Prolegomena to the History of Israel Part 10

In the Book of the Covenant it is commanded that a Hebrew who has been bought as a slave must after six years of service be liberated on the seventh unless he himself wishes to remain (Exodus xxi. 2-6).

By the same authority it is ordained in another pa.s.sage that the land and fruit-gardens are to be wrought and their produce gathered for six years, but on the seventh the produce is to be surrendered (#M+), that the poor of the people may eat, and what they leave the beasts of the field may at (xxiii. 10, 11). Here there is no word of a sabbatical year. The liberation of the Hebrew slave takes place six years after his purchase, that is, the term is a relative one. In like manner, in the other ordinance there is nothing to indicate an absolute seventh year; and besides, it is not a Sabbath or fallow time for the _land_ that is contemplated, but a surrender of the _harvest_.

The first of these commands is repeated in Deuteronomy without material alteration, and to a certain extent word for word (xv.

12-18). The other has at least an a.n.a.logue in Deuteronomy xv. 1-6: "At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release (surrender, s*m+h), and this is the manner of it; no creditor that lendeth aught shall exact it of his neighbour or of his brother, because Jehovah's release has been proclaimed; of a foreigner thou mayst exact it again, but that which is of thine with thy brother, thy hand shall release."

That this precept is parallel with Exodus xxiii. 10, 11, is shown by the word #m+h~; but this has a different meaning put upon it which plainly is introduced as new. Here it is not landed property that is being dealt with, but money, and what has to be surrendered is not the interest of the debt merely (comparable to the fruit of the soil), but the capital itself; the last clause admits of no other construction, however unsuitable the regulation may be. A step towards the sabbatical year is discernible in it, in so far as the seventh year term is not a different one for each individual debt according to the date when it was incurred (in which case it might have been simply a period of prescription), but is a uniform and common term publicly fixed: it is absolute, not relative. But it does not embrace the whole seventh year, it does not come in at the end of six years as in Exodus, but at the end of seven; the surrender of the harvest demands the whole year, the remission of debts, comparatively speaking, only a moment.

The sabbatical year is peculiar to the Priestly Code, or, to speak more correctly, to that collection of laws incorporated and edited by it, which lies at the basis of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi. In Leviticus xxv. 1-7 we read: "When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath to Jehovah. Six years shalt thou sow thy field and prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall the land keep a Sabbath of rest unto Jehovah: thy field shalt thou not sow, thy vineyard shalt thou not prune; that which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest shalt thou not reap, neither shalt thou gather the grapes of thy vine undressed; the land shall have a year of rest, and the Sabbath of the land shall be food for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy cattle, and for all the beasts that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be food."

The expressions make it impossible to doubt that Exodus xxiii. 10, 11 lies at the foundation of this law; but out of this as a basis it is something different that has been framed. The seventh year, which is there a relative one, has here become fixed,--not varying for the various properties, but common for the whole land, a sabbatical year after the manner of the Sabbath day. This amounts to a serious increase in the difficulty of the matter, for it is not one and the same thing to have the abstinence from harvest spread over seven years and to have it concentrated into one out of every seven. In like manner a heightening of the demand is also seen in the circ.u.mstance that not merely harvesting but also sowing and dressing are forbidden. In the original commandment this was not the case; all that was provided for was that in the seventh year the harvest should not fall to the lot of the proprietor of the soil, but should be _publici juris_,--a relic perhaps of communistic agriculture. Through a mere misunderstanding of the verbal suffix in Exodus xxiii. 11, as has been conjectured by Hupfeld, a surrender of the _fruit_ of the land has been construed into a surrender of tbe land itself--a general fallow year (Leviticus xxv. 4). The misunderstanding, however, is not accidental, but highly characteristic.

In Exodus xxiii. the arrangement is made for man; it is a limitation, for the common good, of private rights of property in land,--in fact, for the benefit of the landless, who in the seventh year are to have the usufruct of the soil; in Leviticus xxv. the arrangement is for the sake of the land,--that it may rest, if not on the seventh day, at least on the seventh year, and for the sake of the Sabbath-- that it may extend its supremacy over nature also. Of course this presupposes the extreme degree of Sabbath observance by absolute rest, and becomes comprehensible only when viewed as an outgrowth from that. For the rest, a universal fallow season is possible only under circ.u.mstances in which a people are to a considerable extent independent of the products of their own agriculture; prior to the exile even the idea of such a thing could hardly have occurred.

