Beyond Word Studies: An Introduction to Priests - Episode 038

Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks The Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and today I am going to be doing a bit of a preliminary episode to get ready for a new series that I'm going to be launching in a little bit. And I'm really excited about this series.

I think it should be great, and it should be involved, and it should be long, who knows how long it's going to be. But in any case, the new series is going to be on the concept of worship. And I figure there might be one or two things that I might want to talk about before I jump into the topic of worship.

One of the things I have been meaning to get to in my podcast is the topic of priests. Priests are, of [00:01:00] course, directly related to the concept of worship. And so understanding more about what a priest is, And what they do, and why they do it, is going to lead right directly into that topic of worship. This is going to be a fairly introductory episode, so I will be introducing the concept of priests, who they are, what they do, where they do it, why they do it, but we're also going to be exploring this in the direct context of Genesis.

Now, Genesis is not where you see the establishment of all of these things, but that doesn't mean that we don't see the priesthood in the book of Genesis. A lot of us are probably aware of this, but maybe not everyone. Just because Genesis comes first in our Bibles, that doesn't mean that Genesis was the first book written.

But even in the case of Mosaic authorship, like if Moses [00:02:00] wrote the first five books of the Bible like many people believe, Genesis is still going to have that Exodus context to it, so Genesis was written with the assumed context of the priesthood existing. We will nuance that a little bit as we talk about this subject, but first I want to give you the concept as a whole.

We do have quite a bit of contextual knowledge about priests in general in the ancient Near East. And priests in the Bible do differ in some significant ways from their neighbors, but they're also extremely similar. And this shouldn't surprise us, because they were all living in the same culture, and there were many overlapping concepts and ideas.

In fact, it's so overlapping that I am going to introduce the concept of the priest by comparing it with other things. [00:03:00] To start out with, I want to talk about the three offices that we're already pretty familiar with, which are prophet, priest, and king. These three vocations we might call them, or offices, are related in different ways.

And it might surprise you a little bit to know that the prophet role and the priestly role They're actually very similar in many ways, to the point that we might not even know if a character in the Bible is a prophet or a priest or both or what's really going on there. One example of that would be the figure of Balaam in Numbers 22. He's not called a prophet. He's not called a priest. The king just calls him up one day and assumes that he can do this thing for him. The pagan king wants Balaam to curse Israel as they're going through the land. And while a prophet might do [00:04:00] that, a priest could also do that. We definitely see priests connected with the action of cursing in the Bible.

In particular, I'm thinking of the entrance into the Promised Land where they're going through the two mountains, and you have the Cursed Mountain on the one side and the Blessing Mountain on the other side. The priests are helping Moses out with that. One reason Balaam is probably assumed to be a prophet rather than a priest is because he is said to have oracles, and he is communicating with God, and so he's functioning as that intermediary.

But guess what? Priests could also do that. In fact, the line between prophet and priest as far as their intermediary role is actually fairly fuzzy. Then, of course, we also see the offices of priest and king being combined in the Bible with Melchizedek. And we also see that in the wider ancient Near Eastern world as well, where the king was [00:05:00] functioning as the main intermediary with their gods.

And, of course, we have prophet, priest, and king. Or, maybe judge, or main leader of the people, in a couple of figures in the Old Testament with Moses and also Samuel. And of course, this is also the case with Jesus. There are a few things as well that we might wonder if they fit in with these categories. We have things like the wise men or sages. And the elders of the people. But what's distinctive about prophets, priests and kings is that they are all anointed offices. In part, that means that they are divine callings.

Okay, so we all know what a king is, so I don't really need to explain what a king is and what he does, aside from how he fits into these categories.

And, of course, [00:06:00] both prophet and priests are quite intimately connected with kings and leaders in a symbiotic way. That means they're working together. But at many times in the ancient Near East, the king of an area would be the direct connection to their deity. In the Bible, we have humanity being created in the image of God. In these other places, it is only the king who serves as the image of God, or, of course, the image of their particular deity.

We're pretty familiar with this with the concept of the Pharaoh, right? At times, the Pharaoh was seen literally as God, but at other times, he was just the representation of the God. And there was a bit more of a distinction there. But this was the case for many of the societies and cultures around Israel. Basically, the king would be functioning as their high priest. This wasn't always the [00:07:00] case, though. We still have plenty of instances where the king got his legitimacy from the high priest, or perhaps the previous high priest.

Either way, for sure the king couldn't function in the Ancient Near East unless he was directly connected to what was going on with the religious practices and the priesthood. And the simple reason for that is that they relied on information from the gods and appeasing the gods and communication from the gods in order to conduct their kingdom business.

And of course, depending on the era of history we're looking at. The priests might have been in control of everything, and there was no king or other leader. Aside from being under foreign rule by the time of the New Testament, that's kind of the situation the Jews had.

