# The Development of the Liturgy in the Old Testament

> As we explained, any worship acceptable to God requires a liturgy and a rite bound together. In this section we trace the development of the liturgy from Adam to Mount Sinai, following every act of worship, its form, its liturgical development and the development of its rite.

*2016-12-01T17:34:55Z*

![Quote card: "The Church remained in the mind of God from eternity, and when the time came for her to be revealed to men, the Lord showed her to Moses on the mountain." - Fr. Athanasius al-Maqari, The Church: Its Structure and Meaning, p. 18](/uploads/sites/1274e232-e31c-46f4-a48b-27b854406479/media/liturgy-in-the-old-testament.png?w=815&h=815)

As we explained, any worship acceptable to God requires a liturgy and a rite bound together. In this section we will trace the development of the liturgy from Adam to Mount Sinai, following every act of worship that took place, and recording the form of that worship, its liturgical development, and the development of its rite.

The expression "primitive liturgy" is so called in relation to the primitive theology that was known before the appearance of the Church of the wilderness at Mount Sinai. That is, it is the oral theology of the knowledge of God, which was handed down through the generations by word of mouth without being written down, and was later recorded by the spirit of prophecy at the hand of Moses the prophet. It contained primitive expressions that show flashes along the road to the knowledge of God, but it was an incomplete, deficient knowledge of God, since God had not yet revealed Himself fully to man, for a reason we will discuss later. What is meant by the expression as a whole ("primitive liturgy") is the acts of worship that took place in the pre-Law stage according to a particular rite, without being fixed or bound to a liturgy of place or a liturgy of the word.

We have already mentioned the first sacrifice offered by man in history, the sacrifice of Abel and Cain, in which God accepted Abel's sacrifice, announcing the first liturgy known to history, namely the liturgy of the blood sacrifice. This sacrifice was offered individually, and its rite was the offering of a choice sacrifice from the sheep (Gen 4:4).

No other liturgy of sacrifice appeared after it until the Flood, when righteous Noah offered the second sacrifice known to Scripture at all, and with it a liturgical development appeared: he built an altar and offered sacrifices of animals and birds together, and for the first time Scripture uses the word (clean), thereby distinguishing between two kinds of sacrifices, clean sacrifices and unclean sacrifices. He offered them as burnt offerings, that is, he laid wood, placed the sacrifices on the wood, and burned them to the Lord. This was a notable liturgical development at the level of the rite of offering the sacrifice, and at another level, the liturgy of place, since he built an altar! \[Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.\] (Gen 8:20).

The use of this rite continued in the primitive liturgy after Noah, and this appeared in the sacrifice of our father Abraham when he offered a sacrifice on an altar to the Lord in (Gen 12:7) \[Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, "To your descendants I will give this land." And there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.\] But God asked Abraham for a sacrifice that is considered relatively strange, which brought about a tremendous development at the prophetic level of the true sacrifice, that is, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus on the Cross, for the Lord asked Abraham to take Isaac his son whom he loved and offer him as a burnt offering to Him on one of the mountains of the land of Moriah \[Then He said, "Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you."\] (Gen 22:9).

Abraham offered this sacrifice also according to the same rite of the primitive liturgy known since the days of Noah, for he built an altar, took the wood and placed it on the altar to burn the sacrifice, then took the sacrifice (his son) and placed it on the altar. A development also appeared in the liturgy of place, in that he offered the sacrifice up on a mountain (Gen 22:9). God did not will that Abraham slay his son, but redeemed Isaac with a ram (Gen 22:13), once again declaring the liturgy of this age, and doing so clearly.

