The temple at Shiloh, where the ark was preserved, was the lineal descendant of the Mosaic sanctuary and its priests claimed kin with Moses himself. In the divided state of the nation, indeed, this sanctuary was hardly visited from beyond Mt. Ephraim; and every man or tribe that cared to provide the necessary apparatus (ephod, teraphim, etc.) 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 sanctuary 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 wor shippers; he has certain legal dues, and, if he is disposed to exact more, no one ventures to resist (I Sam. ii. 12 seq., where the text needs a slight correction). The priestly position of the family survived the fall of Shiloh and the capture of the ark, and it was members of this house who consulted Jehovah for the early kings until Solomon deposed Abiathar.
Ultimately, indeed, as sanctuaries were multiplied and the priests all over the land came to form one well-marked class, "Levite" and legitimate priest became equivalent expressions, as is explained in the article LEVITES. But between the priesthood of Eli at Shiloh or of Jonathan at Dan and the priesthood of the Levites as described in Deut. xxxiii. 8 seq. 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. The kingship had not deprived them of their functions as fountains of divine judgment (cf. Deut. xvii. 8 seq.) ; on the contrary, the decisions of the sanctu ary had grown up into a body of sacred law, which the priests administered according to a traditional precedent. 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 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 absorption of the Canaanites and of their holy places, ritual had become much more elaborate, and in royal sanctuaries at least there were regular public offer ings maintained by the king and presented by the priests. (Cf.
2 Kings xvi. 15.) Private s-crifices, too, could hardly be offered without some priestly aid now that ritual was more complex; the provision 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 according to the sacrificial tablet of Marseilles. Their judicial functions also
brought profit to the priests, fines being exacted for certain of fences 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. I 1, xii. 2) ; 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 seq.) ; indeed the monarchs of Judah, like those of other nations, did sacrifice in person when they chose down to the time of the captivity (I Kings ix. 25; 2 Kings xvi. 12 seq.; Jer. xxx. 21).
The detailed steps which prepared the way for the post-exile hierarchy, the destruction of the northern sanctuaries and priest hoods 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 justification of the degradation of the latter to the position of mere servants in the Temple supplied by Ezekiel soon after the captivity, need not here be dealt with. Already in the time of Josiah altar service and not the judicial or "teaching" function had become the essential thing in priesthood (Deut. x. 8, xviii. 7) ; the latter, indeed, was not forgotten (Jer. ii. 8, xviii. 18), but by the time of Ezekiel it also has mainly to do with ritual, with the distinction between holy and profane, clean and unclean, with the statutory observances at festivals and the like (Ezek. xliv. 23 seq.). What the priestly Torah was at the time of the exile can be seen from the collection of laws in Lev. xvii.—xxvi., which includes many moral precepts, but regards them equally with ritual precepts from the point of view of the mainte nance of national holiness. The holiness of Israel centres in the sanctuary, and round the sanctuary stand the priests, who alone can approach the most holy things without profanation, and who are the guardians of Israel's sanctity, partly by protecting the one meeting-place of God and man from profane contact, and partly as the mediators of the continual atoning rites by which breaches of holiness are expiated. In the old kingdom the priests had shared the place of the prophets as the religious leaders of the nation ; under the second Temple they represented the unprogressive traditional side of religion, and the leaders of thought were the psalmists and the scribes, who spoke much more directly to the piety of the nation.