to fructify the rest of the world, Ezekiel saw a river bursting up from beneath the city’s Temple, leaving the sacred precincts and bringing life and healing to the surrounding territory. Along the banks of this river there grew trees “withleaves that never wither and fruit that never fails … good to eat and the leaves medicinal.”18 As they experienced the pain of severance and dislocation, the exiles turned to the ancient myths to imagine a return to the place where they were supposed to be.
Yet Ezekiel was not simply clinging to the past but shaping a new vision for the future. As he contemplated the city of Yahweh Sham, he created a new sacred geography. The Temple in the middle of the city was a replica of Solomon’s Temple, which was now in ruins. Its vestibule (Ulam), cult hall (Hekhal), and inner sanctum (Devir) represented the gradations of holiness: each zone was more sacred than the last.19 As of old, the sacred could only be approached in stages and not everybody was to be permitted to approach the inner circles of sanctity. This concept would be central to Ezekiel’s vision and would form the basis of his new map of the ideal world. The Temple differed from Solomon’s in two important respects, however. The palace of the king was no longer next door to the Temple, and the Temple buildings were now surrounded by two walled courts.20 The holiness of Yahweh was to be segregated more carefully than before from the profane world. God was becoming a more transcendent reality, more radically separate (kaddosh) from the rest of mundane existence. J, the first biblical writer, had imagined Yahweh sitting and talking with Abraham as a friend, but for Ezekiel, a man of the Axial Age, the sacred was a towering mystery that was overwhelming to humanity. But despite the essential “otherness” of the divine reality, it was still the center of the world of men and women and the source of their life and potency, a reality that was symbolized in Ezekiel’s vision by the paradisal river. Ezekiel now described the Promised Land in a way that bore no relation to its physical geography. Unlike the city of Jerusalem, for example, Yahweh Sham was in the very center of the Land, which was far bigger than the joint kingdoms of Israel and Judah had ever been, stretching as far as Palmyra in the north and to the Brook of Egypt in the west.21 Ezekiel was not attempting a literal description of his homeland but was creating an image of a spiritual reality. The divine power radiates from the city of Yahweh Sham to the land and people of Israel in a series of concentric circles, each zone diluting this holiness as it gets farther from the source. The Temple is the nucleus of the world’s reality; the next zone is the city which enfolds it. Surrounding the city and Temple is a special area, occupied by the sacred personnel: the king, priests, and Levites. This district is holier than that occupied by the rest of the twelve tribes of Israel, who inhabit the rest of this sacred territory. Finally, beyond the reach of this holiness, is the rest of the world, occupied by the other nations (Goyim).22 Just as God is radically separate from all other beings, so too Israel, the holy people grouped around him, must share his holy segregation and live apart from the pagan world. It was an image of the kind of life that some of the exiles were trying to establish for themselves in Babylon.
We do not know whether Ezekiel intended this vision as a blueprint for the earthly Jerusalem. It was clearly utopian: at this point, the city, Temple, and much of the land were in ruins and there seemed no hope that they would ever be rebuilt. Ezekiel’s model could have been designed as a mandala, an object of contemplation. When his mysterious visionary guide shows him this new temple, he does not tell him that this is the way the next Temple must be built. The vision has quite another function:
Son of man, describe this Temple to the House of Israel, to shame them out of their filthy practices. Let them draw up the plan, and if they are ashamed of their behavior, show them the design and plan of the Temple, its exits and entrances, its shape, how all of it is arranged, the entire design and all its principles.23
If they wanted to live in exile as they had in Jerusalem, with Yahweh in their midst, the Judaean exiles had to make themselves into a sacred zone, so to speak. There must be no dangerous fraternizing with the Goyim and no flirting with Marduk and other false gods. The House of Israel must make itself into a house for the God who had chosen to dwell among them. By meditating on this idealized cultic map, the Israelites would learn the nature and meaning of holiness, where every person and object had its place. They must find a center for their lives and a new orientation. It must have been consoling for the exiles, who must frequently have felt marginal in Babylon, to realize that they were closer to the center of reality than their pagan neighbors, who were not even on the map. A displaced people would have found this new description of where they really stood profoundly healing.
We can see a little more clearly what this holy lifestyle involved when we examine the Priestly writings (“P”) that were also begun in exile. P’s work appears throughout the Pentateuch but is especially apparent in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. P rewrote the history of Israel from the priestly perspective, and he has much in common with Ezekiel, who, it will be remembered, was also a priest. When P described the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert and codified the laws that God was supposed to have given them on Mount Sinai, he imagined a similar series of graded zones of holiness. In the heart of the Israelite camp in the wilderness was the Tabernacle, the tent-shrine that housed the Ark of the Covenant and the “glory” of Yahweh. This was the holiest area, and only Aaron, the high priest, was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. The camp was also holy, however, and had to be kept clear of all pollution because of the Presence in its midst. Outside the camp was the godless realm of the desert. Like Ezekiel, P also saw Yahweh as a mobile god. In his portable shrine, he was continually on the move with his people. P never mentioned Jerusalem. This is partly because his narrative ends before the Israelites enter the Promised Land and long before the city was captured by King David. But, unlike the Deuteronomists, P did not seem to have envisaged a special “place” where Yahweh could set his name. In P’s vision, Yahweh has no fixed abode: his “glory” comes and goes and his “place” is with the community. For P, Israel became a people when Yahweh decided to live among them. He believed that this accompanying Presence was as important as the Law: he made Yahweh reveal the plan of his portable Tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai at the same time as he revealed the Torah. Again, P’s was a consoling vision: it assured the exiles that Yahweh could be with his people wherever they were, even in the chaos of exile. Had he not already moved about with them in the desolate wasteland of Sinai?
The priests of Jerusalem had probably always had their own esoteric law: P’s chronicle was an attempt to popularize this and make it available to the laity. Because their old world had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the exiles had to build a new one. The creation was central to P’s vision, but he jettisoned the old combat myths, which were so closely associated with temples and fixed holy places. Instead he concentrated on the essence of those stories: the ordering of chaos to create a cosmos. In P’s creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, Yahweh brings the world into being without fighting a mortal battle with Leviathan, the sea monster. Instead, he peacefully separates one element of the primal tohu vohu from all others. Thus he separates night from day, light from darkness, sea from dry land. Boundaries are set up and each component of the cosmos is given its special place. The same separation and creative ordering can be discerned in the Torah, as described by P. When the Israelites were commanded to separate milk from meat in their diet or the Sabbath from the rest of the week, they were imitating Yahweh’s creative actions at the beginning of time. It was a new type of ritual and imitatio dei which did not require a temple or an elaborate liturgy but could be performed by men and women in the apparently humdrum ordering of their daily lives. By this ritual repetition of the divine creativity, they were building a new world and bringing order to their disrupted and dislocated lives in exile.
Many of the commandments (mitzvoth) are concerned with putting things in their correct place. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown that the beings and objects labeled “unclean” in the priestly code have stepped outside their proper category and invaded a realm that is not their own. “Filth” is something in the wrong place, whether an alien god in Yahweh’s