Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back, everyone, to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in the borough of Emmaus in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, in Lafayette, Louisiana. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we’re going to get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So last time, we talked about sacrifice in the ancient world: why it was done, what was sacrificed, how it was done, and what it accomplished. And we touched only very briefly on how that applied to ancient Israel. Well, this second episode in this three-part series is all about ancient Israel, and we’re going to look at what we in the modern world would call the religious life and what it looked like for ancient Israelites: what it accomplished, how it differed from the surrounding paganism, and also how it was oriented toward the whole world.

So let’s go back in time again, as best as we can, and see what the holy Scriptures tell us about prayer and worship, both before the giving of the Torah and after it. And we should add as a caveat here at the outset that we are largely going to be talking about what was normative for ancient Israel, not all the stuff that anyone in Israel did. So when you see Israelites drifting off into Baal-worship, for instance, that was not the norm. So, Fr. Stephen, what was the norm?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Right, and we’re not talking about Norm Peterson or Norm Macdonald, or even the late, great Norm Crosby, but what we’re really talking about in terms of the norm is what the Torah said Israel was to do, what God told Israel in terms of how he wanted to be worshiped in particular. And this is an important caveat to make, because one of the frankly worst arguments that our atheist friends like to make, against the Old Testament in particular and Christianity in general, is they will come and say, “Well, the Old Testament says that ancient Israel was monotheistic and believed in unitarian monotheism, but when we do archaeology we find all this pagan stuff. So, see, it’s all a lie.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. Everything in that sentence is wrong!

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Yes, this is another thing that is fractally wrong. [Laughter] Every element is just as wrong as the whole thing.

Fr. Andrew: That should be on… We should get a t-shirt that says “Fractally Wrong.” I’m sure there are people right now making t-shirts for us, but one of them, folks, should say, “Fractally Wrong” on it.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes. So we’ve done a lot of debunking of the whole monotheism bit, but if you’ve actually read the Old Testament, and some of the people who make this bad argument have and are deliberately misrepresenting it for the sake of rhetorical points, because they know even most Christians haven’t read most of the Old Testament, or they haven’t read it either, and they’ve just picked up this argument from somewhere… That if you actually read the Old Testament, you see that the Old Testament after the Torah is the story of how Israel didn’t follow the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, there’s all kinds of moments where God sends a prophet to Israel and says, “You did it again. You wandered off into idolatry.”

Fr. Stephen: Culminating in the exile. It’s disobedience and then exile; that’s what it says happened. So the reason we know, for example, that from Solomon on they were worshiping Shemesh and Shemesh-Tzedakah, the sun god, in particular, in the Temple in Jerusalem alongside Yahweh, the God of Israel, is because the Bible tells us they were. The reason we know about the golden calves at Bethel and Dan is not because we found them at an archaeological dig; it’s because the Bible tells us they were there as the official state religion of the northern kingdom. So if you believe that what the Bible is telling us in the Old Testament is true, then when we go and dig in Israel, we should expect to find a bunch of pagan stuff, because that’s what they say is going to be there!

So what we’re about to describe in talking about the religious experience of an ancient Israelite is we’re presupposing that this is one of the faithful Israelites, who were in the minority but did exist. There’s the ten thousand in the northern kingdom who never bowed their knee to Baal or some presumably larger group in Judah, the same thing. So we’re talking about those folks and what their religious experience consisted of.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and perhaps another… You’ve already mentioned this, but another point to kind of underline is that this is not the stuff that they came up with, largely speaking. This is stuff that we have direct commandments from God: This is what you should do. Celebrate this feast in this way. Offer this sacrifice in this way. The book of Leviticus in particular is like a liturgical book, pretty much, explaining how to do worship in ancient Israel, and when to do it and all that kind of stuff, and that’s largely what we’re talking about. These are the commandments from God; this is what you’re supposed to do.

Fr. Stephen: And like everything in the Old Testament, this isn’t material that fell out of the sky, but it’s speaking into an existing cultural situation. So a lot of what we’re going to be trying to bring out tonight is, just like with the flood story in Genesis is in many ways similar to the other flood stories we find in the Ancient Near East, but then there are important differences, where it’s correcting things, and we’ve seen that with other stories as well in past episodes. It’s the same thing with the commandments regarding worship. This is within the context of the sacrificial worship we talked about last time, that was universal, but then there are certain particular qualifications and changes made in terms of how Israel is to do it. So it’s not a question of just: Take what your neighboring nations do and do it for Yahweh instead.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think another thing we should also mention, because we got a question about this from someone in our Lord of Spirits group who thought that what we were doing in this series of episodes was—in the first one we’re going to talk about pagan worship; in the second one we’re going to talk about ancient Israel; and then our third one is going to be about atonement, by the way—and he was saying, “Wait. Are you guys trying to say that ancient Israelite worship was derived from paganism, and then Christianity is derived from ancient Israelite worship?” And the answer to that is: No, that’s not what we’re saying at all. Yes, we’re dealing with it in this specific order, but, as you said, sacrifice was happening. It was happening all over the world. We see Cain and Abel offering sacrifices, and they sure didn’t derive that from some kind of surrounding paganism. At least as far as the Bible depicts them, they’re some of the only people in the world at that point.

So it’s not a question of derivation, so when we talk about distinctions and stuff, as you said, it’s not that Israel says, “Okay, let’s take this pagan worship, and we’re going to go make some tweaks here to make it appropriate for Yahweh.” That’s not what’s going on. Everybody is offering sacrifices, and then Yahweh comes in and says, “This is what I want you to do in the sacrifices you’re offering to me.” I think that’s another important point, is we’re not making a kind of chronological argument that “paganism is the earliest form of religion, and then Jewish monotheism comes along…” Like, that’s not… I mean, there are scholars who say that stuff, but that’s not consistent with what the Scripture actually shows. So if you believe that the Scripture’s true, then you’re not going to take that tack.

And it’s not like you have to pit the Scripture against all scholarship, because it’s not a universal thing that all scholars say, either. I mean, this is going to be a massive rabbit-trail we could go down, but I think that’s an important point, too. We’re not saying that ancient Israelite worship is derived from pagan worship, that they start out as pagans and they become something else.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it’s also not completely antithetical to what’s going on.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not radically different.

Fr. Stephen: God doesn’t come down and say, “Everybody else is offering incense and sacrifices. I want you to come for a period of music followed by some Torah exegesis.” [Laughter] He doesn’t say that to the ancient Israelites. He could have, but he doesn’t. So we have to take seriously both the continuity and the discontinuity that exist.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So now we’ve done 11 minutes of caveats…

Fr. Stephen: Yes, qualifiers, disclaimers…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, exactly. The big warning label.

Fr. Stephen: Accept the terms of service…

Fr. Andrew: Click here if you agree to—as my father says, the most frequently told lie in the world is “I have read and accept the Terms of Services and Conditions.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, someday we’re all going to find out we’ve all put ourselves in indentured servitude without knowing it.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed! All right. So now that we’ve said all that, let’s begin. We’re going to be talking about both before and after the Torah. Let’s talk a little bit about before the Torah, so before the Exodus, before Moses brings the people out of Israel… You already… The giving of the Law doesn’t happen until after the Exodus occurs, and so—and yet, the people of Israel go to Pharaoh and say, “We want to go offer sacrifice to our God.” And yet, there’s no Leviticus yet. But they’re offering sacrifices. It’s an existing thing that they’re doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you see that, of course, in the patriarchal narratives in Job.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob build altars and sacrifice to God in various places. And one interesting note is that if you actually track through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the places where they built altars and sacrificed, you’ll find that there’s one in the territory of each tribe. There was an early pre-Torah era, where tribes sort of had their own historic shrines related to their forefathers. But, yes, there’s this earliest layer where it’s essentially the father of the family who is the one active in worship, and that’s not just the father—again, we have to think: not nuclear families—this is extended families, so you’re talking about the father of the family, maybe the granddad or the great-granddad, if he’s still alive, who’s the head of the whole clan. And he’s the one who would go—we see this with Job who offers sacrifices for his wife and for his children. It was the father in the family who offered sacrifices for his family and the worship that was involved.

That, then, passes on to the elders of the clans and tribes, once those smaller clan units formed sort of larger tribal units. There are elders who are basically those people for all the different clans that make up the tribe.

Fr. Andrew: It’s basically the father-figure for each of those tribes.

Fr. Stephen: Right, who is in charge of that. And so when you get to… And most of what we’re going to be talking about tonight is in this post-Torah period, the ancient Israelite period.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I mean, we have the most detail about that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yeah, we’re simply told, for example, Jacob sacrificed at the altar at Bethel. We’re not told what, we’re not told how many or how or any of that. It’s in the Torah where we get these instructions from God. But so again we have to cure ourselves. There’s this perpetual danger that has really plagued a lot of Western theology in particular of assuming that the local Jewish community is what Judaism has always been, even back into ancient Israel. So we probably know better if we think about it for a few minutes, but ancient Israelites were not going to the synagogue on Saturday to hear a sermon from the local rabbi. That just wasn’t happening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think part of the reason… not only that this religion has changed so much over time, but also our understanding of what religion is has changed a lot over time. I mean, it becomes a pastoral issue, too. Even in our time, what is the task of a husband and father according to Christian tradition? He is the one who’s supposed to be leading his family in prayer. And when we who are husbands and fathers are not doing that, we’re actually falling down on the thing that we’re appointed to do by God above all else. And I think part of the reason why that happens so much now is because—even for people who are devout Christians—is because of this concept that religion is a thing you go do somewhere else; it’s not a natural expression of the family life. So what we’re looking now at this kind of earliest layer—I don’t know if “layer” is the right word, but this earliest stage where there isn’t a thing called “religion.” There’s simply the things that you do in your family, and then that expands to be the things that the tribe does, the same things, and then you get the nation, but it’s still not regarded as “Oh, we have this religion.” It’s not a religion.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Not only is there no concept of a religion—that’s a 17th century innovation—but there’s no concept of religion as opposed to other things, like religion versus politics, versus capitalism, versus… So there is simply no concept of it.

So what we’re really talking about is a way of living your life in your family and in your community, in your clan, in your tribe, in your nation. It’s a collective and public way of living life. It involves on its smallest level your family. So this isn’t purely an internal thing, the way we think about religion in the modern world, where it’s about what you believe in your heart or what you think in your head. This is a public way of living and of worshiping your God and interacting with your God and with your community and with your family and with others in general.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s notable that at no point that I can recall in the Old Testament did anyone ever say, “How did you feel about worship today?” Like, that’s just…

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Did you get anything out of it? Were you fed?”

Fr. Andrew: “That was a great sacrifice today, Aaron.” [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they might have said, “Were you fed?” but they were talking about how much you ate at the feast after the sacrifice. They’re literally talking about whether you were fed.

