The Priests Who Controlled the Bible with Dr. Mark Leuchter

Johnny Ova: Welcome back, everybody, to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today my guest is Dr. Mark Leuchter. Dr. Leuchter, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: It's really my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Johnny Ova: Most people assume the Bible came flying out of heaven and landed in their laps, completely done, all the separate chapters in one big, beautiful book, fully formed. Before we go into the granular details, give us the big picture. Who is actually responsible for preserving and passing down the texts that became the Hebrew Bible?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: Scholars have had a range of opinions about this for a long time, but the way a lot of us see it now, and I think this has been the case for the last few decades, is that we think about communities more than individuals. We think about communities preserving traditions, sometimes preserving texts, and certainly sustaining those texts and keeping them alive. So when we think about how these scriptural works developed over time, we have to think about the communities that valued them, sustained them and contributed to them as they were worked into their communities of practice. I think that's maybe the best way to put it.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. Let's talk about the priesthood. I've listened to a couple of your interviews on YouTube on this and on the Levites, which we'll get to in a second. When we hear the word priest, we tend to picture one unified group. But ancient Israel had competing priestly families, did it not? Who are the major players?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: It depends on how far back you go. If we're talking about the post-exilic period, the Persian period, the Hellenistic period, the couple of centuries leading down to the common era, we're largely talking about a priesthood that sees itself as descending from Aaron, Moses' brother, according to the text. Within that priesthood you have a high-ranking family, a set of middle-ranking families, and underneath them the cousins, the Levites. If you've ever been to a wedding where they stick the third and fourth cousins at a table near the kitchen, that's kind of what the Levites were like in the Second Temple period. But the earlier we go, the more complicated it becomes. In the monarchic period, before the Babylonian exile, and moving toward the very origins of ancient Israel, we see that the priesthoods are a little more competitive. Or maybe competitive isn't the right word, maybe just more fragmented. There are priestly types that span the range of tribes and clans and families and towns, and you find common types. In certain places there are more powerful priestly dynasties that dominated certain sanctuaries for a long time. Jerusalem is one of those places. In the monarchic period you have one family that seems to descend from a priest named Zadok, and these Zadokites seem to dominate at the Jerusalem temple for a couple hundred years. But outside that temple you probably found other priests who recognized the temple as an important social, religious and economic institution, but who had their own agendas, and might have had their own liturgies and even their own theologies.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. What would a priest be doing if he's not inside the temple?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: They probably did a lot of different things. We have to think about what priests are across religions around the world. Anthropologists of religion look at priesthoods as institutions with lots of divisions of labor. You have priests who sacrifice, and priests who cultivate what we might call dream theophanies, things a little more like prophecy. You have priests teaching law or liturgy, or overseeing life-cycle events or rituals outside of sacrifice. So depending on where you are, what time of year and what part of the land, different priests probably had different roles. Over time that becomes systematized. As society moves along and economic and social networks form, a priesthood up here and a priesthood down here end up with more common interests, and over time that leads to more common liturgical practices too.

Johnny Ova: Let's talk about the third cousins at the back table by the kitchen, the Levites. You've argued they were far more than low-ranking temple assistants. For our audience, who are the Levites really, and where did they come from?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: The image of the Levites we get when we read Scripture as it is, is really the product of many generations shaping these narratives into something meaningful for a community of practice. I use that phrase deliberately, because communities change over time in terms of the social, economic and political forces that surround and inform them and change their self-perception. The practice of one community over a couple of centuries will change dramatically, and we might say it's not even the same community, even if it's the same lineages. It depends on how they see themselves. When we look at the depiction of Levites in the aggregate, in the Pentateuch, in the prophetic literature, and even in the post-biblical literature of the church fathers and the rabbinic writers who were looking back at the Scripture they inherited and trying to keep it vital, that image is really informed by a Persian or Hellenistic period shaping of older traditions. In that concept, Levites are second tier. They're helpers to the priests. Levites and priests are both "priests," in scare quotes, but if you're talking about a priesthood that holds high and special rank, the Levites are a step below them in the Second Temple period and in memories beyond it.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: But as I mentioned, when you go earlier, you find that the Levites at one point were the highest-ranking. I think they had the most political and ritual authority. As we move from the premonarchic to the monarchic to the late monarchic to the exilic period, institutions, especially royal institutions, end up favoring certain priestly families over others. The Levites who aren't favored by those royal institutions become "the Levites," off to the side, and other priestly groups that may once have been part of the Levites are elevated and see themselves as special. So it really depends on the period. In my opinion, in the early monarchy or the premonarchic period, the Levites are the bee's knees. They're the priesthood dominating the Israelite ritual and sacred landscape. But once we move into the monarchic and late monarchic period, the Levites seem more countryside-oriented, more populist. They're at arm's length from monarchic power and the people holding it, and a lot of the Levite traditions that survived into the biblical record come out of that self-perception: we were once in power, but the kings in their corruption have distanced us from power, and this is not what God wants or what's best for the people of Israel. So here are some traditions we're cultivating that lend insight into that, and maybe you should pay attention to them.

