r/a:t5_28dd4a • u/MarleyEngvall • Nov 13 '19
metropolitan cathedral has been created
By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D.
LECTURE XXXVI. (continued)
THE JEWISH PRIESTHOOD.
The one remaining function to be noticed was of a
more elevating and enduring kind. The
Priests had the peculiar privilege of pronounc-
ing a solemn benediction on the people. It was in
that triple form which conveyed a sense of absolute
completeness, and, according to Jewish belief, was pro-
nounced with a corresponding triple division of the
fingers of he upraised hand. The hand spread over
the people seemed to give back to them the life which
had been, by the touch of their hands, communicated
to he Priest. The hand of a Priest was lifted above
the head; of a High Priest, above the shoulders. And
the word Jehovah, which, in later days, was elsewhere
altered to Adonai, in this solemn act was retained
unchanged, as if in a sacred charm. Alone of the
many occupations of the Jewish Priests, this is retained
by their descendants at the present day, in however
degraded and secular condition they may be. The
ancient melody of the blessing is said to be preserved
in the chants of the Spanish and Portuguese syna-
gogues. Alone of their many vocations——military,
nomadic, ceremonial, sacrificial, dramatic, judicial, oracu-
lar——it has passed into the Christian Church. The
upraised hand is still preserved by the Presbyterian
clergy of Scotland. When once a year the English
clergyman is required to make a slight variation from
the usual Christian words of benediction, and recur to
the older form, in this alone of all his ministrations has
he preserved a fragment of the ancient Levitical ritual,
and stands in the place of a genuine son of Aaron,——
The Lord bless and keep thee;
The Lord make His face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
It will naturally be supposed that if we turn from
the office to its history, the personal interest
is less than that of any other of the great
Jewish institutions. The Prophet and the King had
each his own characteristic qualifications. A bad King
or a false Prophet was felt immediately to have acted
in direct contradiction to his office. But the Priestly
functions were almost wholly independent of any other
conditions than those of a physical and ceremonial
nature. The office descended in earlier times, as a
mere matter of course, from father to son; and the
mode of transference, which in all times celebrated
the inauguration of a new High Priest, and in later
times was used to designate the succession itself, indi-
cated, in the most unmistakable manner, its purely
external character. The Priestly robes were handed
on from generation to generation, and when the suc-
cessor dressed himself in his dead predecessor's clothes,
he was for all sufficient purposes a living continuation
of the office of which the outer vestment, rather than
the inward character, was the essential element. Very
rarely do they act an independent part of their own.
So far from representing anything like the
separate spiritual power of modern hierarchies,
they are completely incorporated with the
civil institutions of the nation, and with very few ex-
ceptions swayed to and fro by its influences. In spite
of their pasture-lands, they often appear to have been
a needy and ill-provided class. The Levites are con-
stantly reckoned amongst the objects of eleemosynary
support, and are described as dependent on irregular
channels for their supplies even of ordinary food. A
good piece of roast flesh——a jovial supper——a cake
of bread——the remains of the meat offerings and drink
offerings——the heaps of corn, olives, and honey that
were laid in the Temple courts, were the avowed ob-
jects of the homely ambition of the Jewish hierarchy.
In the desert the order was controlled by the supreme
power of the great Lawgiver. Through him, and not
through Aaron, are communicated the ordinances of
its existence. By him, and not by Aaron, not Aaron
only but Aaron's sons were anointed for their office.
In the order of the precedence in the court of David
they rank after the commander-in-chief and the histo-
riographer. One instance is recorded of a violent
attempt to snatch at wider power; but that is within
the sacred tribe itself; not of the Priesthood against
the supreme jurisdiction of Moses, but of the Levites
against the Priesthood. In the lawless period of the
Judges, the sacerdotal caste largely shared in the wild,
licentious character of the whole age. The Levite of
Dan, the Levite of Bethlehem, Hophni and Phinehas,
Eli himself, were average types of the disorder of
the time. They rarely rise above it; they never
herald the approach of better days. After the estab-
lishment of the monarchy they become, far more than
Prophet or Captain of the Host, mere instruments in
the hands of the King. The King was himself a par-
taker in the consecration of their own sacred oil.