In the Priestly Code the year of jubilee is further added to supplement in turn the sabbatical year (Leviticus xxv. 8 seq.).

As the latter is framed to correspond with the seventh day, so the former corresponds with the fiftieth, i.e., with Pentecost, as is easily perceived from the parallelism of Leviticus xxv. 8 with Leviticus xxiii. 15. Asthe fiftieth day after the seven Sabbath days is celebrated as a closing festival of the forty-nine days' period, so is the fiftieth year after the seven sabbatic years as rounding off the larger interval; the seven Sabbaths falling on harvest time, which are usually reckoned specially (Luke vi. 1 ), have, in the circ.u.mstance of their interrupting harvest work, a particular resemblance to the sabbatic years which interrupt agriculture altogether. Jubilee is thus an artificial inst.i.tution superimposed upon the years of fallow regarded as harvest Sabbaths after the a.n.a.logy of Pentecost. Both its functions appear originally to have belonged also to the Sabbath year and to be deduced from the two corresponding regulations in Deuteronomy relating to the seventh year, so that thus Exod xxiii. would be the basis of Leviticus xxv. 1-7 and Deuteronomy xv. that of xxv. 8 seq. The emanc.i.p.ation of the Hebrew slave originally had to take place on the seventh year after the purchase, afterwards (it would seem) on the seventh vear absolutely; for practical reasons it was transferred from that to the fiftieth. a.n.a.logous also, doubtless, is the growth of the other element in the jubilee--the return of mortgaged property to its hereditary owner--out of the remission of debts enjoined in Deuteronomy xv. for the end of the seventh year; for the two hang very closely together, as Leviticus xxv. 23 seq. shows.

As for the evidence for these various arrangements, those of the Book of the Covenant are presupposed alike by Deuteronomy and by the Priestly Code. It seems to have been due to the prompting of Deuteronomy that towards the end of the reign of Zedekiah the emanc.i.p.ation of the Hebrew slaves was seriously gone about; the expressions in Jeremiah x.x.xiv. 14 point to Deuteronomy xv. 12, and not to Exodus xxi. 2. The injunction not having had practical effect previously, it was in this instance carried through by all parties at the same date: this was of course inevitable when it was introduced as an extraordinary innovation; perhaps it is in connexion with this that a fixed seventh year grew out of a relative one. The sabbatical year, according to the legislator's own declaration, was never observed throughout the whole pre-exilic period; for, according to Leviticus xxvi. 34, 35, the desolation of the land during the exile is to be a compensation made for the previously neglected fallow years: "Then shall the land pay its Sabbaths as long as it lieth desolate; when ye are in your enemies' land then shall the land rest and pay its Sabbaths; all the days that it lieth desolate shall it rest, which it rested not in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon it."

The verse is quoted in 2Chronicles x.x.xvi. 21 as the language of Jeremiah,-- a correct and unprejudiced indication of its exilic origin. But as the author of Leviticus xxvi. was also the writer of Leviticus xxv. 1-7, that is to say, the framer of the law of the sabbatic year, the recent date of the latter regulation also follows at once. The year of jubilee, certainly derived from the Sabbath year, is of still later origin. Jeremiah (x.x.xiv. 14) has not the faintest idea that the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves must according to "law" take place in the fiftieth year. The name drwr, borne by the jubilee in Leviticus xxv. 10, is applied by him to the seventh year; and this is decisive also for Ezekiel xlvi. 17: the gift of land bestowed by the prince on one of his servants remains in his possession only until the seventh year.

CHAPTER IV. THE PRIESTS AND THE LEVITES.

IV.I.