Johnny Ova: That was going to be my next question. Was there a specific flip of the switch? Are you attributing it to the kings and what would be deemed their wickedness, falling away from the temple?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: In general, yes. I really think the switch to monarchy causes all kinds of problems, even as it solves all kinds of problems. It's a constant ebb and flow, a give and take. You have kings coming in and standardizing certain administrative practices. They're able to defend the people more effectively against outside forces and empires. They stand in a long mythological tradition where God or the gods select the king to represent them on earth, so in some ways kings are even like chief priests in a lot of cultures, and there's some indication that some kings in ancient Israel saw themselves that way. But along the way you had some kings who were more sensitive to the needs of the people and the priestly groups associated with them, mostly the Levites, and other kings who were more elitist in their ambitions. A really good example comes from the book of Jeremiah, which I've written about a lot. It's a really interesting book because it straddles the very end of the monarchic period and the Babylonian exile, when the monarchy has come to an end. You can see in that book that the prophet Jeremiah and the scribes sustaining his teachings favor some kings over others. Some kings did right by God's will and others not so much. One king in particular, Jehoiakim, is presented as Jeremiah's arch nemesis. He's the big bad of the book of Jeremiah. You might say the Babylonians are the big bad, but Jehoiakim is the king who seems to be the trigger that brings on the Babylonians, because he's sinning left, right and center and not doing right by the Levites or the prophets.

Johnny Ova: You've described the Levites as boundary markers for Israel's identity. What does that mean in practice?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: The best way to answer that is to go back to the very early period when the Levites are forming. The term Levite itself is very telling. The word Levi in Hebrew means one who is connected. What I and lots of other scholars have argued is that in the very earliest periods, in emergent Israel at the beginning of the Iron Age, you had different types of priestly figures, and the Levites emerge in an era when there's space for new types of priests who might serve some real social benefit, and I think they do. People end up devoting their children to priestly service, mostly for economic reasons. If you have a household and can't support everybody, and you devote one of your sons to priestly service at the local sanctuary, that relieves some of the economic strain. It also means your interests are represented at the sanctuary, where a powerful priesthood might be dominant. Over time, these children dedicated and connected to sanctuaries form a priestly caste, and that's the origin of the Levites.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: So when I say they're boundary markers, they're geographic boundary markers, because clans and families in certain areas frequented certain sanctuaries and invested their families in them, which creates a geographic boundary of where your family land or estate is identified. They also create boundaries between the lay population and the elite priestly dynasties that had been there a long time. What the Levites are able to do is negotiate these boundaries. They're a mediating caste. If they're dedicated to priestly service at a local sanctuary, they learn a lot about its traditions, but they stay in touch with their families, so they still have interests in what their families on the local estates and farming communities are doing. So they create a boundary marker between priestly elites and lay families, and I think that memory preserves itself in their value system, their ethics and even their theology in the centuries that follow.

