William Robertson Smith and Owen Charles Whitehouse

“ The High Priest at such a moment seemed to embody all the glory of the nation, as the kings had done of old, and when the time came to strike a successful blow for freedom it was a priestly house that led the nation to the victory which united in one person the functions of High Priest and prince. ”

“ For the Messianic hopes of the Pharisees and the Psalter of Solomon see especially Wellhausen, Pharisäer und Sadducäer (Greifswald, 1874) . In its ultimate form the Messianic hope of the Jews is the centre of the whole eschatology, embracing the doctrine of the last troubles of Israel (called by the Rabbins the “birth pangs of the Messiah”) , the appearing of the anointed king, the annihilation of the hostile enemy, the return of the dispersed of Israel, the glory and world-sovereignty of the elect, the new world, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment. ”

“ In point of fact, in Greece and Rome the priest never attained to any considerable independent importance; we cannot speak of priestly power and hardly even of a distinct priestly class. In Greece the priest, so far as he is an independent functionary and not one of the magistrates, is simply the elected or hereditary minister of a temple charged with “those things which are ordained to be done towards the gods” (see Aristotle, Pol. vi. 8) , and remunerated from the revenues of the temple, or by the gifts of worshippers and sacrificial dues. ”

“ The whole structure of Hebrew society at the time of the conquest was almost precisely that of a federation of Arab tribes, and the religious ordinances 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 Mahomet never had. ”

“ The hope of the advent of an ideal king was only one feature of that larger hope of the salvation of Israel from all evils, which was constantly held forth by all the prophets, from the time when the seers of the 8th century B.C. proclaimed that the true conception of Yahweh’s relation to His people could become a practical reality only through a great deliverance following a sifting judgment of the most terrible kind. ”

“ Zoroastrianism is not a nature religion, but the result of a reform which never, under the old empire, thoroughly penetrated the masses; and the priesthood, as it was not based on family tradition, did not form a strict hereditary caste. It was open to any one to obtain entrance into the priesthood, while on the other hand it was only as a priest that he could exercise sacerdotal functions, for these were strictly reserved to priests. ”

“ The acts of religion partake 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 departed kinsmen, the ritual observances of the ancient Arabs were visits to the tribal sanctuary to salute the god with a gift of milk, first-fruits or the like, the sacrifice of firstlings and vows (see Nazarite and Passover) , and an occasional pilgrimage to discharge a vow at the annual feast and fair of one of the more distant holy places (see Mecca) . ”

“ I do not deny that the same man might unite all three functions in one person. Thus a šangu had a definite share in the offerings, a mašmašu a different share. It seems to me that the priests belonged to the old families who were descended from the original tribe or clan, &c., that founded the city, and they could not admit outsiders save by adoption into the family. If a new god had a temple set up he had a new set of priests, but this priesthood descended in its line, e.g. a Samaš priest did not beget a man who became a priest of Nabû. ”

“ Thus the party of the scribes, when they came into conflict with an active political power, which at the same time claimed to represent the theocratic interests of Israel, were compelled to lay fresh stress on the doctrine that the true deliverance of Israel must come from God.
But now the Jews were a nation once more, and national ideas came to the front. In the Hasmonaean sovereignty these ideas took a political form, and the result was the secularization of the kingdom of God for the sake of a harsh and rapacious aristocracy. The nation threw itself on the side of the Pharisees ”

“ But all agree in giving the central place to the realization of a real effective kingship of Yahweh; in fact the conception of the religious subject as the nation of Israel, with a national organization under Yahweh as king, is common to the whole Old Testament, and connects prophecy proper with the so-called Messianic psalms and similar passages which speak of the religious relations of the Hebrew commonwealth, the religious meaning of national institutions, and so necessarily contain ideal elements reaching beyond the empirical present. ”

“ As man approached the gods in sacrifice and prayers, so too the gods declared themselves to men by divers signs and tokens, which it was possible to read by the art of Divination (q.v.) . In many nations divination and priesthood have always gone hand in hand; at Rome, for example, the augurs and the XV viri sacrorum, who interpreted the Sibylline books, were priestly colleges. In Greece, on the other hand, divination was not generally a priestly function, but it did belong to the priests of the Oracles (see Oracle) . ”

“ According to Frazer's view, “as time goes on the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words the magician gives way to the priest. Hence the king starting as a magician tends gradually to exchange the practice of magic for the functions of prayer and sacrifice.” We are not concerned here with the debatable question whether magic preceded religion. ”

“ A sacrificial priesthood will arise as the worship becomes more complex (especially as sacrifice in antiquity is a common preliminary to the consultation of an oracle) , but the public ritual will still remain closely associated with oracle or divination, and the priest will still be, 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 (kōhēn) is identical with the Arabic kāhin, a “soothsayer.” Soothsaying was no modern importation in Arabia ”

“ 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; even the technical terms are mainly the same, so that we may justly assume that the more developed ritual and priesthoods of the settled Semites sprang from a state of things not very remote from what we find among the heathen Arabs. ”