All right, so what about the prophet versus the priest? How do [00:08:00] you distinguish between those two offices? There's a good chance that you didn't even know that you had to. And I can't really blame you, because these days we do a really bad job of describing what a prophet is according to this biblical standard of what a prophet would be. So of course, our typical understanding of a prophet is somebody who can tell the future. Right. A prophet tells prophecies and prophecies foretell the future. Right? Well, that's only one part of a prophet's job, and not all prophets would have to tell the future. That's just a particular type of prophet. Now, quite often it was the prophet's job to tell Oracles a king would inquire of a prophet, for instance, before war to see if going into war was even a [00:09:00] good idea and yeah It would be pretty convenient to know whether you're going to win or lose as to whether you want to even go out there.

I briefly mentioned the priest's connection to the king and how the priest would ordain or coronate or anoint the king Thus giving legitimacy to the king's rule So, that would be the priestly job.

The prophet's job would give legitimacy to the king's actions, because he'd be advising the king on whether or not certain actions were a good idea. So, in this way, the prophet would be the advisor to the king. But in the context of the Bible, the prophet was also a counterpoint to the king, because the main point of the prophet wasn't just to tell the future. It was to enforce covenant keeping. So, if the king was getting out of line, it was the prophet's job to rein him back [00:10:00] in and say, look, this is what we're supposed to do over here. And, of course, the prophet wasn't just talking to the king. He could talk to anybody. He could talk to the people at large.

But the main point of a prophet was to communicate with God, yes, and to have God communicate with people. But primarily, it was to keep people in line as to what they were supposed to be doing because they were a covenantal people. Now, some scholars have distinguished prophets from priests by suggesting that a priest is more ritualistic, more structured, and a prophet is more spontaneous or even charismatic. Because if your job is to call the delinquent back to God... Then that doesn't happen on a set schedule. You just have to go out and do that whenever it crops up.

It has also been suggested by some scholars that prophets were not professional. [00:11:00] I'm not sure I would really agree with that because a lot of times a prophet was paid by the king. So just that would indicate that there's a level of professionalism. Some scholars also say that prophets weren't organized in any way. But we know that there was a school of the prophets. So they had to have some sort of organization and structure and teaching.

As far as how prophets and priests related to one another, we see many times in scripture that they were kind of at odds with one another. We often have the minor prophets condemning the priests. In addition, we also see priests criticizing prophets.

A question we might ask is if we have king priests and Prophet Kings, do we also have priest prophets? And it seems like we do. Ezekiel, and perhaps Zechariah. [00:12:00] In 1 Samuel 10, verse 5, it says, quote, You will meet a group of prophets coming down from the high place, with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre. And the fact that the prophets are coming from the high place suggests that they are priests.

One more thing that's very important to notice in the role of the prophet that we often miss is that prophets, just like priests, were intermediaries. That means they made intercession between God and the people.

And I'm not just talking prayer here. I mean, look at many of the prophets and their lifestyles in the Old Testament. They had to give up their lives in many ways for the people. In fact, Moses himself offered up himself as a sacrifice for the people on the mountain after they had the golden calf incident.[00:13:00]

Now, we might say that was Moses acting in a priestly role, perhaps, but the main way we see prophets in scripture is that they are dedicating their entire lives to try and keep the people on the right track. So we really need to do away with this idea that a prophet Was just a mouthpiece for God and that's it. Because a prophet was really so much more than that.

Okay, so if a prophet could speak for God, intermediate between the people and God, and actually perform some intercession, then what's the deal with the priests? Why are they special? Well, the obvious thing about priests is that they are the religious leaders.

Priests are the ones who are qualified to make sacrifices. To maintain sacred areas, either the buildings or the implements. Priests [00:14:00] were probably not the only educators, but that was part of their job. Because religion and state were very tied together, priests were also involved in the running of the government, so they were administrators.

They were potentially judges, or they helped out the judges. Which is a sensible thing, since they were the ones who maintained things like the Urim and Thummim, which was a way of getting messages from God. Prophets were covenant enforcers, but priests were covenant makers, and they had the rituals to renew the covenants regularly. Priests were guardians of the sacred sites. They were the ones who could handle the sacred implements. They knew how to do this safely, because as we see with Aaron's sons and how they are killed for doing it improperly, approaching a holy god... In the wrong way was a very [00:15:00] dangerous thing to do. In exchange for their services, priests were supported for what they did. They were given generous portions of the sacrifices and other types of compensation. When the land of the promised land was apportioned out to the tribes, the tribe of the Levites, who were the priests, didn't get any portion of the land because they were to be supported by the other people.

When you hear descriptions of the Old Testament priesthood, You will often hear about the different levels or divisions of the Levites. So you had the Levites as a tribe, and not all of them were priests. For one thing, there were probably too many of them, so there wasn't enough work, in the central sacred space at any rate. Then you had another smaller portion from the Levites, who were the temple priests, and then, of course, you had the high priest.