IV.I.1 The problem now to be dealt with is exhibited with peculiar distinctness in one pregnant case with which it will be well to set out. The Mosaic law, that is to say, the Priestly Code, distinguishes, as is well known, between the twelve secular tribes and Levi, and further within the spiritual tribe itself, between the sons of Aaron and the Levites, simply so called. The one distinction is made visible in the ordering of the camp in Numbers ii., where Levi forms around the sanctuary a cordon of protection against the immediate contact of the remaining tribes; on the whole, however, it is rather treated as a matter of course, and not brought into special prominence (Numbers xviii. 22). The other is accentuated with incomparably greater emphasis. Aaron and his sons alone are priests, qualified for sacrificing and burning incense; the Levites are hieroduli (3 Esdras i. 3), bestowed upon the Aaronidae for the discharge of the inferior services (Numbers iii. 9). They are indeed their tribe fellows, but it is not because he belongs to Levi that Aaron is chosen, and his priesthood cannot be said to be the acme and flower of the general vocation of his tribe. On the contrary, rather was he a priest long before the Levites were set apart; for a considerable time after the cultus has been established and set on foot these do not make any appearance,--not at all in the whole of the third book, which thus far does little honour to its name _Leviticus_. Strictly speaking, the Levites do not even belong to the clergy: they are not called by Jehovah, but consecrated by the children of Israel to the sanctuary,--consecrated in the place of the first-born, not however as priests (neither in Numbers iii., iv., viii., nor anywhere else in the Old Testament, is there a single trace of the priesthood of the first-born), but as a gift due to the priests, as such being even required to undergo the usual "waving" before the altar, to symbolise their being cast into the altar flame (Numbers viii.).

The relations.h.i.+p between Aaron and Levi, and the circ.u.mstance that precisely this tribe is set apart for the sanctuary in compensation for the first-born, appears almost accidental, but at all events cannot be explained by the theory that Aaron rose on the shoulders of Levi; on the contrary, it rather means that Levi has mounted up by means of Aaron, whose priesthood everywhere is treated as having the priority. Equality between the two is not to be spoken of; their office and their blood relations.h.i.+p separates them more than it binds them together.

Now, the prophet Ezekiel, in the plan of the new Jerusalem which he sketched in the year 573, takes up among other things the reform of the relations of the _personnel_ of the temple, and in this connection expresses himself as follows (xliv. 6-16):-- "Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Let it suffice you of all your abominations, O house of Israel! in that ye have brought in strangers, uncirc.u.mcised in heart and uncirc.u.mcised in flesh, to be in my sanctuary, to pollute it, even my house, when ye offer my bread, the fat and the blood, and have broken my covenant by all your abominations. And ye have not kept the charge of my holy things, inasmuch as ye have set these /1/ to be keepers of my

In ver. 7 for WYPRW read WTPRW, in ver. 8 for WT#YMWN read WT#YMWM, and for LKM read LKN, in each case following the LXX.

charge in my sanctuary. Therefore, thus saith the Lord Jehovah, No stranger uncirc.u.mcised in heart and uncirc.u.mcised in flesh shall enter into my sanctuary; none, of all that are among the children of Israel. But the Levites who went away far from me when Israel went astray from me after their idols, they shall even bear their iniquity, and they shall be ministers in my sanctuary, officers at the gates of the house and ministers of the house; they shall slay for the people the burnt-offering and the thank-offering, and they shall stand before them to minister unto them. Because they ministered unto them before their idols, and caused the house of Israel to fall into iniquity, therefore have I lifted up my hand against them, saith the Lord Jehovah, and they shall bear their iniquity. They shall not come near unto me to do the office of a priest unto me, nor to come near to any of my holy things, but they shall bear their shame and their abominations which they have committed. And I will make them keepers of the charge of the house, for all its service, and for all that shall be done therein. But the priests, the Levites, sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of my sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from me, they shall come near to me to minister unto me, and they shall stand before me to offer unto me the fat and the blood, saith the Lord Jehovah; they shall enter into my sanctuary, and come near to my table to minister unto me, and they shall keep my charge."