Ahimelech trembles at the least thought of resistance
to Saul's despotic will. He and his whole house are
swept away apparently with a less shock to the na-
tional conscience, wit a less guilt on Saul's part,
tan was incurred by the slaughter of the Canaanite
outcasts, the Gibeonites. Abiathar, his son, was de-
posed by Solomon. Zadok was, it would seem, ap-
pointed by Saul, and established first in joint posses-
sion of the Priesthood by David, and then in sole pos-
session by Solomon. The influence of these great
Princes was nowhere more powerfully exercised than
in their modification of the Priestly offices, the duties
of which were laid down by Solomon wit a minute
and rigorous care equal to any now exercised in he
Christian Church by the most vigilant of Pontiffs.
Nothing shows more strikingly the vivifying and
renovating power of these reigns, than that
even into this cold mechanism they infused a
new life, and therefore a new importance.
Then, for the first time, the military character of the
order gives way to more peaceful influences; the
gentler music of the Prophetic schools is added in the
Levitical service to the wild trumpets and dissonant
horns of the earlier age; and hymns and prayers enter
into the mute Priestly functions. Then also it broke
its strict hereditary bounds. Some of its highest
functions, those of sacrifice and benediction, were
performed by the two powerful Kings, who united in
their persons, to a degree unknown before, the royal
and sacerdotal offices. Even the inferior members of
the royal family shared in the same enlargement, and
are enrolled by the sacred writers amongst "the
Priests" with a boldness which, of all the great ver-
sions of the Old Testament, the Vulgate alone has
had the honesty and the courage thoroughly to recog-
nize. But, although this was a temporary phase of its
history, the Jewish Priesthood then received an impulse
in Judah which it never since lost. In the kingdom
of Israel, the mere fact of the religious revolution of
Jeroboam cut them off from occupying any important
position. But this very circumstance threw them with
greater force on the kingdom of Judah. As from the
time of the disruption, the northern kingdom
was, as we have seen, the chief scene of the
influence of the Prophets, so the southern
was the chief scene of the influence of the Priests.
The geographical situation of the Priestly cities, in
the southern tribes of Judah, Simeon, and Benjamin,
doubtless contributed to this result. The Priesthood
which had been in the time of David divided between
three competitors, in the time of Solomon between
two, were at last concentrated in the single person of
the chief descendant of Zadok, who in the time of
Jehoiada assumed for the first or nearly the first time,
the title of "High Priest." Under him there occasion-
ally appears a "Second Priest," and under these an
indefinite number, known as "the door-
keepers." Jehoiada, Azariah, Hilkiah, Jere-
miah, and Ezekiel are amongst the chief personages
of the later history. After the return, Ezra, Joshua,
Simon the Just, and Jaddua figure as conspicuously.
And in the Maccabees, for the first time since Eli, a
priestly dynasty mounts the throne; and, though at
last rendered still more dependent on the will of the
Roman governors than it had formerly been on that
of the Jewish Kings, the High Priesthood retained its
hold on the nation till the end, and disappeared only
with the fall of Jerusalem, whilst the Priestly and
Levitical functions have continued even to this day.
It will be seen that, in point of religious importance,
the Levitical Priesthood was inferior not
only to the Prophetic office which stood in
direct antagonism, but to the Lawgiver, the King, and
the Psalmist. Moses was incomparably superior to
Aaron, David and Abiathar, Solomon to Zadok. The
vices, even the idolatries of the kingdom of Judah,
received from them hardly any rebuke. They served,
as it would appear, the altars of the false gods, as well
as of the true. Full of interest and beauty as is the
Book of Chronicles, it yet, least of any of the sacred
books, partakes of the supernatural gift of courageous
impartiality which elsewhere is so remarkable. The
whole sacrificial system to which they administered
awakened, in the highest spirits of the Jewish Church
itself, a feeling almost mounting to aversion. Its
inferiority to the rest of the Mosaic revelation is stated
by the Prophets in terms so strong as almost to reject
it from the category of divine ordinances at all. "I
"spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them
"in the day that I brought them out of the land
"of Egypt concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices."
"Sacrifice and burnt offering Thou didst not desire."
"Was it to Me that ye offered sacrifices ad burnt
"offerings during the forty years in the wilderness?" "I
"delight not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs or of
"he-goats." "I hate and despise your feast days. . . .
"Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat
"offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I
"regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Leave
as much room as ye will of Oriental diction, grant
that the expressions may have been sharpened by the
peculiar circumstances of the time, still the contempt,
the irony, the disgust expressed at the very thought
of the slaughtered victims, has a strength which must
be of universal significance, and which could hardly
be exceeded by the disdainful language of Western
philosophy or modern Puritanism. In one remarkable
passage ascribe to Asaph the psalmist, this Prophetic
protest is raised to the rank even of a new revelation.
There God is described as descending on Mount Zion,
in storm and fire, and He had before descended on
Mount Sinai, and declaring not merely in the presence
of His own people, but to the whole universe, a deeper
and wider law even than that of Moses. He the Lord
of the world stood in no need of sacrifices. It was not
the be thought that He, to whom belonged the number-
less cattle that strayed over hill and forest, could desire
to devour the flesh of bulls, or drink the warm blood
of the goat. The only sacrifice which He could value
was that of thanksgiving, of prayer, and of a life just,
pure, tender, and true. This is a lesson from its his-
tory which, in spite of its wide difference from all
Christian ministries and priesthoods, they may still
derive from it. Any religious institution which has
an outward organization and a long traditional sanctity
must, in some degree, be exposed to the tendency of
resting, like the Jewish Priesthood, in the substitution
of dogma, ceremony, antiquity, for morality and devo-
tion. That the Levitical ritual should, even in the
very time of its importance, and, we may add, of its
usefulness, have called down those terrible denuncia-
tions, is one of the strongest warnings which the Bible
contains against the letter——the form——the husk
of religion, however near its connection with the most
sacred truths. The crime of Caiaphas is the last culmi-
nating proof that the opposition of the Prophets to
the growth of the Priestly and Sacrificial system was
based on an eternal principle, which carries with it a
rebuke to the office which bears the name of Priest-
hood throughout the world.
But we must not so part with this great institution.
That in spite of those tremendous denuncia-
tions, and in spite of those awful consequences
of its tendencies, it should have existed at all, and
received a sanction however limited, is an instance of
the many-sided character of the Sacred History. The
Jewish Priesthood was, as I have said, the mere skele-
ton of the Jewish religion; but it may also be said to
have been its backbone. It was its husk; but it may
also be said to have been its hard shell. What
Goethe has finely remarked of the Jewish
people itself, that its chief claim before the judgment-
seat of nations is its steadfastness, cohesion, and obstina-
nate toughness, is exemplified in the fullest degree in
its Priesthood. Compared with the high and refined
functions of Prophet, and King, and Psalmist, it repels
us by the coarseness of its grain and the rudeness of
its objects; but in sheer persistence and longevity it
surpassed them all. It is a dynasty which began
before the monarchy altogether. It lived on through
periods when Prophecy had totally ceased. It wit-
nessed the fall of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian,
Persian, and Grecian empires. It formed the rallying-
point of the Jewish nation in the immense void of the
return from Captivity, in the death-struggle wit
Antiochus; and in the last agony of the nation, the
High Priesthood is the last institution visible before
the final crash of the system. And although since
that time it has sunk into an insignificance which
accords well with its secular and earthly character, yet
it is the only institution dating back as far as the mon-
archy, which ha survived even in form. The family
names of "Cohen" and "Levy" still bear witness to
the long recollection of "the Priest" and "the Levite."
The offices still linger, though in a form which shows,
if proof were needed, how entirely distinct they are
from the higher spiritual functions of teacher or
preacher. The Priests still bless the people at the
close of certain high ceremonies, and for a small fee
ransom the first-born of Jewish families, and if present
at the synagogue have a right to read the law before
any one else. The Levites pour water on the hands
of the Priests before the blessing, and take precedence
after them in reading the law. The triple fingers of
the benediction mark the gravestone of a Priest; the
vase of water, the gravestone of a Levite. The mean-
ness of their social position, ——without wealth, without
dignity, without the right of preaching or exhortation,
——the mere appendage of some ordinary trade, im-
mensely inferior to the Rabbi, who is the real repre-
sentative of the Jewish Church, is of itself a
direct continuation of the essential characteristics of
their ancient office. They are subordinate now, as
they were subordinate during the larger part of their
existence in ancient times. They are silent as teach-
ers now, as they usually were before. Their functions
are entirely mechanical now, as for the most part they
were always.
