A Kingdom of Priests

Immediately prior to the revelation at Mount Sinai, God instructs Moses to communicate His proposal to the people. Through Moses, God invites them to enter into a covenant with Him that will define their identity for all time:

“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me. And now, if you truly heed My voice and keep My covenant, you will become for Me a special treasure among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine. As for you, you will be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Exodus 19:4-6

This phrase – “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” – a mere four words in the original Hebrew, was to become the shortest, simplest, most challenging mission statement of the Jewish people. Indeed, with the possible exception of the United States, the Jewish people is the only nation ever to have had a mission statement. Most are defined in terms of language, geography, political structure, long association and the like. Jews became a nation by adopting a task, by covenanting with God. Absent that, and it is hard to say what it is to be a Jew.

Yet the words themselves are difficult to understand. In this essay I want to look at the first part of the phrase: “a kingdom of priests.” Construed literally, it leads to obvious problems. First, Jews never were a kingdom of priests. Priesthood fell to Aaron and his sons. Even Moses was not a priest. There was a time when Moses said, “Would that all God’s people were prophets” (Numbers 11:29), but neither he nor anyone else said, “Would that all God’s people were priests.”[1]

What is more, priesthood as such is not seen by the Torah as a distinctively Jewish or Israelite phenomenon. Melchizedek, Abraham’s contemporary, is described as “a priest of the most high God” (Genesis 14:18). Jethro, Moses’ father in law, is described at the beginning of the parasha as “a Midianite priest” (Exodus 18:1). All ancient religions had priests.

The classic commentators are divided. Some – Ibn Ezra, Nahmanides – interpret the word to mean “servants.” A priest is one consecrated to the service of God. That was now to be the task of the Israelites as a whole. Others – Saadia Gaon, Rashi, Rashbam – understand it to mean “princes,” based on the verse (ii Samuel 8:18) in which David’s sons are described as kohanim, which cannot mean priests, and must mean royalty, noblemen, princes. Since God is the supreme King of kings, and since He had described the Israelites as “My son, My firstborn child” (Exodus 4:22), it followed that the Israelites were children of the king – royalty.

The most interesting suggestion is that of Ovadia Sforno, who interprets the phrase to mean that the Israelites stand in relation to the rest of humanity as the children of Aaron stood vis-à-vis the Israelites. They are, as it were, the world’s priests, whose task is to “teach the entire human race that all shall call in the name of God and serve Him with one accord, as indeed will be the role of Israel in the future.”[2]

It is notable that Sforno (Italy, 1470–1550) – writing in the Italian Renaissance – provides the most universalistic of interpretations. For it was in Renaissance Italy that Jews and Judaism were more integrated into the wider society than elsewhere.[3]

I want, however, to suggest a different kind of interpretation altogether, by looking at the wider context of the ancient world and the background against which the biblical narrative is set. It begins with the proposition that the most profound transformations of the human situation take place when there is a change in information technology – in the way human beings record and transmit what they know. Other technological advances have localised impact. They change the way things are done. Information technology has systemic impact. It affects the way people think.[4]

One obvious example, which was to change the face of Europe, was Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century.[5]

When Luther initiated the Reformation, his works spread like wildfire across Europe, setting in motion a series of revolutions that led, in the course of time, to the phenomenon we know as “the birth of the modern.” Yet most of Luther’s ideas had already been formulated two centuries earlier, in Oxford, by John Wycliffe. The difference was that in Wycliffe’s time the printing press did not exist, so his impact remained local. By Luther’s day there were more than two hundred printing presses in Europe. Soon they began producing Luther’s writings, and Bibles in vernacular translations, in the hundreds of thousands. It was a tide impossible to control, and it transformed the politics and culture of Europe.

The first technological invention was the birth of writing, in Mesopotamia, some five thousand years ago.[6]

This was the birth of civilization. Although writing was first used for trade and administrative purposes – recording who owed what to whom – its larger possibilities were soon exploited, to record myth and the victories of kings. For the first time, human beings could accumulate knowledge beyond the scope of unaided human memory. Nothing else so accelerated the pace of human progress.