From this pa.s.sage two things are to be learned. First, that the systematic separation of that which was holy from profane contact did not exist from the very beginning; that in the temple of Solomon even heathen (Zech. xiv. 21), probably captives, were employed to do hierodulic services which, according to the law, ought to have been rendered by Levites, and which afterwards actually were so rendered. Ezekiel, it is indeed true, holds this custom to be a frightful abuse, and one might therefore maintain it to have been a breach of the temple ordinances suffered by the Jerusalem priests against their better knowledge, and in this way escape accusing them of ignorance of their own law. But the second fact, made manifest by the above-quoted pa.s.sage, quite excludes the existence of the Priestly Code so far as Ezekiel and his time are concerned. The place of the heathen temple-slaves is in future to be taken by the Levites. Hitherto the latter had held the priesthood, and that too not by arbitrary usurpation, but in virtue of their oun good right. For it is no mere relegation back to within the limits of their lawful position when they are made to be no longer priests but temple ministrants, it is no restoration of the _status quo ante_, the conditions of which they had illegally broken; it is expressly a degradation, a withdrawal of their right, which appears as a punishment and which must be justified as being deserved; "they shall bear their iniquity." They have forfeited their priesthood, by abusing it to preside over the cultus of the high places, which the prophet regards as idolatry and hates in his inmost soul.

Naturally those Levites are exempted from the penalty who have discharged their functions at the legal place,--the Levites the sons of Zadok,--namely, at Jerusalem, who now remain sole priests and receive a position of pre-eminence above those who hitherto have been their equals in office, and who are still a.s.sociated with them by Ezekiel, under the same common name, but now are reduced to being their a.s.sistants and hieroduli.

It is an extraordinary sort of justice when the priests of the abolished Bamoth are punished simply for having been so, and conversely the priests of the temple at Jerusalem rewarded for this; the fault of the former and the merit of the latter consist simply in their existence. In other words, Ezekiel merely drapes the logic of facts with a mantle of morality. From the abolition of the popular sanctuaries in the provinces in favour of the royal one at Jerusalem, there necessarily followed the setting aside of the provincial priesthoods in favour of the sons of Zadok at the temple of Solomon. The original author of the centralisation, the Deuteronomic lawgiver, seeks indeed to prevent this consequence by giving to the extraneous Levites an equal right of sacrificing in Jerusalem with their brethren hereditarily settled there, but it was not possible to separate the fate of the priests from that of their altars in this manner. The sons of Zadok were well enough pleased that all sacrifices should be concentrated within their temple, but they did not see their way to sharing their inheritance with the priesthood of the high places, and the idea was not carried out (2Kings xxiii. 9). Ezekiel, a thorough Jerusalemite, finds a moral way of putting this departure from the law, a way of putting it which does not explain the fact, but is merely a periphrastic statement of it. With Deuteronomy as a basis it is quite easy to understand Ezekiel's ordinance, but it is absolutely impossible if one starts from the Priestly Code.

What he regards as the original right of the Levites, the performance of priestly services, is treated in the latter doc.u.ment as an unfounded and highly wicked pretension which once in the olden times brought destruction upon Korah and his company; what he considers to be a subsequent withdrawal of their right, as a degradation in consequence of a fault, the other holds to have been their hereditary and natural destination. The distinction between priest and Levite which Ezekiel introduces and justifies as an innovation, according to the Priestly Code has always existed; what in the former appears as a beginning, in the latter has been in force ever since Moses,--an original datum, not a thing that has become or been made./1/ That the prophet should know

1. "If by reason of their birth it was impossible for the Levites to become priests, then it would be more than strange to deprive them of the priesthood on account of their faults,--much as if one were to threaten the commons with the punishment of disqualification to sit or vote in a house of lords" (Kuenen, Theol. Tijdschr., iii. 465).

nothing about a priestly law with whose tendencies he is in thorough sympathy admits of only one explanation,--that it did not then exist. His own ordinances are only to be understood as preparatory steps towards its own exactment.

IV.I.2. Noldeke, however, interprets the parallelism between the sons of Aaron and the sons of Zadok in favour of the priority of the Priestly Code, which, after all, he points out, is not quite so exclusive as Ezekiel. /1/ But, in the first place, this is a

1 Jahrb. f. prot. Theol., 1875, p. 351: "Its doctrine that the Aaronidae alone are true priests has its parallel in Ezekiel, who _still more exclusively_ recognises only the sons of Zadok as priests."

