Old Testament Rituals: Don't Try These at Home!
The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, contains a lot of material about rituals. Rituals are easy to make fun of. But in fact, no one can live without ritual. Consider the birthday cake ritual. Do you light the candles before or after you sing the song? Before, of course: if you lit the candles after you sang the song, it would be just wrong. Who blows out the candles? The person having the birthday, of course: if someone else blew out the candles, it would be just wrong. How many candles do you use? It’s according to how old the person is, of course: if it weren’t according to how old the person was, it would be just wrong.
So you see, you’re very attached to the correct performance of this ritual. But if you wrote it all down and someone read it two thousand years from now, they’d say, “Those people back in the 21st century were so primitive! They thought you literally wouldn’t get a year older unless someone stuck hunks of flaming wax in a piece of pastry, and someone else breathed on it to extinguish it.” It’s only a ritual from the outside. From the inside, it’s not a ritual: that’s just how it’s done.
It was the same with Biblical rituals. They expressed the feelings and needs of that time and place. The categories they fall into are very revealing: birth and death, illness and healing, sex and marriage, holidays, ambition and sacrifice, dirt and cleanliness. Of course, we have rituals in these categories today as well. Studying the Biblical rituals may help us to notice our own.
Rituals pertaining to public service and special social roles are particularly powerful. Surely every culture ritualizes status changes and the hiring of community leaders. The Israelites installed their kings and priests by anointment: that is, by pouring olive oil over their heads. The word messiah means “anointed” in Hebrew. This procedure might sound messy to us, but olive oil was a prized commodity, useful both for cooking and for lamps, with a better smell than other common fuels. The Israelites valued their dignitaries enough to shower them with an expensive substance.
Some Biblical rituals are still in use. Incense is burned in the Catholic church; a ram’s horn is blown at the Jewish new year. Many other Biblical rituals persist in modified form, adapted to changing conditions and our evolving religious sensibility. We are not as far from the world of the Bible as we imagine. Come do a little time travel with me into Moses’ Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple. You’ll be amazed how familiar it seems!
Written by: Rabbi Joe Hample
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