Writing was invented independently at least seven times, in Mesopotamia (cuneiform), ancient Egypt (hieroglyphics), the Indus Valley (Indus script), China (ideograms), Crete (the Minoan script known as Linear-B), and the Americas (by both the Mayans and the Aztecs). The first writing systems usually took the form of pictograms, stylized representations of the objects the symbols denoted, or ideograms, standing for qualities or concepts. Some became syllabaries, each symbol representing a syllable.

The earliest writing systems, however, involved an obvious problem. The number of symbols involved was large. In Chinese, there are some sixty thousand. They could take years to master. The result was that in each society where there was writing, there was a literate elite, a knowledge class, often involved in administration. Pictographic or ideographic societies were hierarchical. Only the few had access to knowledge – and knowledge, said Francis Bacon[7], is power.

It was the second revolution that led to possibilities hitherto unknown: the invention of the alphabet. It was this that reduced the number of symbols needed to be learned to less than thirty. The first alphabetic inscriptions, in what has come to be known as proto-Semitic, were discovered by the British archaeologist William Flinders Petrie at Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai desert in 1905. He surmised that they were made by the Israelites on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. Their full significance was not realised until 1916, when they were decoded by British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner, who was the first to grasp that they were, in fact, alphabetical. A second, similar discovery, was made in the mid-1990s by Yale Egyptologist John Darnell, at Wadi el-Hol (the Valley of Terror) near Luxor.

Both Flinders Petrie and Darnell noted that the alphabet was developed from Egyptian hieroglyphics by truncating a word or syllable into its initial sound. Both were convinced that the creators of the first alphabets were not themselves Egyptians, but Semitic workers, traders, slaves or their supervisors. We cannot give a precise date to the first alphabet – some time between 1,800 and 2,000 bce seems likely. But unlike the pre-alphabetical scripts, the alphabet seems to have been invented only once. All the hundreds of scripts that exist are direct or indirect descendants of the proto-Semitic writing from the Sinai desert. The word alphabet itself comes from the first two letters of the Hebrew script aleph-bet. The first script to include vowels was Greek, but this too derived from earlier Sinaitic/Canaanite/Phoenician systems, as we can see from its first four letters. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta in Greek correspond to aleph, bet, gimmel and daled in Hebrew.

The connection between this and the development of the faith of Israel is unmistakable, even if we can only speculate about its precise form. As John Man writes: “Both new God and new script worked together to forge a new nation and disseminate an idea that would change the world.”[8]

The alphabet created the book that created the people of the book. Was it divine providence that led to this invention becoming available at exactly the right time and place to be used by the Israelites for the holiest of purposes, namely, recording the divine word? Or was it this new development that allowed the Israelites to develop the consciousness – the high levels of abstraction, essential to monotheism, made possible by literacy – that allowed them to decipher the word of the One God?

One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says “All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal education. In the book of Judges, before the first of Israel’s kings, we read that Gideon “caught a young man of Sukkot and questioned him, and the young man wrote down for him the names of the seventy-seven officials of Sukkot, the elders of the town” (Judges 8:14). Gideon took it for granted that a young man, selected at random, could read and write.

After the revelation at Mount Sinai, Moses “took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people” (Exodus 24:7). Was this a parchment scroll? A stone inscription? We have no way of knowing. But it is surely no coincidence that Israel became the first – indeed the only – nation in history to receive its laws before its land. A law that could be easily written and read, and that could be transported anywhere, was the expression of the God who was everywhere, in the desert as well as in the land.

Above all, the idea of a society of universal literacy was world-changing because it heralded the possibility of a non-hierarchical society, in which everyone had equal access to knowledge. This was the momentous change, summed up in the radical statement of the sages:

The crown of the Torah is for all Israel, as it is said, “Moses commanded us a law, an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob” (Deuteronomy 33:4). Whoever desires it can win it. Do not suppose that the other two crowns [of kingship and priesthood] are greater than the crown of the Torah, for it is said, “By me [the Torah], kings reign and princes decree justice; by me princes rule” (Proverbs 8:15–16). Hence it follows that the crown of the Torah is greater than the other two crowns.