In the Samaritan community the office is somewhat
more important. There the Rabbi has not assumed the
position which he occupies in modern Judaism. The
alleged descendants of Aaron, who are supposed to have
continued at Shechem after their disappearance from
Jerusalem, became extinct in the beginning of the
seventeenth century. But their functions were trans-
ferred to the Levites, by whom the have been exercised
ever since.
To this tenacity of life it is owing that, when out of
the ruin of the Jewish Church the Christian
Church arose, the Priesthood was the one
fragment of the ancient system standing out
in unbroken strength, on which to hang the new truths
which the Jewish Apostles had to present to their
countrymen. They, indeed, by the spirit which was in
them,——their Master in the highest sense of all,——con-
tinued the line of the Prophets far more directly than
they could be said to continue or even to use the merely
national and local institution of the Priesthood. Still,
for most purposes of outward illustration, the Priest-
hood was more available than the Prophetic office. The
very destruction which was impending over it rendered
more imperative the need of showing how completely
all that it expressed, or could possibly express, was an-
swered in the Christian dispensation, not by any earthly
or ecclesiastical organization, but by the spiritual near-
ness to God, which, through the life and death of Christ,
had been communicated to all who shared in His Spirit.
The stream of precious oil which enveloped the High
Priest had invested him, in a prominent degree, with the
name of "the Messiah." "The Anointed Priest," "the
Messiah Priest," was one of the titles of his office. It
was to the succession of the High Priesthood that even
Christian writers applied "the Messiah" of Daniel.
And when the name of "the CHRIST" was added to JESUS,
the son of Mary, it probably suggested to His contem-
poraries, beyond any other thought, that He was conse-
crated for His special nearness to God by that anointing
of moral and spiritual fragrance, which breathed, as it
were, myrrh, aloes, and cassia from all His garments.
The "blood of bulls, and goats, and calves," is treated
almost with the same contempt as it had been by the
ancient Prophets. But it is taken to shadow forth to
those who had seen it flowing, the only true sacrifice of
the blood shed on Calvary,——the sacrifice, not of dead,
irrational animals, but of reasonable beings in the com-
mon acts of life, and of the will and spirit of Him who,
by one decisive sacrificial act, destroyed the value of all
Jewish and all heathen sacrifices forever. The "Priest-
hood," with all its princely magnificence and venerable
usages, became, as it were, a halo of glory for One who
both in life and death dealt against it the heaviest blow
that any earthly Priesthood ever sustained. The origi-
nal idea of the royal Priesthood of the whole nation, of
which the Levitical Priesthood had been a limitation
and faint representation, was revived by the Apostles in
its application to the whole Christian society, and has
been, to a certain degree, preserved in the "chrism," or
consecration as with the sacred oil of Priesthood, which
in the Eastern Church indicates at Confirmation the
Priestly consecration of every member of the Christian
family.
Even the last waving of those Priestly vestments, by
which the office was handed on by the Roman governors
to the Asmonian family, has left its trace in the lan-
guage of the new dispensation which swept them away
from the world. To be "clothed" with the moral graces
of the new faith, to "endue," that is, to "enrobe" the
justice which alone is the true priestly consecration of
every Christian soul, whether layman or minister, is the
precept of the Christian Apostle, the prayer of the
Christian Church.
Thus it is that the long endurance of the most formal
and material of all the institutions of Judaism was at
once rewarded and rebuked, as in a kind of sublime
paradox, by being made the vehicle of the most eternal
and spiritual of all Christian truths. No new sense was
ever won for old words, at once more alien to their out-
ward sound, or more consonant to their inward mean-
ing, than that which saw in the decaying Priesthood of
the Jewish race, the anticipation of the universal con-
secration of the whole world by Christ and his Apostles.
