1.A 04. The Holiness Code

The Holiness Code

Now there follows still another addition. The great basic sentence which in itself contains the very essence of the religion of Israel is: " Ye shall be holy, for I Jehovah your God am holy" (Leviticus 19:2). Bit by bit there had grown up rules and regulations and principles governing this holiness, and laying down in what this holiness consists. These holiness laws are embodied in a document which is known as the Holiness Cqde, which is contained in Leviticus 17:1-16, Leviticus 18:1-30, Leviticus 19:1-37, Leviticus 20:11-27, Leviticus 21:1-24, Leviticus 22:1-33, Leviticus 23:1-44, Leviticus 24:1-23, Leviticus 25:1-55, Leviticus 26:1-46, and which is usually denoted by the letter H. This was compiled and published somewhere about 550 B.C., and it was natural that it, too, should be added to the growing sacred literature of Israel. So, then, the Holiness Code was, as it were, the next volume to be added to the divine library of the Old Testament.

There remains one great volume to be added, and then the Pentateuch is complete. This last section of the Pentateuch is called P, because it contains all the great ritual and sacrificial practice in the second Temple, and it is essentially a priestly document. It is composed of the remaining part of Leviticus, in which the sacrificial laws are set out. It also contains the rest of the history of the Pentateuch, and it is characterized by certain, features. It can be noble and austere, as it is in Genesis I, when it tells its story of creation. It often tells stories to explain how the great religious practices and festivals of Israel came into being. For instance, its creation story explains the supreme importance of the Sabbath day. It is very fond of genealogies, for to a priest purity of lineage was essential, and it is to it that the long genealogies of the Pentateuch belong, and It became the great framework into which all the other parts of the Pentateuch were fitted. It was completed somewhere about 500 B.C.

So, at last, after more than a century under the guidance of the Spirit of God, the great divine library of the Pentateuch stood complete. It had begun with Deuteronomy; it had embraced the precious history of J and E; it had taken in the great Holiness Code; and finally it had found its unity in the setting of the laws and the history of the great priestly document called P. To put it in very brief form, we might say that the Law, the Pentateuch, equals D + JE + H + P. But we have now to ask, wlicrudid this great doquxucixt. become sacred Scripture? When did it cease to be simply a great and precious book, and when did it come to be regarded and accepted as in a special and unique sense nothing less than, and nothing other than, the word of God? A first step was that the part of it which told specially of the great laws of Israel became separated from the rest. That is to say, the Law proper, the first five books of the Bible, became separated from Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. It was the Law of God which was of supreme importance. Three things help us to fix a time when the Law became Scripture in the full sense of the term. i. One of the great events in religious history was when the^ Old Testament was translated into Greek, and when the Greek Old Testament, which is known as the Scpfuagnt, and which is denoted by the letters LXX, first emerged. The importance of / it was that the Old Testament was no longer hidden away in the! Hebrew language, but became available to almost the whole \ world, for at that time almost all men spoke Greek as well as, their own tongue. That translation was made under the auspices * of Ptolemy the Second Philadelphus, who was king of Egypt from 285-246 B.C. It was originally only the Law which was translated, and we know that by that time the Law was par excellence the sacred book of the Jews. It was for them Scripture in the full sense of the term. We can then say with certainty that by 250 B.C. the Law was Scripture. But can we trace the story further back? ii. To this day the Samaritans accept only die Pentateuch as Scripture, and do not accept the other books of the Old Testament. That can only mean that when the Samaritans split from the Jews, and when the great national schism took place, the Scriptures consisted only of the Law, for it was only the Law that the Samaritans took with them. When that great and lasting schism took place is not accurately certain, but there is good evidence that it at least began to threaten in the days of Nehemiah, that is, at some time not very long before.

There are signs of this belief even within the Old Testament itself. In Deuteronomy the hope and the belief is that God will always raise up a prophet for His people (Deuteronomy 18:15), but in Malachi all that can be expected is not the emergence of any new prophet, but the return of Elijah (Malachi 4:5). Zechariah envisages a time when anyone who claims to be a prophet must be necessarily an impostor. "If anyone again appears as a prophet, his father and mother who bore him will say to him, You shall not live, for you speak lies in the name of the Lord; and his father and mother who bore him shall pierce him through when he prophesies" (Zechariah 13:3). In Psalms 74:1-23 there is a verse which is probably not a part of the original psalm but rather a comment of some editor, and it is a verse of this latter-day despair: "There is no longer any prophet, and there is none among us who knows how long" (Psalms 74:9). In i Maccabees we repeatedly come on this belief. That book speaks of a sorrow in Israel "such as there has not been since the days that the prophets ceased to appear among them" (1Ma 9:27). It describes how the people put aside the stones of the polluted altar, not knowing what to do with them, and waiting until a prophet should arise in Israel to tell them (1Ma 4:46). It tells that they agreed to make Simon high priest until such time as a prophet should appear (1Ma 14:41)-

It is the same in the writings of the Rabbis. One passage says that up until Alexander the Great Ezra was not very long before Alexander the prophets prophesied through the Holy Spirit, but from that time onward all that a man could do was to listen to the wise, that is, to the scribes. Rabbi Akiba, writing in the Christian era, declared that any Jew who read in the Christian books had no share in the life to come. He went on to say that books, like that of Ben Sirach and others such, which had been composed after the age of the prophets had closed, might be read, but only as a man reads a letter.