Nor can we speak of our father Abraham without mentioning the wonderful and unprecedented sacrifice of Melchizedek the priest, which is the second sacrifice of prophetic dimension offered by man in history, for he offered bread and wine. Scripture says nothing about him except that he was a priest of God Most High, and the strange thing is that the order of priesthood had not yet appeared at all, nothing was known of a liturgy of the offering of bread and wine, and it had no origins since the beginning of history. It was as if it were a hidden mystery, about which divine inspiration chose to speak only in simple words, declaring that the time for the mystery of the Eucharistic liturgy had not yet come to be revealed; rather, Melchizedek and his offering were also a shadow of a reality we would not know except in the Church of the New Testament. \[Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was the priest of God Most High.\] (Gen 14:18)

And since we have spoken of the time of our father Abraham, the friend of God, we must also speak of righteous Job, for many studies conducted on the Book of Job have established that this book is one of the first books written in history, and, more important than that, the studies have stated that Job the righteous lived in the period between Noah and Abraham![^1]

Noah also offered a sacrifice according to the same rite of the primitive liturgy, and the Book of Job says: \[So it was, when the days of feasting had run their course, that Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, "It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts." Thus Job did regularly.\] (Job 1:5).

And in his sacrifice a new liturgical element appeared, for he offered the sacrifice on behalf of his children, announcing also a liturgical development, namely the possibility of offering the sacrifice on behalf of others. That is, the sacrifice was no longer limited to the individual but could also be offered on behalf of the community, and with this the first features of the liturgy of the Church of the wilderness appeared, which became a liturgy in the true and complete sense.

The sacrifices remained at this level in rite and liturgy, and this also appeared in the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 26:25) and the sacrifice of Jacob (Gen 33:20). And as in the days of Abraham, God chose a place for Jacob at which to offer a burnt offering, namely Bethel \[Then God said to Jacob, "Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there; and make an altar there to God, who appeared to you when you fled from the face of Esau your brother."\] (Gen 35:1). As we mentioned, the rite of the liturgy is something delivered by God; so God chose this place, blessed it and sanctified it, just as He also chose the land of Moriah for Abraham to be a place for His name, and asked Jacob to offer the sacrifice in it.

The primitive liturgy continued even in the age of Moses before reaching Mount Sinai, for from the mountain the Old Testament Church came down with its rite and its wonderful liturgy. The first sacrifice mentioned after the sacrifice of our father Jacob was the sacrifice of Moses the prophet after he fought Amalek and prevailed \[And Moses built an altar and called its name, The-Lord-Is-My-Banner\] (Exod 17:15)

And at the mountain the balance shifted, for the liturgy of the Church of the wilderness gradually seeped through until it appeared in complete form in the Tent of Meeting. The most important manifestation of the development of the liturgy at this time was the covenant of blood through the altar!

\[And Moses took half the blood and put it in basins, and half the blood he sprinkled on the altar. 7 Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read in the hearing of the people. And they said, "All that the Lord has said we will do, and be obedient." 8 And Moses took the blood, sprinkled it on the people, and said, "This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you according to all these words."\] (Exod 24:6).

This declaration is considered the third prophetic declaration of the sacrifice, for it was announced in it that there is no covenant without the shedding of blood, so that the shedding of Christ's blood might be the covenant of reconciliation between God and man!

From here the Church of the wilderness began to appear with the appearance of the covenant, or the Law and the commandment, and the Old Testament Church appeared with its wonderful rites and liturgy, which are a shadow of the heavenly liturgy, and the bride of the Old Testament came down from the mountain adorned with all the beauty of her king and lord, Yahweh the Holy.

**Mount Sinai and the Main Features of the Church of the Wilderness (the Old Testament Church) and Its Liturgy:**\
\[The Church remained in the mind of God from eternity, and when the time came for her to be revealed to men, the Lord showed her to Moses on the mountain. After Moses fasted forty days and forty nights, God showed him a tent not made with hands, and commanded him to make everything according to the pattern that his eyes had seen (Exodus 25:40), Hebrews (8:5). So the design of the Church was not from man but from God. The Church came down from the mountain while she was in the mind of Moses, until all the people completed her building on earth, with all precision, inspiration and obedience. Thus she became the church of the mountain and the wilderness, the first church of man, a church resembling the heavenly things and their shadow, the dwelling place of God among His people, and the place of the people's worship of their Lord God.\] [^2]

