Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/752

Rh 728 PRIEST tuary of equal dignity. The priest of Shiloh is a much greater person than Micah s priest Jonathan ; at the great feasts he sits enthroned by the doorway, preserving decorum among the worshippers ; he has certain legal dues, and if he is disposed to exact more no one ventures to resist (1 Sam. ii. 12 sq., where the text needs a slight correction). The priestly position of the family survived the fall of Shiloh and the captivity of the ark, and it was members of this house who consulted Jehovah for the early kings until Solomon deposed Abiathar. Indeed, though priesthood was not yet tied to one family, so that Micah s son, or Eleazar of Kirjath-jearim (1 Sam. vii. 1), or David s sons (2 Sam. viii. 18) could all be priests, a Levite that is, a man of Moses tribe was already preferred for the office elsewhere than at Shiloh (Judges xvii. 13), and such a priest naturally handed down his place to his posterity (Judges xviii. 30). Ultimately, indeed, as sanctuaries were multiplied and the priests all over the land came to form one well-marked class, &quot;Levite&quot; and legitimate priest became equivalent expressions, as has been explained in detail in the article LEVITES. But between the priesthood of Eli at Shiloh or Jonathan at Dan and the priesthood of the Levites as described in Deut. xxxiii. 8 sq. there lies a period of the inner history of which we know almost nothing. It is plain that the various priestly colleges regarded themselves as one order, that they had common traditions of law and ritual which were traced back to Moses, and common interests which had not been vindicated without a struggle (Deut., ut sup.). The kingship had not deprived them of their functions as fountains of divine judgment (comp. Deut. xvii. 8 sq.) ; on the contrary, the decisions of the sanctuary had grown up into a body of sacred law, which the priests administered according to a traditional preced ent.- According to Semitic ideas the declaration of law is quite a distinct function from the enforcing of it, and the royal executive came into no collision with the purely declaratory functions of the priests. The latter, on the contrary, must have grown in importance with the unifica tion and progress of the nation, and in all probability the consolidation of the priesthood into one class went hand in hand with a consolidation of legal tradition. And this work must have been well done, for, though the general corruption of society at the beginning of the Assyrian period was nowhere more conspicuous than at the sanctu aries and among the priesthood, the invective of Hos. iv. equally with the eulogium of Deut. xxxiii. proves that the position which the later priests abused had been won by ancestors who earned the respect of the nation as worthy representatives of a divine Torah. The ritual functions of the priesthood still appear in Deut. xxxiii. as secondary to that of declaring the sentence of God, but they were no longer insignificant. With the prosperity of the nation, and especially through the absorp tion of the Canaanites and of their holy places, ritual had become much more elaborate, and in royal sanctuaries at least there were regular public offerings maintained by the king and presented by the priests (comp. 2 Kings xvi. 15). Private sacrifices, too, could hardly be offered without some priestly aid now that ritual was more complex ; the pro vision of Deut. xviii. as to the priestly dues is certainly ancient, and shows that besides the tribute of first-fruits and the like the priests had a fee in kind for each sacrifice, as we find to have been the case among the Phoenicians accord ing to the sacrificial tablet of Marseilles. Their judicial functions also brought profit to the priests, fines being exacted for certain offences and paid to them (2 Kings xii. 16; Hos. iv. 8; Amos ii. 8). The greater priestly offices were therefore in every respect very important places, and the priests of the royal sanctuaries were among the grandees of the realm (2 Sam. viii. 18; 2 Kings x. 11, xii. 2) ; minor offices in the sanctuaries were in the patronage of the great priests and were often miserable enough, 1 the petty priest depending largely on what &quot;customers&quot; he could find (2 Kings xii. 7 [8]; Deut. xviii. 8). That at least the greater offices were hereditary as in the case of the sons of Zadok, who succeeded to the royal priesthood in Jerusalem after the fall of Abiathar was almost a matter of course as society was then constituted, but there is not the slightest trace of an hereditary hierarchy officiating by divine right, such as existed after the exile. The sons of Zadok, the priests of the royal chapel, were the king s servants as absolutely as any other great officers of state ; they owed their place to the fiat of King Solomon, and the royal will was supreme in all matters of cultus (2 Kings xii., xvi. 10 sq.); indeed the monarchs of Judah, like those of other nations, did sacrifice in person when they chose down to the time of the captivity (1 Kings ix. 25 ; 2 Kings xvi. 12 sq.; Jer. xxx. 21). And as the sons of Zadok had no divine right as against the kings, so too they had no claim to be more legitimate than the priests of the local sanctuaries, who also were reckoned to the tribe which in the 7th century B.C. was recognized as having been divinely set apart as Jehovah s ministers in the days of Moses (Deut. x. 8, xviii. 1 sq.). The steps which prepared the way for the post-exile hierarchy, the destruction of the northern sanctuaries and priesthoods by the Assyrians, the polemic of the spiritual prophets against the corruptions of popular worship, which issued in the reformation of Josiah, the suppression of the provincial shrines of Judah and the transference of their ministers to Jerusalem, the successful resistance of the sons of Zadok to the proposal to share the sanctuary on equal terms with these new-comers, and the theoretical justifica tion of the degradation of the latter to the position of mere servants in the temple supplied by Ezekiel soon after the captivity, have already been explained in the article LEVITES and in PENTATEUCH (vol. xviii. p. 510), and only one or two points call for additional remark here. It is instructive to observe how differently the prophets of the 8th century speak of the judicial or &quot;teaching&quot; functions of the priests and of the ritual of the great sanctuaries. For the latter they have nothing but con demnation, but the former they acknowledge as part of the divine order of the state, while they complain that the priests have prostituted their office for lucre. In point of fact the one rested on old Hebrew tradition, the other had taken shape mainly under Canaanite influence, and in most of its features was little more than the crassest nature- worship. In this respect there was no distinction between the temple of Zion and other shrines, or rather it was just in the greatest sanctuary with the most stately ritual that foreign influences had most play, as we see alike in the original institutions of Solomon and in the innovations of Ahaz (2 Kings xvi. 10 sq., xxiii. 11 sq.). The Canaanite influence on the later organization of the temple is clearly seen in the association of temple prophets with the temple priests under the control of the chief priest, which is often referred to by Jeremiah ; even the viler ministers of sensual worship, the male and female prostitutes of the Phoenician temples, had found a place on Mount Zion and were only removed by Josiah s reformation. 2 So, too, the more com plex sacrificial ritual which was now in force is manifestly not independent of the Phoenician ritual as we know it from the Marseilles tablet. All this necessarily tended to make the ritual ministry of the priests more important 1 See 1 Sam. ii. 36, a passage written after the hereditary dignity of the sons of Zadok at Jerusalem was well established. 2 2 Kings xxiii. 7; comp. Deut. xxiii. 18, where &quot;dogs&quot;= the later Galli ; comp. Corp. Insc. Sem. , i. 93 sq.