Fr. Andrew: “The Levites were really on today, weren’t they?” [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: And… well, it’s a little bit of a rabbit-trail, but you see some of the earliest sins attributed to clergy, like Eli and his sons in the Old Testament, are basically gluttony, that they’re growing fat off the sacrifices, that that is about indulgence.

But so, to talk about the way of life of people, as I said, we have to sort of… It’s very different from any way of life that we live as modern people, at least in first-world, industrialized, technologically advanced countries. We’re living under late capitalism; they’re in a primarily agrarian economy, so most people are farmers, living on ancestral land that they were granted in the Torah, and working that land in order to feed their families and survive. And then, once Israel is settled in the land, you have the beginning of towns and cities, and so that brings in the elements of mercantile economy and artisanal economy—artisanal economy being making things—so you have people making furniture and making things, and the mercantile economy of people taking resources and the things that people make from one place to another place.

Fr. Andrew: Right, trading them around.

Fr. Stephen: Yep, moving them around. So that’s sort of the economic background. And so one of the reasons why you don’t have this separation of religion or your interactions with your God from everything else is that the structures that we have now in our modern society that allow us to compartmentalize “religion” and compartmentalize God and our interactions with him, ritually and otherwise, weren’t there. So if the crops are bad one year, one or more of your children is probably going to die of starvation in front of you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this insulation that we now have because, frankly because of our technological advancement. I mean, literally, what do I do for a living? As I sit in front of this microphone, in addition to other things. I don’t… I mean, we do have a garden in the back, but we can decide, you know what, we’re not going to do a garden this year—and no one in our house is going to starve as a result.

I think that this lack of dependence on divine help is one of the reasons that we have this concept of religion as a kind of boutique piece of life, or just “yes, yes, you should have some religion,” even at best. That when your life depends upon things that are totally outside of your control or significantly outside of your control, then you’re much more likely to be calling upon your God. And it’s interesting to note that even in the pagan world, how much the association of the gods was with things that were necessities of life and survival. You’ve got gods of agriculture and of warfare, all of that kind of stuff. And the modern world has become so convenient that we feel like we don’t… It’s not that we really disproved the existence of God; it’s that we just feel we don’t need him. I mean “we don’t need him.” Or let’s add a little blessing; “Oh, we’re about to do this thing; okay, God, won’t you bless it? But we all know it depends on us, because we got this,” right?

And this is a radically different world we’re talking about. This is a world where if you go off into the wilderness, there is no one in charge out there. If you get beat up by robbers, there are no police to call. If you go out into the woods and you encounter something, there is no certain rescue from the local government that’s going to come take care of you.

Fr. Stephen: There was no Israelite police state, or state in general. They were not practicing some kind of ur-fascism or something in ancient Israel where the state was there to hold your hand and take care of things and make sure you were fed.

Fr. Andrew: You are on your own. It’s you and your neighbors and your God. That’s… Life hangs on that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this is an everyday thing. You’re constantly aware of your dependence on God, your direct dependence on him. So it’s not a coincidence, then, that the most basic level of the Israelite calendar, that the first layer of the Israelite calendar is based on the agrarian calendar. We’re going to talk later on tonight, at least a little bit in brief, about the feasts on that calendar, but they’re related to the harvest primarily, because you’re living in an agrarian world. So the harvest, planting—seed-time and harvest, these things are events of religious significance and form the basis of the community between the human community and God.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So how…? Okay, so if we’ve got this world in which sacrifices are being offered in the home and in the neighborhood, essentially, but eventually we get to the point that we see that Israel has this kind of priestly tribe, the tribe of Levi. How does that happen? Why is it that then they become the ones who are offering sacrifice on behalf of everyone else rather than just being “this is something that Dad does”? Why does that get separated out?

Fr. Stephen: Because the elders were bad.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They were very bad. So we won’t go into it, because this is an episode in and of itself in terms of the priesthood being removed from Moses and given to Aaron. We’re going to touch on a lot of things this episode that will someday get blown up into whole independent episodes.

Fr. Andrew: And that is our deal. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But the priests are being taken away from Moses and the high priesthood being given to Aaron, but there’s this second episode where the priesthood gets taken away from the presbyters, from the elders of the people. And that happens in the episode of the golden calf, where the presbyters, the elders of the people, join with Aaron in sacrificing to the golden calf while Moses is on the mountain. When Moses comes down to settle things down and take care of the situation, it’s the Levites, the tribe of Levi, who comes to stand with him. So, because of that, the priesthood was taken away from the presbyters, from the elders, and given to the Levites as a separate class.

And the part that we’re really going to touch on only in brief, but maybe more in a future episode, is that that, just like priest and king from Moses and Aaron gets reunited in Christ, we see very clearly in the New Testament that eldership, the presbyterate, and priesthood get reunited in the Church when this judgment is taken care of. But that will have to wait for another time.

So that means there’s now a particular priesthood, and we talked about it a little bit when we were talking about God’s body, about the importance of: God says there’s only going to be one place, which—here’s a big discontinuity from paganism, where in the various pagan systems, you created a body for your god, an idol or a particular place; you localized… Every god was localized to a bunch of different places, and sort of had these different instantiations in this different places, whereas Yahweh, the God of Israel says, “I’m going to put my name in this one place. My body is going to be in this one place, in the Temple; the tabernacle, then the Temple.”

Fr. Andrew: So to worship him, you have to go there.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: You can’t offer sacrifice in your backyard any more.

Fr. Stephen: So this means for your average Israelite, who lives probably weeks’ journey from Jerusalem, if he’s a faithful Israelite, this is one of the lures of paganism and of the sort of false religion of the northern kingdom with Jeroboam with the golden calves, is you didn’t have to go as far.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! “Well, there’s one of these just down the street.”

Fr. Stephen: “There’s a high place right outside of town.” But, to be faithful, you would have to make this journey. So that means you weren’t doing it every Saturday.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just too much.

Fr. Stephen: It would take you weeks to get there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! You’ve got to live.

Fr. Stephen: You literally, functionally, could not. So for the average Israelite, this becomes usually a single, annual pilgrimage. If they were well-to-do, or if they were involved in the mercantile trade so they’re moving around more, they might be in Jerusalem for more of the major feasts. But for the average person, this would be: you would make a pilgrimage once a year for Pascha, for Passover, to Jerusalem, and that would be the main time. There’s even instructions in the book of Deuteronomy, saying to do this, accepting that this is going to be the reality, and saying that, therefore, a person should save up their tithe. So the tithe, the firstfruits, all the things you would have offered to God, because you can’t get to the Temple to do it, you’re supposed to save it all up for the time of the Passover, for Pascha, and then when you make the journey, you take all that money, and it says to buy “wine or other strong drink,” meaning fermented drink—sorry to our Baptist friends—and food, and to eat and to drink them before the Lord. And that “before the Lord” doesn’t mean in front of him; it means—

Fr. Andrew: With him.

Fr. Stephen: —in his presence, so with him. With him.

Fr. Andrew: The meal.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is sacrificial language. And it’s talking about having this communal meal once a year, because realistically, that’s when you could do it. And you saved up the tithe, you saved up everything for that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you’re saving it all up… Pascha, Passover, is in the spring, but you’ve got these other times that are coming at these other times of year, firstfruits, etc., etc., you probably can’t—it’s not necessarily going to keep, all that time. So what do you do? You sell some of it, so that you have the money.

Fr. Stephen: You sell it and save the money.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’ve got the money set aside, and bring that with you.

Fr. Stephen: And probably the most famous biblical example of someone doing exactly that is Christ and the apostles, going to Jerusalem for the Passover, and renting a room and buying food and wine and other strong drink, and literally eating and drinking it with the Lord, because Christ was sitting there at the table.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s actually sitting there. God is at the table.

Fr. Stephen: So the Mystical Supper, or the Last Supper, is the fulfillment of this in a very literal sense. This is the place. That’s the place and time when it most really and truly happened, but that was… So the religious experience of the average Israelite was about faithfulness. This is why faithfulness is so important with Abraham. Abraham in Genesis doesn’t have a Temple, he doesn’t have priests, he doesn’t have any of this stuff, but it’s about how he lived each day, how he conducted himself with his wife and his children and his servants, how he conducted business, how he interacted with the people he encountered as he sojourned different places. And so it was the same thing for the average Israelite. Being faithful to God was not about believing certain things in his head or feeling certain things in his heart or holding to certain doctrines; it was about, every day, what he did, from when he woke up to when he went to sleep, most of which was farm work.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it should probably be mentioned that we’re not talking about only being ethical, being a good person, although obviously that’s included—you were expected to behave ethically—but rather that all is done with prayers, that all is done with… like, for instance, the tithes are literally taking your livelihood and giving it to God, that it’s not a system of doctrine and morals, although certainly those things are included. It’s, as you said, a whole way of life.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, we have this… Probably the biggest difference between the religion of the Torah and every other religion in world history—I’ll go that far—is that ethics is religious in the Torah. There is no system of ethics attached to Greco-Roman paganism, but because… The closest thing you get in paganism, religiously, is that there are certain ways you have to act when you’re in a temple or towards a temple or towards an idol, towards a god, but what happens in the Torah is we find out that humanity is made in the image of God, so every human you meet every day is the image of God, is God’s body in that sense. So how you treat them and act to them, that is a religious act; you’re doing it to God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right. It is an act of piety. Right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re venerating them.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yeah! So, a little bit related to that, before we go to break, we received a question from Evan, who sent this to us, and this is connected somewhat with our previous episode where we talked about incense, but this actually does integrate into this episode, because we were talking about the—as we would think of it—religious life of the average faithful Israelite. So Evan has a question about the use of incense in the home. So this is what he says:

With incense being something that is offered to God, and with the sacerdotal priests and bishops being the ones that offer the sacrifice of the Eucharist and offering incense in the services of the Church, how are we to understand the practice of using incense at home during family or personal prayers? Does it have the same kind of propitiatory and/or expiatory effect there when used by lay people as it does during the services of the Church by the priest? Or is it different, perhaps even to the extent of just being a pleasant smell for us, when we pray in that context?

So what do you think, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s continuity and discontinuity. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there you go.

Fr. Stephen: So you do find, for the average ancient Israelite—we’ll stay where we are, historically—this is a massive flash-forward from last time, by the way; we’re only talking about the second millennium BC now, and some of it’s from the first millennium BC: this is recent times!—but we find incense boats, ways of offering incense in the home, but not altars of incense. So there is a distinction between what’s going on when incense is offered on the altar in the tabernacle or the Temple, and when incense is offered with prayers at home, although incense is offered with prayers at home.

Now this isn’t a complete discontinuity; it’s not two different things. So it’s not just: this is my Febreeze plug-in as opposed to an act of worship. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and sometimes I hear people say, “Oh, I like the smell when I pray at home.” I’m like: “Well, that’s good, but it’s not the reason that we offer incense when we pray at home.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it is, in a sense… Those things you do at home, like when you have an icon corner and you offer incense there when you pray, it’s a way of participating in the worship of the Church when you’re not there in the church. So there’s a connection. Now, it wasn’t feasibly possible at that time for somebody to go get a coal from the altar of incense and take it home with them on its weeks’ journey. And don’t ask your priest for that now, because…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, please!

