ההוראות לכוהנים בכתב לוי הארמי וסדר עבודת התמיד

The Aramaic Levi Document (ALD) includes a long section, narrated in the first person by Levi, son of Jacob, in which he relates how his grandfather, Isaac, taught him “the law of the priesthood.” This section is preserved in an Aramaic manuscript found in the Cairo Genizah and in a Greek translation, as well as in four tiny fragments from Qumran. I argue that the details concerning the “whole burnt offering” in ALD refer to the tāmîd (the daily sacrifice) offered in the mornings, rather than to voluntary whole burnt offerings, as commonly understood in the scholarly literature. I contend that the passage of “the law of the priesthood”—a collection of laws on purity, wood used for the altar, and sacrificial offerings—pertains to the daily morning service in the Jerusalem Temple. The section on “the law of the priesthood” in ALD is, according to this interpretation, an exemplar of the genre of instructions for the order of service of the morning daily offering, which has its roots in priestly manuals of the ancient Near East and is attested also in the Mishnah.