Now, I will tell you right now, [00:16:00] if you get into the scholarly literature about the priesthood and about the history of Israel and the compiling of the Bible, you will find a lot of ideas that suggest that it's not really that nice and neat throughout history. There is quite a bit of indication that there was more than just the Levite priesthood.

And you have ideas like maybe the Aaronic Priesthood, that one that came from Aaron, was actually a later development. And of course, I do suggest that we Christians can just take the Bible, the way it's written, and appreciate it and understand it in that light. But just understand that the history behind that might be messier than what's really presented on the pretty page to us.

Some people might be shocked and appalled, and really oppose that idea. But I think we can just take it as God uses messy human history, and He [00:17:00] organizes it to show His beautiful purposes. I know, in particular, that that doesn't go along with the narrative that there has to be this unbroken line of the priesthood. And I get that idea, and I can appreciate it, but I don't think God is restricted to that. And the way that we see the priesthood and worship and everything associated with those things showing up throughout the Old Testament, I just think we need to take it all with a grain of salt and say it's just much more rocky than this nice little box that we have in our minds.

But in any case, when you think about the priesthood, if I could tell you to think about anything in particular at all, it would be about relationship with God. That's functionally what the priesthood and priests were for.

I want to read you this cool little [00:18:00] quote from Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible. It says, quote, As servants of God, they represented God's principal purpose in this world, namely, the well being of his chosen people. The people would only experience that well being if their relationship with God was maintained, end quote.

We today tend to think of that kind of maintenance of relationship with God to be centered around our personal sin, and while no doubt that plays an absolutely essential part of our relationship with God, the concern about the relationship with God was much broader in the Old Testament than just personal sin.

I am going to read another quote from Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible. It says, quote, the need for a mediator was partly practical. In the days of the patriarchs and family [00:19:00] religion, there had been no formal priesthood for the family unit was small, but Israel was an entire nation bound to God in Covenant. The existence of priests and Levites recognized the human need for so large a community to set aside a group of people whose permanent task was to watch over and care for their relationship with God. The need for mediation, however, was also based upon a particular understanding of the nature of God. Although God was Father, He was also an awesome and holy being. His holiness was such that he could not lightly be approached by the ordinary man and woman. The priests and Levites thus assumed the grave task of approaching God on behalf of the people as a whole.

Skipping a little bit down, it says, A priest could take steps to bridge the gap, not because priests were innately better than any other man or woman, but precisely because that was the task to which [00:20:00] God, in his mercy, had appointed them. Thus, from an Old Testament perspective, the existence of a priesthood is not evidence of the genius of the founders of the Israelite religion, rather it is evidence of the mercy of God towards his people. There is one further vital theological dimension to priesthood in the Old Testament. It is that the role of the priests as servants of Israel was parallel to the role of Israel as servant to all nations. end quote

And we're going to be unpacking that a little bit more as we proceed, but for now, I want you to really note that there is this connection between the priests and the nation of Israel and the nation of Israel and the world, because those connections are going to make a difference to us as Christians and how we can take application of these passages that we thought maybe had nothing to do with us to begin with.[00:21:00]

All right, so now I am going to take a moment to go back over the functions of a priest. So we have those clearly in our minds. Priests were functionaries of the cult and by cult,. I am using it in a very academic way, and I'm using the term here because I want you to be familiar with the academic terms so that if you come across them in academic literature, you don't go, wait a second.... the Israelites weren't in a cult, but we have different uses of the word cult. A cult can be a kind of a religious system that we wouldn't agree with and that has certain characteristics within it. But the academic use of cult is just, this is the, the religious practices of the religious group. So when I use the word cult, I'm talking about the religious system and its rituals and rules and all of that.

The prophet had nothing to [00:22:00] do with the cult, but the priest does, because they're the ones managing the system. So the priests are the ones who care for the sanctuary, the furniture of the sanctuary, including the Ark of the Covenant. They're the ones who oversee the offerings, the sacrifices, the purifications, and in with all of that, they're the ones who make declarations or pronouncements to declare something clean or unclean, to declare something leprous or whatever it is. Priests were also educators. They also took care of the law and the books of the law. They would create and renew covenants, and in general, their big overarching role was to act as mediators. They could perform blessings and cursings, and they could provide oracles, sometimes with the use of actual objects.

[00:23:00] Now, the Bible denounces divination, so these oracles are not divination in the sense that God is requesting them to do these, or they are done in a certain pattern and done in accordance with the will of God. So they're not trying to manipulate the deities for their own purposes, but there were things in place that God put there so that they could receive word from him.

Now, a lot of the reason that they did the things, the way they did them was because they had a certain view of the world, right? They worshiped a holy God, and holiness was a dangerous thing. If you were impure, unclean, sinful, whatever, and you entered the space of the Holy God, you would be consumed by that holiness.

