Smoke Gets in Our Eyes
by Eliezer Segal
In the days when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the service of the Day of Atonement was focused principally on the unique ceremonies that were performed there by the high priest. On that one day of the year when he alone entered the Holy of Holies, the Torah instructed that “he shall take a censer full of burning coals of fire from off the altar before the Lord… and bring it within the curtain. And he shall put the incense upon the fire before the Lord, that the cloud of the incense may cover the covering that is upon the ark of testimony, lest he die.”
The wording of the passage seems quite clear about the sequence: First, the priest removes some burning coals from the altar in the sanctuary and places them in a censer. Then the ingredients of the incense are carried in. After these items have been conveyed through the curtained partition leading into the Holy of Holies, he activates the incense by placing it on the burning coals, thereby producing the desired cloud of fragrant smoke. This indeed is the sequence delineated in the Mishnah and other rabbinic traditions.
However, during the era of the Second Temple some Jews were insisting that the high priest place the incense on the fire before entering the Holy of Holies so that the cloud would envelop him while he was approaching the inner sanctum.
This divergence of interpretation was the topic of a crucial sectarian split between the two most influential Jewish ideological groupings of the era, the Pharisees and the Sadducees (or “Baitusin”). The rabbinic texts normally reflect the viewpoints of the Pharisees out of which talmudic Judaism evolved. A contrary position was advocated by the Sadducees, the party that was rooted in the priestly aristocracy (descended from the line of King David’s high priest Zadok). Josephus Flavius and the rabbinic tradition both attest that the Sadducees were reluctantly compelled to follow the Pharisee practices under pressure from the general populace for whom any deviation could provoke violent protests.
With regard to the preparation of the incense, the talmudic traditions traced the Sadducee position to the wording of a verse introducing the Torah’s account of the Day of Atonement: “for I will appear in the cloud upon the ark covering.” In its original context, the verse seems to be employing the familiar imagery of the divine presence being concealed in a mystical cloud. However, the Sadducees applied it specifically to the smoke of the burning incense. From this they inferred that there is no moment when the high priest can venture inside the Holy of Holies without the protective covering of the incense cloud. According to the Talmud, the Pharisees explained that text differently, as a requirement that the incense formula contain an ingredient that made the smoke rise upward.
This controversy does not conform to the usual patterns of disputes between the sects over the interpretation and application of Jewish law. In most cases, it was the Sadducees who supported simple literal readings of the scriptural texts, whereas the Pharisees proposed novel interpretations or followed customs based on oral traditions that had little or no basis in the written Bible. And yet when it came to the preparation of the incense on Yom Kippur, it was the Pharisees who come across as the literalists and the Sadducees who appear to be taking liberties with the sacred text.
For these reasons, a widely accepted theory among scholars is that this dispute did not really originate in differing textual interpretations, but rather in the experiential dimensions of the Day of Atonement service. The Sadducees, we must recall, represented the perspectives of the elite priestly circles; and it was the high priests alone who had to undergo the awesome encounter with the divine presence. We may readily imagine the fear and trepidation that agitated the priest lest he violate the Torah’s admonition “that he come not at all times into the holy place, lest he die.” Indeed, biblical and rabbinic traditions contain examples of unfortunate persons who perished from approaching the sacred domain. The high priests would even hold parties after Yom Kippur to celebrate their safe emergence from the terrifying ordeal.
Some scholars interpret the dispute in a very different direction. They argue that the Pharisees were the ones who perceived the cloud of incense permeating the Holy of Holies as a tangible embodiment of the divine presence enshrined in the Temple; whereas the Sadducees—by situating the burning of the incense in an outer area—were in effect rejecting that position.
The Sadducees noted that the normal rules governing social etiquette at banquets required that incense be prepared in an outer hall before being brought into a banquet hall; hence it would appear disrespectful to act otherwise toward the Almighty.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch pounced on this detail to score polemical points against advocates of modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. This was in keeping with a well-established polemical convention where ideological rivals accused each other of being the successors of the heretical Sadducees, whether for their inflexible conservatism or for their rejection of oral tradition. “So already with these ancient Sadducees, empty conventional forms were the same hollow idols to which alone our modern Sadducees bow, and in whose name they try to introduce the most open breaches of the Law into the most holy moments of the divine service.”
The Mishnah relates that the elders who instructed the high priest in performing the Yom Kippur rites used to impose on him a solemn religious oath “not to change even one detail of all that we have taught you.” Both sides were then moved to tears at the realization of how factionalism and distrust had made such an oath necessary.
Perhaps we would do well if we too were moved to shed a few tears over the ideological intransigence and dogmatism that persist in casting their clouds over our fragmented Jewish world.
- First Publication:
- The Alberta Jewish News, Edmonton and Calgary, August 23, 2021, p. 22.
- For further reading:
- Albeck, Ch. “Le-Maḥaloḳot ha-Perushim veha-Ṣeduḳim be-‘Inyanei Ha-Miḳdash ve-Ḳodashav.” Sinai 55 (1963): 1–8. [Hebrew]
- Feintuch, Yonatan. “The Tale of the Sadducee and the Incense in b. Yoma — the Metamorphosis of a Text and Commentary.” Sidra: A Journal for the Study of Rabbinic Literature 29 (2014): 79–94. [Hebrew]
- Finkelstein, Louis. The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of Their Faith. 3d ed. The Morris Loeb Series. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962.
- Greenspahn, Frederick E. “Sadducees and Karaites: The Rhetoric of Jewish Sectarianism.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18, no. 1 (2011): 91–105.
- Hoffmann, David. Das Buch Leviticus. Berlin: MPoppelauer, 1905.
- Kalimi, Isaac. “The Day of Atonement in the Late Second Temple Period: Sadducees’ High Priests, Pharisees’ Norms, and Qumranites’ Calendar(s).” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14, no. 1 (2011): 71–91.
- Knohl, Israel, and Shlomo Naeh. “Milluim Ve-Kippurim.” Tarbiz 62, no. 1 (1992): 17–44. [Hebrew]
- Lauterbach, Jacob Zallel. “A Significant Controversy Between the Sadducees and the Pharisees.” Hebrew Union College Annual 4 (1927): 173–205.
- Luria, B. Z. “‘Maaleh Ashan’, in the Incense of the Day of Atonement.” Beit Mikra: Journal for the Study of the Bible and Its World 21, no. 2 (1976): 193–98. [Hebrew]
- Milgrom, Jacob. “Haḳṭarat Ha- Ḳetoret Bi-mei Bayit Sheni.” In Sefer Ben-Tsiyon Lurya: Meḥḳarim Ba-Miḳra Uve-Toldot Yisra’el, Mugashim Lo Bi-Melot Lo Shivʻim Shanah, edited by Ben-Tsiyon Lurya, 330–34. Publications of the Israel Society for Biblical Research. Jerusalem: Israel Society for Biblical Research and Ḳiryat Sefer, 1979. [Hebrew]
- Oppenheim, Chaim. “Maḥloḳet ha-Perushim u-Mitnaggedeihem be-‘Inyan ‘Avodat Yom ha-Kippurim.” Beth Talmud 4 (1883): 268–71. [Hebrew]
- Tabory, Joseph. Jewish Festivals in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995. [Hebrew]
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