Parashat Tetzaveh (Exod 27:20-30:10)
Once in a Year
This week, once again, we have one of those situations where the last two verses of the Christian chapter 27 are not included with last week's synagogue reading. By saving them until this week, the Jewish division of the Bible makes them precede the beginning of Exodus 28.
It’s not, in fact, easy to decide whether those two verses should go with chapter 27 or chapter 28. They don't really fit with either of them. They did have to go somewhere and I guess they went here.
This week, however, instead of lingering near the beginning of the reading as I so often do, I thought I would go right to the very end where we almost never get — in fact, to the very last verse, Exod 30:10. Here too the Christian chapter does not break where the Jewish division is. But the Masoretic text clearly marks Exod 30:10 as the end with a פ as the end of a paragraph.
That’s also not our subject this week, though. Instead, I want to focus specifically on this particular verse. As you remember, we've been talking last week and this about constructing the Tabernacle and everything that goes along with it.
The altar that’s described at the beginning of Exodus 30 is not the altar that you would use for animal sacrifice; this is the altar that's inside the Tabernacle, for burning incense. There are some complicated instructions that go into making this altar: how it is to be overlaid with gold, that it should have poles to carry it, where exactly it should be located, and finally the kind of warning (in 30:9) that we are used to seeing on dangerous equipment:
Do not put unauthorized incense on it!
Do not put a burnt offering or grain offering on it!
Do not pour a libation on it!
Now that you’ve been suitably warned, we’ll look, as promised, at v. 10, the very last verse of this week’s synagogue reading:
Once a year, Aaron shall make atonement (כפר kipper) on its horns. With some of the blood of the atonement (כפרים kippurim) sin offering, once in a year, he shall make atonement (כפר kipper) on it, for all your generations. It is most holy to YHWH.
In a health-care setting you don't think of purifying things by applying blood to them, but in the temple ritual that's actually how you cleanse things. The animal blood somehow neutralizes all of the sinful miasma that has accumulated during the year.
What I want to look at is the phrase אַחַ֖ת בַּשָּׁנָ֑ה aḥat ba-shanah, literally “once in a year.” You might think this would be a common phrase in the Bible, but you — that is, I — would be wrong. It isn’t. Biblical Hebrew has a handful of different ways to say yearly or annually or every year. Here they are, followed by their literal English translations:
שָׁנָה שָׁנָה shanah shanah, “year year”
בְּכָל שָׁנָה וְשָׁנָה b’khol shanah v’shanah, “in each year and year”
שָׁנָה בְשָׁנָה shanah b’shanah, “year by year”
מִדֵּי שָׁנָה בְשָׁנָה mi-dei shanah b’shanah, “every year by year”
מִיָּמִים יָמִימָה mi-yamim yamimah, “from days to days”
That last one, perhaps, could stand a bit of explanation for those who are still working on their Biblical Hebrew: יום yom literally means “day,” but the plural can be used, as here, to mean “a year.” Exodus itself uses the phrase mi-yamim yamimah in 13:10 to explain that one must commemorate the exodus from Egypt by abstaining from leavened bread for seven days “at its proper time every year.” And we will hear b’khol shanah v’shanah next week when we read the Scroll of Esther for Purim.
But today’s expression, “once in a year,” though it occurs twice in Exod 30:10, is found only once elsewhere in the Bible, and that is Lev 16:34:
This shall be an eternal law for you, to make atonement (כפר kipper) upon the Israelites from all their sins once in a year.
The verse goes on to say, “He did as YHWH had commanded Moses,” but without telling us who “he” is. Presumably, as in our Exodus verse, it is Aaron, who has been performing the previous rituals in Leviticus 16, including the same sort of purification from sin with blood that’s described in our passage.
What is the once-a-year occasion on which Aaron performs this ritual? You might well guess that it is Yom Kippur, then as now the most sacred day of the Jewish year, but although in traditional sources everyone understands Leviticus 16 to be talking about the Day of Atonement, the word kippurim (always plural in Biblical Hebrew) does not appear in that chapter. If you are looking for the Day of Atonement, yom ha-kippurim, you need to look in Leviticus 23.
That chapter is one of the biblical sources that walks through the calendar festival by festival. Leviticus 23 begins with a public service announcement about the Sabbath and then, starting in v. 4 with the Passover offering of the first month, walks through the festival year. Eventually, by v. 27, we get to the tenth day of the seventh month and are told that it is the day of atonement, yom ha-kippurim, “for making atonement upon you before YHWH your God” (v. 28).
Strangely, Exod 30:10 uses this otherwise unique once-a-year phrase and the word kippurim, yet without hinting at the nature of that unique, once-a-year day. Leviticus 16, the one other occurrence of the phrase, is simply describing the event. It does not get around until v. 29 to telling us that this will even happen more than once! — and always “in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month.”
Back in Exod 30:10, we are in the midst of that long section explaining the Tabernacle and its appurtenances. Inside the tent, there is an altar used for burning incense; as Baruch Schwartz explains in the Jewish Study Bible, this is “perhaps regarded as a natural activity in a courtly residence, creating a pleasing aroma inside.” The incense, according to vv. 7–8, is burnt every morning and evening. Yet once a year a kippurim ritual is performed by putting blood on the horns of this altar where no animal sacrifice occurs; only incense is burnt.
Quick! Which date on the calendar is this ritual on the horns of the incense altar performed?
It’s always good to remember that the Torah was not written in a time when all the Jews had those calendars from the Original Weinstein Brothers Funeral Home and everybody knew what date occurred when and everybody called all the festivals by the same names. In the storyline of the Torah, we are still before the beginning of the Tabernacle ritual. The Tabernacle itself has yet to be built. It is just being described. Most importantly, strange as it sounds, the Jews don’t yet know anything about the Day of Atonement, Yom ha-Kippurim.
Did Aaron, and after him the succeeding High Priests, perform the cleansing, the kippurim of Exod 30:10 on the 10th day of the 7th month, on the day described in Leviticus 16, the day that we call the Day of Atonement? The Mishnah thinks so, detailing this ritual in M. Yoma 5:5 as part of the procedure performed on that day.
The mystery remains. Our text is not about the Day of Atonement but about the incense altar: how to make it, how to use it, and — oh, yes — a warning to make sure it is “cleansed” with blood once a year. Nonetheless:
The unusual “once in a year” phrase occurs nowhere else but Leviticus 16.
Two of the other 7 occurrences anywhere in the Bible of kippurim are in Leviticus 23, describing the Day of Atonement.
The phrase kipper al (כפר על), ordinarily “to make atonement on behalf of,” as in Lev 16:34 and Lev 23:28, is only used twice in its literal sense, “to make atonement over” — in Exod 30:10 and Lev 16:10, over the goat that will be sent off to Azazel.
Perhaps most mysterious of all, the entire Tabernacle description directs just one thing to be done annually, using any of those possible Hebrew ways of saying it: the purging of the golden incense altar inside the Tent.
I, for one, am still wondering why.