To Jerusalem
How Centralizing the Temple Changed Everything
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Do you remember when we started talking about the origins of Deuteronomy, and how King Josiah, who ruled Judea from ca. 640â609 BCE, just "happened" to find this scroll that told him to do things that were related to centralizing Temple worship to Jerusalem?
We didn't get into the nitty-gritty of why, then, but it's hard to understand Deuteronomy without that context. So we'll open that door today.
As the Book of Kings tells it, the First Temple in Jerusalem was constructed in the 10th c. BCE. For a long time, it served as the royal headquarters in Judea, but it wasn't the only place from which sacrifices to God were offered.
As discussed previously, we have mentions of altars elsewhere all over the biblical textsâ Shiloh, famously, from the Hannah story in I Samuel 1, and there's also archeological and/or textual evidence of altars in places like Bethlehem, Beersheva, Arad, Gibeon, and Bethel.
King Hezekiah ruled Judea from 727â698 B.C.E. According to the Book of Kings,
He abolished the high places/shrines and smashed the pillars and cut down the sacred post. (2 Kings 18:4)
We'll get into the pillars and sacred post business another day. But the shrines are notable now.
Why did he do all this? Let's see. In 722, the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdomâ a horrific disaster that resulted in mass death and many, many northern refugees streaming down into his kingdom. It may have been that Hezekiah saw this disaster as a sign that his own kingdom ought scrub out any traces of religious corruption, clean up their own act.
It may have been that, as the Assyrians encroached, he thought centralizing could simplify things, help him have oversight and control over operations generally. (The Assyrians did siege Judea pretty hard around 701 BCE, which ended with Hezkiah becoming the tribute-paying subject of the Assyrian King Sennacherib).
It's also possible that Deuteronomy was basically sci-fiâ that is, that, by the time the Assyrians had rolled through the North in 722 BCE and then Judea 20ish years later, these satellite altars weren't much to speak ofâ that the Assyrians themselves were the ones who razed them, not these pious Judean kings. (That's what Bible scholar Lisbeth Fried argues.)
Anyway, assuming it was Hezekiah, as reported:
Would you like to guess how popular this plan was? Tell people that they can't have their local cultic shrines, and give them nothing to fill the void?
Mmm.
The minute that Hezekiah's son, Manasseh, took the throne,
He rebuilt the shrines that his father Hezekiah had destroyed⌠(2 Kings 21:3)
And yet. The whole Centralized Temple In Jerusalem (Conveniently Next to the Royal Seat of Power) concept never really left. When Manasseh's grandson Josiah took the throne,* there seemed to be a key reason for him to try againâ carefully accounting for a few of the factors that caused great-grandad's attempt to fail.
*Josiah's dad Amon was assasinated after two years of reign-- that's a short story.
Now, this thing before of smashing the high places but not filling that emotional or spiritual voidâ that didn't work so hot. So now?
We're going to create a new system wherein people are going to find a new relationship with worship, and with the Mothership:
You are not permitted to slaughter the Passover sacrifice in any of the settlements that God is giving you; but at the place where God will choose to establish the Divine Name, there alone shall you slaughter the Passover sacrifice, in the evening, at sundown, the time of day when you departed from Egypt. You shall cook and eat it at the place that God will choose; and in the morning you may start back on your journey home. ...
Three times a yearâon the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the Feast of Weeks, and on the Feast of Boothsâall your males shall appear before God in the place that [God] will choose.. (Deuteronomy 16:5-16, very abridged)
Come visit!!!!!
Come visit a lot! Regularly! (The walk from Beersheva to Jerusalem was about two days. Very few places in Judea would be farther than that.)
No doing Pesach at home; it's a Temple holiday, now. And then, seven weeks later, the wheat harvest, Shavuot. And then, four-plus months later, come back for the fall harvest, Sukkot!
Show up and get absolutely blasted by the holiness and the awe, the mystery and the grandeur of the place, the power of being in that space with the entire communityâ get hit so hard that the good stuff fills you up until the next sacred time.
Get full up on the sense of usâ strengthening a collective Judean identity.
Why, though?
Why is Josiah/Deuteronomy going through all the hassle of trying to rewire these longstanding traditions? Getting people to do things in new ways (always... easy.... right?)