The idea was that death and sickness and impurity. And also, [00:24:00] sin would form a layer of corruption, and thus the holy space itself would need to be purified from that corruption. And so, getting into a right relationship with God and maintaining that relationship was actually a very complex thing. It was more than just sin, it was the entire idea of impurity, which sin fed into, but also many other things did as well.

It wasn't morally sinful to touch a dead body. But it would make you unclean and that was a bad thing. So when we're talking about priests and we're talking about the priesthood, there's a very wide structure that we need to fit that into. And it's very based on having like a full society with all of these organizations and cultural aspects and worldviews.

So right now I am only giving a basic introduction. I [00:25:00] absolutely am going to be touching on all of these points. At some point in the future, the topic of sacred space and how that works and the logic behind it in the ancient world and the logic behind it in the biblical imagination. I think it's such a cool thing.

I think it's really helpful to me to get into that kind of formulation of how I think about things. And I will be showing how we can see all of that in the first chapters of Genesis and throughout the rest of the book as well. So, there are these things that priests do, and just as an aside, like, what I thought growing up about the priesthood and priests, I thought more along the lines that they had some sort of special power, like they were literally investured with a particular power that could flow from them in some way, right?

And maybe some people still have that kind of [00:26:00] idea, but in my mind, it was a little bit more like It's like pagan magic rituals, right? Like pagan priests would do ritualistic magic in order to manipulate the world. That's not the Israelite system. The Old Testament system is a structure that centers on holiness and purity and people having believing loyalty and being in the covenant.

And all of that was so that God could dwell with his people. The priesthood wasn't there to get magical things from God. The priests and the offerings were about relationship and order and goodness. In fact, the sacrificial system was built on fellowship meals, fellowshipping with each other as well as fellowshipping with God.

So in other words, it's not about trying to convince God to do something or tricking Him or gaming the system to get some [00:27:00] results that we want. It's knowing that God has our back. And will be faithful and good, and here's a system to help us work that out.

Okay, so we know quite a bit about priests now, and what we can do at this point is we can take the imagery and the metaphors and the basic language and even beyond that to the concepts of the priesthood and the priests at large. We can take all of that. And then look at scripture to see where we can find those things.

If you've been around the block in Bible study at all, you probably have been exposed to, or done, word studies. Happily, what we're doing here kind of builds on that technique and that skill, but it expands it as well.

So if you know how to do a word study, that's going to stand you in good stead for this. [00:28:00] But it's not going to be the only thing that you need. The other thing you need is a little bit harder to teach because what you need to do is back up a little bit and look at the concept and theme as a whole. Like what is going on in this situation and how does it compare to this other situation that's going on in this other passage?

Is there crossover in concepts there? That's a little bit harder to do simply because we're so divorced from that ancient context, so the concepts might not be super clear to us. And that's why we need to understand more about culture and history of the Bible.

I'll give you a bit of an example here. If you're not familiar with how cleanliness is super important to the priest, and you're not understanding why that is, then, in the story of the Good Samaritan, you're not going to understand that the Levite who passes by had a [00:29:00] very good reason for not stopping, like a reason that he could defend biblically. The fact that the Samaritan was supposed to stop and help the man, it was incredibly countercultural. And of course, you have the whole story with the Samaritans and why that's also shocking in and of itself.

And to us, we might be tempted to look at that story and think, well, what it's saying is that impurity wasn't a big deal. But rather, if we understand that it really was that big of a deal, then we can understand just how much higher of a big deal it is to take care of one's neighbor, no matter what, and preserve life. Like if we downgrade the seriousness of purity in the story, then that downgrades the entire story.

Okay, so when we realize that priests are very involved in a concern with purity and death and disease, [00:30:00] along with worship, Sacrifice, offering, teaching, and covenant. If we understand that that is a big picture of the priesthood, then when we come across those things in Scripture later, we can hook that back into this whole structure of the priesthood.

Now, of course, what we want to usually do is create more than one point of connection if we're trying to create these hyperlinks. You don't just go for one word or one thing that shows up. But if there's multiple things that are showing up in your narrative, then that's going to bring your mind back into these concepts.

So all those things that I just mentioned, those are things that they are concerned with doing something about. We can also look at locations that priests are found. When we see mention of high places, that's a mention of a worship area. You also have trees and streams and gardens. And also, when you [00:31:00] have something jewel like or colorful, those hook back into the temple, sacred space, and priestly kind of activity. Priests also deal with holiness a lot, , any kind of purity language, and quite often the law or instruction.

Okay, so how do we take these themes and ideas and use them in our biblical studies just for ourselves? As I said, we do want to look at words, the repetition of particular words, and also concepts.

