Prolegomena to the History of Israel

by Julius Wellhausen

The high priest stands forth as absolutely sovereign in his own domain. Down to the exile, as we have seen, the sanctuary was the property of the king, and the priest was his servant; even in Ezekiel who on the whole is labouring towards emancipation, the prince has nevertheless a very great importance in the temple still; to him the dues of the people are paid, and the sacrificial expenses are in return defrayed by him. In the Priestly Code, on the other hand, the dues are paid direct into the sanctuary, the worship is perfectly autonomous, and has its own head, holding not from man but from the grace of God. Nor is it merely the autonomy of religion that is represented by the high priest; he exhibits also its supremacy over Israel. He does not carry sceptre and sword; nowhere, as Vatke (p. 539) well remarks, is any attempt made to claim for him secular power. But just in virtue of his spiritual dignity, as the head of the priesthood, he is head of the theocracy, and so much so that there is no room for any other alongside of him; a theocratic king beside him cannot be thought of (Numbers xxvii. 21). He alone is the responsible representative of the collective nation, the names of the twelve tribes are written on his breast and shoulders; his transgression involves the whole people in guilt, and is atoned for as that of the whole people, while the princes, when their sin-offerings are compared with his, appear as mere private persons (Leviticus iv. 3, 13, 22, ix. 7, xvi. 6). His death makes an epoch; it is when the high priest—not the king—dies that the fugitive slayer obtains his amnesty (Numbers xxxv. 28). At his investiture he receives the chrism like a king, and is called accordingly the anointed priest; he is adorned with the diadem and tiara (Ezekiel xxi. 31, A.V. 26) like a king, and like a king too he wears the purple, that most unpriestly of all raiment, of which he therefore must divest himself when he goes into the holy of holies (Lev. xvi. 4). What now can be the meaning of this fact,—that he who is at the head of the worship, in this quality alone, and without any political attributes besides, or any share in the government, is at the same time at the head of the nation? What but that civil power has been withdrawn from the nation and is in the hands of foreigners; that Israel has now merely a spiritual and ecclesiastical existence? In the eyes of the Priestly Code Israel in point of fact is not a people, but a church; worldly affairs are far removed from it and are never touched by its laws; its life is spent in religious services. Here we are face to face with the church of the second temple, the Jewish hierocracy, in a form possible only under foreign domination. It is customary indeed to designate in the Law by the ideal, or in other words blind, name of theocracy that which in historical reality is usually called hierarchy; but to imagine that with the two names one has gained a real distinction is merely to deceive oneself. But, this self-deception accomplished, it is easy further to carry back the hierocratic churchly constitution to the time of Moses, because it excludes the kingship, and then either to assert that it was kept secret throughout the entire period of the judges and the monarchy, or to use the fiction as a lever by which to dislocate the whole of the traditional history.

To any one who knows anything about history it is not necessary to prove that the so-called Mosaic theocracy, which nowhere suits the circumstances of the earlier periods, and of which the prophets, even in their most ideal delineations of the Israelite state as it ought to be, have not the faintest shadow of an idea, is, so to speak, a perfect fit for post-exilian Judaism, and had its actuality only there. Foreign rulers had then relieved the Jews of all concern about secular affairs; they had it in their power, and were indeed compelled to give themselves wholly up to sacred things, in which they were left completely unhampered. Thus the temple became the sole centre of life, and the prince of the temple the head of the spiritual commonwealth, to which also the control of political affairs, so far as these were still left to the nation, naturally fell there being no other head! /1/

— Footnote 1. Very interesting and instructive is Ewald's proof of the way in which Zech. vi. 9-15 has been tampered with, so as to eliminate Zerubbabel and leave the high priest alone. Just so in dealing with Caliphs and Sultans, the Patriarchs were and are the natural heads of the Greek and Oriental Christians even in secular matters. — Footnote