What's at stake for him, here?
One possibility: The Assyrian Empire began falling apart not long after Josiah took the throneâ but all these generations of paying the imperialist bullies had taken their toll on the place.
So while there was suddenly a lot of opportunity to annex lands that the Assyrians had once held strongly (*cough* the Northern Kingdom of Israel *cough* ), they weren't in the strongest position economically to jump on a, uh, plan of attack.
But:
...look only to the site that your God will choose amidst all your tribes as Godâs habitation, to establish the divine name there. There you are to go, and there you are to bring your burnt offerings and other sacrifices, your tithes and contributions, your votive and freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks... (Deuteronomy 12:5-6)
Ah, yes. The tithes.
The tithes that are now not going to the local shrines, but, rather, to Temple HQ to shore up the royal treasury. The same tithes and agricultural surplus that will help build Judea back better, rather than letting the bulk of it go to the local officials.
And, of course, if need be, those traveling from too far away couldâ if necessaryâ bring the cash value of the grain (Deuteronomy 14:24-25).
And to offset some of the hassle of this new system, folks would be able to eat some of the tithe due â God would partially pay travel expenses, if you will. (EG Deuteronomy 14:23, 16:7-8, etc).
Even so, it may not surprise you that all these changes likely got mixed reviews.
Bible scholar Norman K. Gottwald posits that of course the Temple centralization was great for those who were in charge, and suggests that
it is likely that the biggest supporters of the reforms among the exploited sub-classes were day laborers who were descended from refugees of the northern kingdom in 722 BCE or who came off farms in Judah that they had lost to indebtedness. This rootless group, often unemployed, would profit from increased work in military preparations, in public construction, and in service jobs occasioned by the pilgrimage trade. Living in and around Jerusalem, they also stood to gain more from public charity than peasants scattered in the countryside....
Others, thoughâ the ones who were happily settled across the countryside and who were perfectly content with their closest franchise altars might have been less excited about having to schlep cross-country three times a year. But schlep, it seems, that they didâ tithes and traveler's checks in tow.
Josiah also had to deal with the HR implications of shutting down all these subsidiary branches.
The priests who'd been serving at all these local shrines got brought to the Jerusalem Temple, but weren't allowed to work the altar (2 Kings 23:8-9). It's thought by many scholars that this was the real beginning of the division between priests, who performed the sacrifices themselves, and the Levites, who did things like carry stuff, serve as guards and, most famously, sing and play music.
To put it another way: the now-Levites who'd been working at the local shrines were suddenly out of a job, and also hit the list of marginalized folks in need of care. Soâ now we need to make sure that they get cared for! That has to start being spelled out, explicitly:
You shall rejoice before God your God with your son and daughter, your male and female enslaved-person, the Levite in your settlements, and the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow in your midst..... (Deuteronomy 16:11)
There are other practical issues that need to be resolved:
Up until this point, meat was eaten only as part of a sacred ritual slaughter at one of these franchise "high places." But to tell people that they can only eat meat if they're in Jerusalem wasn't going to work. As if everybody in the Bethel suburbs will just forego BBQ most of the year? Yeah, right.
So Deuteronomy had to come up with a workaround:
But whenever you wish, you may slaughter and eat meat in any of your settlements, according to the blessing that God your God has granted you....But you must not partake of the blood; you shall pour it out on the ground like water. (Deuteronomy 12:15-16)
Ahhh! OK. We don't need a local priest anymore, but we just have to be careful not to eat the blood (because blood is life, and we have to continue to remember that taking this life is a big deal. So then we'll engage this meat-eating with the appropriate reverence it deserves.)
And the examples continue.
Law after law, ritual after ritual in Deuteronomy is related to the great project of reorienting Judea spiritually, ritually, culturally and financially, and perhaps even mythically.
This reworking, sadly, did not last long. Josiah was killed in battle in 609 BCE, not long before the Egyptians, and then the Babylonians, were to come into the picture. (The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE.)
But by giving us this radical reworking of the Judean people's relationship to the Templeâ to worship, to authority, to everything from meat-eating to holy day observance, from Temple staffing to a myriad other things that we'll see in the following weeks, Josiah gave us the blueprint to a world, and a worldview, that would far outlast even his own ambitious vision.
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