Fr. Stephen: “Can I have one of your used charcoals?” [Laughter] But the idea is the same. So it’s different enough that one is not a substitute for the other. One is more full, more rich, but it is a sort of lesser degree of participation in the reality.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right. Well, we’re going to go ahead and take our first break, and we will be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the second half of the show. We’re ready to take your calls, so you just heard the Voice of Steve. Feel free to give us a ring: 855-AF-RADIO.

We were just talking about incense, so that actually leads very nicely into the next part of our discussion. It’s not like—again, it’s not like religion as we tend to think of it now, where we tend to think of religion as something that happens… for most of us, it happens on Sunday morning—there’s religion down there at the church—and then when we come home. I remember when I was pastoring—this didn’t happen very often, but I did have people, like: “What do you do during the week, Father?” And it’s like: “Well, actually, we have services during the week…” [Laughter] “We do come to the church and pray and offer incense, among other things.” So was it the same in ancient Israel? Were they doing services every single day at the tabernacle, and then later the Temple?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mostly play Assassin’s Creed during the week… [Laughter] But it’s good that… I’m glad that you’re there praying.

Fr. Andrew: Because you have nothing else to do! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’re there praying for me; I’m glad.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. [Laughter] You just ruined a lot of pastors’ day. “Look, Fr. Stephen plays Assassin’s Creed during the week, but you’ll handle the prayer for me, won’t you, Father?” “Yes, of course.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, you can tell I was being facetious because I said it.

Yeah, what we’re going to talk about in this half—of the several halves we have this evening—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: —we’re talking about the different offerings going on at the tabernacle and then the later Temple. And these different types of offerings also serve as building blocks; they’re like LEGOs, or the knock-off DUPLO blocks that I used to get. No bitterness here at all. [Laughter] They’re sort of like LEGOs in the sense that they exist in their own right, and they’re going on at the tabernacle and the Temple in their own right, but then when we get to the feasts, they’ll be sort of put together in different ways for sort of larger ritual celebrations. So, as one example that we’ll talk about more next time when we talk about atonement and the Day of Atonement in particular, is the first instruction for the Day of Atonement is that the high priest and his sons who are assisting him need to go and offer sin-offerings for themselves. It doesn’t spell that out at the time, because it’s already told you what a sin-offering is, so you just sort of plug that in there.

So these not only were offerings that were done, but they’re also building blocks for larger ritual realities, for feasts and other celebrations. And so that starts with the very first commandment concerning worship. Let me—this is another brief digression, but let me go ahead and do it. When we’re talking about worship, it’s important that… We already mentioned this, that God gave particular commands, but worship is something that we’re offering to God, which means we need to offer him what he wants, not what we want to give and what we want to offer.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s not a show we’re putting on for the people who come.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So that runs against our idea of worship. We want to express ourselves and our creativity, and that kind of thing from a biblical perspective is really bad and dangerous. [Laughter] But if you even think about it for a minute, the things that are offered in sacrifice are universally referred to as “gifts,” and we talked about how it’s hospitality. So when you’re giving hospitality, you’re giving something to please the guest, not what you like and you want to give to them. But the example I give a lot of the time is that if my anniversary or my wife’s birthday rolls around, and I get her a Makita cordless power drill, she’s not going to be happy, and that’s not because it’s a lousy drill, that’s not because it’s not a very useful tool or that there’s something wrong with it; it’s that it’s not what she wanted. My wife wanted a saber-tooth tiger skill, not a Makita cordless power drill. Actual Christmas gift.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I was going to say, this sounds too specific to just be made up on the spot!

Fr. Stephen: You can see it on our mantelpiece.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, my wife once wanted a laminator.

Fr. Stephen: There you go!

Fr. Andrew: That is what she received! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s the idea. So if what God wants are these things, that’s what we give to him and bring to him.

The first commandment he gives—sort of the baseline for what’s going to happen in the tabernacle and then the Temple—is given in Exodus 30, and that’s basically that incense is to be offered at the altar of incense, at morning and at evening, every day. I don’t know if you actually want to read that, read those verses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m going to read that, and then we actually have a call coming in that’s directly related to this, so we’ll just take the call in a second. This is Exodus 30:7-9:

Aaron shall burn on it sweet incense every morning; when he tends the lamps, he shall burn incense on it. And when Aaron lights the lamps at twilight, he shall burn incense on it, a perpetual incense before the Lord throughout your generations. You shall not offer strange incense on it or a burnt-offering or a grain-offering, nor shall you pour a drink-offering on it.

So it’s reserved for incense only, and at particular times.

Fr. Stephen: “It” being the altar of incense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and not the “strange incense,” so there’s a particular kind you’re supposed to use. All right, so we’ve got James from Washington, and he’s calling specifically about incense. James, can you hear me? Welcome to The Lord of Spirits.

James: I can hear you. Thank you for having me on!

Fr. Andrew: Great! What’s your question or comment, James?

James: So I actually originally started thinking about this in context of the last episode, talking about incense and how it was used as a purgatory-type thing, where you’re cleaning out for demonic worship as well, of like one kind of demon that you’re worshiping, you use incense to cleanse the area. So I was wondering what was it being cleansed from: is it other demons that it’s being cleansed from? And why would they not like that particular odor and scent? Maybe they have different factions of different kinds of smells that they might have?

And then I was thinking about going back into the actual regulations in this particular passage in Exodus 30, about how God gave a very specific recipe for what kind of incense one’s supposed to use, and not use “strange” or “foreign” incense, and then when Moses or Aaron’s sons used that strange fire, they were killed for it. So there’s very strict rules about that, but then I noticed that in modern usage we have some people who use that same exact recipe for incense, and other people who use other ones, for the Magi, when they have particular incense for them, or for the Annunciation, they use different incenses for different time periods, like it’s not strict any more. So I was wondering if you could comment on that part.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that’s a great question, and I have no answer to any of that, but I’m pretty sure that Fr. Stephen has something! [Laughter] That’s really interesting, actually; I just don’t know! Father, I’m sure you know something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. I’m tempted to reinsert my chiastic reference from last time, but I’ll spare everyone, because Fr. Andrew didn’t get in anyway.

Fr. Andrew: I didn’t, no.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s not an issue of that particular smell drives them away, drives demons away, like garlic with vampires or something. So there’s sort of two pieces here. The first piece is… the purgative element has to do with the fact that—and we’ll get into this a little more in just a minute—we have a little—we talked about this last time—we have a very transactional view of sin—sin is breaking a rule, committing a crime, and that’s been sort of invested in us through our American Puritan religious culture—but in actuality, we talked about, is this power or force that’s active in the world, and that’s how St. Paul talks about it. He talks about “sin,” not “sins,” most of the time. And that leaves a residue.

The way it’s talked about in the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament is very much more like a disease, and now that we’ve all been quarantined for a year, we all have a much better idea of this. It’s not just the disease or a person with the disease that we have to worry about; it’s things that have been touched by the person with the disease, coming into the place afterwards, the air that’s been breathed out by the person with the disease—that things become tainted or infected by sin; the material creation becomes affected and tainted by sin.

So the purgative element of sacrifice, that expiation element, is cleansing and removing and purifying from that taint, so it’s not just driving the demons out but removing the residue that they’ve left and the residue of our sins. When people ask me why I need to come every year and bless their house after Theophany, I say, “Well, I don’t as long as you don’t sin in it.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right! I also tell people that!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t need to bless and rededicate it as long as you don’t commit any sins there. [Laughter] You don’t let sin into your house.

So that’s the same kind of thing with incense. That’s why we cense the sanctuary at the beginning or right before the beginning of all of our services: it’s cleansing and rededicating the physical space. That’s something that we as modern Americans don’t have: this ontological understanding of sin as sort of stuff, as sort of grime, as sort of literal filth. That’s why there’s such a connection between sin and uncleanness in the Torah in the Old Testament. So you’re kind of cleaning the air.

James: So when you’re worshiping demons with incense, is that like you’re putting soot out there, like you’re deliberately contaminating the area with sin? And then the court is like a reverse of that, then?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it would in some cases they’d use it to conjure certain spirits, but even pagans had an idea that there were spirits they wanted to interact with and spirits they didn’t want to interact with.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I imagine that offering incense to a particular spirit is part of… like, it’s not just like… You were asking about the sort of recipe, James, but I can’t imagine—I don’t know; correct me if I’m wrong about this, Father—but I can’t imagine that particular recipes drive away certain kinds of spirits, like you said, garlic with vampires, but rather that it’s a question of participation, of offering this as a sacrifice to the spirit that you’re offering it to, and not, then, to the other ones around. Am I getting that right?

James: Like a heraldry kind of thing: I’m doing this because this is related to you, this is your pattern, and so I’m using that same pattern, to put an address on the prayer, in a sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the pagan gods and other spirits were involved in these constant conflicts with each other, so you’re driving away the enemies of the god that you want to… the antithetical, enemy spirits of the god that you’re wanting to be there and interact with. Yeah, in terms of the recipe and us not having a recipe per se, this is one of the major things that happen—we’re going to talk about this more last time—last time? next time; I’m apparently time traveling now—

James: Cool.

Fr. Stephen: —we’re going to talk about this a lot more next time when we’ll talk about atonement, but part of what happens in Christ’s atonement is that the entire material world becomes cleansed, and so you no longer have material objects and things and animals and trees and plants and places that are necessarily unclean by nature any more. And so you’ll find in the Torah things being very limited in terms of material, what material things can and can’t be made out of, and of course all the food laws. All of this is a product of that, is that they’re… We have to view ancient Israel, or the camp in the wilderness and then ancient Israel when they were functioning the way they were supposed to be, as sort of this island, this set-apart island of holiness in this world consumed with darkness.

James: [Inaudible] kosher laws.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s a whole… There are these particular things that are made clean and holy and sacred, and everything else and any deviation from that is still part of that corruption. There’s this major transition, and we’re going to talk about this with Christ’s atonement and then the coming of the Holy Spirit and how this island comes to then expand and encompass the creation. But that’s why there is no now particular recipe for incense that is more or less clean. But incense, if you get Orthodox incense, when the incense is being rolled and the incense is being made, there are prayers that are said and blessings that are asked for. It’s sort of parallel to foods. Now we receive all foods with prayer and thanksgiving, as opposed to only certain foods being clean and certain other foods being unclean; it’s the same thing with incense, essentially.

James: That makes sense.

Fr. Andrew: Incense-sense, as it were. [Laughter] Sorry. Well, all right. Does that answer your question, then, James?

James: It absolutely does, and I am happy there are no pumpkin-spice factions of demons or the other spice-types. This is super cool. I really appreciate the answer there.