Johnny Ova: You originally used the word rival, though maybe not so much rivals, between these multiple priestly groups. I'll use the word rival. How did these rivalries play out? What were the power struggles over? Who got to speak for God? What were they fighting over specifically?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: That's exactly it. Who gets to speak for what God really wants? We live in an era where lots of people are religious and have deep, rich spiritual lives, but they might also work in an accounting office, and their personal religious beliefs don't factor into their job. I live in Philadelphia, and there's a different kind of religion in Philadelphia. It's called being an Eagles fan. I'm not kidding. If you're a scholar of religion, you see some of those games as religious experiences. God might not factor into it, although some people do pray that the Phillies or the Eagles win, but all the hallmarks of religious identity are associated with the teams and the sport and the icons. So we have different spheres of activity in our lives. But in ancient times the idea that God or the gods were in every aspect of life was simply accepted. That's not always the case now. Plenty of people think, I'd better keep my personal religious beliefs out of working at the DMV. I have a job to do and God has nothing to do with it. In the ancient world, God was everywhere. He was interested in what went on in the house, in your relationships, in the business deal where you sold these cows for a little piece of farmland. Even minor everyday behaviors had the divine woven into them.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: If that's the case, then the question of who gets to speak for the divine is really serious. If you have a priesthood at a temple in Bethel or Dan in the north, or in Jerusalem or elsewhere, and there were lots of temples and temple sites across ancient Israel, not just Jerusalem, you have a priesthood that isn't necessarily connected to people working in the fields thirty miles away. Maybe it's not as connected to what it means to be a shepherd, or to live in a border territory with the Philistines in the west or the Ammonites in the east, which can be disruptive, especially in periods of economic crisis. So is this priesthood best suited to speak for you when you need someone to intercede between you and God? Is it best suited to speak for God when you need to discern what God wants from you during these difficult times? So these rivalries may have ended up being less about actual political clout and power, although that sometimes factors in. Sometimes it's very practical. Is this priest attuned to my needs? Does this priest have the blessing of ancestors, given by God, in a way that will reach God when I ask him to speak or sacrifice on my behalf? Sometimes it's really about the demographics you serve, or that are devoted to you and the shrine where you're located. So I think it's very practical most of the time.

Johnny Ova: You're in Philly, I'm in New York. This sounds very mafioso to me. This whole thing sounds spiritually mafioso.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: It can be. Listen, I have met exactly two people in the mafia in my entire life, and they were both very devout. One was Russian Orthodox and one was Italian Catholic, both in Miami, many years ago. When they found out I was doing my PhD in religion, I was a year shy of finishing at that point, all the questions they had for me. We sat down and talked, and they didn't flex their mafia muscle at all. They legitimately had questions about the history and the text and what this means and how do I know what God wants from me. And I said, I can't answer that, I'm just a historian, but there are some things I can answer, so we talked about those. So when you say it sounds mafioso, it's really not far removed. A lot of people imbued with tremendous power that they think has a sacred background, the thumbs up from God, will exercise that power. Religious people throughout history have exercised power with what they perceive to be God's approval, and sometimes that lets them do things the rest of us couldn't do or couldn't get away with.

Johnny Ova: You'd better answer those questions right when those people are asking.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: Well, I'm still alive, so I must have done something right.

Johnny Ova: All right, the golden calf story. Exodus 32 is one you've written about, and you see something going on beneath the surface. Can you elaborate?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: Most scholars in my field, when they encounter stories in the Pentateuch, don't think they're disconnected from history. I don't think the material in the Pentateuch is disconnected from history. I think it arises from real historical experiences, but uses metaphor to say something about them. When we look at the history of Israel in the monarchic period, which is when most of the Pentateuch was written down, scholars ask whether something in a given story resonates strongly with what we know happened in the monarchic period. The golden calf story is one of those. To understand it, look at two things. First, how metaphor works and why it matters. Metaphor is not false. Metaphor is true. Metaphor speaks to deep truths, but it uses symbolic terms to say something about why those truths matter. Second, look at the history. Is there a moment in Israel's history where something like the golden calf story would have been particularly poignant or forceful? There really is.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: When the northern kingdom of Israel is first formed after the death of Solomon, we read in 1 Kings 12 that the first king of northern Israel looks around and says, I'd better establish a competing state cult, a state system of religion, or everybody is going to keep going back to Jerusalem and its temple and I'll be out of a job. So this first king, Jeroboam son of Nebat, establishes shrines in the northern and southern parts of his kingdom, at Dan and at Bethel, and at these shrines he sets up golden bulls, or golden calves. Apparently there was a liturgical formula people continued to use in the northern kingdom when they made pilgrimage to these sites: behold your God, O Israel, or your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt. It's not that it was idol worship. It was a symbol for understanding the God who actually was Israel's patron God, and the symbol of this God was a bull. We have artistic work from around 800 BCE at a shrine called Kuntillet Ajrud, with an image of Israel's God and right next to it a bull. So bull imagery as a symbolic way of understanding the power of the God of Israel is completely consistent with what archaeology and sociology tell us about ancient Israel.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: If that's the case, and you have a northern king setting up golden bulls at the major shrines of his kingdom and saying, behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt, then when we read the golden calf story, what we may very well have is somebody who wrote a story to criticize that northern kingdom, using language that would really resonate with the audience and make the story reflect a deep truth about why that northern religious experiment was doomed to failure. I think, and many scholars would agree, that's where the golden calf story really comes from. When it was written is up for debate. I think it tilts early. Some scholars think it was written after the northern kingdom fell, when someone could more confidently criticize the cult of the north. But I think it was written, or at least conceived orally before being written down, by Levites in the north who saw the institution of this golden calf cult and said, nope, that's a bad idea, and we have something to say about it. Eventually it was written down, and that's the text we have.

