Proto-Kabbalistic Elements in the Priestly Literature of the Pentateuch

Moshe Idel has proposed that kabbalah is best defined as consisting of a set of ritual behaviors, especially theurgical ritual behavior; in addition, kabbalah entails the ideas that explain and justify those rituals. In this paper I review scholarship from the past several decades concerning the systems of ritual purity and sacrifice in the Pentateuch`s Priestly Document, as well as that document’s narrative of cosmogony and its relationship to the Tabernacle. In light of this scholarship (by scholars such as Jacob Milgrom, Baruch Schwartz, and Jonathan Klawans), it becomes clear that the core of P`s ritual system is what Idel would call "drawing-down theurgy," while P`s narrative of a deliberately incomplete divine cosmogony (Genesis 1) and its long-delayed climax in human temple-building (Exodus 25-40) serve as the ideology justifying and explaining the ritual system. While the actual rituals prescribed by P and by medieval kabbalists are entirely different and without historical or genetic connection, their purposes are strikingly similar. From the point of view of the phenomenology of religion, P and classical kabbalah can be regarded as two manifestation of a single religious impulse. The difference between the legalism of E and D (which may be seen as proto-Maimonidean) and the entirely different conception of the law as a means to a theurgical end in shows that core debates of Jewish thought are embedded in the earliest strata of Jewish literatures. Thus this paper encourages greater dialogue among biblical critics, scholars of Jewish thought, and phenomenologists of religion.