point of subordinate importance, the main thing being that Ezekiel has to make the distinction between priests and Levites, which is regarded in the Priestly Code as very ancient. In presence of the fact that the former introduces as a new thing the separation which the latter presupposes, the precise degree of the distinction drawn by the two is of no consequence whatever. In the next place, to bring the sons of Aaron into comparison with the sons of Zadok, as a proof of their higher antiquity, is just as reasonable as to bring the tabernacle into comparison with the temple of Jerusalem for a similar purpose. The former are priests of the tabernacle, the latter of the temple; but as in point of fact the only distinction to be drawn between the Mosaic and the actual central sanctuary is that between shadow and substance, so neither can any other be made between the Mosaic and the actual central priesthood. In the Priestly Code the ancient name is introduced instead of the historical one, simply in order to maintain the semblance of the Mosaic time; if the circ.u.mstance is to be taken as betokening the earlier origin of the work, then a similar inference must be drawn also from the fact that in it the origin and character of the Levites is quite obscure, while in Ezekiel it is palpably evident that they are the priests thrown out of employment by the abolition of the Bamoth, whom necessity has compelled to take a position of subordination under their haughty fellow-priests at Jerusalem. In truth it is, quite on the contrary, a proof of the post-exilian date of the Priestly Code that it makes sons of Aaron of the priests of the central sanctuary, who, even in the traditional understanding (2Chronicles xiii. 10), are in one way or other simply the priests of Jerusalem. By this means it carries their origin back to the foundation of the theocracy, and gives them out as from the first having been alone legitimate. But such an idea no one could have ventured to broach before the exile. At that time it was too well known that the priesthood of the Jerusalem sept could not be traced further back than David's time, but dated from Zadok, who in Solomon's reign ousted the hereditary house of Eli from the position it had long previously held, first at s.h.i.+loh and n.o.b, and afterwards at Jerusalem, at what had become the most prominent sanctuary of Israel.

In a pa.s.sage of Deuteronomic complexion, which cannot have been written long before the exile, we read in a prediction made to Eli regarding the overthrow of his house by Zadok: "I said indeed, saith Jehovah the G.o.d of Israel, that thy house and the house of thy father shall walk before me for ever; but now I say, Be it far from me, for them that honour me I will honour, but they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. Behold, the days come that I will cut off thine arm and the arm of thy father's house, ...and I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind; and I will build him a sure house, and he shall walk before mine anointed for ever"

(1Samuel ii. 27-36).

Here it is the house of Eli, and of Eli's father, that is the priestly family duly chosen in Egypt; _contrary_ to hereditary t.i.tle, and contrary to a promise of perpetual continuance, is it deposed at the higher claims of justice. The faithful priest who is to fill the vacant place is Zadok. This is expressly said in 1Kings 2:27; and no other than he ever had a "sure house" and walked uninterruptedly as its head and ruler before the kings of Judah. This Zadok, accordingly, belongs neither to Eli's house nor to that of Eli's father; his priesthood does not go back as far as the time of the founding of the theocracy, and is not in any proper sense "legitimate;"

rather has he obtained it by the infringement of what might be called a const.i.tutional privilege, to which there were no other heirs besides Eli and his family. Obviously he does not figure as an intermediate link in the line of Aaron, but as the beginner of an entirely new genealogy; the Jerusalem priests, whose ancestor he is, are interlopers dating from the beginning of the monarchical period, in whom the old Mosaic _sacerdotium_ is not continued, but is broken off. If then they are called in the Priestly Code "sons of Aaron,"

or at least figure there among the sons of Aaron, with whom they can only in point of fact be contrasted, the circ.u.mstance is an unmistakable indication that at this point the threads of tradition from the pre-exilic period have been snapped completely, which was not yet the case in Ezekiel's time. /1/

1. To satisfy the Pentateuch it is shown in the Book of Chronicles, by means of artificial genalogies, how the sons of Zadok derived their origin in an unbroken line from Aaron and Eleazar.

Compare my Pharisaer u. Sadducaer, p. 48 seq. This point was first observed by Vatke (p. 344 seq.), then by Kuenen (Theol.

Tijdschr., iii. p. 463-509) and lastly by me (Text der BB. Sam., p. 48-51).

The relation between the priestly legislation and the Book of Ezekiel, which has now been shown, gives direction and aim to the following sketch, in which it is sought to exhibit the individual phenomenon in its general connection.

IV.II.