Johnny Ova: I love the framework you put on that, because I have a question about scribes next, and this is a good handoff. As a pastor, I don't think a lot of Christians step back and think, okay, there wasn't a guy with a pen sitting there watching everything and recording it as a story, writing the Bible and tucking it away into a book. I think we miss that oral tradition came first, a lot of spoken stories, and then as literacy improved, people started writing this down. We miss a lot of that looking at it through our modern 2026 lens.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: For sure we do. I talk about this with my undergraduate students a lot, not only in courses on ancient Judaism and ancient Christianity but in courses on religion overall. Look at the world we live in. Look behind me. You can see a FedEx box up there. There's a little Baby Yoda up there by my thumb, and I have a lightsaber next to it. My students always give me gifts because they know I'm a Star Wars nerd. I don't know what the FedEx box is for. But I have a lot of books in this office, and I'm looking at the screen we're on right now and I see my name on it. Almost everybody listening probably has a book in their house, or a newspaper, or a smartphone they can read. I have a little New Testament right here that I keep with me all the time, and a second one in case anybody shows up for a visit. We live in a literate world. If you meet somebody who is illiterate, that's somebody society has really failed. It's the exception to be illiterate. There are levels of literacy. Someone with a ninth or tenth grade education can probably read, but might not be able to read closely or critically. One of the things that's really beneficial for anyone who reads Scripture is knowing how to read critically and closely, and knowing there are multiple levels of meaning in every word we encounter.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: That's us thinking in a sophisticated, literate way, because we live in a literate society. But in ancient times most people were not literate. If they were wealthy, they might have enough training to read very simple things and sign their name, but most people could not sit down and read their favorite novel. It just wasn't part of daily life, and cultures grew around the norms of daily life. You even have people who say, writing, schmiting, I don't need that, I have oral tradition, or I have just enough written tradition to sign documents and read decrees, but I don't need to read this sacred text the priest is reading in his temple workshop. So we live in a very different world. That means you needed literate specialists who could read these texts not just critically but what we call mantically: what is this text telling me about what God really wants? Because in the ancient world everything was connected to God, everything, everywhere. What do we say when someone sneezes? God bless you. Sometimes we just say it to be polite, but a lot of people really mean it, because they believe everything down to a sneeze is somehow connected to God's will. That's what people believed in antiquity. There was no space for atheism in antiquity.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: So everything that involved text was taken very seriously, even if you were not literate. You needed scribes who were really skilled, not just in the mechanics of writing, but enculturated in the ethics of your people, in the liturgies of the temple or sanctuary, in the poetry, songs and prayers of your ancestors, even in the myths and legends of other peoples, to understand your place in the larger world. That's what scribes were like. They were not just intellectuals, they were almost sacred intellectuals. In Babylon, scribes rivaled priests in their ability to speak for the gods. That eventually finds its way into ancient Israel as well, and forward into ancient Judaism, all the way down to Jesus and Paul. Paul himself was a trained Pharisee. I know the Pharisees get a pretty bad rap in the New Testament, but that's probably one particular perspective on a much larger group of people not represented in the New Testament. Paul learned from them the sacred ways of reading texts, and those ways derive from much earlier scribal ways of reading, transmitting and expanding texts with a sense of authority and understanding.

