From Sacred Space to Sacred Object to Sacred Person in Jewish Antiquity

Abstract

28 SHOFAR Fall 1993 Vol. 12, No. 1 FROM SACRED SPACE TO SACRED OBJECT TO SACRED PERSON IN JEWISH ANTIQUIlY by Joseph P. Schultz Joseph P. Schultz is the Oppenstein Brothers Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies and director of the Danciger Judaic Studies Program at the University ofMissouri-Kansas City. He founded this program and earlier also founded the Judaic Studies Program at Boston University. 1. In all religious traditions places embodying numinous powers are set aside as sacred space. The people of archaic communities tended to live in close proximity to the sacred space which they conceived as being at the center of the world. The concept of the center was connected with three complementary images: 1) The sacred mountain where heaven and earth meet is also part ofthe sacred center. 2) Every temple or palace and by extension every sacred town and royal residence is assimilated to a sacred mountain and thus becomes a center. 3) The temple or sacred city, in turn, as the place through which the axis mundi (the center of the earth) passes, is held to be a point of junction between heaven, earth, and hell. The development of this model of the symbolic center was one of the great contributions of the comparative study of religions, particularly the school of Mircea Eliade. Eliade has noted two basic approaches to the concept of the center in the history of religions, one emphasizing its accessibility to humans in cities, temples, and even ordinary dwellings, and the other emphasiZing its inacceSSibility except to an elite who have undergone ordeals and possess the necessary merit to gain entry. The center idea is an outgrowth of Eliade's distinction between sacred and From Sacred Space to Sacred Person· 29 profane space. The former is the result of a hierophany which, from the religious perspective, makes it non-homogeneous, i.e.; qualitiatively different from the surrounding milieu while the latter retains its homogeneous character.l The critique of Eliade by Jonathan Z. Smith has focused on the following elements that are pertinent to this treatment of the geography, structure, and ritual of the First and Second Temples: 1) There is a tendency in Eliade's comparative studies to sever the symbolic pattern and its system from the concrete historical culture that produced it which results in an overemphasis on similarity without a corresponding sensitivity to fine gradations of difference. This leads to a universalization of the pattern without the recognition that it must be proven anew for different historical contexts. 2) In focusing on the center, Eliade has neglected the importance of periphery in certain religious traditions such as Judaism where the exile and the diaspora created alternatives to the sacred center of the Jerusalem Temple. It can be argued that there was nothing inherently sacred about the location of the Jerusalem Temple. Jerusalem was a Jebusite fortress before its conquest by David (2 Samuel 5:6). The Temple could, in principle, have been built anywhere, and etiological traditions would have been developed for it as they were developed for its rivals such as Beth EI Gen. 28: 10-22; 35:1-8). Moreover, the texts which provide the authentication of the Jerusalem Temple and other such sites as sacred centers are the product of temples and royal shrines whose priests and scribal elites had a self-serving interest in propagating this ideology. 3) Eliade's contention that sacred space is non-homogeneous in contrast to the homogeneity of profane space does not hold up in regard to the Jerusalem Temple in the visions of Ezekiel 40-48. Here the gradations and incongruities of sacred space determined by Temple ritual and hierarchy have their parallel in the profane space and the social distinctions outside the Temple precincts.2 'Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1958), pp. 375-379; The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, and Co., 1959), pp. 26-29. 'Jonathan Z. Smith, Imngining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 26-29; Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History ofReligions (Leiden: E. J...

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