Sometimes, too, we can look at adjacent ideas to those concepts, and even contrasting ideas. But we first need the repeated ideas and words in order to start the ball rolling. So, we're going to start in Genesis, and we're going to get this ball rolling, so to speak. Because the interesting thing [00:32:00] is that as you get more and more passages, more and more concepts get rolled up into the ball that we're looking at. It becomes a richer picture as we go.

We're talking about priests, so we're going to go ahead and start where we see the word first show up in our Bibles. And that is in Genesis 14, verse 18. And this is the story of Abram with Melchizedek. Abram and some others defeated some bad guys. They came back to Salem, which was probably the area of Jerusalem.

And verse 18 says, And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abram by God Most High. Possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be God most high, who has delivered your enemies into your hand. And Abram gave him a 10th of everything. end quote. [00:33:00] I read through verse 20 there.

So in the book of Genesis, there is no preamble to this. There is no establishment of the priesthood anywhere in Genesis. This priest who doesn't even belong to Abram's family is a priest of the God most high. By the time we get to this, we're under the assumption, as readers today, that there was no widespread worship of the true God, and yet here we are.

We would also be confused if we assumed that the establishment of priestly duties and priests didn't happen until, like, the Exodus or something. But here we have Abram, who was chosen by God to start God's new nation, and Abram is giving a tithe to a priest who is at Salem--to a king priest, that is.

Okay, so that's our first situation that we come upon with direct evidence of priests. We already have a connection with [00:34:00] kingship, we already have the patriarch who is himself performing worship and giving a tithe to this priest. So when we're packing our bag of priestly ideas to carry with us as we're reading the rest of scripture, those are all things that we can put in this bag.

What else do we see here? We see the concept of blessing. We see the concept of tithing. We see the fact that they are enjoying a meal together. We have bread and wine.

My suggestion to you as you're reading scripture and studying it on your own, when you're reading, write down these concepts. I mean, you can highlight your Bibles, and that can be really helpful, but if that's what you're doing, that tends to kind of anchor it into the page, and it's harder for it to carry forward through scripture.

At least I think so in my own studies. I have gotten the most out of study when I have something with me that I can write words and phrases that stand out to [00:35:00] me so that when those words and phrases and concepts show up again later, I can go, Oh, I see. This is hearkening back to this other thing, or maybe it's an opposite kind of a thing, or whatever it is.

And you can also notice what's absent in your text that you're looking at. For instance, here, we're so used to sacrifice being part of what a priest does, and there is no obvious sacrifice here. At least when we think of sacrifice as the killing of an animal and that kind of thing. What we do have here is offerings.

They share a meal together. Abram is offering a tithing. And this is a really good example of how you need to look at concepts rather than just words. If you're just looking at the words bread. and wine, and tithing, you might not see how that actually meshes in with the sacrificial system. But if you understand the sacrificial system as a whole, [00:36:00] then when these types of things are showing up, you're going to make those connections.

Many of us have probably been puzzled with this section of scripture. Like, where in the world did this king come from? How is he worshiping the true God? Why is Abraham giving him this tithing? It just kind of appears here, like out of the blue, we're not expecting it, but again, we don't have the imagination of the original audience.

But we're developing it, right? We're getting there. Okay, we're going to keep on with our search for the word priest, because we want to keep building our treasure trove of priestly imagery and metaphor and ideas, right? Surprisingly, the next place that a priest shows up is all the way into Genesis 41.

And the priest isn't even active in this section of scripture. He's just the father of Joseph's wife, who was given to him by the Pharaoh. [00:37:00] I am going to read a section of chapter 41, starting in verse 37 and going down to about 45, I think. It says, quote, This proposal pleased Pharaoh and all his servants.

This is where Joseph is presenting his plan to save everyone from the famine. And Pharaoh said to his servants, Can we find a man like this in whom is the Spirit of God? Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, Since God has shown you all this, there is none so discerning and wise as you are. You shall be over my house, and all my people shall order themselves as you command.

Only as regards the throne will I be greater than you. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt. Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his hand, and put it on Joseph's hand, and clothed him in garments of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck. And he made him ride in his second chariot.[00:38:00]

And they called out before him, Bow the knee. Thus he set him over all the land of Egypt. Moreover, Pharaoh said to Joseph, I am Pharaoh, and without your consent no one shall lift up hand or foot in all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh called Joseph's name Zaphonoth Panea, and he gave him in marriage Asenath, the daughter of Potipharah, priest of On.

So Joseph went out over the land of Egypt. End quote.

Okay, so when you're doing this kind of study, because you're looking at the concepts of the entire story and what a narrative that's going on. You do want to try and make sure you're getting a good chunk of what the text is in order to kind of build your case, right?

Now, here it seems like the inclusion of the priest is just incidental to the story. Like, here's just some interesting tidbit of information. Nobody really needs to know that, right? [00:39:00] But scripture doesn't tend to be that free with its just random data. So in this case of this story that's going on, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with priests or the priesthood, but a priest is mentioned.

