Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/751

Rh PRIEST 727 munity are submitted. In Greece and Rome the public sacrifices were the chief function of religion, and in them the priesthood represented the ancient kings. But in the desert there is no king and no sovereignty save that of the divine oracle, and therefore it is from the soothsayers or ministers of the oracle that a public ministry of religion can most naturally spring. With the beginning of a settled state the sanctuaries must rise in importance and all the functions of revelation will gather round them. A sacri ficial priesthood will arise as the worship becomes more complex (especially as sacrifice in antiquity is a common preliminary to the consultation of an oracle), but the public ritual will still remain closely associated with oracle or divination, and the priest will still be, above all things, a revealer. That this was what actually happened may be inferred from the fact that the Canaanite and Phoenician name for a priest (kdhen) is identical with the Arabic kdkin, a &quot;soothsayer.&quot; Soothsaying was no modern im portation in Arabia; its characteristic form a monotonous croon of short rhyming clauses is the same as was prac tised by the Hebrew &quot; wizards who peeped and muttered &quot; in the days of Isaiah, and that this form was native in Arabia is clear from its having a technical name (saf), Avhich in Hebrew survives only in derivative words with modified sense. 1 The Tcdhin, therefore, is not a degraded priest but such a soothsayer as is found in most primitive societies, and the Canaanite priests grew out of these early revealers. In point of fact some form of revelation or oracle appears to have existed in every great shrine of Canaan and Syria, 2 and the importance of this element in the cultus may be measured from the fact that at Hierapolis it was the charge of the chief priest, just as in the Leviti- cal legislation. But the use of &quot;kahin&quot; for &quot;priest&quot; in the Canaanite area points to more than this : it is connected with the orgiastic character of Canaanite religion. The soothsayer differs from the priest of an oracle by giving his revelation under excitement and often in a frenzy allied to madness. In natural soothsaying this frenzy is the necessary physical accompaniment of an afflatus which, though it seems supernatural to a rude people, is really akin to poetic inspiration. But it is soon learned that a similar physical state can be produced artificially, and at the Canaanite sanctuaries this was done on a large scale. We see from 1 Kings xviii., 2 Kings x., that the great Baal temples had two classes of ministers, kokdnlm and nebmm, &quot;priests&quot; and &quot; prophets,&quot; and as the former bear a name which primarily denotes a soothsayer, so the latter are also a kind of priests who do sacrificial service with a wild ritual of their own. How deeply the orgiastic character was stamped on the priesthoods of north Semitic nature-worship is clear from Greek and Roman accounts, such as that of Appuleius (Metam., bk. viii.). Sensuality and religious excitement of the wildest kind went hand in hand, and a whole army of degraded ministers of a religion of the passions was gathered round every famous shrine. The Hebrews, who made the language of Canaan their own, took also the Canaanite name for a priest. But the earliest forms of Hebrew priesthood are not Canaanite in character ; the priest, as he appears in the older records of the time of the Judges, Eli at Shiloh, Jonathan in the private temple of Micah and at Dan, is much liker the xadin than the kdhin. 3 The whole structure of Hebrew 1 Meshugga. , 2 Kings ix. 11, Jer. xxix. 26, a term of contempt applied to prophets. 2 For examples, see PALMYRA and PH^ISTINES ; see further, Lucian, De Dea Syria, 36, for Hierapolis ; Zosimus, i. 58, for Aphaca ; Pliny, II, N., xxxvii. 58 (compared with Lucian, ut supra, and Movers, Phoe- nizier, i. 655), for the temple of Melkart at Tyre. 3 This appears even in the words used as synonyms for &quot;priest,&quot; mK E, t)Dn &quot;IDt^, which exactly correspond to sddin and hajib. That the name of |!