Secret lore

William Morrow is pondering Leviticus, in the Torah. Every Jew is expected to know enough Hebrew to understand Torah, by the age of thirteen for boys. (A tradition perhaps mostly honoured in the breach.) Morrow finds interesting that Leviticus has descriptions of Priestly ordination... at all. This is what we Catholics would call canon-law. The average Schlomo or, for that matter, Mario wouldn't have any need of this stuff.

Morrow brings the namburbi genre, in Sumeria. Sumerians - and Assyrians who preserved this - believed in omens. The omens were public. Namburbi was how an Assyrian might overrule a bad omen (or a good omen, for his enemy). The Assyrian caliphs deemed namburbi too important to allow just anyone to read them.

Morrow thinks that Leviticus 6:1–7:21 was for specialists, 1:3–5:26 for the commons. So... some Dennis Prager of the era had approached the Temple and, by permission or no, published Levite and/or Aaronid lore for the masses, even in part "dumbing it down". Those opening chapters haven't changed since at least En Gedi.

It was a bold move, to open up the proceedings, allowing anyone outside Temple to see how Yahudi ordination was done. Some, oh, Hasmonaean could then ordain priests yea even unto the aforementioned En Gedi, and all the educated Jews over there would know what they were looking at. Oooor... a Samaritan could do it, in Shechem.

When was this Levitical dissemination? - is now the question. I could bring the history of errata in Torah text and the Seleucid spike in expense for copying literature. After Antiochus III it became more-expensive for the Madinat Yahud to fake a Torah scroll. Several Psalms care much more about legends shared in our Torah but which our Torah cares much less about.

Before all that, like under the Ptolemies, how many Jews even cared what Jerusalem was up to? Papyrus Amherst 63 and all that Elephantine / Yeb content look very very different from what our Bibles preserve. Hellenistic Jews had a different Exagogue than the Haggadah remembers: Moses, not G-d.

For the vulgate publication of Leviticus, I am pondering the roaming Tabernacle. As an Egyptian holdover (from the Ptolemies?) its priests would be Levites.

Also to be noted in-context may be the various Aramaic Levite documents; including Amran, Qahat and - sigh - Tobit. Of course Tobit was no secret. How about Levi?