Equality is the holy grail of revolutionary politics. It has often been sought, but never achieved. The two best-known attempts have been equality of wealth (through communism or socialism) or equality of power (through participative, as opposed to representative, democracy). It is unlikely that any such system will endure, because wealth and power are essentially contested goods. The more you have, the less I have. Therefore my gain is your loss.

Knowledge is different. If I give all I know to you, I will not thereby know less. I may know more. Equality of dignity based on universal access to knowledge is the only equality likely to last in the long run. All the more so is this true if the knowledge at stake, as it is in Judaism, is of the law, and the source of the law, God Himself. That is the knowledge on which citizenship is based. At Mount Sinai, all Israel became partners to the covenant. God spoke to everyone – the only recorded revelation, not to a prophet or a group of initiates but to an entire people. Everyone was party to the law, because, potentially, everyone could read it and know it. All were equal citizens in the nation of faith under the sovereignty of God. That is what happened at Sinai.

What does this have to do with the phrase “a kingdom of priests”? Normally we think of a priest in terms of his duties, ministering to God in a holy place. But priests also had certain capacities. The word “hieroglyphics” means “priestly script” – because only the priests could read and write. The English word “clerical” means (a) pertaining to the clergy, ministers of religion, and (b) office staff who type letters and keep records. The reason one word means two such different things is because, throughout the Middle Ages, ministers of religion were almost the only literate class. The first universities were primarily for the teaching of religious officials.

Functionally, a priest in the ancient world was one who could read and write. A kingdom of priests is therefore a nation of universal literacy. Understood this way, the nature of the covenant, and of Israel’s mission, becomes clear. The law God was about to reveal at Mount Sinai would become the possession of every member of the nation. He or she could know it, read it, study it, internalize it and make it their own. The Jewish people was summoned to become, as it were, a nation of constitutional lawyers. That, to a remarkable extent, is what they became, at least in the rabbinic period.

Torah – God’s law and teaching – was not a code written by a distant king, to be imposed by force. Nor was it an esoteric mystery understood by only a scholarly elite. It was to be available to, and intelligible by, everyone. God was to become a teacher, Israel His pupils, and the Torah the text that bound them to one another. In the words of the Psalm, “He has revealed His word to Jacob, His laws and decrees to Israel. He has done this for no other nation; they do not know His laws. Halleluya!” (Psalm 147:19–20).

There is nothing quite like this in the annals of the religious experience of humankind. Eventually, within Judaism, study would become a religious experience higher even than prayer.

Jews would be educated when most of Europe was sunk in illiteracy. It was through study that Jews created a new and still-compelling form of human dignity and equality, and it was made possible through the birth of the alphabet. That is how Jews became “a kingdom of priests.”

[1] To be sure, Korach argued for equality, and also sought to be a priest (Numbers 16), but that is a complex narrative in the course of which there appear to have been several different claims by the various groups that took part in the rebellion.

[2] Sforno, commentary to Exodus 19:6. His comment on the previous verse is equally striking. He interprets the phrase “a special treasure among all the peoples,” to mean that though Jews are beloved of God, so too are the righteous of all peoples since “all the earth is Mine.”

[3] Sforno was a man of wide humanistic scholarship. He studied mathematics, philology, philosophy and medicine. Between 1498 and 1500 he taught Hebrew to the Christian humanist Johannes Reuchlin.

[4] On the way literacy “restructures consciousness,” see Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (Yale University Press: 1967), and Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 1982). See also Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[5] The Chinese, of course, had invented it earlier, but the technology had not yet reached Europe.

[6] On the history of writing and the alphabet, two recent books are David Sacks, The Alphabet (Arrow Books, 2004); John Man, Alpha Beta (Headline Books, 2000). On the Hebrew alphabet specifically, a classic work is David Diringer, The Story of the Aleph Bet (Lincolns-Prager, 1958).

[7] Sir Francis Bacon, Religious Meditations, “Of Heresies” (1597).

[8] John Man, Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World (Wiley, 2001), 129.

[9] Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Talmud Torah 3:1.

[10] See Shabbat 10a.