The Chronicler gave a corresponding number of high priests to the twice twelve generations of forty years each which were usually assumed to have elapsed between the exodus and the building of Solomon's temple, and again between that and the close of the captivity; the official terms of office of these high priests, of whom history knows nothing, have taken the place of the reigns of judges and kings, according to which reckoning was previously made (1Chronicles v. 29, seq.). One sees clearly from Sirach l., and from more than one statement of Josephus (e.g., Ant., xviii. 4, 3, xx. 1, 11), how in the decorations of Aaron (where, however, the Urim and Thummim were wanting; Nehemiah vii. 65) people reverenced a transcendent majesty which had been left to the people of God as in some sense a compensation for the earthly dignity which had been lost. Under the rule of the Greeks the high priest became ethnarch and president of the synedrium; only through the pontificate was it possible for the Hasmonaeans to attain to power, but when they conjoined it with full-blown secular sovereignty, they created a dilemma to the consequences of which they succumbed.

CHAPTER V. THE ENDOWMENT OF THE CLERGY.

The power and independence of the clergy run parallel with its material endowment, which accordingly passes through the same course of development. Its successive steps are reflected even in the language that is employed, in the gradual loss of point sustained by the phrase "to fill the hand," at all times used to denote ordination. Originally it cannot have had any other meaning than that of filling the hand with money or its equivalent; we have seen that at one time the priest was appointed by the owner of a sanctuary for a salary, and that, without being thus dependent upon a particular employer, he could not then live on the income derived from those who might employ him sacrificially. But when the Levitical hereditary priesthood arose in the later kingdom of Judah the hands of the priests were no longer filled by another who had the right to appoint and to dismiss, but they themselves at God's command "filled their own hand," or rather they had done so in the days of Moses once for all, as is said in Exodus xxxii. 26-29, an insertion corresponding with the position of Deuteronomy. It is obvious that such a statement, when carefully looked at, is absurd, but is to be explained by the desire to protest against outside interference. Even here the etymological sense is still sufficiently felt to create an involuntary jar and leads to a change of the construction; but finally all sense of it is lost, and the expression becomes quite colourless: "to fill the hand " means simply "to consecrate." In Ezekiel not only the priest but also the altar has its "hand filled" (xliii. 26); in the Priestly Code the abstract milluim ["consecrations">[ is chiefly used, with subject and object left out, as the name of a mere inaugural ceremony which lasts for several days (Leviticus viii. 33; Exodus xxix. 34), essentially consists in the bringing of an offering on the part of the person to be consecrated, and has no longer even the remotest connection with actual filling of the hand (2Chronicles xiii. 7; comp. xxix. 31). The verb, therefore, now means simply the performance of this ceremony, and the subject is quite indifferent (Leviticus xvi. 32, xxi. 10; Numbers iii. 3); the installation does not depend upon the person who performs the rite, but upon the rite itself, upon the unction, investiture, and other formalities (Exodus xxix. 29).

This variation in the usus Ioquendi is the echo of real changes in the outuard condition of the clergy, which we must now proceed to consider more in detail.

V.I.

V.I.1. Of the offerings, it was the custom in the earlier time to dedicate a portion to the deity but to use the greater part in sacred feasts, at which a priest, if present, was of course allowed also in one way or another to participate. But he does not appear to have had a legal claim to any definite dues of flesh.

"Eli's sons were worthless persons, and cared not about Jehovah, or about the priests' right and duty with the people. When any man offered a sacrifice the servant of the priest came (that is all we have here to represent the 22,000 Levites) while the flesh was in seething, with a three-pronged flesh-hook in his hand, and stuck it into the pan, or kettle, or caldron, or pot; and all that the flesh-hook brought up the priest took. So they did in Shiloh unto all the Israelites that came thither. Even before the fat was burnt, the servant of the priest came and said to the man that sacrificed: "Give flesh to roast for the priest; he will not take sodden flesh of thee, but raw. And if the other said to him: Let the fat first be burnt, and then take according to thy soul's desire; then he would answer: Nay, but thou shalt give it now; and if not, I will take it by force" (1Samuel ii. 12-16).