One of the pillars of biblical criticism concerns the role of the central sanctuary in the development of Israel’s religion. As such, it is an excellent case study of the ways in which liberal biblical criticism obscures the authentic sense of the inspired text on account of its use of interpretive shortcuts when facing a text which suggests the unexpected or inexplicable. If the Christian doctrine of Scripture is correct, such unexpected or confusing texts are actually opportunities, whose integration into one’s biblical theology will correct unseen misunderstandings and provide new insight into the faith.
For those unfamiliar, in Deuteronomy 12 we are told that God will set His Name at a special place of His choice. It is at this place that the people of Israel are to gather to offer sacrifice and to celebrate the Passover, Weeks (Pentecost), and Tabernacles (Booths).Throughout the history of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the people worship at “high places” or independent cult sites found on hills throughout the land. This persists until the reforms of Kings Hezekiah and later Josiah, both of whom seek to remove the high places and establish the centrality of Israel’s liturgical cult at Jerusalem. It is important to distinguish worship at the high places from rank idolatry. Usually, the people worshiped the one God of Israel at these cult sites rather than pagan gods. In other words, it is a violation of the Second Word (which not only requires worship of the true God but worship of Him in the manner He has commanded) instead of the First Word.
However, the orthodox view in biblical criticism is that the requirement for a central sanctuary is a late innovation which was developed in order to increase the wealth of the priestly class in Jerusalem. One does not need to be a genius to see the influence of the Puritan and then liberal Protestant prejudice against “priestcraft” or an ecclesiastical hierarchy. This does not prove it historically wrong but it does set it in its context- the German biblical criticism of the 19th century which exists in an ideological lineage with the Reformation. (this is not an argument against Protestantism, which would de
Before addressing the substantial point of this issue, I wish to point out the classic paradox of biblical criticism as it is manifest in this case. On the one hand, the texts are supposed to be in such obvious contradiction that the only explanation is that they are an ad hoc collection of texts which themselves are a pastiche of various different hypothetical sources in contradiction. But on the other hand, we are invited to believe that the hand of the redactor knit these texts together into a single scroll- which were then transmitted as a corpus by the tradition of the Jewish people. The redactor is alleged to have harmonized the disparate sources and to have edited his texts in order to create a single literary unit. Moreover, when features of one alleged source emerge in a text alleged to be in a different source, the conventional biblical critic again summons the redactor as an explanation. And so we are to believe that the texts are plainly distinct, except when they are not. We must believe that the redactor created a literary unity, except when he chose to permit obvious contradictions.
In this case, the contradiction is so obvious that one wonders how it could have possibly been missed. This is especially so in the sacrifice on Mt. Carmel. Kings is supposed to be a part of the “Deuteronomistic history” whose central purpose is to exalt the reforms of Josiah and explain the exile by the failure to centralize Israel’s sacrificial liturgy. So what in the world is a major sacrifice on Mt. Carmel doing at the heart of the book’s narrative? A major theme of the Book of Kings is the failure of the kings to obey the words of God as communicated through the prophets. The prophetic ministry in the life of Israel manifests the preeminence of divine action in the nation. The prophets are called to a charismatic ministry whose authorization comes from the divine call. Not being from a specific family or deriving their legitimacy from their line of descent, the work of the prophets cannot be controlled or stamped out by the kings of Israel and Judah. No matter how hard they try, those rulers who seek to dethrone the Lord of Hosts from the kingship of Israel and Judah are unable to do so on account of the intrinsically unpredictable institution of prophecy. The literary core of Kings is in the extended narratives describing the ministries of the Prophets Elijah and Elisha.