God's Firstborn
"I will take the Levites in place of all the firstborn of the children of Israel." - Numbers 8:18
For all the firstborn among the children of Israel are Mine, man and animal. On the day that I smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt I sanctified them for Myself. And I will take the Levites in place of all the firstborn of the children of Israel.” – Numbers 8:17-18
A favorite theme of Jordan Peterson’s is sacrifice, which he says means “that you give up something of value in the present so that you can improve the future.” This sounds like a simpler idea than it is. Cain and Abel both made sacrifices. But only Cain’s was not accepted. Why?
Ibn Ezra found a clue in the Bible’s description of Abel’s sacrifice as “the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof,” a description that is notably absent when Cain’s sacrifice is described. The implication: Cain’s sacrifice was, in Peterson’s terms, not everything it could be, which meant that it was not in service to the highest good. Cain did not bring the best of his crop, and hoped that God would accept it anyway. But, as anyone who has started and abandoned a workout routine knows, a half-hearted effort leads to a half-hearted result.
Cain’s great error was turning his disappointment into resentment against his brother, whom he kills. Ramban saw this as a basic misunderstanding (perhaps willful) on Cain’s part. It wasn’t Abel’s fault that Cain had not brought the best of his own harvest, nor was it to Abel’s detriment that he had brought the best of his. Cain missed that he could have best surpassed his brother by creating and bringing the best of what he alone could produce.
If this is sacrifice gone wrong, what then is sacrifice gone right?
One answer can be found in the above quote, which comes at the end of one of the oddest passages in the Bible. The Levites, the tribe designated to serve as priests for the Tabernacle (the portable Temple the children of Israel carried with them through the desert), are isolated and surrounded by all the firstborn, who place their hands upon them in open imitation of the manner in which the priests put their hands on animals that are brought to the Tabernacle to be sacrificed. Then they are waved in the air by Aaron, again in a very similar manner in which sacrifices are waved.
Instead of being killed they are transformed into the workmen of the Tabernacle: the ones who break down and carry the great structure from place to place through the desert, who hold its golden pans and shovels, and who blow its silver trumpets. The Levites also famously lived in the most precarious economic position of all Israel’s tribes, for they both had no land to work and were at the bottom of the priestly pecking order, beneath the high priest and his family. Which meant they lived off the offerings of the offerings. Indeed, it was the Levites who were among those who suffered most the corruption of the priesthood in ancient Israel in the decades before the destruction of the Temple, as the office of high priest was sold to the highest bidder, who might leave the Levites to starve by selling their grain to enrich himself.1
The work and suffering of the Levites, then, is also part of their sacrifice.
The message: since the firstborn of both man and animal belong to God, a sacrifice of each must be made. But murder of another person, all of whom were created in God’s image, is also forbidden. We therefore enact the sacrifice, those who are meant to be sacrificed literally putting their hands on those who are to take their place as if through touch transferring the responsibility of sacrifice, which is then literally put to service in the most mundane of holy tasks, proving (among other things) that all must be sacrificed before the sanctity of human life.
If all that holds water, you might still ask why any of this must be made manifest? Why have the ritual with the laying of the hands and the actual work of the Levites? Isn’t it all perhaps a bit performative?
The short answer is that we humans need ideas to be translated into rituals for them to have meaning. Think of football players who bring their hands together before a game. Or the elaborate choreography of a presidential inauguration. Both are collective actions (either at the grand level of the nation or the more basic level of a football team) that make no rational sense but that infuse events with meaning.
The Bible is consumed with this kind of ritualization of meaning. Often, surprisingly, the deepest meaning is found in the rituals that seem, at first glance, to be the most strange. One shining example is the laying of hands on the Levites, through which we learn that sacrifice is both necessary and can never include the taking of a human life.
A recently published history on the Great Revolt against Rome describes well how the Levites suffered under a corrupted priesthood. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57615537-for-the-freedom-of-zion