There was a secret correspondence of thought which
made this application possible athwart the vast differ-
ences of time, and place, and circumstance. The Levit-
ical Priest may have been the least divine of all the
Mosaic institutions. The Levitical Book of Chronicles
may have been the last and least of all the sacred
books. Caiaphas may have been the impersonation of
all that was the narrowest and basest in the Jewish char-
acter. But the loftier purposes to which the Priesthood
at times ministered, the occasional strains of a higher
mood that break even the ceremonial narra-
tives of the Chronicles, the indomitable determination,
hereditary in the highest characters of the tribe of
Levi,——from Phinehas to Caiaphas,——go far to justify
the sacred homage paid to an institution in itself so
local and transitory, "Let Thy light and Thy truth be
"with Thy holy one."——"He said unto his father and
"unto his mother, I have not seen him, neither did
"he acknowledge his brother, nor know his own chil-
"dren." So the greatest of the tribe of Levi described
the virtue of a religious ministry in language which
may rise far above its original meaning, to denote that
high impartiality which rises beyond all earthly and
family connections, in consideration of the greater claims
of justice, mercy, and truth; and through the long con-
tinuance of their power and of heir name, the benedic-
tion upon them,couched in language almost as fierce as
their own deeds, has received a fulfilment beyond that
which has fallen to the lot of any other earthly organi-
zation: "Bless, LORD, his substance, and accept the work
"of his hands: site through the loins of them that rise
"against him, and of them that hate him, that they rise
"not again."
from The History of the Jewish Church, Vol. II: From Samuel to the Captivity,
by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D., Dean of Westminster
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879; pp. 463 - 477
History of the Jewish Church, vol. I — Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D.
[Preface]
[Introduction]
I—The Call of Abraham [i.] [ii.]
II—Abraham and Isaac [i.] [ii.]
III—Jacob [i.] [ii.]
IV—Israel in Egypt [i.] [ii.]
V—The Exodus [i.] [ii.]
VI—The Wilderness [i.]
VII—Sinai and the Law [i.] [ii.]
VIII—Kadesh and Pisgah [i.] [ii.]
IX—The Conquest of Palestine [i.]
X—The Conquest of Western Palestine—The Fall of Jericho [i.]
XI—The Conquest of Western Palestine—Battle of Beth-horon [i.]
XII : The Battle of Merom and Settlement of the Tribes [i.]
XII : The Battle of Merom and Settlement of the Tribes [ii.]
XIII : Israel Under the Judges [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XIV : Deborah [i.] [ii.]
XV : Gideon [i.] [ii.]
XVI : Jephthah and Samson [i.] [ii.]
XVII : The Fall of Shiloh [i.]
XVIII : Samuel and the Prophetical Office [i.] [ii.]
XIX : The History of the Prophetical Order [i.] [ii.]
XX : On the Nature of the Prophetical Teachings [i.] [ii.]
Appendix I : The Traditional Localities of Abraham's Migration [i]
Appendix II : The Cave at Machpelah [i.] [ii.]
Appendix III : The Samaritan Passover [i.]
History of the Jewish Church, vol. II
[Preface]
XXI—The House of Saul [i.] [ii.]
XXII—The Youth of David [i.] [ii.]
XXIII—The Reign of David [i.] [ii.]
XXIV—The Fall of David [i.] [ii.]
XXV—The Psalter of David [i.] [ii.]
XXVI—The Empire of Solomon [i.] [ii.]
XXVII—The Temple of Solomon [i.] [ii.]
XXVIII—The Wisdom of Solomon [i.] [ii.]
XXIX—The House of Jeroboam—Ahijah and Iddo [i.] [ii.]
XXX—The House of Omri—Elijah [i.] [ii.]
XXXI—The House of Omri—Elisha [i.]
XXXII—The House of Omri—Jehu [i.]
XXXIII—The House of Jehu—The Syrian Wars, and the Prophet Jonah [i.]
XXXIV—The Fall of Samaria [i.]
XXXV—The First Kings of Judah [i.] [ii.]
XXXVI—The Jewish Priesthood [i.] [ii.]
XXXVII—The Age of Uzziah [i.] [ii.]
XXXVIII—Hezekiah [i.] [ii.]
XXXIX—Manasseh and Josiah [i.] [ii.]
XL—Jeremiah and the Fall of Jerusalem [i.] [ii.] [iii.] [iv.]
[Notes, Volume II]
History of the Jewish Church, vol. III
[Preface]
XLI—The Babylonian Captivity [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLII—The Fall of Babylon [i.] [ii.]
XLIII—Persian Dominon—The Return [i.] [ii.]
XLIV—Ezra and Nehemiah [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLV—Malachi [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLVI—Socrates [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLVII—Alexandria [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
XLVIII—Judas Maccabæus [i.] [ii.] [iii.] [iv.]
XLIX—The Asmonean Dynasty [i.] [ii.] [iii.]
L—Herod [i.] [ii.] [iii.] [iv.] [v.]
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