Aaron

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Aaron is, in the Hebrew Bible, the elder brother of Moses and the first high priest of Israel: the man through whom the hereditary priesthood of the Aaronids traced its claim to the altar. Where Moses speaks for God, Aaron speaks for Moses — appointed at the burning bush as his brother’s mouth before Pharaoh, because Moses pleads that he himself is slow of speech.

The narrative of the Exodus and the wilderness gives him a double face. He stands beside Moses through the plagues and the parting of the sea, his rod working signs of its own; he is consecrated, with his sons, into an elaborate sacrificial office whose vestments and rites the book of Leviticus describes in minute detail. Yet the same texts record his failures without softening them. While Moses is on Sinai, the people press Aaron to make them a god they can see, and he casts the golden calf — the act that nearly undoes the covenant. Later he and his sister Miriam challenge Moses’s unique standing and are rebuked. Like Moses, he is told he will not enter the promised land, and he dies on Mount Hor, his priestly garments transferred to his son Eleazar before the people’s eyes.

What the narrative is doing here is, in the reading of modern scholarship, inseparable from a struggle over priesthood. Much of the Aaron material belongs to the strand of the Pentateuch that scholars call the Priestly source, and it serves to anchor the legitimacy of one priestly family against rival claimants; the Korah rebellion in Numbers, and the sign of Aaron’s staff alone budding overnight among the tribal rods, read as charters settling who may approach the holy things. Whether a historical figure stands behind the portrait is not something the evidence can establish, and the entire shape of the story is the work of writers with an institutional stake in its outcome.

Later tradition kept building on him. The Aaronic blessing — “The Lord bless you and keep you” — became one of the most widely used liturgical formulas in both Judaism and Christianity, and descent from Aaron defined the kohanim, the priestly caste whose ritual distinctions persist in Jewish practice long after the Temple’s destruction. The New Testament’s Epistle to the Hebrews invokes him at length, arguing that Christ holds a priesthood of a different and higher order than Aaron’s. In rabbinic memory he is remembered above all as a peacemaker, a maker of reconciliation between estranged neighbours — a portrait drawn less from the biblical text than from what the tradition wished its first priest to have been.

→ Related: Assumption Of Moses