Fr. Andrew: Excellent.

Fr. Stephen: Pumpkin spice summons white girls and drives me away, for the record.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. Well, thank you for calling in, James. Nice to hear from you.

So we talked about incense-offerings. There’s a bunch of other offerings that we want to talk about in this particular segment, so let’s get rolling here. What the next one, Father?

Fr. Stephen: In this of our many halves.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Right. Some people ask, “How can you have a third half?” It’s like: Because this is one-and-a-half shows. In this particular episode, we’re going to have four halves, because this is a double show.

Fr. Stephen: Two shows for the price of one.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Cheap is free, right there.

So the next one we’re going to talk about is sin-offerings, and these are sacrifices, obviously, that are sacrificed on the altar of burnt-offering, not on the altar of incense. And these… Importantly, sin-offerings, if you read Leviticus closely—I know it’s hard, and I know no one wants to do it, but it’s worthwhile; it pays off if you actually do it—Leviticus is very clear that it’s not always animals. It’s always food, but sometimes…

Fr. Andrew: Right! It’s always food. Sometimes it’s cakes, sometimes it’s alcoholic beverages.

Fr. Stephen: And oil. And sometimes then there’s also meat from an animal that has been killed, because that’s where you get meat. But in sin-offerings, the killing, again, as talked about last time, is not ritualized. You have to kill it so you can eat it. You have to slaughter an animal to prepare it as meat. But the killing part is not ritualized. It’s just about, again, food, and everything we’ve said about sacrifices already applies to this.

But it’s also not—again, talking about that transactional view of sin—it’s not responsive. It’s not like the priests were sort of sitting around the tabernacle, saying, “Are we going to have to do any sin-offerings today? Aw, here comes Symeon, always lying; he’s got a sheep with him. I suppose we’re going to have to sacrifice it again.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s this on-going thing. Sin-offerings are being offered every day, right?

Fr. Stephen: Continuously.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because sin is in the world, and it’s a driving-off of that effect, a cleansing of that effect. It’s not one-to-one, it’s not like paying a fine to God—“Oh, we sinned so we’re going to make it… we’re going to fix it.” This, I think, is such a critical point, because there’s such a lot of bad theology out there—I’m just going to call it that. There’s a lot of bad theology out there that thinks that’s what sacrifice is, but sin-offerings—it’s interesting that they are specifically the sin-offerings—are specifically not that. It’s like—I don’t know, in some ways it’s like that offering of incense, which is done to cleanse, to purify and cleanse whatever, and we don’t say, “Okay, how sinful was I this morning? I’ll put three pieces of incense in the censer today.” [Laughter] Like: “Oh man, I had a big fight with my wife last night. Son, you’ve got to put ten pieces of incense on censer.” It’s not like that. It’s not quantitative, it’s not retributive, it’s not any of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there’s this bizarro-world idea—and I call it that—because you just can’t get it from the Old Testament, but a lot of people have it in their heads that someone would steal something, so they would say, “Oh no, I stole something. God’s going to kill me, but if I kill this goat, he’ll take that instead. So I’m going to go down to the tabernacle or the Temple and kill this goat. And then everything’ll be okay and I can go on my merry way.” That’s not it at all.

Fr. Andrew: Citation needed. [Laughter] There isn’t one!

Fr. Stephen: The sin-offerings for all the thefts and all the lies and all the unfaithfulness and all the sins are being committed, are going on all the time at the tabernacle and the Temple. And when I steal something, what I do to repent is I go and pay back, make restitution of what I stole, plus four times more, to the person I stole from. And then, then I have repented. And the combination of the sin-offering that’s going on at the tabernacle or Temple, that I’m nowhere near—I’m weeks away—and me repenting and making the restitution is what takes care of the situation and restores the situation. But the thing that I do is make the restitution.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Make it right.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s how sins are dealt with in the Torah. There aren’t, like, public beatings and floggings like in Hammurabi’s Code, to punish you for what you did. You aren’t maimed or disfigured, like in Hammurabi’s Code, based on what you did. There are limits placed on vengeance—but, see, even vengeance is a communal means of restoring justice. It’s a way of re-balancing the scales, even vengeance. So the Torah limits vengeance to keep it from going out of control, but restitution is what’s called for.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s also another side to this which I think is also really important to underline which is: Why do you need to deal with sin? It’s not just like: “I don’t want to go to hell when I die” or something like that. There’s actually something much… Although we should maybe… We’ll flesh that out in our episodes on sacred geography! I know people are waiting on those.

No, there is actually a reason to deal with sin, and that is that God’s presence is potentially dangerous, and so you deal with sin so that God will remain present with you, and the reason why is because God’s presence in the presence of sin burns that away. If you retain sin and you enter into the presence of God, then that is harmful for you, because God’s holiness does that to things that are corrupted by sin. And of course we see in the Old Testament a number of times where God withdraws his presence in his response to great sin, not because, like, “I’m going to punish you by leaving,” but rather, “I’m going to leave to give you a chance not to be annihilated by being in the presence of the holy God.” That’s why it’s necessary.

Fr. Stephen: And our caller, James—and I’m not picking on him; I’m not picking on you, James—but you notice when he brought up Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, how he just defaulted into expressing it: They broke the rules about incense, and so they were killed, which isn’t actually what the story says in Leviticus. What the story says in Leviticus is that they came into God’s presence unworthily and the fire of God’s presence incinerated them. That’s very different.

That’s very different, and so, yes, this is… for God to live among his people, this holiness and purity needs to be maintained, because otherwise God is going to break out and consume the camp or he’s going to have to leave, which he does in the exile.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Okay, so we’ve got another kind of offering that’s given. There’s incense-offerings, sin-offerings; next is peace-offerings. Peace-offerings, what’s that all about, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and I’m using the old King James nomenclature on these.

Fr. Andrew: That warms my dinosaur heart so much.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “Ye olde…” Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: With those Ss that look like Fs? Oh, those are the best. Yes.

Fr. Stephen: So sin-offerings are helping restore the relations within the community and the community’s relationship to God, and sort of maintain it on a regular basis, sort of this sin-maintenance system. Peace-offerings are when there’s been a major rupture in that relationship.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so you’ve got to make peace.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this’ll happen in two situations. Number one, moments of great repentance, which… and often these two things are related—when the community realizes: Wow, we’ve really messed up; or, We’ve been messing up for a long time. [Laughter] So we need to turn around and repent and make peace with God and reestablish this whole relationship from scratch, like King Josiah’s reforms.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and sometimes they know that that’s necessary because there’s been a famine or plague, this… Yeah, like: Oh, this horrible thing is befalling us; we had better make it right.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not: God gets angry and punishes them; it’s: this is what it takes to get their attention.

Fr. Andrew: Right. God permits this suffering on a mass scale precisely to get them to repent.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to prevent something worse down the road, if they continue down the road that they’re going.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So relevant for our present moment.

Fr. Stephen: That’s right. And so these peace offerings are similar to sin-offerings. They’ll often involve sort of more or more valuable animals, or more or more valuable grain offerings. More is involved, to make a bigger show, not because: Oh, this is more powerful; if you do two bulls, then God’ll really listen to you, instead of one bull, right?

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. [Laughter] Keep up those phrases!

Fr. Stephen: Right, but it’s to emphasize and display actual contrition. If we put this into our hospitality metaphor, there’s a difference between me inviting somebody over who is my friend and I’m just maintaining and deepening that relationship, and something’s come between me and someone else—I’ve done something that offended them or hurt them badly, and I’m inviting them to my home to try to make peace. I’m going to be sort of more giving and more… to try to truly express to them how sorry I am, and the sincerity of the fact that I’m going to try to change and not do that again, in those same kind of relational terms.

So then to get through sort of the last few, these are relatively quick: there are thank-offerings, which are voluntary—

Fr. Andrew: What they sound like. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, what it says on the tin. [Laughter] So God gives us gifts; hopefully we’re thankful for them, so we go and offer thanks. In ancient Israel a lot of times this was related to taking vows.

Fr. Andrew: Right. “Lord, if you do this, then I will— If you do this for me, then I will offer a sacrifice in thanksgiving.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you deliver.

Fr. Andrew: God does the thing? Offer the sacrifice.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Don’t be like the nine lepers who went off into town. And then grain-offerings, which are usually attached to— they’re a type of thank-offering, really, but they’re related to the harvest, generally, so it’s the firstfruits of the harvest. We’ll talk about the feast of firstfruits. And then drink-offerings, which were just… Drink-offerings just means that it’s liquid, not that you drink it. [Laughter] And those are sometimes done independently, like at the olive and grape harvest, when you just offer oil or wine, but usually it’s done in the context of another sacrifice, where the oil and the wine, and/or the wine, are poured out on what it is that you are offering.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and so then, question that I have about that is… One of the things I think about oil and especially about strong wine maybe have in common, other than being liquid, is that they’re flammable. Is that an element of it, that you pour it out on the sacrifice to make it easier to light?

Fr. Stephen: To make it easier to light, and, yeah, it would be hard to sacrifice water. Elijah pulled it off, but, ah, he had help. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: He did.

Fr. Stephen: So should I do the “Fr. Stephen Ruins Your Sunday School” since I brought that up?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we might as well before we go to our next break.

Fr. Stephen: It’s time for “Fr. Stephen Ruins Your Sunday School.” Fire from heaven, particularly in the context of the Baal cycle—so Baal is what’s at issue in the Prophet Elijah on Mt. Carmel—“fire from heaven” is the way that they described lightning, so it’s actually saying that lightning struck the altar and the sacrifice…

Fr. Andrew: It wasn’t some fiery funnel of fire coming down in a big spiral and…?

Fr. Stephen: It was not. It was not. We made an amateur video when I was in eighth grade of this episode, where we took some GI Joe figures and wrapped them in toilet paper as robes and made a little altar with a plastic cow on it, and then zoomed in real tight and sprayed some WD-40 over a lighter in front of the lens to incinerate everything, but that was not historically accurate.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “And we’ll be releasing that on YouTube later this month.” All right. Well, now that Fr. Stephen has ruined Sunday school for all of you, let’s take our next break.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, welcome to the third half of the show! We just kind of did a lightning-fast—pun fully intended—tour through the offerings, sacrifices of ancient Israel. All right, let’s talk about the ways that some of this is different from the surrounding paganism, because as we said a the beginning, we’re not claiming that Israelite worship is derived from paganism, that this is just sort of one paganism that we have privileged as being the one, true one. But there are really some interesting and important discontinuities, so let’s talk about some of those. And I know that the one we wanted to start with is what is referred to in this wonderful, King James-y English as the shew-bread (s-h-e-w) or show-bread.

Fr. Stephen: It’s pronounced “show” either way. I just spelled that way to warm your heart-cockles.

