The Persian religion throughout all its multitude of purifica tions, observances and expiations was a constant warfare against impurity, death and the devil. Amid all the ceremonialism of its priesthood there were also high ideals set forth in Zoroastrian re ligion of what a priest should be. Thus we read in Vendidad xviii., "Many there be, noble Zarathustra, who bear the mouth bandage, who have yet not girded their loins with the law. If such a one says 'I am an Athravan' he lies, call him not Athravan, noble Zarathustra, said Ahura Mazda ; but thou shouldst call him priest, noble Zarathustra, who sits awake the whole night through and yearns for holy wisdom that enables man to stand on death's bridge fearless and with happy heart, the wisdom whereby he attains the holy and glorious world of paradise." Semitic Races.—Among the nomadic Semites there was no developed priesthood. Religion partook of the general simplicity of desert life ; apart from the private worship of household gods and the oblations and salutations offered at the graves of de parted kinsmen, the ritual observances of the ancient Arabs were visits to the tribal sanctuary to salute the god with a gift of first-fruits or the like (see NAZARITE and PASSOVER), and an oc casional pilgrimage to discharge a vow at the annual feast and fair of one of the more distant holy places. (See MECCA.) These acts required no priestly aid ; each man slew his own victim and divided the sacrifice in his own circle; the share of the god was the blood which was smeared upon or poured out beside the stone set up as an altar or perhaps as a symbol of the deity. We find therefore no trace of a sacrificial priesthood, but each temple had one or more doorkeepers, whose office was usually hereditary and who had the charge of the Temple and its treasures.
The sacrifices and offerings were acknowledgments of divine bounty and means used to ensure its continuance ; the Arab was the "slave" of his god and paid him tribute, as slaves used to do to their masters, or subjects to their lords; and the free Bedouin, trained in the solitude of the desert to habits of absolute self reliance, knew no master except his god. The decision of the god might be uttered in omens which the skilled could read, or conveyed in the inspired rhymes of soothsayers, but frequently it was sought in the oracle of the sanctuary, where the sacred lot was administered for a fee by the sadin. The sanctuary thus became a seat of judgment, and here, too, compacts were sealed by oaths and sacrificial ceremonies. These institutions, though known to us only from sources belonging to an age when the old faith was falling to pieces, are certainly very ancient. The fundamental type of the Arabic sanctuary can be traced through all the Semitic lands, and so appears to be older than the Semitic dispersion.
With the beginning of a settled state the sanctuaries rose in importance and all the functions of revelation gathered round them. A sacrificial priesthood arose as the worship became more complex (especially as sacrifice in antiquity is a common prelimi nary to the consultation of an oracle), but the public ritual re mained closely associated with oracle or divination, and the priest was, 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 (kOhen) is identical with the Arabic kdhin, a "soothsayer." Soothsaying was no modern importation
in Arabia ; its characteristic form—a monotonous croon of short rhyming clauses—is the same as was practised by the Hebrew "wizards who peeped and muttered" in the days of Isaiah. The kdhin, 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, and at Hierapolis it was the charge of the chief priest, just as in the Levitical legislation.
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 more like the sadin than the keihin. The whole structure of Hebrew society at the time of the conquest was almost pre cisely 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 householder presents and con sumes with his circle in a sacrificial feast without priestly aid.
As in Arabia, the ordinary sanctuary is still a sacred stone set up under the open heaven, and here the blood of the victim is poured out as an offering to God. (See especially I Sam. xiv. 34, and cf. 2 Sam. xxiii. 16, 17.) The priest has no place in this ritual ; he is not the minister of an altar, but the guardian of a temple, such as was already found here, and there in the land for the custody of sacred images or other consecrated things (the ark at Shiloh, I Sam. iii. 3; images in Micah's temple, Judges xvii. 5; Goliath's sword lying behind the "ephod" or plated image at Nob, I Sam. xxi. 9; no doubt also money, as in the Canaanite temple at Shechem, Judges ix. 4). Such treasures required a guardian; but, above all, wherever there was a temple there was an oracle, a kind of sacred lot, just as in Arabia (I Sam. xiv. 41, lxx.), which could only be drawn where there was an "ephod" and a priest (I Sam. xiv. 18, Sept., and xxiii. 6 seq.). The Hebrews had already possessed a tent-temple and oracle of this kind in the wilderness (Exod. xxxiii. 7 seq.), and ever since that time the judgment of God through the priest at the sanctu ary had a greater weight than the word of a seer, and was the ultimate solution of every controversy and claim (I Sam. ii. 25; Exod. xxi. 6, xxii. 8, 9, where for "judge," "judges," of A.V. read "God" with R.V.).