IV.II.1. The setting apart from the rest of the people of an entire tribe as holy, and the strongly accentuated distinction of ranks within that tribe, presuppose a highly systematised separation between sacred and profane, and an elaborate machinery connected with cultus. In fact, according to the representation given in the Priestly Code, the Israelites from the beginning were organised as a hierocracy, the clergy being the skeleton, the high priest the head, and the tabernacle the heart. But the suddenness with which this full-grown hierocracy descended on the wilderness from the skies is only matched by the suddenness with which it afterwards disappeared in Canaan, leaving no trace behind it. In the time of the Judges, priests and Levites, and the congregation of the children of Israel a.s.sembled around them, have utterly vanished; there is hardly a _people_ Israel,--only individual tribes which do not combine even under the most pressing necessities, far less support at a common expense a clerical _personnel_ numbering thousands of men, besides their wives and families. Instead of the Ecclesiastical History of the Hexateuch, the Book of Judges forthwith enters upon a secular history completely devoid of all churchly character. The high priest, who according to the Priestly Code is the central authority by the grace of G.o.d, is here quite left out in the cold, for the really acting heads of the people are the Judges, people of an entirely different stamp, whose authority, resting on no official position, but on strength of personality and on the force of circ.u.mstances, seldom extends beyond the limits of their tribe. And it is plain that in this we behold not the sorry remains of an ecclesiastico-political system once flouris.h.i.+ng under Moses and Joshua, now completely fallen into ruins, but the first natural beginnings of a civil authority which after a course of further development finally led to the monarchy.

In the kernel of the Book of Judges (chaps. iii.-xvi.) there nowhere occurs a single individual whose profession is to take charge of the cultus. Sacrifice is in two instances offered, by Gideon and Manoah; but in neither case is a priest held to be necessary. In a gloss upon 1Samuel vi. 13 seq. the divergence of later custom reveals itself. When the ark of Jehovah was brought back from exile in Philistia upon the new cart, it halted in the field of Bethshemesh beside the great stone, and the inhabitants of Bethshemesh, who were at the time busy with the wheat harvest, broke up the cart and made on the stone a burnt-offering of the kine by which it had been drawn. After they have finished, the Levites come up (ver. 15) (in the pluperfect tense) and proceed as if nothing had happened, lift the ark from the now no longer existent cart, and set it upon the stone on which the sacrifice is already burning;- of course only in order to fulfil the law, the demands of which have been completely ignored in the original narrative. Until the cultus has become in some measure centralised the priests have no _locus standi_; for when each man sacrifices for himself and his household, upon an altar which he improvises as best he can for the pa.s.sing need, where is the occasion for people whose professional and essential function is that of sacrificing for others? The circ.u.mstance of their being thus inconspicuous in the earliest period of the history of Israel is connected with the fact that as yet there are few great sanctuaries. But as soon as these begin to occur, the priests immediately appear. Thus we find Eli and his sons at the old house of G.o.d belonging to the tribe of Ephraim at s.h.i.+loh. Eli holds a very exalted position, his sons are depicted as high and mighty men, who deal with the wors.h.i.+ppers not directly but through a servant, and show arrogant disregard of their duties to Jehovah. The office is hereditary, and the priesthood already very numerous. At least in the time of Saul, after they had migrated from s.h.i.+loh to n.o.b, on account of the destruction by the Philistines of the temple at the former place, they numbered more than eighty-five men, who, however, are not necessarily proper blood-relations of Eli, although reckoning themselves as belonging to his clan (1Samuel xxii. 11). /1/

1. In 1Samuel i. seq., indeed, we read only of Eli and his two sons and one servant, and even David and Solomon appear to have had only a priest or two at the chief temple. Are we to suppose that Doeg, single-handed, could have made away with eighty-five men ?

One sanctuary more is referred to towards the close of the period of the Judges,--that at Dan beside the source of the Jordan. A rich Ephraimite, Micah, had set up to Jehovah a silver-covered image, and lodged it in an appropriate house. At first he appointed one of his sons to be its priest, afterwards Jonathan ben Gershom ben Moses, a homeless Levite of Bethlehem-Judah, whom he counted himself happy in being able to retain for a yearly salary of ten pieces of silver, besides clothing and maintenance. When, however, the Danites, hard pressed by the Philistines, removed from their ancient settlements in order to establish a new home for themselves on the slopes of Hermon in the north, they in pa.s.sing carried off both Micah's image and his priest; what led them to do so was the report of their spies who had formerly lodged with Micah and there obtained an oracle. It was in this way that Jonathan came to Dan and became the founder of the family which retained the priesthood at this afterwards so important sanctuary down to the period of the deportation of the Danites at the a.s.syrian captivity (Judges xvii., xviii.). His position seems very different from that of Eli.