Johnny Ova: Can you go into how somebody became a scribe? At some point authority starts shifting from the altar to the pen. When and why does that happen?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: I love this question, and I'm so glad you asked, because I've written about it quite a bit. My second book, which came out in 2008, was on the book of Jeremiah, and it talks about how the book of Jeremiah, as it comes together during the Babylonian exile, starts to substitute for the temple. Instead of scribes working in the temple to create master texts that priests could study and then talk about during a sacrifice, scribes are writing books people can read and invest themselves in as a surrogate for temple spaces. The written word becomes the manifestation of the divine presence, as opposed to entering a space where God's presence resides, because you don't have access to that space anymore. So scribal authority shifts over time along with what's happening historically and socially. To become a scribe in ancient Israel was in some ways easier than in Egypt or Babylon, the two other major cultures of the time. There it was an elite family matter, generation after generation. You had to be really privileged to spend all day, every day, for fifteen or twenty years, from age five to twenty or so, learning to write in signs where every image represents a word.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: When the alphabet was invented, that changed, because now you only had to memorize 22 symbols, each representing a sound. Almost anyone could learn the alphabet. But real sophistication with what these words mean still required a kind of elite status. So it wasn't common for ordinary people who weren't upwardly mobile economically to be scribes. It was still very much a family matter. It was just a little easier to enter that elite status in Israel than in Egypt or Babylon, because the learning curve was so different. But as we get into the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries, leading down to the Babylonian exile, and literacy becomes more common, I think it becomes more common for people to have the opportunity to attain some kind of scribal status. So it was permeable.

Johnny Ova: That's interesting, because I never had that view of what a scribe was. Back to the mafioso: it's a family business, and it's very interesting to see who controls the written text and who doesn't. Speaking of scribes, here's where I want to go. You've argued that Deuteronomy was written by Levite scribes, refugees from the fallen northern kingdom. Can you walk us through that? What's the evidence, and what brought you to that conclusion?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: This has been a hot topic in scholarship for a hundred years, maybe more. There was a time when people really thought the language of Deuteronomy reflected a particular historical period. We can date Hebrew texts by the kind of Hebrew they use. I don't think it's an open-and-shut case. There are other tools in the kit we have to use to say when a text was written, but linguistics is really helpful. For example, if I say to you, to be or not to be, that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind, and so on. I have the whole thing memorized. I had to do it in tenth grade. My tenth grade English teacher was a harsh taskmaster. And you know what, I had to memorize pi to sixty-five decimal places in eleventh grade and I can still do it. I perform it at parties, which tells you a lot about the kind of parties I go to. But back to Shakespeare. His language is very particular to around 1590 or 1600. If you got Shakespeare's soliloquy and it sounded like, to be or not to be, that's a good question, whether it's nobler to suffer the arrows of outrageous fortune, certain words drop out because they aren't used as much, and certain contractions change because they're used more. The language tells us that's probably a later text, and the earlier form might have looked a little different.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: What a lot of scholars think, and I think there's credibility to it, is that some traditions in Deuteronomy are pretty old, but the text itself comes from a particular moment when certain conventions of language were used that give it its current shape. What's really interesting is that it's not only the ideas in Deuteronomy that point to a scribal group we might identify with the Levites. It's also the coded way the Levites refer to themselves in Deuteronomy. The Levites in Deuteronomy are a privileged caste. We constantly see references to them having authority, and not just any authority: authority over text, over reading, over writing, over the transmission of what's written. There is a brilliant scholar in the Netherlands named Karel van der Toorn, who writes in English, so his work is accessible to English-language audiences. He makes a really good point. He argues this is a way a scribal group can identify itself as the author of a text without coming out and saying, hi, we wrote this. In antiquity it was considered kind of poor form to say, hi, I'm the author of this text, my name is so-and-so and I come from such-and-such a place. Rather, anonymity was a hallmark of authority. But you also wanted people to know what kind of anonymity you came from. It wasn't full anonymity. You didn't get names and addresses, but by looking at a text carefully you could get a sense of which sacred group it represents or whose interests it advances. That's what Deuteronomy seems to do.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. That raises the obvious question I'm sure my listeners are whispering in my ear: where does this leave Moses?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: I think it leaves Moses in a very good position, and that might seem counterintuitive if I say it was written at a certain point in time by a bunch of Levites. There are multiple reasons, but I'll give you two. The first is that the Levites saw Moses as their patron saint. All kinds of traditions in the Hebrew Bible and beyond suggest that the historical Moses, whoever he was, was intimately connected with the founding of the Levite caste, and the Levites as a priestly group continued to look to Moses as inspiration, almost as a mythic figure. One way to think about it: in medieval China, the Mandarin caste saw themselves as trustees of the legacy of Confucius. Confucius was their patron saint. Was there a historical Confucius? Yes. Did he know these Mandarins? No, they lived hundreds of years after him. But they preserved what they believed, and what you could argue was, the essence of what Confucius innovated or transmitted from some deeper cultural experience. I think the Levites did that.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: The second thing is that there's a very strong tradition in the Hebrew Bible that Moses himself was a Levite. That needs nuance if we're looking at it purely historically, but I do think the very earliest priesthoods where we find Levites were priesthoods that by family lineage actually descended from a historical Moses. Some scholars don't think we can say anything historical about Moses at all, and to a degree I understand that much of what we have about him is legendary, symbolic, maybe even mythological. When I say myth, I don't mean something false. I mean something greater than history, something that transcends the boundaries of history. So there may be something mythological about Moses, but plenty of scholars think that mythological Moses comes from a real historical Moses who lived somewhere around 1200 BCE and left such a deep impression on the foundational ideas of ancient Israel that early priestly groups like the Levites saw it as their sacred charge, maybe their divine calling, to transmit those messages, ideas, values and that sense of identity as it evolved. So when we say Deuteronomy, which presents itself as Torat Moshe, the teaching of Moses, was written by people who lived long after Moses, these were nonetheless people who saw themselves as Moses' agents, his ideological descendants and trustees, maybe even his surrogates. We get the sense that they see Moses as alive and well on a sacred level in their day, still speaking to them through the text they inherited, developed and transmitted.