So that should maybe tickle our ear a little bit. And as we think of this, and as we pull out our other examples of concepts from our little bag that we're stuffing it all into, right? We say, hmm, there is kingship and leadership involved here in this story. Pharaoh is giving Joseph an office. Pharaoh is giving Joseph clothing.

He is giving him a gold chain. Now, those are all subtle things that we might not understand what they mean in context of the Ancient Near East and Egypt in particular. And in this day and age, it's fairly easy to just go and do a search and see if you can pull anything up on those ideas that you're like, hmm, what is the gold chain? [00:40:00] What is the significance of that?

And if you do a search on that, you'll probably find some really easily accessible information that will tell you that that's connected to royal appointments and higher dignity levels in Egyptian society. That connected with giving him the signet ring displays that level of command that Joseph has.

But he was also given those garments, and those both harken back to the coat of many colors that Joseph had when he was younger. But also, that connects to priestly garments. And the fact that Joseph was able to marry a priest's daughter has a little bit of suggestion that he was involved in the priesthood on some level in Egyptian society itself, or that this was his entrance into that.

And at some point in the podcast, far down the line probably, we will be talking about how Joseph is a type of Christ. And so to have Joseph connected to the kingship, and also to the [00:41:00] priesthood... It's part of that matrix of ideas, which is important because it makes for a solid case to look at these types of things, literally, like types, you know, typology and archetypes.

Those are very important to us because then we can more fully understand the work of our Messiah. Man, we have only done two passages and we're already up to talking about Jesus. How awesome is that? Of course, we're kind of cheating because we have brought in some more of our knowledge already into this reading of Genesis, and that's okay, because that's what we're supposed to do.

So, there's ideas like... Are we supposed to bring later scripture and later understanding into earlier texts that were written earlier, right? And to some degree, we shouldn't do that too much. But when we know that the readers were already [00:42:00] thinking these things and they already had this in their brains, then that's perfectly fine to really be doing because they would have been thinking that.

That's why I keep harping on the biblical imagination and forming it. One more thing I want to mention about the text we just read is that it also centers around the provision of food. So I find that quite the interesting connection as well. Okay, moving through Genesis, the next use of the word priest just refers back to what we just had.

It has a bit of a genealogy in chapter 46. But in chapter 47, We have what's actually going on during the famine and how Joseph is helping the people. He's collecting the grains, and then he's selling it back to them during the famine. In verse 20, it says, quote, So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for all the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe on them.[00:43:00]

The land became Pharaoh's. As for the people, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other. Only the land of the priests he did not buy, for the priests had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on the allowance that Pharaoh gave them. Therefore, they did not sell their land, end quote.

Okay, so this is a bit different from what we expect to see as Bible readers. We expect that priests don't have land because the Levites weren't granted land when they went up into Canaan, but in Egypt, the priests actually owned their own land and they had an allowance from Pharaoh as well. So, there is the idea of the priests being supported.

And here's an example of where we have the same parallel concept, but it's presented in a slightly opposite way. During the famine, the priests were the only ones who kept their land. That's the opposite of what we see in Israel, where the [00:44:00] priests are the only ones who don't have land. And we can think about why that is.

Why this contrast? Of course, Egypt isn't presented negatively in Genesis, not the way it is later on in Exodus. But we still have this indication that Egypt wasn't doing things the way that God was going to have the people do when they went into the land. Of course, most of us are thinking immediately, well, The Egyptian priesthood is a pagan priesthood, so of course they don't have anything to do with the right kind of priesthood.

But you do have to remember that Joseph has married into a priestly family from Egypt. So at this point, it's not necessarily the case that we should see that priestly class as the enemy. That kind of thing developed. At this point in time, Pharaoh's kind of doing God's will because he's helping the people in Egypt and the people in Canaan to have food [00:45:00] during this famine.

And Pharaoh is treating Joseph well. So when Pharaoh is going according to God's plan, things aren't going so bad, and it's when Pharaoh turns away from God and is actively hostile, that's when things get really bad for the Egyptians, right? Now, I'm not saying we should just approve of pagan priests and priesthoods, okay?

We need to be directing worship to the true God. And that's it. But we do need to be aware of when the Bible is really pointing something out as evil, and when it's like, look, this is working along with God's purposes. How that really ultimately shakes out in the end, I don't know. But there's a distinction there.

Otherwise, we might be tempted to say that Joseph was entirely wrong to take his wife, but his wife produced the two tribes that stem from Joseph. They weren't disinherited. And part of this [00:46:00] is the necessity of seeing that the Bible isn't really as ethnic as some people want to say. Most of us are probably saying, well, of course it's not.