&quot;D was borrowed from the Canaanites appears certain, society at the time of the conquest was almost precisely that of a federation of Arab tribes, and the religious ordi nances are scarcely distinguishable from those of Arabia, save only that the great deliverance of the Exodus and the period when Moses, sitting in judgment at the sanctuary of Kadesh, had for a whole generation impressed the sovereignty of Jehovah on all the tribes, had created an idea of unity between the scattered settlements in Canaan such as the Arabs before Mohammed never had. But neither in civil nor in religious life was this ideal unity expressed in fixed institutions; the old individualism of the Semitic nomad still held its ground. Thus the firstlings, first-fruits, and vows are still the free gift of the individual which no human authority exacts, and which every house holder presents and consumes with his circle in a sacrificial feast without priestly aid. As in Arabia, the ordinary sanc tuary is still a sacred stone (i&quot;Q5ttp = nosb) set up under the open heaven, and here the blood of the victim is poured out as an offering to God (see especially 1 Sam. xiv. 34, and compare 2 Sam. xxiii. 16, 17). The priest has no place in this ritual ; he is not the minister of an altar, 4 but the guardian of a temple, such as was already found here and there in the land for the custody of sacred images and palladia or other consecrated things (the ark at Shiloh, 1 Sam. iii. 3 ; images in Micah s temple, Judges xvii. 5 ; Goliath s sword lying behind the &quot; ephod &quot; or plated image at Nob, 1 Sam. xxi. 9 ; no doubt also money, as in the Canaanite temple at Shechem, Judges ix. 4). Such trea sures required a guardian ; but, above all, wherever there was a temple there was an oracle, a kind of sacred lot, just as in Arabia (1 Sam. xiv. 41, Sept.), which could only be drawn where there was an &quot;ephod&quot; and a priest (1 Sam. xiv. 18 Sept. and xxiii. 6 sq.). The Hebrews had already possessed a tent-temple and oracle of this kind in the wilderness (Exod. xxxiii. 7 sq.), of which Moses was, the priest and Joshua the sedituus, and ever since that time the judgment of God through the priest at the sanctuary had a greater weight than the word of a seer, and was the ultimate solution of every controversy and claim (1 Sam. ii. 25 ; Exod. xxi. 6, xxii. 8, 9, where for &quot;judge,&quot; &quot;judges,&quot; read &quot; God &quot;). The temple at Shiloh, where the ark was preserved, was the lineal descendant of the Mosaic sanctuary for it was not the place but the palladium and its oracle that were the essential thing and its priests claimed kin with Moses himself. In the divided state of the nation, indeed, this sanctuary was hardly visited from beyond Mount Ephraim ; and every man or tribe that cared to provide the necessary apparatus (ephod, teraphim, &c.) and hire a priest might have a temple and oracle of his own at which to consult Jehovah (Judges xvii., xviii.) ; but there was hardly another sanc- for that out of the multiplicity of words for soothsayers and the like common to Hebrew and Arabic (either formed from a common root or expressing exactly the same idea &quot;OyV, arraf ; &quot;OH, habir ; iljn, n&O, hazi ; DDp, comp. istiksam) the two nations should have chosen the same one independently to mean a priest is, in view of the great difference in character between old Hebrew and Canaanite priest hoods, inconceivable. Besides |i&quot;D Hebrew has the word &quot;ID3 (pi. D HIDD), which, however, is hardly applied to priests of the national religion. This, in fact, is the old Aramaic word for a priest (with suffixed article, kumra ). Its origin is obscure, but, as it belongs to a race in which the mass of the people were probably not circumcised (Herod., ii. 104, compared with Joseph., Ant., viii. 10, 3, and C. Ap., i. 22) while the priests were (Dio Cassius, Ixxix. 11 ; Ep. Bamabie, ix. 6 ; comp. Chwolson, Ssabier, ii. 114), it may be conjectured that kumra means the circumcised (Ar. kmnara, &quot; glans penis &quot;). 4 It is not clear from 1 Sam. ii. 15 whether even at Shiloh the priest had anything to do with sacrifice, whether those who burned the fat were the worshippers themselves or some subordinate ministers of the temple. Certainly it was not &quot;the priest&quot; who did so, for he in this narrative is always in the singular. Hophni and Phinehas are not called priests, though they bore the ark, and so were priests in the sense of Josh. iii.