The primitive liturgy remained at work until the people of God came out of the land of Egypt and reached Mount Sinai, for these sacrifices were the solid foundation that paved the way for the appearance of the liturgy of the Church of the wilderness. Moses the prophet, who received the Law and the rite of the liturgy of the Church of the wilderness, had a wide background in the sacrifices of the primitive liturgy and their rite, as we explained that he offered his sacrifice after the war with Amalek and the victory over them, according to the same method as the primitive liturgy.

On this basis, and in the last of God's plagues upon the land of Egypt, God appointed a plague, the death of the firstborn, to proclaim in this plague a mystery that showed a profound development in the primitive liturgy, until this liturgy reached its furthest development when God declared the mystery of the Passover lamb. For it was not possible for the Church of the wilderness to come forth except through the blood of the Passover lamb, since this lamb was a type of the slain Christ, as St. Paul the Apostle made clear in his first epistle to the Corinthians: \[Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you are truly unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.\] (1 Cor 5:7).

And we notice the Apostle's use of the word (our Passover), declaring thereby that the Passover lamb was a type of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross; and just as the Church of the New Testament came forth from the sacrifice of the Cross, so also the Church of the Old Testament came forth from the sacrifice of the Passover.

God did not will to declare the liturgy of the Old Testament Church clearly unless the Passover were first completed and the people cleansed by the blood of the Passover lamb, declaring thereby that the Church cannot appear unless He Himself establishes her. As we explained, it was God who chose the liturgy of place, as He chose the land of Moriah for the sacrifice of our father Abraham and Bethel for the sacrifice of our father Jacob, as an indication that the Church, which is the dwelling of God with men, can only spring forth through the blood of redemption, even if symbolically, since the Passover lamb was an image and type of the slain Christ, as we explained

In this regard the late Anba Youannes, Bishop of Gharbiya, says: \[But God did not dwell with these people despite His love for them.. Why? Because it was not possible for God to dwell among His people except after the redemption by blood was completed, even symbolically, that is, after reconciliation. The Passover lamb had to be slain, and the people had to go out by the power of the blood, and be freed from slavery, before God could have a holy house in their midst!!\][^3]

From the blood of the Passover lamb (Exod 12:7), and afterward the blood of the covenant with which the people were sprinkled before going up to Mount Sinai to meet God (Exod 24:6), the Old Testament Church came forth with her liturgy, her rite, her sacrifices and her feasts, to be the seed and the solid foundation on which the Church of the New Testament would later be built, with her rites, liturgies and feasts, and everything we will include in this study.

And among the foundations on which the Old Testament Church was built, after her cornerstone, who is Christ Himself pictured in the image of the Passover lamb, was the fear of God, as a declaration that no true worship can stand, and no firm liturgy can be established apart from a living relationship with God, unless this liturgy passes through the furnace of the fear of God, if one may say so; for the fear of God is the solid foundation on which divine love is built, which, as we explained, is the root on which our worship fundamentally stands.

For a good understanding of this article, please read the article before it [here](/en/blog/orthodox-worship-church-fathers)

[^1]: Introduction to the commentary on the Book of Job, by Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty (Muqaddimat Tafsīr Sifr Ayyūb).
[^2]: al-Kanīsa Mabnāhā wa Ma‘nāhā [The Church: Its Structure and Meaning] – Fr. Athanasius al-Maqari, p. 18
[^3]: al-‘Ibāda fī Kanīsatinā: Dalālatuhā wa Rūḥānīyatuhā [Worship in Our Church: Its Significance and Spirituality] – the late Anba Youannes, Bishop of Gharbiya, p. 12

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Source: https://abba.fadymondy.com/en/blog/liturgy-in-the-old-testament