“ In the Psalms the ideal aspect of the kingship, its religious importance as the expression and organ of Yahweh’s sovereignty, is prominent. When the Psalter became a liturgical book the historical kingship had gone by, and the idea alone remained, no longer as the interpretation of a present political fact but as part of Israel’s religious inheritance. It was impossible, however, to think that a true idea had become obsolete merely because it found no expression on earth for the time being ”

“ But in the desert there is no king and no sovereignty save that of the divine oracle, and therefore it is from the soothsayers or ministers of the oracle that a public ministry of religion can most naturally spring. With the beginning of a settled state the sanctuaries must rise in importance and all the functions of revelation will gather round them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moreover, in the earlier times we find the prince of the nome acting as the High Priest of the local god, but in course of time the state, represented by the king, began to an ever-increasing degree to take oversight over the more important local cults. Thus we find that the Egyptian monarch was empowered to exercise priestly functions before all the gods. We constantly see him in the wall-paintings portrayed as a priest in the conventional attitudes before the images of the gods. ”

“ In most cases, however, where an ancient civilization shows us a strong priestly system we are unable to make out in any detail the steps by which that system was elaborated; the clearest case perhaps is the priesthood of the Jews, which is not less interesting from its origin and growth than from the influence exerted by the system long after the priests were dispersed and their sanctuary laid in ruins. ”

“ The answer to this question will be in many cases negative or affirmative according to our strict adherence or the reverse to the definition of the priest set forth above as “a minister whose stated business it was to perform on behalf of the community certain ritual acts, in some cases sacrifices (or the recitation of prayers) , directed Godwards.” On the other hand the seer, diviner and prophet is a minister whose function it is to communicate God's will or word to man. This is not a distinction which governs Zimmern and other writers. ”

“ Church office is a copy of the old hierarchy. Now among the Jews, as we have seen, the hierarchy proper has for its necessary condition the destruction of the state and the bondage of Israel to a foreign prince, so that spiritual power is the only basis left for a national aristocracy. ”

“ So long as the wars of independence occupied the Palestinian Jews, and the Hasmonaean sovereignty promised a measure of independence and felicity under the law, the hope that connected itself with the House of David was not likely to rise to fresh life, especially as a considerable proportion of the not very numerous passages of Scripture which speak of the ideal king might with a little straining be applied to the rising star of the new dynasty (cf. 1 Macc. xiv. 4–15) . ”

“ PRIEST (Ger. Priester, Fr. prêtre) , the contracted form of “presbyter” (πρεσβύτερος, “elder”; see Presbyter) , a name of office in the early Christian Church, already mentioned in the New Testament. But in the English Bible the presbyters of the New Testament are called “elders,” not “priests”; the latter name is reserved for ministers of pre-Christian religions, the Semitic כֹּהֲנִים‎ (kōhănīm, sing. kōhēn) and כְּמָרִים‎ (kemārīm) , or the Greek ἱερεῖς. ”

“ All such passages are frequently called Messianic; but the term is more properly reserved as the specific designation of one particular branch of the Hebrew hope of salvation, which, becoming prominent in post-canonical Judaism, used the name of the Messiah as a technical term (which it never is in the Old Testament) , and exercised a great influence on New Testament thought—the term “the Christ” (ὁ χριστός) being itself nothing more than the translation of “the Messiah.” ”

“ In the best times of 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. ”

“ But when the prophets were succeeded by the scribes, the interpreters of the written word, and the yoke of foreign oppressors rested on the land, Yahweh’s kingship, which presupposed a living nation, found not even the most inadequate expression in daily political life. Yahweh was still the lawgiver of Israel, but His law was written in a book, and He was not present to administer it. ”

“ This position, we see, can be reached by various paths: the priest may become indispensable through the growth of ritual observances and precautions too complicated for a layman to master, or he may lay claim to special nearness to the gods on the ground, it may be, of his race, or, it may be, of habitual practices of purity and asceticism which cannot be combined with the duties of ordinary life, as, for example, celibacy was required of priestesses of Vesta at Rome. ”

“ Among higher religions orthodox Islam has never had real priests, doing religious acts on behalf of others, though it has, like Protestant churches, leaders of public devotion (imāms) and an important class of privileged religious teachers (‘ulemā) . But a distinction of grades of holiness gained by ascetic life has never been entirely foreign to the Eastern mind, and in the popular faith of Mahommedan peoples something very like priesthood has crept in by this channel. ”

“ The theologians of the Greek and Latin churches expressly found the conception of a Christian priesthood on the hierarchy of the Jewish temple, while the names by which the sacerdotal character is expressed—ἱερεύς, sacerdos—originally designated the ministers of sacred things in Greek and Roman heathenism, and then came to be used as translations into Greek and Latin of the Hebrew kōhēn. ”

“ Priestly acts—that is, acts done by one and accepted by the gods on behalf of many—are common to all antique religions, and cannot be lacking where the primary subject of religion is not the individual but the natural community. ”