Archives: High Priest

Rehabilitating Aaron

Rehabilitating Aaron

The ceremony to induct Aaron and his sons into the priesthood worried the expositors of the Midrash. It was Aaron who had made the Golden Calf, the worst of all the offences committed by the Israelites in the wilderness. Even though he was Moses’s brother, and stood alongside him in the confrontation with Pharaoh, to give him the high priesthood after such an event seemed wholly inappropriate. It looked, heaven forfend, like nepotism: Moses giving the most important job, after his own, to his brother.

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Sparkling Fringes- How Language Helps Us Make Connections We Might Otherwise Miss

The High Priest in the Israelite Tabernacle, and later in the Jerusalem Temple, was told to wear an object, identified as a tzitz, on his forehead. The instruction to make this object is found in the book of Exodus (28, 36-38), but no details are given as to its size, shape or weight. All we are told is that it is to be made of pure gold, placed upon the priest’s linen headdress and suspended from a woollen thread dyed with t’chelet, a blue pigment extracted from a particular species of marine snail. The tzitz is to have the words Holy to the Lord engraved upon it.

As we would expect, rabbinic tradition amplifies this very vague instruction. According to the Talmud (Shabbat 63b) the tzitz was a plate, two fingerbreadths in breadth, that extended the full width of the forehead, from one ear to the other. To the Lord was written on one line, the word Holy was written beneath. R. Eliezer ben Yosé disagreed; he claimed to have seen the tzitz in Rome, taken there with the other treasures after the Romans had destroyed the Temple. The words Holy to the Lord were, he said, written on one line. Continue reading

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