Clothes Made the Kohen

 

This week’s Torah reading describes the special garments to be worn by the kohanim (priests) in the Temple. Those garments were no minor detail. In ancient Israel, clothes made the kohen; he couldn’t serve in the Temple without those priestly garments, and the very sight of them seems to have inspired an awe that modern readers have difficulty imagining. The anonymous author of the Letter of Aristeas (probably written sometime in the second century BCE) described the effect in these terms:

 

[The priests’] appearance makes one awestruck and dumbfounded. I emphatically assert that anyone who comes near the spectacle of what I have described will experience astonishment and amazement beyond words, his very being transformed by the hallowed arrangement of every single detail.

 

On the same theme, Ben Sira (early second century BCE) said that Aaron’s priestly clothing possessed a “glorious splendor and stunning appearance, a delight to the eyes, the very height of beauty. Before his time there never were such things.” Somewhat later (first century CE), Philo of Alexandria said the high priest’s clothing “seems to be a likeness and copy of the universe.”

 

These descriptions of the priestly garments raised a question for ancient interpreters. The Torah reports that Israel’s ancestors sometimes acted as priests, offering sacrifices to God: Noah, Abraham, and Isaac were said to have done so. In fact, tradition had it that these figures were part of an unbroken chain of priests stretching back to the beginning of history. But the Torah says nothing about any special clothing that might have they worn for the occasion. How could these earliest kohanim have forgone this crucial part of the job?

 

According to an ancient interpretive tradition, the very first priest in history was also the very first human being, Adam. He inhabited what was the first sanctuary (in biblical terms, the first place where God Himself was present), namely, the Garden of Eden. God was indeed present there; Adam and Eve are said to have heard “the sound of the Lord God walking about in the Garden” (Gen 3:8). So naturally, Adam ought to have offered a sacrifice to God in the Garden.

 

There was only one problem: he didn’t have any clothes. A priest had to be clothed for reasons of modesty (Exod 20:23), and although Adam and Eve were said to have had some sort of translucent covering, “clothes of glory,” these were apparently not sufficient to allow Adam to serve as a priest. However, just before their expulsion from Eden, the pair were given clothes: God made “garments of skin” (kotnot ‘or) for Adam and Eve (Gen 3:21). Obviously, these garments were no ordinary clothing; God Himself had made them! And since they were what the Torah calls “tunics” (ketonot), the same word used in this week’s reading in describing the priestly garments (Exod 28:4), the conclusion was obvious: God had equipped Adam with the first priestly garments in history. Indeed, according to the book of Jubilees (early second century BCE), once Adam had been given this sacred clothing, he prepared a sweet-smelling sacrifice of frankincense and other spices, the first priestly offering.

 

Those priestly garments were then passed down from priest to priest: from Adam to Enoch, from Enoch to Noah, and from Noah to Shem (who was known by his other name, Melchizedek). Melchizedek, however, made a serious priestly mistake. When he encountered Abraham returning from battle, he blessed him with these words: “Blessed be Abram to God Most High, creator of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your foes into your hand” (Gen 14:19-20). Blessing Abraham first and God second was an obvious blunder; the priesthood was immediately transferred from Melchizedek to Abraham, who then passed it on his son Isaac, and from Isaac to…Esau.

 

Esau was, after all, a firstborn son, and as such he had been destined to receive the sacred clothing. But he ended up selling his firstborn status to his younger brother Jacob in exchange for some lentil stew. Thereafter, Jacob was the firstborn. Their mother Rebekah therefore did not hesitate to clothe Jacob in the priestly garments when he went in to be blessed by his by-now blind father, Isaac. According to the Torah, Isaac was not sure who he was blessing until he smelled the garments Jacob was wearing. Then he declared, “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed” (Gen 27:27)—presumably, the “field” was the future site of the Jerusalem Temple—and gave Jacob his blessing.

 

What happened to those original priestly garments thereafter? It seems that they were never used by Jacob himself, but were passed on directly from Isaac to Jacob’s son Levi, which was how the tribe of Levi became the priestly tribe. Ultimately, the priesthood was further narrowed down to the descendants of Moses’s brother Aaron, who served as the high priest after the completion of the portable desert sanctuary, the mishkan. (The mishkan’s construction is detailed in five consecutive Torah readings, starting with last week’s.) But from this point on, there would be a multitude of kohanim, Aaron’s descendants, all of them and their offspring eligible to serve in the mishkan and future sanctuaries. As a result, new priestly garments had to be prepared. These garments, described in this week’s reading, are the same that so amazed Ben Sira and Philo and other visitors to the Jerusalem Temple more than a thousand years later.

 

Shabbat shalom!