Anointing Oil

Exodus 30:22 to 33 gives Moses a precise formula for the anointing oil used to consecrate the Tabernacle, the ark and its furnishings, and Aaron and his sons as priests: a stated weight of pure myrrh, sweet cinnamon, sweet calamus and cassia compounded into a hin, an ancient liquid measure, of olive oil according to 'the art of the perfumer.' The text is unusually specific for a ritual instruction, giving exact quantities rather than general guidance, and it immediately restricts the resulting compound's use: it may be poured only on the Tabernacle, its vessels and the priesthood being consecrated, may never be poured on the body of an ordinary person, and no one may compound its equivalent for private use, on pain of being cut off from their people, a formula of exclusion the Torah uses elsewhere for its most serious ritual offenses.

Beyond the priesthood's initial consecration, the Hebrew Bible's narrative books describe kings of Israel anointed with oil at their accession, Saul, David and Solomon among them, an act that gave the Hebrew term for anointed, mashiach, messiah, the royal and later eschatological associations it carries through the rest of Jewish and Christian tradition. Whether royal anointing used the identical Exodus 30 compound or a related but distinct oil is a question the biblical text does not settle explicitly, and later rabbinic sources debate the point directly.

Rabbinic tradition, recorded in the Talmud, tractate Horayot and elsewhere, and later codified by Maimonides, holds that the original batch of anointing oil compounded by Moses in the wilderness miraculously never diminished despite centuries of use anointing successive High Priests and, in Jewish tradition, several kings, and remained in use through the First Temple period until it was hidden away, according to rabbinic accounts by King Josiah before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, anticipating the exile. The Second Temple, built after the return from Babylonian exile, is understood in this tradition to have functioned without the original anointing oil at all, its priests consecrated instead by investiture with the priestly garments alone, a change rabbinic sources treat as one of several ways the Second Temple's sanctity was held to fall short of the First's.

The oil's disappearance placed it, alongside the Ark of the Covenant itself, among the sacred objects Jewish tradition holds are hidden rather than destroyed, expected in some eschatological readings to be restored in a future messianic age together with a rebuilt Temple. Maimonides' legal code, the Mishneh Torah, discusses the anointing oil's original composition and its restricted status in detail as part of his broader codification of Temple law, preserving the Exodus recipe and its prohibitions as a matter of settled halakhah even though, in the absence of a Temple, the law has had no occasion for practical application for two millennia, one of a substantial body of Temple-dependent commandments Jewish law retains in codified form pending, in traditional belief, a future restoration.