Fr. Andrew: Either way, I know. It really does warm my heart! I’m almost about to pull down my 1611 King James from the shelf up here and look at those wonderful Ss that look like Fs. [Laughter] All right, so “show-bread,” either way it’s spelled. Well, what is that? What is show-bread, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Thine excitement showeth forth. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It came to pass. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this is one of those sort of over-looked things. Maybe if, when you were a kid, you made the little model of the tabernacle. You know, you made the tiny little table for the show-bread, but other than that it gets passed over pretty quickly.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, I have to interrupt you there and say this. I never did that, actually, but my great-great-grandfather, who was a Baptist preacher up in New England, he was a pastor at a number of churches up there, but he had a thing that he would do, and he made a model of the tabernacle, and he would go around giving presentations on it. And there’s pamphlets and stuff from when he did this. So I’m pretty sure, based on what I’ve seen what he did—he was very detailed about this—so I’m sure he must have had a little show-bread table. So although I never did that, it is indeed in my blood. Just had to add that.

Fr. Stephen: Did he make tiny bread to put on it? That would be the true…

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know! That would be so cool…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So this is another thing that does what it says on the tin.

Fr. Andrew: Show bread.

Fr. Stephen: This is a table, a literal table, with bread on it. And that bread was replaced every day, and that bread was there to be eaten by the priests during their service in the tabernacle and then later in the Temple. I think it gets passed over because people are like: okay, so there’s a place where they kept their sack lunch.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. Priests got to eat, too, guys.

Fr. Stephen:That was their cubby.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but it’s obviously a ritualized thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because there’s specific instructions about the replacement of the bread and the exact dimensions of the table and what it was to be made out of and how it was to be decorated.

And so what this basically represents is an inversion. We talked about in the past how, once a god had been localized in a pagan temple, it was then cared for by the priests, so they would dress it, they would make sure it stayed standing up if it tipped over because there was an earthquake, and they would bring it food. So they were servants to and slaves to, essentially, and providing for this divine spirit that they were worshiping. So the fact that there is this table in the presence of Yahweh the God of Israel, from which he feeds his priests—so rather than the priests feeding God, God is feeding the priests and providing for them—is a direct inversion of what was going on at the pagan temple.

Probably the most famous place that people actually have read—because they probably haven’t spent a lot of time in Exodus reading the—not one, but two times!—that the exact dimensions of the table are given—they may remember the episode where David, while he’s fleeing from Saul, needs food badly—warrior needs food badly—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you. [Laughter] I got that one! “Warrior is about to die! Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!” [Laughter] Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: So he goes—he’s running the Gauntlet [Laughter]—and he goes to where the priests are serving, and he eats some of the show-bread. Probably more people than have actually read that original story in the Old Testament have read the place where Christ refers to it in the New Testament, in the Gospel, where Christ refers to it during an issue, one of the perennial issues between [him] and the Pharisees, about the sabbath.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, where they’re like: “How dare you do this on the sabbath!?” And Jesus says, “Whoa, guys. You know the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath. Don’t you remember how David ate the show-bread?”

Fr. Stephen: Right, because his… the particular issue at that point was the disciples were, as they walked through a field, plucking heads of grain and eating them. So the Pharisees said, “Hey! That’s harvesting! Red card.” [Laughter] Low-grade harvesting. So Christ talks about: “Haven’t you read where David ate the show-bread in the Temple? Do you not know the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath?” And it might maybe have struck us as odd as, like, wait: what does one have to do with the other? So, like, David ate some bread; they’re eating grain—I kind of see that. And they’re doing it on the sabbath, so then he talks about the sabbath, right?

But the reason Christ is referring to this is: David’s on the run from Saul, David is God’s anointed, and God provides food for him. The show-bread is all about God feeding his people and giving his people what they need. So in the same way, the same principle, Christ is saying, is at work in the sabbath. The sabbath is a day of rest that’s given as a gift. It’s not given as an obligation; it’s not set up as a test.

Fr. Andrew: And this just shows, again, how different Yahweh is from all of the petty gods of paganism, in that he loves his people. I mean, we see this with the manna in the wilderness, exactly the same: God directly feeding the people. And then, of course, the feeding of the 5,000—we could keep going on and on about this!

Fr. Stephen: Right, God provides his people with food, and he provides them with rest on the sabbath, and not only them, but for their fields, for their animals, for their servants. He provides rest for the whole creation; that’s what connects those two things.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So the next one that we wanted to talk about—and this was one that really intrigued me, because I had never paid attention to this—and that’s the question of what exactly the vestments of the high priest are all about. So I know if our friend, Fr. Timothy Hojnicki, is listening—and I know he is a fan of Lord of Spirits—his ears are perking up right now, because if you ever go to Fr. Timothy’s church, he has this vast collection of vestments. I think a lot of them have been gifted to him, but I know he loves vestments, and well he should. He is the best-dressed priest in the OCA. Just putting that out there. [Laughter]

Anyway, so this is about vestments, the high priest’s vestments. How does that compare or contrast to paganism? What’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: And this is another thing that will probably eventually… The whole high priest and the high priesthood and how that relates to Christ—that will be a future episode, undoubtedly, unto itself. But for our purposes here, this is another thing that a lot of people don’t read through, is the not one, but two times we’re told in great detail about the vestments of the high priest and what they’re to be made out of and all of the deals, and we’re not going to go into super detail about that right now.

But as a broad overview and a tease for that future episode, when you compare that to the ceremonial garments that were put on idols in pagan Canaanite temples, they’re virtually identical.

Fr. Andrew: So the priest, the high priest, is dressed like an idol, a Canaanite idol. Is that what you’re saying?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: O-kay…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! Up to and including the diadem, the crown that’s put on his head, that has on the front of it the name of God. It has “Yahweh” on it, on his forehead. And this goes back to—and we’re going to touch on this again, in our fourth half—this goes back to—we’ve talked about on the show before—Genesis 1 takes this form of building of a temple, and then Adam is placed there to serve in that temple, and Adam is placed there, man is placed there as the image of God. Man is the image of God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is the inversion of the pagan pattern, where man builds a temple, man builds his own image of god; instead, here, man is the image of God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the high priest wears a crown, but he’s not a pagan priest-king; he doesn’t receive worship himself.

Fr. Andrew: Right. The pagan god-kings do get worship. Like, the people are worshiping them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they are one of the bodies of that god, and so they are that god, in some sense. But again, this is an inversion. The high priest images God through his service in the Temple. He serves as an icon of God through his service, through his actions. The image is this verbal idea. So that service shows him as the image of God. And again, we’ll get into this more when we do the inevitable whole episode, but this whole theology surrounding the high priest as the image of Yahweh in the Old Testament, serving in the Temple, is what, for example, your old friend, St. Ignatius of Antioch, who I still wish somebody would write a good book about… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Maybe if you go to store.ancientfaith.com you could find one. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: ...that St. Ignatius of Antioch picks up on when he starts talking about the bishop in the Church as the icon of Christ, and his role in the gathered community. And so there’s a continuity there, but this is a major discontinuity between… with the priest-kings of the pagan world and the dressing of idols.

Fr. Andrew: You know, this is really interesting to me, and this is just now kind of occurring to me, too—is we made the point again that Israelite worship is not sort of derived from pagan worship, and that there’s important discontinuities that we’re pointing out now, but notice, everybody, the kinds of discontinuities these are. These are discontinuities that say something specific about the character of pagan worship, especially of the demons that the pagans worship. It’s not “oh, well, we have our own version of this”; it says something about who Yahweh is and how he is not like any of the other ones. If something were being derived… If the one was being derived from the other—if Israelite worship was being derived from paganism, you would expect it to be, like, a grander version, or just sort of a different version, and that’s the way that derivation usually goes.

But these are direct negations about the very core identity questions of who is being worshiped. So it couldn’t be derived from, because at the core there’s this… it’s an utter negation of those things. And, as a Christian, I would look at this and say actually it goes the other direction, that pagan worship represents a reduction, distortion of this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, a corruption of reality.

Fr. Andrew: Corruption, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in the same way that when we were talking about the five(ish) falls of the angels, the way that the succession myth in paganism, where there’s some kind of divine rebellion of a divine son against his father who kills him, whatever else, and overthrows him—is corrected to the fall of the devil, after his attempted insurrection. It’s the same kind of principle at play here, but very functionally, in ritual worship, enacted and participated in.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you have to imagine, if a pagan were present at this—a devout, if we could put it that way, pagan—he would be offended by what he was seeing. He would have to be, because this is insulting his gods in a very direct kind of way, not by saying Yahweh is better, but by utterly saying Yahweh is unlike, totally unlike those gods.

Fr. Stephen: And to offer that kind of pagan worship to Yahweh is therefore insulting to him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can’t…

Fr. Stephen: It’s a dishonoring of him because of what it says about him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can’t—right, exactly. It would be like going… It would be like meeting—I don’t know. If you would get an audience with the president of the United States, or if you would get an audience with the queen of England, and a normal thing to do would be maybe to bring some kind of gift, and you were to go and get a toy from the dollar store and offer that to them as a gift, that would be insulting and totally inappropriate, because that’s for kids. So, yeah. Cool stuff!

Fr. Stephen: And so then the last big discontinuity—and this is a major discontinuity—is sort of what was done or, in this case, really, what wasn’t done, with the blood of these sacrifices.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if you’re offering an animal, there’s blood.

Fr. Stephen: And we talked a little bit last time about some of the things that [were] done with the blood. Everybody agreed there was power in the blood. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wonderworking power.

Fr. Stephen: How they chose to use that power was different.

So we talked about, in paganism that often, for example, in Greco-Roman shrines, there would be a shrine to the god and there would also be the grave of a hero, and the blood would be poured over the hero. The blood was seen to sort of feed… the shades of the dead would feed on it, because that was sort of your netherworld, afterlife in Hades was you existed as this shadow of your former self, then sort of slowly faded away as people forgot about you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think I made the comparison to Tinkerbell last time, or at least in my head I did. You have to believe in her…

Fr. Stephen: Or Marty McFly’s Polaroids, yeah. [Laughter] They sort of cease to exist. So this was sort of feeding them, remembering them and feeding them.

In other rituals, the blood would actually be consumed, and so that’s why there are such strict rules against the consumption of blood in the Torah, in Leviticus, in the holiness code in particular. Those continue—and we’ll probably do an episode on this at some point—but that’s one of the things that continues in the book of Acts, chapter 15, that continues in the Church; is about the consumption of blood. But we’ll get into that at some later point.

So that’s what was done with the blood in pagan circles. So for most of the sacrifices in Israel, the ones that were being done correctly, at least, the blood was collected, just like it was collected in the pagan sacrifices, but then in most of them it was poured out at the base of the altar.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Why would you do that?

