The Ladder of Jacob by James L. Kugel

Author:James L. Kugel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400827015
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Isaac Blessed Levi

Thus, for the author of Jubilees, Isaac was a priest and Jacob was not. This fact—virtually imposed by the Genesis narrative itself—furthermore worked quite well with the second exegetical motif under consideration, namely, that the great chain of the priest-hood among Israel’s ancestors passed directly from Isaac to Levi and that therefore it was Isaac who ushered Levi into the priest-hood. The relevant passage from Jubilees has already been partially cited above:

And a spirit of prophecy came down upon his [Isaac’s] mouth. And he turned to Levi first and he began to bless him first, and he said to him . . . “May the Lord give you and your seed very great honor. May He draw you and your seed near to Him from all flesh to serve in His sanctuary as angels of the presence and the holy ones. May your sons’ seed be like them with respect to honor and greatness and sanctification. . . . The word of the Lord they [your descendants] will speak righteously, and all of His judgments they will execute righteously. And they will tell My ways to Jacob, and My paths to Israel. The blessing of the Lord shall be placed in their mouth, so that they might bless all of the seed of the beloved. (As for) you, your mother has named you “Levi,” and truly has she named you, [for] you will be joined (lwh) to the Lord. . . . His table will belong to you, and you and yours sons will eat from it.” ( Jub. 31:12–14)

It is to be noted that, in this passage, Isaac does not actually instruct Levi in priestly matters; instead, he confers on Levi the same kind of prophetic, powerful blessing he had given to Jacob years before, save that Levi’s blessing, unlike Jacob’s, centers entirely on the fact that he has been chosen to succeed Isaac in cultic service.“May the Lord give you and your seed very great honor,” Isaac says—and it is clear from this wording that he is not merely announcing a decision that has already been made but is himself blessing-and-so-bringing-about, just as he had done with his own sons Jacob and Esau—“May He draw you and your seed near to Him from all flesh to serve in His sanctuary.” This change in Levi’s status is thus brought about through Isaac’s words, although, to be sure, it comes ultimately from God, for the passage stipulates that a “spirit of prophecy” guided Isaac’s blessing. In other words, this passage in Jubilees contains another, quite self-sufficient, answer to the question, “How did Levi come to be a priest?” Its answer is that he was divinely appointed to the priesthood through a special blessing pronounced by the last priest, Isaac, just as Isaac had himself been initiated into the priesthood by his father Abraham ( Jubilees 21). In its Jubilees form, this motif would suffice to answer our question without reference to any “human tithe” undertaken by Jacob, and without any of the supernatural visions that our various texts attribute to Levi and Jacob.

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