Johnny Ova: You've also said Deuteronomy was designed to make the voice of God accessible to everyone, not just the priestly elite. That sounds almost revolutionary for the ancient world. Was it?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: To a degree, yes. Toward the end of the monarchic period there are more literate people, more access to texts, writing, literacy and scribalism. It becomes more common for the ordinary farmer in the hills of Judah to have access to text. Even if he can't read, he knows somebody who can. So I think the book of Deuteronomy is capitalizing on the power of the word and the idea that God can speak through written words, that God's voice can be discerned through a text right in front of you. Deuteronomy's writtenness means you can encounter this word in a text in front of you and inquire of it. If you have literate skill, this text is not to be squirreled away in a temple. It's to be read in front of you, and you can ask, what does that word mean? What is this talking about? I don't remember this happening, or I remember it differently. You can start investing in the text. I think that's really important for Jews and Christians today. The idea that the text is the living word of God is very important to a lot of people around the world. I'm not speaking from a religious perspective here. I'm speaking as a scholar of people who hold religious perspectives. The word of God is transformative in their lives, their communities and their ethics. The word of God is alive. The word of God can become manifest in a human being. So this becomes very important, and I think Deuteronomy is revolutionary because it takes something that was once separate from the ordinary person and says, this isn't something only priests should read. This is something you should hear, and if you have literate skill, something you should read.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: Deuteronomy has some very important passages that say you should keep a copy of this in your home, on your gates and doorposts. You should even bind it to your arm. Some of your listeners might have seen images of religious Jews at weekday morning prayers putting on phylacteries, tefillin: a leather strap over the head with a box, and a leather strap around the arm binding a box to it. In those boxes are tiny scrolls. They're not the entirety of Scripture, but they symbolize it. The idea is that this text, this word, this physical thing is part of your life, your heart, your soul and your mind. You, the accountant or the gym manager or the farmer or the professor or the pastor, whatever your job is. It's not just for somebody whose father's father's father descended from Aaron and is now ensconced in a temple in Jerusalem. It's for anybody with the mind and heart to inquire and learn and think.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: And I think even the academic approach can offer insights. A colleague of mine who teaches at Emory University made a really good point, one my own thesis advisor also made when I was doing my PhD. My advisor was a Jesuit priest, and as you and some of your listeners may know, the Jesuits have a strong academic approach that they see as completely consistent with their spiritual approach to Scripture. Both of them said the same thing: the critical method, the way academics read the text, is a gift from God. You can be an academic and read the text, value it, and see your work as historical-critical methodology without a religious component. But for people who are religious, that approach can yield insights and ways of reading and valuing the text that can navigate you through some choppy waters. So I think there's a lot of merit in seeing the physicality of the text as revolutionary, because look what it's done over the last two thousand years.