Fr. Stephen: You’re disposing of it: you’re disposing of it by pouring it into the ground, you’re returning the life to the ground from which it came, and you’re disposing of it in a sacred place, not just any old place—not throwing it in the trash. So it’s seen—because blood is life, it’s seen to be in some sense sacred, and so it’s disposed of in a sacred place, in a sacred way, and…

Fr. Andrew: And isn’t it also used, the way incense is also used, in that it’s sprinkled on people and on stuff and in places. It’s understood to purify and cleanse.

Fr. Stephen: Well… In rarer cases, yeah. Mostly it’s disposed of in that way, and then there are particular cases—we’re going to talk about the most major one next time, when we talk about atonement, how it’s used on the Day of Atonement—but at the giving of the covenant, it was sprinkled on the people; at the ordination of the high priest, it was put on his ear and his thumb and his big toe…

Fr. Andrew: Ha!

Fr. Stephen: The high priest episode will talk more about that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right!

Fr. Stephen: It usually wasn’t applied to people, but, yes, in those other cases the blood was seen as this cleansing and purifying agent. It was never offered to anybody in Israelite religion. It was never offered to anybody, it was not used to pay for anything, it was not “blood for the blood god”—you’ve got to go to Mesoamerica to get that. It was either disposed of in the sacred way or used for the purpose of cleansing and purification.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not… You don’t put it on the table and eat and drink it with your God—unless you’re a pagan.

Fr. Stephen: Or offer it to him in any other way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right. A very important point. Okay, well, having gone through those discontinuities—and there’s lots of other things we could say, of course—we’re going to go ahead and go to our next break. We’ll be back with the fourth half of tonight’s Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, now it’s the fourth and final half of Lord of Spirits, because this is twice the show tonight. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’re doubling down.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. We are. Okay, let’s talk now about calendars a little bit. All right. As we mentioned at the beginning, there’s these two calendars that exist. There’s a calendar that’s tied to the agricultural year, and there’s a calendar that’s tied to Passover. Okay, so, what is that all about? What’s going on? This is the big stuff, right? For us Orthodox Christians, Pascha, Pentecost, Nativity—these are our major feasts. So we’re going to be talking about some of those majors feasts now. What’s going on? Let’s talk about the most important one first: the Passover cycle. What’s happening in that?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So if there’s one thing Orthodox people love talking about, it’s calendars.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: Never been any controversy about them either.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, totally, totally unified on that question. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: As we mentioned, the agrarian cycle sort of comes first, and then the Passover cycle that we’re about to talk about gets layered onto it, of course, when Passover happens. So that’s an actual event in the life of Israel that ends up helping constitute Israel. That sort of comes second. So you have these two separate cycles, and so the Passover cycle, appropriately enough, begins on Pascha, on Passover. And this is of central importance, obviously, not only in the Old Testament, because in the Exodus it is the formative event of Israel; it is what constitutes Israel—but it is the formative event in the New Testament in the sense that when Christ’s sacrifice is being talked about, when his death is being talked about, it’s identified, the vast majority of the time, with Passover. So Christ is the Lamb of God, not the goat of God—Day of Atonement is a goat. So we think about Christ’s sacrifice primarily in terms of atonement, because we’ve grown up in the West, but that’s not the way the Scripture does it.

Fr. Andrew: He is the Lamb—and not the bull of God, either. Oh, please no! [Laughter] For so many reasons!

Fr. Stephen: Now, that said, there are places—and we’re going to talk about those next time, when we talk about atonement, the Day of Atonement—there are places, chiefly St. Matthew’s Gospel and the Passion narrative in it, 1 John, Hebrews are the big ones, that are going to talk about Christ’s sacrifice in terms of the Day of Atonement and atonement. So that is there in the New Testament, but that’s the minority report.

Fr. Andrew: Right. He’s the Lamb of God. I mean, that’s how he’s introduced in John’s Gospel, especially when you get St. John the Forerunner: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it’s important that… I mean, that tells us; the New Testament is telling us that if we want to get who Christ is and specifically what Christ does, if we want to get that right, we have to understand Pascha; we have to understand the Passover in the Old Testament, because that’s what they’re using to explain what he does to us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and one of the cool things I notice about that parallel is, in both the Old and the New Testament, you actually get the instructions from God about how to celebrate this thing—before the thing happens! [Laughter] So there’s: “This is how you’re going to celebrate the Passover”—and now Passover occurs. And with Christ, it’s… there’s the Mystical Supper: “Do this as my remembrance. Do this… For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup…” And then he is sacrificed for the sin of the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He says, “This is my body, broken for you.” His body hadn’t been broken yet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: He was showing them how to participate in it ritually later. Just as a side note, for anybody who gets hung up on that word, “remembrance,” as I imagine some of our friends do, the word anamnesis, the word “remembrance,” there is the same word that’s used in Numbers 10:10 in the Greek to refer to sin-offerings.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. “Do this as my sin-offering.”

Fr. Stephen: Sin-offerings are offered as a remembrance before the Lord. So what Christ is really saying there, if you take it in the context of the Septuagint, is he’s saying, “Do this as my remembrance.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “This is the worship that I expect.”

Fr. Stephen: “This is taking the place of the sin-offering.” Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He’s transforming the whole deal at that moment.

Fr. Stephen: The Eucharist is fulfilling the sin-offering; it’s not sin-offerings just stop.

Fr. Andrew: Mic drop. Sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So in addition to that… There is that, and of course Christ dies at the Passover; he doesn’t die on the Day of Atonement. He dies at the Passover.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right, St. John makes that super, super clear.

Fr. Stephen: And rises again at the Passover. Yeah, all four gospels make that clear. Yeah, St. John has the element of setting it up so that Christ dies as the lambs are dying.

The first important thing, in terms of getting Passover right, is there’s no element of substitution, penal or otherwise, in the celebration of the Passover. What do I mean by that? This is another one of those things that’s in people’s heads, is that we’re killing this lamb so that God doesn’t kill my kid.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, because at the Passover the angel of death comes to Egypt and kills the firstborn son of every Egyptian household, including the son of Pharaoh. So there’s this idea then that people have of: if we kill this lamb, then my son’s not going to be killed.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: But if you look at the instructions on what to do with the lamb, it kind of doesn’t actually work out that way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because not only are there no instructions on how to kill it—so again, the killing part isn’t ritualized; it’s about eating it—but they’re not proportioned one lamb per firstborn son. So if we think about it for a minute, if I don’t have any kids, do I just not eat the Passover because, hey, there’s nobody to die.

Fr. Andrew: Right, or if you only have daughters.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if I only have daughters. Or, on the flip-side, if great-granddad and granddad and dad and son are all firstborn sons, and we all live in the same household—we don’t do four lambs. We still just do one. And the instructions explicitly say there’s not supposed to be any leftovers, because, again, the instructions are all about how to eat it, not how to kill it. There’s no leftovers, so if your family isn’t big enough to eat the whole lamb, you’re supposed to share one with another whole family. It’s not like half a lamb for each son. [Laughter] The lambs are in no way apportioned according to children.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s no correlation. It’s an act of worship, not an act of payment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, not a… Or punishment, or… there’s some impending death penalty.

And, I mean, that wouldn’t make sense in the first place, because the whole reason the tenth plague happens, the plague of the firstborn happens, is that Pharaoh went and murdered all the sons of Israel. He had them thrown in the Nile, and God says, “Those were my children,” and so this tenth plague is balancing the scales of justice. Why would he kill more Israelite children?

Fr. Andrew: Mm. Yeah. So the point is to make… I mean, we’re going to make this point a little bit more, but there is a distinction coming.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Trying to wedge some kind of substitution, especially penal substitution, in there, that dog don’t hunt. It just doesn’t. It doesn’t work with what the Bible says.

So that’s the negative side, and then we get to the positive side: what God does.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so what exactly is God doing here? Obviously, especially for this podcast in particular, we always kind of love it when God puts the smack-down on demons. That’s kind of the whole deal—that’s our deal. So, yeah, God says, “I am judging the gods of Egypt.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Tonight I will judge all the gods of Egypt.” So that’s the first thing he says about what he’s doing. Nothing about “I need to kill some kids for some reason.” It’s: “I’m judging the gods of Egypt, punishing them.”

Fr. Andrew: Or, to throw back to our earliest episodes, not “I will judge all these imaginary beings that you guys worship for some reason, even though they don’t exist.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. “I’m going to lay the smack-down on the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” yeah. “I’m going to beat up fictional character Captain America.”

So this is, yeah, war. This is war on the Egyptian gods. That’s where it’s directed. Remember, Pharaoh was one of the gods of Egypt. That’s why he’s part of this. So then the second piece—and this is the clearest piece in terms of what is going on at Passover; the basic, bottom-line description of Passover. What is Passover when it’s at home? Is that this is a bunch of slaves being set free from slavery, which is…

Fr. Andrew: Right, but slavery to whom?

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right, right.

Fr. Stephen: Not slavery… Well, slavery to Pharaoh, but Pharaoh, remember, is one of the gods of Egypt.

Fr. Andrew: He’s one of the gods. Right.

Fr. Stephen: So these people are being set free from slavery to the gods of Egypt, and the fancy word for today is “manumission,” which I like because it contains the idea of manumittence, and the same “-mit-” in there is the same “-mit-” from “remit,” and so remission, which is a word we use liturgically to talk about sin. So the reality is that after Babel—and we’ve talked about this—the whole world—there is no Israel at this point, so all the nations, the whole world is in slavery to these demonic powers, and the chains are sin. Sin is the power that binds them into that slavery.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so God is setting free anyone in this event who chooses to worship him in the Passover, no matter who, no matter what their family tree is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because he says, the other thing God says—it’s always good to get it from the horse’s mouth, right? What does God say he’s doing at Passover? He says, “I am going to make a distinction between Israel and Egypt.” So before that, he had sort of done that, because we read about the earlier plagues, like the darkness was over the land of Egypt, but not over the place where Israel lived, in Goshen.

Fr. Andrew: Right, not over Goshen.

Fr. Stephen: And the frogs were all the places except where Israel lived. But that’s a geographic thing. And people descended from Abraham and full-blooded Egyptians were living as next-door neighbors. We know this; the text says so, because those Egyptians give them gifts while they’re leaving, their neighbors.

So this distinction is different. This distinction is: Who is going to be Israel and who is going to be an Egyptian? And those who are Egyptians are going to be those who are still enslaved to the gods of Egypt, and Israel are going to be all those who are set free. So that night, if you took the blood of that lamb—again, it’s about what you do with the blood—and you use that blood to mark your door-post, to mark you out as an Israelite, it doesn’t matter if you’re ethnically a full-blooded Egyptian, an Asiatic Canaanite, full-blooded descendant from Abraham himself, a Midianite like Moses’ wife—it doesn’t matter. That night, if you mark your door-post, you’re now an Israelite. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter if you’re a full-blooded descendant of Abraham—if you don’t mark your door, you’re now an Egyptian.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it’s important, as this sort of freedom from slavery occurs and the creation now of this new nation of Israel. I mean, like you use the word “manumission, redemption,” and that does include… The way we tend to think about it is buying a slave and setting him free, but the important part of that is the setting them free, because God isn’t paying off the Egyptian gods: “Here you go, guys. We’re going to give you this so I can have these people now.” That’s not what’s going on. So there is a redemption going on, but the important part of it is the being set free from slavery. It’s not about any kind of payment being made, because God does not pay demons. That’s not a thing!

