History

Having established this ordered ritual narrative, however, the text im­mediately calls it into question, in the story of the investiture of Aaron and his sons (chaps. 8—10). This is the only extended passage of full-fledged narrative in the book. In it, Moses follows the instructions given him in Exodus 29 for the anointing of the tabernacle and the consecration of Aaron and his four sons as the chief priests. The initial preparation alone takes a full week and is intricate and difficult, even dangerous, given the immense divine power with which they are dealing. Aaron and his sons perform everything flawlessly, as we are told at the end of this phase:

And Moses said unto Aaron and to his sons... Therefore shall ye abide at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation day and night seven days, and keep the charge of the Lord, that ye die not: for so I am commanded. So Aaron and his sons did all things which the Lord commanded by the hand of Moses. (8:31, 35-36)

So far so good, and on the eighth day Aaron offers the final series of sacrifices (chap. 9), which culminate in a direct response from God: "And there came a fire out from before the Lord, and consumed upon the altar the burnt offering and the fat: which when all the people saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces" (v. 24).

No sooner is the ritual complete, though, than disaster strikes, for Aaron's eldest sons make the mistake of improvising an offering of their own, not specifically requested by God: And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the Lord spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace. (10:1-3)

A strange inauguration of the ritual order! Here the officiants themselves go the way of the burnt offering just made by their father. Clearly the episode serves, in part, a monitory purpose, warning against the invention of new practices or the importation of practices external to the cultic order. ("Strange fire," 'esh zarah, can also be translated "foreign fire" and suggests something either lying outside the prescribed order or literally coming from another people.) The purely ritual message here stresses the danger inherent in God's power. Like the fire, which concretely expresses God's action in the scene, God's power is the basis of civilized life if handled properly, but a raging, destructive force if misused. The passage draws this ritual moral through its description of the strange fire not actually as something forbidden but simply as something that God had not asked for. This is also the perspective of chapter 16, when the deaths are described as the result of Nadab and Abihu's having come too close to God: "they drew near to the Lord and perished" (16:1 [at]; the King James Version and some modern translations obscure this point by assim­ilating this passage to the earlier one, but the Hebrew simply uses the verb qarav, whose normal sense is "to approach"). Here the narrative details drop out as unimportant to the purely ritual message, which refers to the inherent structure of divine-human relations rather than to anything specific to the historical incident.

Yet the shocking quality of the event, both in its timing and in the stature of its victims, has a broadly disturbing effect. Indeed, within the text itself, the disaster shakes Aaron's own faith in his ability to carry on with the ritual order. The chapter ends with Moses' discovery that Aaron's surviving sons have failed to eat the goat of the sin offering, as they were supposed to do. He angrily reproaches them, but Aaron replies:

Behold, this day have they offered their sin offering and their burnt offering before the Lord; and such things have befallen me: and if I had eaten the sin offering to day, should it have been accepted in the sight of the Lord? And when Moses heard that, he was content. (10:19-20)

A clue to the wider meaning of the episode lies in the sudden shift from Aaron's sons to Aaron himself, and specifically in Aaron's sense that the death of his sons is something that has befallen him, a sign that he himself is not entirely worthy in God's sight. In fact Aaron is the focus of this enigmatic episode, whose ramifications present a classic case of the biblical confrontation of the present in the form of the past.

Nadab and Abihu have no existence apart from Aaron; this is their one action in the Pentateuch, apart from accompanying Aaron on Sinai in Exodus 32. Their names, however, have a more extended referential life. In i Kings we read of a pair of brothers, Nadab and Abijah, the sons of King Jeroboam I. These brothers die young, both because of their own misdeeds and because of their father's sins, which have determined God to destroy his lineage (i Kings 14-15). Now Jeroboam's signal sin is his establishment of a cult of a golden calf, at Bethel and at Dan (i Kings 13); at Bethel he personally offers incense at the altar—-just the sort of offering which brings about the death of Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus.³

The echo of Aaron's great moral lapse, his forging of the Golden Calf at Sinai, is clear, and the story of Jeroboam has served as a model for the reworking of Exodus 32 into its present form. Indeed, the one alteration in the names of the brothers only serves to point to Aaron as the real focus of the Leviticus story. "Nadab" is retained unchanged, but "Abijah," which means "God is my father," is altered to the more general "Abihu," "He is my father." In the present context, the father is certainly Aaron, who here receives his punishment for the forging of the Golden Calf.

It is this punishment which gives a literal point to the initial cleansing of the people at the end of the Golden Calf incident. Moses calls together all the Levites, who disperse among the people and slay the three thousand ringleaders among the other clans. Since all the Levites have rallied around Moses, they are not slaying their own clansmen, but Moses describes their feat in a striking metaphor: "And Moses said, Today you have ordained yourselves to the Lord's service, everyone at the cost of his son or of his brother, so that God may bless you this day" (Exod. 32:29 [at]). Leviticus 8-io presents the literal ordination, and the literal death of sons and brothers.

Four distinct layers of history are folded into the ritual order by this episode. First, the complexity of the historical moment at Sinai is encap­sulated as Nadab and Abihu in effect recapitulate the Golden Calf episode and their father is brought to face the consequence of his sin. Aaron's making of the Golden Calf stemmed from the people's demand to have a tangible divinity, since Moses was remaining out of sight up on Sinai; the calf was an expression of the people's spiritual weakness.

The proleptic reference to the history of Jeroboam brings the action forward into the time of the monarchy, strengthening the association between priest and king already implicit in the regal paraphernalia given to Aaron as high priest (Exodus 28). In contrast to the weakness behind Aaron's misdeed, Jeroboam's making of the calves is an act of cynical power politics: king of the newly separate Northern Kingdom, he makes the calves in order to keep his people from returning to the shrine in Jerusalem, where he fears they will renew their allegiance to the Davidic dynasty, now represented by King Rehoboam of Judah. The episode is typical of the history of the monarchical period, with politics as the central testing ground of moral issues, whereas the premonarchical period rep­resented by the time of the Exodus stages moral issues more directly in terms of divine leadership and ethical demands.

In addition to these specific historical references, the fact that it is Aaron's eldest sons who fail in their duty ties the scene into the family politics of the patriarchal period, when in case after case the younger brother takes the lead after the elder one is shown to lack moral strength. On the death of Nadab and Abihu, the younger brothers Eleazar and Ithamar for the first time begin to play an active role and become the forefathers of the divisions of Levites later organized by David. In its reference to Aaron, the episode of Nadab and Abihu also completes the theme of the logic of Moses' own predominance over his elder brother. On a deep symbolic level, this theme of the necessary triumph of the younger over the older represents, as has long been noted, one aspect of Israel's self-awareness as the people chosen by God in preference to the older and more powerful cultures around them.

These three historical levels, patriarchal, Sinaitic, and monarchical, provide resonance for the fourth, that of contemporary history. Leviticus reached its full form during or soon after the period of the Babylonian Exile. Both the fickleness of the people and the misuse of royal and priestly power under the monarchy were seen as responsible for the downfall of the nation. Nadab and Abihu serve as a warning of the importance of just leadership by the priestly class (in the absence of any formal government during the Exile) and, more generally, are an image of the justified de­struction already visited on a large part of the population and a threat of even further woe to the remnant if the survivors fail to reform. In this aspect, the plaintive cry of Aaron concerning the sin offering acknowl­edges the shock of the Exile even while the story asserts the need to pick up the pieces and carry on.

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