Johnny Ova: Beautifully said. I've got a few more questions, if you don't mind. I had to get to Jeremiah, another book you've spent years on. You've connected it to a specific scribal family. Who were they, and how did they shape the book we read today?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: The book of Jeremiah as we have it today, I have to admit, was largely shaped in the Jerusalem temple by priestly scribes and priests during the Persian period and maybe the early Hellenistic period. When I say shaped, I mean organizing and moving one chapter here and one chapter there. Texts are migratory, even within Jerusalem. People were rearranging material all the time. That's one thing the Dead Sea Scrolls teach us. As you said at the start of our conversation, the Bible didn't come down in fixed form from a chorus of angels saying, here, take this and never change a word. It grew over time within a living community and represents the lifeblood of that community or communities. But the sources those Persian and early Hellenistic scribes inherited, which I think largely resembled what they eventually shaped, were a written tradition or collection of traditions shaped by an even earlier scribal group, and that group is fascinating. It comes from a family called the family of Shaphan. In the book of Kings we learn there's a scribe in Jerusalem named Shaphan who apparently has a lot of political clout and is very popular with the Jerusalem elites, and he seems to have sired a line of scribes. Again, very much a family business.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: The children of Shaphan eventually form a kind of faction, and there are people associated with it who aren't part of the family but are trustees of it. I might catch some trouble for saying this, but think of the Sopranos. Not everybody in the Sopranos' crew has the last name Soprano. Think of the Shaphanides like that: a family with a network of people aligned with them ideologically. Most of them probably descend from northern Levites who fled the destruction of the northern kingdom and took up residence in Jerusalem. There's textual and archaeological evidence for northern refugees with scribal training setting up shop in Jerusalem, though not necessarily for the Shaphanides specifically. The Shaphan family seems to have been entrusted with the legacy of Jeremiah. Why them? I think Jeremiah was associated with them, maybe loosely related to them. They all come from the same northern Levite stock, with roots in the region of Benjamin, at the northern frontier of the kingdom of Judah. That was a contested region, for a while part of the northern kingdom of Israel. So the Shaphanides have material that Jeremiah seems to have initiated in his oracles, which they took up in their own writing and development of the deeds of Jeremiah that we now have in the book.

Johnny Ova: By the time of Ezra, only the Aaronide priests were considered legitimate. What happened to everyone else? Did the other priestly families just disappear?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: It's not that they disappeared. They got assimilated. Imagine before the Babylonian exile you have a Levite clan here and another there, a Zadokite clan in Jerusalem, a Phinehas clan in Bethel. Eventually the northern kingdom falls, the Phinehas clan comes into Jerusalem, a northern Levite group comes into Jerusalem, and some get amalgamated into the Jerusalem priesthood while others just become associated with it. There's still diversity. Then with the Babylonian exile and the return fifty years later, you have different social circumstances. You have a Persian Empire that looks to a particular family to govern on its behalf. Actually there are two families: the descendants of David and the descendants of Zadok. The descendants of Zadok see themselves as descendants of Aaron, and all other families associated with the Aaronide priesthood are beneath them. The descendants of David sort of exit stage left. We don't know exactly what happened to them. But over the Persian period the priesthood descended from Zadok, understanding themselves as descendants of Aaron, becomes the predominant political force. They represent the Jewish world in that region to the Persian Empire and the Persian Empire to that Jewish world. Under those imperial circumstances, priestly groups that kept their diversity in the pre-exilic period get sucked into this much larger priestly administrative establishment. So they didn't disappear. They redefined their identity.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: And this is something your listeners will find really interesting. When people look at the genealogies in the Hebrew Bible, most think, this is the most boring stuff ever. Where's the good stuff? Where's the soap opera? Where are the wars? Where's the sex? I get it. You don't make movies out of genealogies. You make movies out of great floods. But the genealogies are really important, because earlier genealogies will show a priestly family associated with one lineage, and a later genealogy will show the same family associated with a different lineage. That tells us this family survived from the monarchic period through the exile into the post-monarchic period, but in the post-monarchic period, to have legitimacy, it had to be associated with a different priestly clan, so it adopted that clan as its own. It's really amazing, and we have anthropological evidence of this happening around the world even today. It's very common, and the biblical record is really helpful for understanding how the priesthood developed over time. So the stuff that's boring, not so boring if you know what you're looking for.

