When the High Priest and the Seventy Bullocks Bore the Weight

The 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature preserves two Temple-era passages that on the surface look unrelated. One describes the Yom Kippur preparations of the high priest. The other parses the seventy bullocks offered during Sukkot. Read together, they sketch the rabbinic theology of the Temple's intercessory role.

The Week the High Priest Could Not Be Alone

The first passage describes the seven days that preceded Yom Kippur in the Second Temple. During that week the high priest was removed from his home and lodged in a chamber within the Temple precinct. The elders walked oxen, rams, and lambs past him so he would be expert in the day's sacrificial details by the time he had to perform them.

Food and drink were not withheld from him during the seven days. On the eve of the Day of Atonement itself, the elders limited what he ate, because heavy food induces sleep and the high priest could not be allowed to nod off during the night-long preparations.

At dusk the elders of the Sanhedrin handed him over to the elders of the priesthood. The priests led him to the hall of the house of Abtinas, where the incense formula was kept. There they administered an oath. The passage preserves the wording: My lord high priest, we are ambassadors of the Sanhedrin; thou art our ambassador and the ambassador of the Sanhedrin as well. We adjure thee, by Him who causes His name to dwell in this house, that thou alter not anything that we have told thee.

The passage adds the human detail. After the oath, both the elders and the high priest wept. The passage explains why each side wept. The elders wept because they had to suspect the high priest might be a Sadducee who would change the incense procedure away from the rabbinic ruling. The high priest wept because he had been suspected. The narrative captures, in a single moment, the strain that ran through the priest-rabbi relationship in the late Second Temple period.

The Seventy Bullocks of Sukkot

The second passage asks a sharper theological question. Rabbi Eliezer asked, For whose benefit were those seventy bullocks intended? The reference is to the offerings prescribed in Numbers 29:12-36, the diminishing series of bullock sacrifices that the priests offered across the seven days of Sukkot.

The answer the passage records is unambiguous. The seventy bullocks were offered for the seventy nations into which the rabbinic worldview divided the Gentile world. Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator the anthology cites directly, asserts that the seventy bullocks were intended to atone for the nations so that rain might descend across the whole earth. The Feast of Tabernacles, in the rabbinic calendar, is the moment when judgment is rendered concerning the year's rainfall.

The passage closes with a lament that frames the entire post-Temple period. Woe to the Gentile nations for their loss, and they know not what they have lost. For as long as the Temple existed, the altar made atonement for them; but now, who is to atone for them?

The Theology That Connects the Two Passages

Read in sequence the editorial logic of Hebraic Literature's compilers becomes clear. The first passage shows the high priest being prepared, by force, to bear weight he could not have borne alone. The Sanhedrin walked animals past him for a week. The elders fed him. The elders restricted his food. The elders swore him in. The elders wept with him. The high priest was not an individual performing private worship. He was a person being collectively prepared to act on behalf of others.

The second passage names who the others were. The bullocks of Sukkot were offered for the seventy nations. The atonement of Yom Kippur was for Israel. The Temple service held both directions simultaneously. Inward, for the covenanted people. Outward, for the nations of the world who, on the rabbinic reading, did not know the altar was bearing weight on their behalf.

What the Compilers Wanted Readers to See

The 1901 anthology placed these two passages in proximity because together they show what the Temple's destruction removed. The collective preparation of a single human being to act on behalf of the whole people. The annual sacrifice that the rabbinic tradition believed was sustaining rain for the entire Gentile world. The lament that closes the second passage, who is to atone for them now?, is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the question the rabbinic project after the Temple's fall had to answer in a new key.

Hebraic Literature does not answer that question for its readers. The anthology preserves the question in the form the Temple-era voices framed it, leaves the seventy bullocks burning on the altar of the absent Temple, and lets the high priest stand weeping with the elders of the Sanhedrin in the doorway of a building no longer there.