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Priest - Background

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. But the origin of a separate priestly class, distinct from the natural heads of the community, cannot be explained by any such broad general principle. 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 habitual practices of purity and asceticism which cannot be combined with the duties of ordinary life.

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". Homer knew special priests who preside over ritual acts in the temples to which they are attached; but his kings also do sacrifice on behalf of their people. The king, in fact, both in Greece and in Rome, was the acting head of the state religion, and when the regal power came to an end his sacred functions were not transferred to the ordinary priests, but either they were distributed among high officers of state, as archons and prytancs, or the title of " king " was still preserved as that of a religious functionary.

In Rome, again, where the functions of the priesthood were politically much more weighty, where the technicalities of religion were more complicated, where priests interpreted the will of the gods, and where the pontiffs had a most important jurisdiction in sacred things, the state was much too strong to suffer these powers to escape from its own immediate control: the old monarchy of the king in sacred things descended to the inheritors of his temporal power; the highest civil and religious functions met in the same persons (cf. Cic. De dom. i. 1); and every priest was subject to the state exactly as the magistrates were, referring all weighty matters to state decision and then executing what the one supreme power decreed. And it is instructive to observe that when the plebeians extorted their full share of political power they also demanded and obtained admission to every priestly college of political importance.

Among the nomadic Semites, to whom the Hebrews belonged before they settled in Canaan, there has never been any developed priesthood. 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.

With the beginning of a settled state the sanctuaries must rise in importance and all the functions of revelation will gather round them. the Canaanite and Phoenician name for a priest (kohen) is identical with the Arabic kahin, 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. 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. The bases of priestly power under the post-exile system are the unity of the altar, its inaccessibility to laymen and to the inferior ministers of the sanctuary, and the specific atoning functions of the blood of priestly sacrifices. All these things were unknown in old Israel. From the foundation of the Hasmonean "state to the time of Herod the history of the high-priest hood merges in the political history of the nation; from Herod onward the priestly aristocracy of the Sadducees lost its chief hold over the nation and expired in vain controversy with the Pharisees.