Aaron Went Back Into the Room Where Fire Took His Sons

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Two Bodies on the Dedication Day

The oil was still wet in Aaron's beard when it happened.

The sanctuary had opened that morning. Everything was new, the altar, the vestments, the smell of fresh cedar and blood, and Nadav and Avihu took their fire pans and brought in an offering nobody had asked them for. Fire came out from before the LORD and went through them and they were dead on the floor in their priestly linen while the service was still running.

Moses spoke. Aaron said nothing at all.

His wife Elisheva had woken up that morning holding more honor than any woman in the camp. Her brother-in-law led the nation. Her brother was a prince of Judah. Her husband was high priest. Two of her sons had walked in that morning as deputies to their father. By the time the incense burned off, two of the five were gone, and the loudest celebration Israel had ever held finished as a funeral nobody was permitted to conduct properly.

Every celebration in Israel carries the shadow of Aaron's sons after that. It was not a saying. It was a Tuesday.

The Chapter That Opens After a Funeral

What comes next in the scroll is not a lament. It is a procedure.

After the death of the two sons of Aaron, the LORD spoke to Moses, and the instructions that follow are addressed to the father of the dead men. He is to come into the Holy Place. Not never again. Once a year, on one day, and here is exactly how.

Read it in order and the arrangement is almost unbearable. Aaron's sons came too close and were killed for it, and the immediate consequence is that their father is given a standing appointment to do the same thing, correctly, for the rest of his life. The room did not become forbidden. It became scheduled.

He is told what to take off first. The breastplate with its twelve stones, the gold, the blue robe with the bells sewn along the hem so the man inside could be heard moving. All of it comes off at the door. What he wears in is linen.

Bull, Ram, Goat, and Four Threads of Linen

Plain white, and nothing on it worth stealing. That is what a man wears into the room where the fire lives.

The animals waiting outside were not anonymous either. The bull was Abraham, who ran to the cattle himself when three strangers turned up at his tent in the heat. The ram was Isaac, because a ram had stood in the thicket on that mountain with its horns caught while a knife came down toward a boy. The goat was Jacob, the two kids his mother sent him for, good for him because he got the blessing out of them and good for his children because they get atonement out of them.

The word for linen appears four times in the description of the garments, and the sages counted it four times on purpose: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, one for each thread the high priest put on. He walked in wearing the matriarchs and leading the patriarchs on ropes.

Rabbi Berekhya and Rabbi Yirmeya said it in Rabbi Hiyya's name: as the service is above, so the service is below. Ezekiel saw one in the middle of them clothed in linen. So does the man at the door of the Tent.

Cloth That Cannot Go Back in the Drawer

He comes out and takes the linen off and leaves it there. The scroll says leave it, and says nothing about what happens to it afterward, and the sages split.

Rabbi Hiyya said the garments have to be buried. Not washed, not stored, not folded into the priestly chest with the everyday robes. Interred, like a body, and never worn into that room on any later Day of Atonement. They had held too much of one day.

Rabbi Dosa would not accept the waste. Let an ordinary priest wear them, he said. Common priests serve all year in four linen garments anyway. Put them back into circulation and let a man sweep ashes in them.

One of them looked at the cloth and saw a corpse. The other looked at it and saw a uniform. Both of them were reading a father who had buried two sons in their vestments and then been handed a new set.

The Year the Elder Did Not Come Out

Centuries later, Shimon HaTzadik came out of the Holy of Holies and told the priests around him that he would die that year.

They asked how he knew.

Every year, he said, an old man dressed in white and wrapped in white goes in with me and comes out with me. This year he went in with me. He did not come out.

No man shall be in the Tent of Meeting from the moment the high priest enters until he emerges, the scroll says, and Rabbi Abahu pushed on it. Who says the one walking beside him was a man at all. And then the harder question, because the high priest himself is standing in there. Is he not a man?

Rabbi Pinhas answered it. When the spirit rested on him, his face went up like torches. The priest is called a messenger of the LORD of hosts, and a messenger is not a man, and so the verse is exact: there was no man in the Tent of Meeting.

Aaron's line had been walking into that room since the morning two of them were carried out of it. Shimon counted the white shapes going in and coming out, the way you count children at a river crossing, and one year the count came up short, and he knew whose it was.