The only point of resemblance is that both are hereditary priests, Levites so called, and trace their descent from the family of Moses,-- of which more anon. But while Eli is a man of distinction, perhaps the owner of the sanctuary, at all events in a position of thorough independence and the head of a great house, Jonathan is a solitary wandering Levite who enters the service of the proprietor of a sanctuary for pay and maintenance, and is indeed nourished as a son by his patron, but by no means treated with special respect by the Danites.

The latter case, it may well be conjectured, more nearly represents the normal state of matters than the former. An independent and influential priesthood could develop itself only at the larger and more public centres of wors.h.i.+p, but that of s.h.i.+loh seems to have been the only one of this cla.s.s. The remaining houses of G.o.d, of which we hear some word from the transition period which preceded the monarchy, are not of importance, and are in private hands, thus corresponding to that of Micah on Mount Ephraim. That of Ophra belongs to Gideon, and that of Kirjathjearim to Abinadab. In fact, it appears that Micah, in appointing one to minister at his sanctuary for hire, would seem to have followed a more general practice. For the expression ML( YDW, which still survived as a _terminus technicus_ for the ordination of priests long after they had attained a perfectly independent position, can originally in this connection hardly have meant anything else than a filling of the hand with money or its equivalent; thus the priestly office would appear in the older time to have been a paid one, perhaps the only one that was paid. Whom he shall appoint is at the discretion of the proprietor: if no one else is available, he gives it to one of his sons (Judges xvii. 5; 1Samuel vii. 1),-- of a "character indelibilis" there is of course in such a case no idea, as one can learn from the earliest example, in which Micah's son retires again from the service after a brief interval.

David, when he removed the ark, intrusted it in the first instance to the house of Obededom, a captain of his, a Philistine of Gath, whom he made its keeper. A priest of regular calling, a Levite, is, according to Judges xvii. 13, a very unusual person to find at an ordinary sanctuary. Even at s.h.i.+loh, where, however, the conditions are extraordinary, the privilege of the sons of Eli is not an exclusive one; Samuel, who is not a member of the family, is nevertheless adopted as a priest. The service for which a stated minister was needed was not that of offering sacrifice; this was not so regular an occurrence as not to admit of being attended to by one's self. For a simple altar no priest was required, but only for a house which contained a sacred image; /1/

1. BYT (LHYM, "house of G.o.d," is never anything but the house of an image. Outside of the Priestly Code, _ephod_ is the image, _ephod bad_ the priestly garment.

this demanded watching and attendance (1 Sam. vii. 1)--in fact, an ephod like that of Gideon or that of Micah (Judges viii. 26, 27, XVii. 4) was an article well worth stealing, and the houses of G.o.d ordinarily lay in an open place (Exodus x.x.xiii. 7). The expressions #MR and #RT to denote the sacred service were retained in use from this period to later times; and, while every one knows how to sacrifice, the art of dealing with the ephod and winning its oracle from it continues from time immemorial to be the exclusive secret of the priest. In exceptional cases, the attendant is occasionally not the priest himself, but his disciple. Thus Moses has Joshua with him as his _aedituus_ /2/

2 M#RT M#H, more precisely m'' (T YY PNY M#H HKHN, 1Samuel. ii. 11.

(Exodus x.x.xiii. 11), who does not quit the tent of Jehovah; so also Eli has Samuel, who sleeps at night in the inner portion of the temple beside the ark of the covenant; even if perhaps the narrative of Samuel's early years is not quite in accordance with the actual circ.u.mstances as they existed at s.h.i.+loh, it is still in any case a perfectly good witness to a custom of the existence of which we are apprised from other sources. Compare now with this simple state of affairs the fact that in the Priestly Code the sons of Aaron have something like the half of a total of 22,000 Levites to a.s.sist them as watchers and ministers of the sanctuary.