Fr. Stephen: He doesn’t owe them anything.

Fr. Andrew: Right! They don’t have any rights! They don’t have any rights.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And then, going forward… So that night, participation in the Passover, and circumcision that had come previously, marked out who was an Israelite—and that stays true going forward. The person who is the Israelite is the person who is circumcised and eats the Passover. So that’s what distinguishes, when you get into Leviticus and the holiness code, what distinguishes someone just living in Israel from an Israelite: is that someone who is an Israelite eats the Passover, and if someone wants to eat the Passover, they have to be circumcised.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s circumcision, and then participation in the ritual meal. The rite of initiation, participation in the ritual meal, makes you an Israelite. And there may be some parallels to that in the Church.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. And, you know, notably, this is one of the things that’s also parallel in paganism. Like, what is it that makes you an Egyptian? It’s that you make sacrifices to and participate in that worship, of the Egyptian gods.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s ritual. It’s ritually determined, not genetically determined, because they didn’t have a concept of genetics.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right. It’s not about genealogy.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and one of my favorite examples of this that I don’t think I’ve done on this show before, but I will now, is that Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, who was the high priest of Israel, was an African.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so he would have been Moses’ great-nephew.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we know this for sure. His mother was from Put, which was Libya at the time, and his name, Pin-has, in Egyptian, roughly, or Pin-hasi, literally means Nubian or dark-skinned one.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and he was right up there in the leadership of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: He didn’t look like Abraham. He was the high priest. He was one of the most celebrated high priests in Israelite history. So the ethnic idea of Israel did not exist in ancient Israel. It was ritually determined.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so that’s Passover/Pascha—two words that mean the same thing, by the way, for everybody. But that’s not the only major feast in this cycle, right? There’s also Pentecost seven weeks later.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s often referred to in our King James titles again: the feast of weeks in the Old Testament, which sometimes confuses people, because it’s clearly called Pentecost in the New Testament, and “Pentecost” of course comes from “fifty days.”

Fr. Andrew: Fifty, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But they don’t realize that the feast of weeks is the same thing. It’s called the feast of weeks because on the 50th day, you’ve got 49 days in between, that’s seven sevens, so it’s a week of weeks.

Fr. Andrew: A week of weeks, right.

Fr. Stephen: So that makes it the feast of weeks. And that was the participation… That begins with and then is the future ritual participation in the giving of the covenant on Mount Sinai. And that also involved blood and the sprinkling of blood on the people when they received the covenant. So as it was celebrated later, people who were newly admitted, who had eaten the Passover for the first time, this is where they celebrated becoming party to the covenant with Israel, and this was, for people who were long-term Israelites, and later Judeans, when they sort of reaffirmed and recommitted and rededicated themselves to the covenant.

Fr. Andrew: And an interesting detail, probably worth pointing out since this is The Lord of Spirits podcast, is the giving of the Torah happens by means of angels, as it says in Scripture that angels are present. It’s not like—such a big disappointment in some ways for me—it’s not like where you see Charlton Heston, alone on the mountainside, in The Ten Commandments: “One: Thou shalt have no other…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And wasn’t it lightning? Didn’t they have lightning come down and write it? It’s been a while since I’ve watched the movie.

Fr. Andrew: Right! [Lightning sizzle] Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: And it wasn’t lightning; it was Jesus with his finger.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: And that will be in a future episode. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but there’s angels involved in the giving of the Law. I mean, it says this in the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this sprinkling with blood that we see for cleansing and purification and dedication, again at the Temple, when the Old Testament talks about new covenant that’s to come, in Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36:24-28 and Joel 2—we won’t read all those now—but it talks about being sprinkled with pure water, sprinkling with water as this making of the new covenant, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Lo and behold, when we get to Pentecost in the book of Acts, we see the reception of the Holy Spirit and baptism with water, and those two things brought and combined together.

Fr. Andrew: How ‘bout that. Ha! [Laughter] Okay, so that’s Pentecost. All right, there’s also this other calendar, the calendar that has to do with the agricultural cycle. I think this is a good place for us to finish up here, because this helps to emphasize again for us that religion is not this separate thing; it is simply the right way… There is the right way of life. So nothing… I shouldn’t say nothing, but an agricultural, liturgical calendar really emphasizes this, because it’s these things being necessary for survival being sort of fused with a festal, liturgical, prayerful character.

Okay, so let’s just talk about a few of those. The one we’re not going to talk about this time is the Day of Atonement, also known as Yom Kippur, because—tune in next time! That’s what that’s going to be all about, so we’re just going to save it.

Fr. Stephen: It’s going to be all atonement, all the time.

Fr. Andrew: All the time, yeah. Put a pin in that.

Fr. Stephen: Goats all the way down.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There we go! Maybe that should be the title of the episode; I don’t know. All the way down the cliff… [Laughter] Yeah, okay. There’s Rosh Hashanah—Rosh Hashanah? Yeah. I… Now I suddenly remember. So when I was in college—I remember this now… Now, is this the day when they have the really serious fasting, or is that Yom Kippur that has the big fasting?

Fr. Stephen: Most of the fasting now is Yom Kippur, because they can’t do the rest of it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay, yeah, because I remember when I was in college—so we’re not going to talk about Yom Kippur this time—when I was in college, I had a Jewish friend, and she referred to Yom Kippur—I mean, this is what she called it—as “cranky hungry Jew day.” I was like: “Oh. … Oh, that’s interesting.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Yom Kippur is marked by lots of praying and no breakfast.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So, Rosh Hashanah, what’s that all about?

Fr. Stephen: Rosh Hashanah, which is on Tishri 1 on the calendar, that’s the beginning of—well, that’s New Year. That’s the beginning of the cycle, this agricultural cycle. So on the Paschal calendar, Moses is told: This month, the month of Nisan, when Pascha falls, Nisan will be for you the first of months—and then there’s this other New Year’s.

Fr. Andrew: Two New Years.

Fr. Stephen: That’s because of two calendars, yeah. So it begins then, and this is in early September that this cycle… These are the cycle of sort of fixed-dated feasts. We talked about this; we won’t go too much into it now. You can refer back to the astrology episode; we talked about that in terms of Christ’s birth and Noah’s birthday, the coronation of David, and all the things that happened on Tishri 1, on that New Year’s day. We’ll just footnote that back to that episode.

So the next major one on the agricultural calendar is firstfruits, which is again exactly the same name: it does what it says on the tin.

Fr. Andrew: What it sounds like! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s the beginning of the harvest. But the reason why it’s so important that you bring the first stuff… There’s also all the things related to the firstborn being holy—the male that opens the womb of animals and of people is holy and dedicated to the Lord, and there’s sacrifices associated with that, also the firstfruits of the grain—is because firstborn in the Scriptures is not primarily about birth order; it’s a status. It’s the heir.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why Jacob and Esau… Jacob gets it and Esau loses it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It defaulted to birth order usually, but it’s not always based on birth order. It’s about being the heir. It’s about having this status.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the heir has this particular responsibility, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, sort of. The heir inherits everything, and he’s supposed to, then, share it out with his brethren. This, of course, did not always happen. There’s an episode in the gospels where someone comes to Christ and says, “Tell my brother to share the inheritance with me!” Right? [Laughter] “I’m going to go get the rabbi on your case!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They didn’t have it run through probate?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Christ basically says, “Don’t worry about that material stuff. Come follow me and be my disciple.” But they’re supposed to share it out. But this language—and we won’t go into this now; at some future date—this is critically important to understand what St. Paul is doing in Romans 9 and in Colossians, when he talks about Christ as the firstborn and the heir, and us as co-heirs with Christ. We talked about this a little when we talked about “sons of God,” but that Christ as the firstborn inherits everything, literally everything, the whole creation. And then he shares his rule and his reign and his priesthood and all of these things with us as his fellow-heirs who become sons of God by grace.

So by offering the firstfruits and the firstborn and the first, you’re effectively offering the whole thing. You’re offering your whole life, your whole self. A family’s future was that heir, who was going to receive everything and carry on the family into the future. So if that’s offered and dedicated to God, you’re dedicating everything you are, everything you have to God in that action.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So then the next feast is called the feast of booths or tabernacles or—I know I get this wrong—Sukkoth? Sukkot?

Fr. Stephen: Sukkot, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Sukkot, and this is done at the end of the harvest. So you’ve got the firstfruits, and now this is at the end of the harvest, and it’s called the feast of tabernacles or booths because, during this period, Israel would go and live back in tents or temporary housing of some kind.

Fr. Stephen: Or huts or shacks or lean-tos, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, in sort of remembrance of this… of the time that they were nomadic peoples. But it actually has this kind of greater purpose and meaning. So what’s going on there exactly?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it wasn’t a love-shack for you to get together with your friends. [Laughter] The idea was, over and over again—

Fr. Andrew: I got that one, too.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —in the Torah, especially in Deuteronomy, there’s this constant warning from God: Right now you’re dependent on me, out in the desert, for food and water, to take care of all these things, but once you get into the land and you settle down and you plant crops and you get into this rhythm, you’re going to be tempted to forget: forget about God, forget about the fact that it’s him who’s providing for you, that it’s him who’s caring for you, just forget about God in general. So this was a one-day-a-year sort of a reminder, where, at the time they were feeling the most settled—when they reaped their harvest—that was the day that they unsettled themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it would be like: Okay, everybody, we’re going to celebrate Thanksgiving by setting up tents in the backyard, everybody. Right?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! And this was, so that we would be thankful for all the things we’re doing without. And this is of course a theme that gets picked up especially by St. Peter in the New Testament about us living as aliens and strangers in this world and not becoming too settled. But in the Old Testament, the paradigmatic people who do this, not just on that one day, but all the time—it’s sort of an ancient asceticism that’s referred to, God praises them for doing this in Jeremiah, Jeremiah 35—are the Rechabites, whose forebears—

Fr. Andrew: Who are they?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, whose forebear, Yonadav or Jonadab or Jehonadab, depending on what translation you read, taught them that they should never settle, that they should always live nomadically in tents, and they should never drink alcohol.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s this ascetical way of life.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and alcohol—it’s not just that alcohol is bad, but if you think about it, in order to get alcohol, you have to let it ferment, so it’s part of being settled, again. So they were to live in this unsettled way, and they did that all the way up until Jeremiah’s day in the exile. They came from Sinai in the wilderness, and they just never settled, to try to maintain, in their whole lives, this sense of dependence on God, and they’re praised for that. But then there’s this other major ritual that was done at the feast of tabernacles that is very important, at Sukkot, and that’s that 70 bulls were sacrificed to Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: 70, you say? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. “Meat’s back on the menu.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That one’s for you, Eugene Schreder. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, 70 bulls. So where have we heard that number before?

