The Israelite cultus, or worship pattern, is responsible primarily for the origin, preservation, and transmission of a large portion of the Old Testament.
Although Old Testament scholars continue to stress Israel’s contributions in such areas as monotheism and ethical prophecy, not enough emphasis has been placed on Israel’s achievement in worship. The purpose of this study is to explore the major lines of Israel’s worship and to suggest the areas in which it can continue to enrich Christian worship.
The purpose of Israelite worship is to create life, that is, to maintain the ordered course of the world of nature and the world of humankind as it was created by God and as it is sustained by God. Encounter with God through worship sustains the world order, reaffirms the human relationship with God’s creation, and maintains relationships among neighbors. Worship sustains, creates, and re-creates a relationship not magically, but sacramentally—a relationship initiated, sustained, and continually renewed by God himself.
In Israelite worship, the overriding purpose was the “re-presentation of history,” the contemporizing of those creative, historical acts of salvation that had formed, nourished, and sustained Israelite existence. None will deny that the faith of Israel was historically oriented, based on the fact that God credeemed a people from Egyptian bondage, welded them into a covenant people through the Torah, and confirmed that salvation by the gift of the land. Whatever tribes or clans actually experienced the Egyptian Exodus event, all Israel affirmed that God had acted in her behalf, that Yahweh had served Israel, and that this salvation was a continuing process in her existence. To be sure, the Exodus event occurred only once, at a particular point in human history, a unique and unrepeatable act. But Israel, uniquely conscious of history, could not allow this formative event to recede into timeless myth as her Near Eastern neighbors would have done. In no sense could the Exodus event be subject to annual repetition in the same way Marduk in Babylon annually defeated the chaotic Tiamat—the uniqueness of the Exodus event precluded annual cyclic recurrence. Nevertheless, Israel’s worship sustained the faith that because God had acted once, he would continue to act for her salvation. Thus, Israel, freed from the reduction of her past to myth and assured of the continuation of redemptive history, “re-presented” in worship those historical acts that were determinative for her life.
These functions are primary to Israelite worship: to actualize, to re-present unrepeatable historical events, to bring the worshiper into an existential identification with these events, to bridge the time and space gap, and to participate in the original history. In Israelite worship, each generation vicariously entered into that original and nonrepeatable history through two patterns: (1) historical recital and (2) dramatic re-presentation.