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Milgrom talks about Priestly cultic imagery serving as a kind of theodicy. A theodicy
of course is a response to the problem of evil. How can an all-powerful, good God allow
so much evil to exist and even go unpunished? And according to Milgrom, this is the priestly
answer: every sin pollutes the sanctuary. It may not mark the sinner, but it does mark
the sanctuary. It scars the face of the sanctuary. You may think you've gotten away with something,
but every act of social exploitation, every act of moral corruption, pollutes the sanctuary
more and more until such time as God is driven out entirely and human society is devoured
by its own viciousness and death-dealing. So again, the ethical message here is that
humans are in control of their destiny and the action of every individual affects and
influences the fate of society. This is really the Priestly version of an old biblical doctrine,
a doctrine of collective responsibility. Sin affectsůindividual sin affects the entire
fabric of society. There's no such thing as an isolated evil; our deeds affect one another.
And when evildoers are finally punished, they bring down others with them. Those others,
however, aren't so blameless, Milgrom says, because they allowed the wicked to flourish
and contribute to the pollution of the sanctuary, the corruption of society. So P's cultic imagery
is informed, according to Milgrom, by the same communal ethic that we will see running
through the Bible, much of the Bible, until a later period. It's simply conveying that
ethic in its own modality through the symbolism of the sanctuary and the cult.