Israel was to bring in the nations, and the nations were still to be brought into the fold of God. But there's an awful lot of people who disagree with that and seeing these things subtly in scripture and just deeply Embedded into it. I think can help us really make undeniable points to my way of thinking .

Oh, but here's another point that I want to make from this chapter chapter 47 of Genesis in verse 23 It says then Joseph said to the people behold I have this day bought you and your land for Pharaoh now here is seed for you and you shall sow the land And as the harvests, you shall give a fifth to Pharaoh and four fifths shall be your own as seed for the field and as food for yourselves and your households and as food for your little ones.

And they said, [00:47:00] you have saved our lives. May it please my Lord. We will be servants to Pharaoh. So Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt. And it stands to this day that Pharaoh should have the fifth. The land of the priests alone did not become Pharaoh's end quote. So, here we go. We have the mention of the priests, and we have this division of the produce.

And again, mention of the land. The land is supporting the people, but Pharaoh is getting kind of like a tithe. It's a fifth of what they have. I want to move on to some other things, but I want to put that out for you guys to think about. It's these little details that really form a nice core of meditation for us to take into and think, how does this compare to other things in Scripture? And what is it saying about this right here? And what is it saying about a commentary, perhaps, on other things that also happen?

Alright, well [00:48:00] that is all of the mentions of priests in Genesis. All of them. That's it. Once you get into the Book of Exodus, the priestly language ramps up quite a bit. But even there, there's a lot of priestly stuff that's assumed before you really have what you think is the establishment of the priesthood.

So once you've gone through more of the major passages that have to do with your basic theme, Then you have a really good selection of imagery and metaphor and concepts that you can then take back into the rest of your studies. It is super interesting to me that in the book of Genesis, you do not see a priest from God's family.

You do see Melchizedek, who is offering to the true God. But of course, once you get to Abraham, he is nomadic. So he's traveling around. He's not established in a city. [00:49:00] He is the seed of the new nation and a new culture, right? And we do see Abraham worshiping and giving tithes to priests. But here is my next question.

Can we take the themes of the priests and the priesthood and look for them at a deeper level in the Book of Genesis? I would argue that, yes, we can do that. I would argue that we really need to in order to understand what Genesis is even telling us a lot of the times. If we don't do this, I think that we're missing a big chunk of the meaning of the entire book.

And I mean that right from the beginning. I think that not having this understanding is what leads us to all of the divergent interpretations that we end up having. For instance, once we understand Genesis 1 as a temple building text, [00:50:00] Then not only does that inform the way that we are looking at the formation of the cosmos, perhaps, but it also helps us situate the entire temple complex and system within that framework.

Then it's not just God reaching into humanity through a family and only caring about that one family and that one ethnicity. What that becomes is a type of the whole cosmos. If we see Genesis 1 as a temple building text, then we see the sacredness of all of creation. We see how the temple is providing a template to the purposes of God in creation.

And some of you might be wondering, okay, I, I get it, I guess, but I'm still not really seeing the big point, like why does this really even matter? In part, I would say that it matters because there's plenty of people out there, especially in [00:51:00] our modern world, who still can't get past the idea that the Bible is not just a rule book.

Because they see the laws and they see the, construct of the temple and how people were supposed to go and atone for all of their sins, right? That's the idea that's in our minds of what's going on in the temple. Like, we need the temple in order to atone for our sins. That's the entire point of the temple.

But if creation as a whole is a temple... Then that has to shift our mental focus from this legalistic justice system into the broader conception of what even is a temple. And if the temple exists, there's got to be priests. And if there's priests, those priests were Adam and Eve, and they weren't in the temple initially to atone for anything.

In fact, when they did make a mistake, they were kicked out. They couldn't make atonement back into sacred space. I think [00:52:00] most of the time we think, well, that just means that the sacrificial system was imperfect and we needed the perfect sacrifice of Christ, right? And to a point, sure. But notice we're still indicating that the temple is something that's substandard and might just be an accommodation.

And to a point, that's fair enough, especially when you realize that the initial type of something is going to be substandard. It's not going to be as awesome and ultimate as the end, right? But I think that the fact that the temple and its system can be seen as a reflection of that creation that initially was, that was declared good, that wasn't dealing with some kind of sin management system.

Well, maybe it's not so much a sin management system at all. Well, do you remember that point that I made earlier [00:53:00] about the priests being servants to Israel and Israel being servants to the nations and how I think that is actually really helpful to us? I think a key takeaway is that as the priests are mediating a relationship with God with the people, And this is done in the system via sacrifices and offerings and cleansings and care for sacred space and all of that stuff.

They are protecting the people from their holy God. While, at the same time, they're offering fellowship with that holy God. And what this means for the world, from the nation of the priests of Israel, and us today as a kingdom of priests, is that we now mediate by bringing the gospel to people, by bringing them Jesus, and by imaging God and Jesus to them.

