The Review of Rabbinic 14 (2011) 92–107 brill.nl/rrj

The ’s Conception of the Priesthood: The Aggadah versus the Halakhah

Jacob Neusner Institute for Advanced , Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 USA [email protected]

Keywords priesthood in Judaism, Aggadah, Halakhah, Mishnah

The divides into two parts, each with its own task, logic, and rhetoric: lore (Aggadah) and law (Halakhah), the one dealing with the of Scripture and the amplification of its narratives and prophecy, the other with the normative law and its detailed rules. Each sets forth its own message about a topic common to them both, a division we see most clearly in connection with the Temple priesthood, its integrity and reliability. One and the same document, the Mishnah, a philosophical law code that reached closure in ca. 200 C.E., presents contradictory accounts of the priest- hood of the Jerusalem Temple. Legal passages rest on one set of premises, narrative passages on another, contradictory set. The rhetoric of the law bears no relationship to that of the lore, the one concise and declarative, the other fully spelled out and discursive. The logic of coherent discourse of the legal passages is syllogistic and propositional, that of the narrative passages is teleo- logical. And the messages conflict. When the Mishnah portrays the priesthood in normative law (Halakhah), it affirms the priest’s unique power to mediate between and . Not only so, but the picture that the law draws of the priest in the premises of the law portrays him as punctilious and principled. The premise of the entire Halakhic structure of sacrifice confirms that the priest functions with correct intentions and makes provision for occasional error. It does not control for the deliberate and systematic violation of the law, whether in action or intention,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007011X564869 J. Neusner / The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011) 92–107 93 by the priesthood. The intentionality of the priesthood always matches the sacred task, barring a rare error. That the normative law deems the priesthood to be virtuous and a suitable instrument of divine service presents a surprise, because the counterpart nar- ratives (Aggadah) take the contrary view that the priesthood acts in a self- interested and arbitrary manner, is comprised by ignoramuses, and when it does its job properly, simply serves as the puppet of the sage. The Aggadic narratives of the Mishnah (and its complement, the ) portray the priest-automaton, the priest-ignoramus, the priest unworthy of his charge. From these stories we should not have formed a picture of the priest upon whose correct intentionality Israel’s and the Israelite’s relationship with God depends. To what is at stake in the Halakhah, which is reconciling God and the erring Israelite through an act of will on the part of the ever-faithful priest, the stories about the capricious and unreliable priest are monumentally irrelevant. The disjuncture between the Halakhic premises concerning the priesthood and the Aggadic narratives about the same is complete and beyond reconcili- ation. In the premise of the Halakhah, holy Israel has placed its entire fate into the hands of the priesthood, a premise that is beyond imagining were the priesthood corrupt and not to be trusted. Since I derive from a family of the priesthood, a family tradition through the male line that extends backward for many generations and has now been confirmed by DNA studies of the priest- hood in the state of Israel for a sizable sample of the contemporary priesthood, I am not an unbiased observer. Each sector of the Rabbinic canon carries out its assignment, the one—the Halakhic—facing inward and portraying the interiority of Israelite existence with God, the other—the Aggadic—turned outward and portraying the external politics of the Israelite social order.

I. The Aggadic Indictment of the Priesthood of Temple Times A brief survey of the Aggadic portrait of the Temple priesthood commences beyond the limits of the Mishnah and the Tosefta, to that summa of the Rab- binic canon, The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan, which as is often the case states the Rabbinic position in a concrete and succinct way. In the present instance the document states in a few words the Aggadic judgment of the priesthood: