Claude Mariottini had an interesting post yesterday on the last phrase of 2 Samuel 8:18, “and David’s sons were priests.” Claude contrasted 2 Sam 8:18 with 1 Chronicles 18:17 (Claude inadvertently typed the reference as 2 Chronicles 18:17), which characterizes David’s sons as “first ministers of the king” (NJPS). Claude surveyed a number of translations that assimilate 2 Sam 8:18 to 1 Chron 18:17 and translate כהנים kōhănîm, “priests,” as something other than “priests.”

As Claude wrote, the Chronicler apparently found it unacceptable for non-Levites to be priests, but, in Claude’s words, “Since David performed some priestly functions in the Jerusalem cult, it is very possible that he delegated some of his priestly responsibilities to his sons.” Claude apparently means this as a historical point about David, which I judge a tenuous point to make. However, I would think it entirely proper to say that the author of the original source from which 2 Sam 8:18 was drawn, and perhaps subsequent compilers and editors of the traditions and documents that eventually became the canonical form of the book of Samuel, had no objection to non-Levites serving as priests or, in the case of the compilers and editors, felt bound to preserve their source as faithfully as possible.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this, and I do not pretend that the comments I’m about to make are exhaustive or rigorous (this is a blog post, after all). However, I find them interesting. Normally, my “fire” is “lit” primarily by literary-aesthetic readings of biblical texts rather than by historical investigations, though I have found that my early, naïve attempts to evade historical questions by wrapping myself in aesthetics and literary theory simply did not work. Here I want to focus on matters of the literary history of the Bible.

The transformation of David’s sons from “priests” in 2 Sam 8:18 to “first ministers” in 1 Chron 18:17 strongly suggests that the notion that that only Levites could be priests gained currency in Judean thinking sometime between the composition of 2 Samuel (or, more strictly speaking, the smallest original unit containing 2 Sam 8:18) and the composition of 1 Chronicles. This realization really does have some pretty significant implications for the history of Israelite thought and the composition of biblical literature. For well over a century, most biblical scholars have concluded that the books of Exodus and Leviticus were not written by Moses, as long-standing tradition posited. Even the underlying traditions may not go back as far as Moses. I am oversimplifying terribly, but we are basically presented with the dilemma that either the author of the smallest original unit containing 2 Sam 8:18, as well as (presumably) the tradents who preserved that unit through to canonical expression, either (a) did not know anything about the Priestly Torah’s insistence that only Levites may be priests, or (b) were not bothered enough by David’s flouting of these commandments to rewrite the text or to insert an editorial comment on the impropriety, or (c) they themselves were not happy with this situation but thought it represented historical reality, and they were historically sensitive enough to realize that times change. Of course, (b) would follow if (a) were the case, and in fact (a) probably is the case; neither (b) nor (c), of course, excludes (a), and (b) and (c) are neither mutually exclusive or mutually dependent.

Admittedly, all of this is basically “old news” to biblical scholars. I offer these reflections partly just because Claude’s post stimulated them, but also so with the hope that non-specialist readers of my blog can gain from this a bit of insight into how biblical scholars reason about the history of the Bible, and can begin to reason the same way. Scholars once used the term “higher criticism” as an umbrella term for the various methods of analysis designed to answer the overarching question, “How did the Bible get to be the way it is?”

Our current answers to that question are many and varied, but all good scholarly approaches, even when they disagree sharply, treat the Bible as an historical phenomenon. Many on the conservative/evangelical end of Christendom apply to the Bible a Qur’anic model of inspiration, resulting in the idea that God basically wrote the Bible by means of dictation to human secretaries. If this be the case, then apparently God either had a slip of the divine tongue when dictating 2 Sam 8:18, and “said” kōhănîm when intending to say hāri’šōnîm lĕyad hammelek—an awfully large slip—or made the same error in reverse, or changed the divine mind about what David’s sons had been between dictating the two texts. This image is simply silly, and doesn’t fit the textual facts in front of us. The textual facts are best explained by a change in perspective among the Judean/Jewish literati over time regarding the prerequisites for priesthood. By implication, it seems that the restriction of the priesthood to the Levites did not occur in some pre-monarchical wilderness experience, real or imagined, but sometime relatively late in the monarchy or after it. The whole thing has implications for the authorship and provenance of the Torah and of the book of Samuel. But note that these musings stem from an observable phenomenon in the test itself. Asking such questions does not mean kowtowing to some “history of religions” paradigm, nor do such questions constitute some sort of atheistic attack on Judaism and/or Christianity. Rather, for biblical scholars of all religious outlooks or lack of same, such questions arise from careful scrutiny of the text itself.