Oh, there we go again, talking about imaging God, right? And maybe you're not looking at this in the same way that I do. [00:54:00] But, to me, the idea of managing my sin is kind of one direction of thought, and the idea of imaging God is another direction of thought. Like, those things cross paths and have to do with one another, but the question is which one is more basic, and which one is our focus, and which one is the point of creation, you know?

Like, if you're imaging God, then I guess, like, it's already the case that your sin is being managed as a part of that, but you're not managing your sin simply because of the sin itself, right? It's just that, to me, these are two different ways of thinking that are not exactly the same, even if they have things that are very related within them.

It's like, if what I'm thinking about daily is, I'm not good enough, that's just exceptionally different than thinking. I am an imager of God, here to represent Him. [00:55:00] Well, I know which way I want to live and think in my day to day life. And what's fun in the Bible is you start making these connections and you go, huh, if that's the case, then it really is important to pay attention to these priestly narratives and imageries, because that really relates to who I am.

Who said biblical theology wasn't relatable?

Okay, so my last few minutes, I want to introduce a couple of books that I think are really approachable and helpful. If you want to delve into the concept of the priest, the first book is a biblical theology book called Raising Up a Faithful Priest, Community and Priesthood in Biblical Theology.

And this is by Richard D. Nelson. If you're new to biblical theology, this is actually a pretty good book to look at to see how biblical theology approaches things. [00:56:00] Like a lot of people think that biblical theology is harder to put into application. But I don't think that's true. Here's a little bit from this book.

We can't understand how Jesus, quote, crosses and thus obliterates the barriers between clean and unclean, holy and profane, end quote, unless we really understand how people of the Old Testament thought versus what's going on in the New Testament. Here is another quote from Raising Up a Faithful Priest.

He says, quote, The typical human response to the chasm between God and humanity has always been to bridge it with priestly access to the holy and sacrificial transfer. The New Testament, in contrast, asserts that Jesus has decisively mediated between God and mortals by means of a unique act of self sacrifice, understood in different ways by different biblical authors.[00:57:00]

Both the Western Church's preoccupation with sin and its forgiveness and the Eastern Church's expression of humanity's theosis Or deification have been attempts to explore and express the nature of this act of mediation end quote.

Thus understanding the very concepts underpinning the priesthood enables us to see how Jesus fulfills and fits with them but in a more perfect way But at any rate, this book is pretty great.

It tells you a bit about the history of Israel's priesthood and their surrounding culture. It explains the functions of the priesthood, and of course it talks about sacrifice and how all of these things mesh with theology. And it talks about, like, the ultimate expression of these things, and the priesthood in the New Testament, and also talks about how that spills over into the church.

So, all in all, it's a very good survey [00:58:00] of the priesthood from the biblical theology lens. And I will also say it gives a fairly good introduction to a wider view of the concept of sacrifice and what that might actually mean. So that's definitely stuff we will be getting into in the worship series as well, which I'm very excited about.

The other book that I wanted to mention is by David S. Schrock, which is spelled S C H R O C K, and this book is called The Royal Priesthood and the Glory of God. The description that I have of it reads, quote, From Genesis to Revelation, the theme of the royal priesthood is a silver thread running through the biblical story from the Garden of Eden, through the priesthood of Israel, to Jesus Christ, the true and better priest. The theme of priesthood culminates with the creation of God's covenant people, called out of the nations [00:59:00] to be his priests to the nations. End quote.

This is also a biblical theology book, but it's less topical than the last one was. This one has sections about the priesthood in the beginning of creation, and then it sections over into how the priesthood was established with the law, and then it talks about the priesthood showing up in the prophets, and also the writings, and then into the Gospels, and then Acts through Revelation.

So basically, it's describing how the priesthood is showing up in all of these different sections of Scripture. That's biblical theology. And again, this was more of a introduction into the topic of priests and an overview. So we might be pulling out this book later to dig a little bit more into all of these fun details.

If you have any questions or points you would like to have addressed in particular regarding priests or priesthood, [01:00:00] feel free to shoot me a message or ask me a question and I'm also gathering a lot of really great topics and questions for the worship series. So, if you have anything that you want to see addressed in the worship series, please let me know.

It's going to be an awesome series, I can already tell you that. And thank you to everyone who has provided that. You guys are awesome. You can join me in my Facebook group for further discussion there. You can email me at genesismarksthespot@gmail.com. You can also message me from my website, which is genesismarksthespot.com, and sign up for my newsletter there as well. And again, check your spam folders. Thank you for listening, and thank you to my Patreons and those who donate to me through PayPal. You guys are such a blessing to me, I can't even tell. Thanks also to those of you who [01:01:00] share the episodes and who have rated my podcast.

Those are really, really helpful things, both to encourage me and also to help others find the content that they might enjoy as well. All right, well, that is it for this episode, and I wish you all a blessed week, and we'll see you later.