ancient Israel (Richmond, 1966); G. E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Ancient Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh, 1955); S. Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship (Nashville, 1967).

Gary A. Anderson

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

WORSHIP, ISRAELITE

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)