Johnny Ova: True. Here's the tension a lot of people feel. If human institutions, possibly with agendas, shaped these texts, what does that mean for people who hold the Bible as sacred? Do the human fingerprints rule out divine purpose in these texts?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: I don't think so. Whenever students ask me this, I always pass the buck, because I'm just a historian. I don't have spiritual answers. I'm always wary of academics who dismiss out of hand things that can't be answered through scholarly methods. What I think is responsible is when a scholar says, I just don't have the tools to answer that. And I don't. I'm not anybody special. If you ask me about electric guitars, I can tell you anything you want, because I've designed some electric guitars, and that's something I know on a very personal level. But beyond the technical scholarly stuff, I have to plead ignorance. And if I plead ignorance, that certainly doesn't rule out the religious needs and perspectives people bring to these texts and draw from them. In fact, what scholars of human history and evolutionary anthropology say, the things that sometimes make religious people nervous, is that religion is very natural. Religion is inherently part of being human. It's as old as language and as old as human society, and the idea of some supernatural agent standing behind what we experience is something we've had since the very first human beings appeared on earth. Whether you see those first human beings as Adam and Eve or as Homo erectus or Neanderthals or Homo sapiens, whatever framework you use, the impulse for religious thinking is entirely natural. So I think it's a mistake to say that because these texts show the thumbprint of human agency, they're disconnected from some deeper truth that still guides people's lives and can give them meaning.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: I'm Jewish, but as an academic who respects religious perspectives and loves my Christian brothers and sisters, I've been so privileged to attend services and speak at churches and interact on a really meaningful level with people deeply committed to the Bible as God's word. If I can bring something as an academic that widens the scope of what they can do with this text, so much the better. I'll tell you one very brief story that's a really good example of why this works. Right around September 11th, 2001, I was teaching at Florida International University. September 11th happened, and two days later I had to go in and teach. My students were completely shocked. They didn't know what to think. So we started talking about something I'd planned to cover much later in the semester: theories of evil and what evil is in the world. We looked at some biblical texts critically, including the book of Job, which as you know is a remarkably resonant text, overwhelming in what it implies about humanity, suffering and God's role in all of it, and it doesn't offer easy answers. A couple of years later, a student from that class who had grown up in a very traditional, very conservative Catholic background emailed me to say that because he had learned to read these texts with an eye to what humans were saying as they shaped them, he was able to keep his sense of religious identity during moments of spiritual crisis without rejecting the world he lived in, facts, good decisions and responsible critical thinking. And I thought, if there's evidence of a God, that's the evidence right there.

Johnny Ova: That's a win right there. My last question for you today, and thank you for sharing that and a little of your background. This can be religious or historical or one big lump sum for you. After decades of studying the people behind these texts, has your own view of the Hebrew Bible changed? Do you read it differently now than when you started?

Dr. Mark Leuchter: Absolutely. I grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish community, so I grew up with this material. I grew up with the Torah and the prophets, and of course with the rabbinic literature that offers a framework for reading it within a cultural context. I had also read and valued the New Testament very much. When I first started studying this academically, and I think I started taking it seriously in maybe my third year as an undergraduate, I began seeing things in it that were brilliant and really important, which made me value it much more than if I had gone into a different field, become a doctor or an accountant or some other profession. Reading it academically changed the way I valued it, and that's been the constant throughout the last thirty years of doing this. I'll be 54 in October, so I've been reading this material really critically since my master's program ended and my PhD program started around thirty years ago. The constant is that I'm always seeing something new and learning something new, from Assyriologists and archaeologists and linguists and anthropologists. And it makes me more committed to what it means to me as a Jew, and as a member of a world where Jews and Christians live together and have to work together with people of other religious traditions for a common cause. It's a really valuable thing. It has made the text much more precious to me, and it helps me understand why it remains so precious to other people too.

Johnny Ova: That's amazing. Dr. Mark Leuchter, thank you so much. We're going to link all your books in our description. This has been so enlightening and so fascinating. Thank you for your time today.

Dr. Mark Leuchter: Thank you. I really, really loved this. Thank you.