Tetzaveh

The JC- Portion of the week

14 February 2008

“And you shall put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Tummim and they shall be upon Aaron’s heart, when he goes in before the Lord…” Exodus 28:0

The Urim (“lights”) and Tummim (“perfections”) were gemstones carried by the High Priest on the ephod (breastplate) of the priestly garments. They were used by Aaron and his successors to channel Divine inspiration, to receive answers from God. Tradition suggests that God caused the Urim and Tummim to light up in certain patterns, or that they were engraved with symbols identifying yes / no and true / false, and thrown like dice.

But no one knows exactly how they were used. It is thought that the letters inscribed on the 12 stones of the breastplate would illuminate. That was the Urim part. But they apparently would be scrambled. One needed to break the code to discover what the letters were saying.

The commentator Ramban explains that there were secondary holy names called the Tummim, which gave the High Priest the ability to interpret the Urim.

The system may sound a little vague and unreliable.How accurate were they in foretelling God’s word? It was, it seems, all down to the interpreter, who needed both to decode the message and to understand it.

The Talmud records where this could go wrong: the High Priest Eli, watching Hannah at prayer, was suspicious when he saw her lips move. Consulting the Urim and Tummim, he misread the letters of the Urim as shin- cof-reish-hay (shikorah, drunken one) when the correct reading was cof-shin-reish-hay (kesheirah, worthy one).

References to the Urim and Tummim are rare in the Tanach. The historian Josephus, the first century historian, notes that during the Maccabean era, “this oracle had been silent” for 200 years. So if the Urim and Tummim ceased with the destruction of the First Temple, presumably the people were expected to turn to the prophets to provide God’s words instead.

Important during Israel’s earliest history, the Urim and Tummim eventually fall into disuse. Mystery proves unsustainable and must be replaced by words directly from God’s chosen messengers.