Get Me to the Church

Hosea (2:14-20) allegorizes the exodus as a love story. Yahweh lures Israel from Egypt to the wilderness, speaks to her heart, becomes her ‘ish (man) and no longer her Baal (lord, or Baal). Yahweh is promising to take Israel out to the wilderness for a second honeymoon, but that implies that the first wilderness excursion was a honeymoon too.

Israel starts out its Egyptian sojourn in Goshen, a fertile garden-land suitable for shepherds where Israel is fruitful and multiplies. Eventually, Israel becomes mingled with the Egyptians, and Yahweh performs the radical surgery of plague and Passover to extract Israel from Egypt and bring her to His mountain of marriage. “Let us go that we may sacrifice to Yahweh” can be glossed as “Get me to the church on time.”

Israel is ripped from Egypt, like a rib from Adam, so that she can be built (cf. Genesis 2:22) into a bride for Yahweh. Israel ascends from Egypt as a son prepared to take a throne beside Yahweh his father. Yahweh also proceeds from Egypt as a bride built for her husband.

The development of Israel’s sacrificial system ritually depicts this story-line. Several pieces of evidence line up. First, as I noted in a post yesterday, no one offered a peace offering (which included a meal) prior to Sinai. The first use of the word shelemim is in Exodus 20:24, at the beginning of Israel’s covenant-cutting wedding ceremony. The patriarchs may have enjoyed sacrificial feasts in the presence of God, but we are never (or rarely) told so. After Sinai, the tabernacle becomes a place of continuous feasting, an ongoing wedding feast, presided over by the bridegroom priest (cf. Isaiah 61:10-11).

This is underscored, second, by the introduction of another term into the sacrificial vocabulary of the Old Testament: ishsheh. This term is used for the first  time in the instructions for the priestly ordination rite (Exodus 29:18, 25, 41) but after that it is used of every one of the five major offerings (Leviticus 1:9; 2:2-3; 3:3; 4:35; 7:5). The word appears 84 times in Leviticus, which someone might be tempted to factor into 12 and 7.

There is no consensus about the translation of the term, which is often rendered as “fire offering,” sometimes as “food offering.” James Jordan has made the suggestive observation that ishsheh is closely linked to ish (man) and ishshah (woman) and both are aurally if not etymologically linked with fire (esh). The gendered words are first used in Genesis 2, after the creation of Eve. Prior to that the man is adam, from the adamah, the ground; with the presentation of the woman, he becomes ish. He is an earthen, unlit altar; when the woman comes, he catches fire. And speaks.

Given this background, Jordan suggests that ishsheh be translated as “bridal food.” When Israel has entered into marriage covenant with Yahweh, she offers herself continuously as bridal food for His delight (cf. Song of Songs 5:1) in a continuous marriage feast. 

This new term fits the new-creation pattern in the exodus: Yahweh tears a “rib” from Egypt, brings to the wilderness where He builds a Bride (people and bridal tent), where they bring near ishsheh to Yahweh’s table. 

The arrival of the bride “transforms” Yahweh. He has not been silent in Genesis, but nowhere do we hear anything like the discourses of Exodus 25-40, and then nearly the whole of Leviticus. He is the divine adam, whose tongue is loosed when he sees the Bride He has made for Himself (cf. Zephaniah 3:17). 

Yahweh himself becomes associated with esh only as the exodus approaches (Exodus 3:2), as He leads Israel from Egypt (Exodus 13:21-22; 14:24), at Sinai (Exodus 19:18), in the finished bridal tent (Exodus 40:38), and at the inauguration of sacrificial system, when He breaks out in fire for the first time in the Bible to eat an ishsheh, bridal food (Leviticus 9:24). 

Not surprisingly, the first use of “jealousy” in connection with God is in Exodus (20:5; 34:14). Both of these are in connection with idolatry. In Exodus 20:5, Yahweh the Lover demands that his Bride devote themselves to Him, not to an image; 34:14 prohibits spiritual adultery or, as Yahweh calls it “harlotry” (v. 15).

When ishshah arrives, Yahweh reveals Himself the divine archetype of the ish. For the first time, He is shown to be the divine esh, fired with jealous passion for His beloved.