The priest met the worshiper at the Temple, not so much to kill the sacrifice—the usual rule seems to have been that the worshiper did the slaughtering—as to offer it or consecrate it by splashing some of its blood around the altar and burning the assigned portions of the flesh. These actions bridged the gap, as it were, between the worshiper’s profane status and the sacredness of the sanctuary, and so brought the worshiper symbolically into contact with GOD.49 One of the ways of bridging this gap was that the worshiper gave the priest certain parts of the sacrificial animal. In one sense, this was a fee for the priest’s specialized service. In another sense, what went to the priest also served to consecrate the sacrifice, for the priest was a part of the sacred more than of the profane sphere.50
Israelite priests, accordingly, lived under various restrictions designed to separate them from the profane world that might defile them. They had to be male. (Women were particularly prone to impurity, in the Israelite view, because of menstruation.)51 They had to be from a single tribe, that of Levi. Those of the first rank had to be from a single line of descent in that tribe, the house of Aaron. They had to be very certain to eat no unclean food. They had to maintain their purity in order to avoid eating the sacred gifts in an inappropriate state. They could marry only the purest of pure Israelite women and take no chances on the legitimacy of their offspring. They were not to mourn for any but their closest blood relatives, not even for their own wives, since contact with the dead rendered one impure. Even those who enjoyed correct descent could not serve at the altar if they had any physical imperfection.52
This stress on purity fits with what we have already said about the nature of the worship in which these priests served. They took part in a ritual focused at a particular place, a place whose sacredness imaged the transcendence of GOD. By the time Leviticus reached its final form, it was taken for granted by most Israelites that there must be only one sanctuary for sacrificial worship in the land of Israel and perhaps in the whole world. This reemphasized the singularity of the Temple and its remoteness from the profane sphere. Even a person who lived in the very shadow of the one Temple had a long way to go in traveling from the everyday world at the foot of Mount Zion to the sacred sphere at its summit.53
The priests were indispensable to anyone who wished to make this journey. For one thing, they dared to enter into the innermost court of the Temple, where no layperson could safely go. One of them, on one day of the year, even entered the innermost chamber (Leviticus 16). That their identity and their daily life lay within the Temple and that they maintained a high level of purity authorized them to move through the sacred precincts with relative freedom. In addition, since they knew the parameters of safe behavior, they could instruct the outsider in matters that were beyond his or her profane knowledge. In the sacred world, the wisdom of the profane seemed of little use.
The work of priests, however, was not limited to the Temple and its rites. If the sacred drew people to itself, it also reached out to shape the life of the profane world. We are apt to think of the offering of sacrifice as the priest’s principal job—and there is a great deal on this topic in the scriptures of Israel. But another major aspect of the priest’s work was to give instruction in the right way to live. The Hebrew word for such instruction is torah, often (but perhaps misleadingly) translated “Law.” It means direction for the kind of life that, even in the profane world, would accord with the sacredness of the Temple. Not that the same degree of sacredness would be required (or even possible) in the profane world, but that the ideal of daily life should stand in relation to what the sanctuary represented.
This extension of sacredness into the profane world took place primarily through the observance of purity. The network of purity connected Israelite people to their sanctuary through the very substance of the profane world. What they ate or avoided eating, what they wore, how they planted their fields, how they cleansed themselves after sexual intercourse, how they dealt with the dead or with lepers—all these served to connect them with the sacredness centered in the Temple. Purity also served to set Israel apart from the far more profane world of “the nations,” the Gentiles, who lacked even the most basic connection with the sacred center of Israelite religion. It was the priest, originally, who taught these things.
The sacramental priests of ancient Israel thus had a pivotal role in the religious life of the people as a whole. This did not mean that their priesthood simply replaced that of the people as a whole; the scriptures continued to assert that the whole of Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Nor did the priests of religion monopolize all access to GOD, for it was accepted that GOD would also speak with kings and prophets and had a special relationship with the poor. Their priesthood had a critically important role, however, in that it served as the religious model for interpreting the more fundamental priesthood of the whole people.
As we have already observed, our understanding of the fundamental priesthood will always be closely connected with our understanding of the HIDDEN. Both the one and the other belong to that category of things to which it is hard to give definitive expression. We can know them only tangentially and in fragments, never face-on or whole. Our language has no direct, ordinary vocabulary for these two concepts. To give enough specificity to them that we can at least begin to deal with them, we make concrete models in the form of religion and its priesthood. Thus, for example, the Temple created an image of the borderlands. Its sacredness was an image of GOD’S holiness, its purity an icon of the distinction between the HIDDEN and the everyday world. Its rites and traditions offered a concrete model of how one might approach GOD, through offering something valuable and shaping one’s life with reference to the sanctuary. The Temple’s priests were an image of the fundamental priesthood by which we sustain one another in the border country.
Such models of things ungraspable and inexhaustible are called “sacraments.” One classic definition of sacraments is that they are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”54 They put us in touch with that grace in a tangible way. They may even be said to convey grace, for behind them stands the boundless generosity of GOD.55 Yet they hold no monopoly on grace, which is an uncontrolled and uncontrollable gift of the HIDDEN REALITY itself. Rather, they point toward grace; they map it for us; they remind us of its pervasive (and therefore ungraspable) presence by creating images of it in concrete rites, objects, and persons.56
Sacraments do not exhaust grace, as if one had no access to grace except through these sacramental rites or objects or persons. Grace always remains free of human control. GOD is always free to address us by any means whatever. If an Israelite made a pilgrimage to the Temple and there made use of the sacramental priests to guide him or her through the appropriate rites, and to carry the blood and choice portions of the sacrifice to the altar, that did not mean that that person had no other avenue of access to the HOLY or that GOD could not deal with that person directly. The lay Israelite, though not a priest of religion, continued to be a true priest and to participate in the priesthood of the whole people. Such a person might be surprised by an encounter with the HIDDEN ONE at any moment. For the priesthood of the people of Israel was and is the fundamental priesthood bestowed on all humanity—in the particular form shaped and conditioned by Israel’s particular encounter with the HOLY. If the fundamental priesthood of the people of Israel were to disappear, the sacramental priesthood would lose its significance, having nothing to signify.
What the sacramental priesthood of the Temple did for the Israelite was to set forth in visible and tangible form the shape of every Israelite’s priesthood. The one Temple, with its rites and priesthood, figured GOD’S oneness. The purity rules of the torah figuredGOD’S graciousness in choosing Israel and in instructing the people in clean behavior and so separating them from the nations. The worshiper’s purification and the cautious and obedient ascent of Mount Zion alluded to Israel’s acceptance of the covenant at Mount Sinai. The sacrifice shadowed forth the danger and cost of our approach to GOD—and also its bountifulness, for most sacrifices culminated in a sacred banquet.
The purpose was not to replace the ordinary Israelite’s priesthood—that fundamental priesthood which he or she exercised in the way uniquely possible within the called people of Israel—but rather to illuminate it, to help the worshiper remember and interpret the truths that informed it,