Fr. Stephen: That’s the number of the sons of God; that’s the number of the nations. So Israel is offering these 70 bulls to Yahweh—one for each of the nations. So in doing this, the nation of Israel is acting as a priesthood for the world. So what we see in the holiness code and in other places that talk about cleanness and uncleanness in the Torah are these sort of concentric circles around the presence of God.

So the priests, who are the ones who are going to go most—well, the high priest especially, but then the whole priesthood, the Levites, were going to go into the presence of God, have to maintain this level of holiness and sanctity at all times—they have to wash more, wash their clothing more; they have to practice more ritual cleanliness and purity and holiness than the average Israelite. And then the average Israelite has these food laws, uncleanness and cleanness restrictions, that they need to follow that the people who live in the other nations don’t have to follow. And they’re never called upon—the priests are never called upon to enforce their standards of holiness on the people, and the people of Israel are never called to enforce their standards of holiness on the Syrians or the Moabites or… They were [never] called to go to them and make them follow those rules.

Now, if they were to become Israelites, they had to begin to follow those rules and practice those things, but if not, then they did not. So there are these concentric circles, and those on the more inner circles served as priests for those in the more outer circles.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah. I mean, that’s… it’s fascinating because, as modern people, we tend to think, again, of distinction as implying opposition. “Well, Israel—” And it’s interesting, you know: often, when Israel encounters ancient peoples, like there’s a sense that, I think that some of the Romans have: Israel is weird. Right? They’re holding themselves as different and separate. But the point is not to say that we’re better than the nations or anything like that; it’s that this thing that we’re doing, these actions of purification, these standards that we’re being held to, are so that we may serve as the priests of the nations. And then, within Israel, you’ve got the priesthood that is being held to another standard, so that they may offer sacrifices on behalf of the whole nation.

But, yeah, like you said, there wasn’t this expectation that everybody has to do this stuff. It’s about preparation. It’s about allowing them to have this function, as… And it’s interesting. There’s all kinds of potential implications for how we could look at things now. A good example, right: Orthodox Christians, we’re expected to fast—there’s all kinds of times where we’re expected to fast—but we’re not expected to preach the gospel of fasting. [Laughter] We’re not sent out into the nations: “Go unto all the world and preach that you must fast on Wednesdays and Fridays and half the other days of the year.” That’s not the thing that is the Gospel to the nations. Now, when someone becomes part of the Church and they become part of the royal priesthood, then they take these things on, so that they can then serve in this priestly function as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s where that language comes from. In Exodus, Israel’s told, “You’re going to be a kingdom of priests.” Priests for whom? Priests for the world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s on behalf of someone.

Fr. Stephen: But those priests had their own priests. [Laughter] So there were Levites who were the priests for Israel, and the people of Israel were the priests for the world. So there are these two phases. And then St. Peter takes that same language, that’s translated “royal priesthood,” from the Greek usually—same language and applies it to the Church, almost as if the Church were Israel—

Fr. Andrew: How ‘bout that?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] —and says the same thing, which means it’s not just that these are these rules and these are these customs. Sometimes, even in the Orthodox Church, even with a good Orthodox understanding of salvation, we can fall into this idea that the goal is just about me saving myself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: Right? But the reason we’re keeping these disciplines and the reason we’re drawing close to God is so that we can serve as priests—we offer the Liturgy; we offer the sacrifice of the Eucharist for the life of the world and for its salvation, for the whole creation, which includes but is not limited to all the people in it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I’m reminded of that famous… There’s this quote from St. Seraphim of Sarov that often gets quoted as a sort of slogan: “Acquire the Holy Spirit” or “Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved.” I think sometimes people hear that and they take it as, like: “Oh, well, there’s this lovely secondary effect that people around me are going to be saved if I just work on my own salvation.”

Fr. Stephen: Collateral damage, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! Right? I mean, there’s a certain truth to that, but often it gets turned into this kind of quietism, that “All I have to do—just humble me, a sinner, just a poor sinner—is work on my salvation, and that might have a nice effect on the people around me.” But if you look at what St. Seraphim himself actually did, yes, he did spend those three years out there, kneeling on a rock out there in the wilderness, praying and really praying, but then, after that, his life became this open door for the world. He became an offering for the world. He became a priest for the world. It always goes like that. It’s like at the end of the Divine Liturgy: there’s the “Let us go forth in peace.” To do what? [Laughter] To go to coffee hour? That’s not… It’s: Go forth, having received this, having received the Holy Spirit. We go forth now, as priests of the world, to bring the blessing of God into the world, to intercede on behalf of the world, to help cleanse the world. That’s what we’re being sent forth to do. It’s not just: “I’ve got to make sure I’ve got my ticket so that I can go to the good place when I die, and not the bad one.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Or the other place, where you just sit and watch the same VHS over and over again.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Whew. I remember VHS.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well… Yeah. Okay, just some final thoughts, then.

There’s so much more we could say. I think this might be the episode where we said the most times, “But we can talk about that in a future episode…” [Laughter] So there’s so much more that we could say about all these offerings and feasts and sacrifices and so forth that we discussed, but I think that, for me, the big take-away is the utter integration of worship and prayer into the human life. I remember one time…

I have somewhere in my collection of books a collection of texts from the Celtic Christian tradition, and part of that collection is occasional prayers. Like, there’s prayers for rowing your boat; there’s prayers for washing your baby. There’s stuff like this, which, it’s funny, if you were to ask most people now, “Do you need to pray while you row your boat?” They’d be like: “Wh- what?” Or “Do I have to say a prayer while I’m washing my kid?” It’s hard enough to wash my kid who hates the bath anyway! Why do I need…? Right? This stuff seems like non-sequitur to us, and yet that stuff isn’t even from the ancient world. It’s just a little pre-modern.

There is this sense that God truly is everywhere present, filling all things, and also that the angels and the saints are present with us. If that’s really true—and if we believe what the Scripture says, then we have to believe it’s true; if we’re Christians, we believe what the Scripture says: so Christians believe this—if that’s really true, then that means that our task is to, if I can use this term, to enchant the world, and I love the fact that “enchant” refers to singing—to enchant the world by constant prayer, by, as often as I can, participating in the sacrifices of the Church, by praying at home. I think probably every single person listening to this, even if you have a prayer rule, it probably needs some work, including me. Including me: I am by no means excepted from that.

And if we feel, as we so often do, that God is far away or that maybe none of this is really true or whatever, I mean, I’m just reminded of what the Lord says: “You have not because you don’t ask.” You don’t even ask. Like, of course you feel abandoned! You’ve abandoned your friends! God, who is your Friend, the Friend of mankind; the angels and the saints who are your friends, because they’re the friends of God—we can bring them in. And ancient Israel has all of these things. It’s enormously complicated! We only just scratched the surface of the complexity of all of this. Read the book of Leviticus, people. Like, that is a complicated book! But it has all these detailed instructions on how to do all these things.

Ancient Israel has all these tools, and so does the modern Church, the Church of right this moment. It has these things, and it’s not about heaping up lots of merit badges so you can become a heavenly Eagle Scout—although nothing against Eagle Scouts. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about faithfulness and obedience to God in every single second, and his giving of grace in all of that in order to show us forth truly as his imagers, as truly his sons. So that’s my main take-away.

I mean, there’s a lot of things that I could say, but I love this, and, you know, it’s funny to me that there are Christians who look at all of this stuff and they say, “Well, that was the Old Testament, but in the New…” although I hope that no one says that now, having heard the things that we’ve said. But—how can you say that!? Look at what this does. Are we to believe now that God has taken all of that away from us? Or maybe—maybe—I’m being slightly sarcastic here—we should believe as the early Church did? and say that this has been fulfilled, transformed, filled to overflowing, given to us in all of its fullness now, with the coming of Christ, who says, “Do this is as my remembrance.” So that’s my take-away. Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’m… It may not be clear immediately how it’s related, but Christ says that we’re in the Church the salt of the earth, and if the salt loses its saltiness, you can’t make it salty again if it goes stale. And he says that we’re to be the light of the world, and he doesn’t mean to leave a nightlight on inside the birdhouse in your soul.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes! I got that one!

Fr. Stephen: That’s directed outward. And one of the big things we lose when our Christianity becomes materialist is we lose the priesthood, and we lose sacrifice, and we lose worship, because those aren’t things any more. Priesthood is maybe something—Christ is the great high priest who is doing off in heaven—but sacrifice isn’t really a thing we’re doing.

And what happens with materialist Christianity, every time, is it devolves into politics. If it’s conservative materialist Christianity, it devolves into right-wing politics; if it’s liberal materialist Christianity, it devolves into liberal politics—but in both cases you’re using fundamentally material means to try to bring about or enforce some idea of justice or to create some kind of utopia on earth through purely physical means, which means—‘material means’ means force. It means force, either in the form of direct force and violence or social force, the force of public shame and public will and public sentiment. Your enemies become the people who disagree with you: they’re the enemy that has to be defeated and destroyed.

And we’re trying to do all this without God being involved, because we’re doing it without priesthood, and we’re doing it without worship, and we’re doing it without sacrifice, so the only thing we can possibly create is hell on earth.

So the answer to this is to realize, once again, who we are. People who are in the Church and people who are outside the Church; people who love Christ and people who hate Christ have the same enemy, and it’s not Christ. They have the same enemy, and it’s the demonic powers who want to enslave and destroy us. And we are here as priests. We are the hope that has been placed in the world for those people who are outside the Church. We are the ones who, as priests, are able to bring Christ to them and bring them to Christ. We’re the ones who are called and empowered to connect, reconnect them with God, to bring them into community of which Christ is a member, so that they can come to know us and be in communion with us and be in communion with Christ. That’s what can transform the world. That’s what can transform people. That’s what can help us all defeat our common enemies.

But if we give up, if we forsake, if we ignore, if we give up that role that God has given us and called us to, then, just like Christ said about the salt and about the lamp that gets put under a bushel, there’s no hope for a world; those people aren’t going to find that hope; the world is not going to be changed in any positive way. So the gifts that God has given us—of knowledge, of understanding, of our own salvation—he has given to us as a deposit that he expects to bear fruit. He’s planted something within us, and he’s going to want the harvest from that to be offered to him at some point in the future.

So I think when we come to understand Israel’s worship and how it was directed outside of itself—it wasn’t solipsistic; it wasn’t just contained in Israel and just Israel concerned with their fellow Israelites and “we’re going to find salvation and to heck with those people outside; they’re all evil and rotten sinners”—that has to transform the way we view our own lives and our own worship and the purpose of all of this in the first place.

Fr. Andrew: Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you did not get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion group if you still do that sort of thing.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and may God bless you always.