semiopen

Once temples are built, I doubt that there is any question that a priest was in charge.

Regarding the Levite issue.

Not 100% certain that the Levite/Kohan concept was pre Exilic, but no worse than even wager.

bacht

Good point. Do we have evidence for pre-exilic temples in Judah, like in Lachish or elsewhere outside Jerusalem?

spin

I think Levites are second class priests, the ones who looked after local temples and shrines. The centralization put them out of a job.

But my concern is working from the text indications to real world ones, not to the artificial narrative within the text, which is so readily treated as though it were history and not relatively untested narrative.

Look at the distribution of the words priest and Levite through the Hebrew bible:

	Levites	Levite		Priests	Priest
All	236	26		367	479
Gen-Ruth	74	22		50	263
- Gen	0	0		2	4
- Ex	2	1		3	18
- Lev	2	0		10	147
- Nu	48	0		2	35
- Deut	8	12		8	6
- Josh	14	0		24	11
- Jdg	0	9		1	12
- Ruth	0	0		0	0
1Sam-2Kgs	3	0		44	57
1Chr-2Chr	90	3		72	25
Ezra-Neh	57	1		58	18

According to most pundits Judges contains some of the oldest biblical material, but there's not a trace of the Levites there. The Levites make their big appearance in the Pentateuch in Numbers, but that's not too unusual, as it sets out lots of rules for Hebrew society and it's rather hard to date. In Exodus and Leviticus they are rather scarce, though there is a fair presence in Deuteronomy and Joshua. The big winners are Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. Sam/Kgs, basically have nothing to say about the Levites. Don't you find this strange?

Consensus in this field is plainly a religious commitment. You cannot expect any balanced judgment on the issue out of the seminaries.

I agree that Zadok is odd, but then everything is odd in these matters.

Kohanim, not Lewim. At least, that's the biblical attitude. Levites don't sacrifice; they're.. well.. janitors. (I think we have to wait for the Pharisaic friction with the priesthood before the Levites are given any quality time.)


spin

DrJim

Spin,
Going from memory here, but I'm not sure I follow you about no Levites in Judges. Chapter 19? Or am I muddled?

spin

No, you're right. I flubbed the table. I put the Jdg "Levite" in Joshua, which uses the plural but not the singular, while Judges uses the singular but not the plural. This of course means that my brilliance on Judges in that post can be dismissed, though the data becomes more interesting. :frown:


spin

DrJim

And Judges 17-18?

semiopen

This came up in a vid's post a few days ago.

Tell_Qasile is in Tel Aviv, Philistine from about 1200BCE, this is a little scary though because Benjamin Mazar says this was destroyed by King David.

There were numerous Judahite temples other than Jerusalem, but I'm not aware of any older than the traditional dates given for the Jerusalem Temple.

I referred to the article Pagan Yahwism: The Folk Religion of Ancient Israel
By Ephraim Stern in the May/June 2001 Biblical Archaeological Review.

Reagrding the priestly class, my guess is that the high places would probably not have had a priest.

bacht

Thanks, I should pay better attention

Right, and if Judah was thinly populated until the later 8th C we shouldn't expect a lot of substantial building remains until the era of Hezekiah.

I'm sure someone has suggested this, but could we hypothesize that northern refugees were literary "pioneers" in Judah after 722? I'm thinking of stories or story elements in Kings that may have originated in Israel/Samaria and were recast as southern. I'm wondering if northern escapees walked into a cultural "vacuum" and filled it with their own traditions as writing and literacy took hold in Judah (?)

spin

Here's a challenge: find a modern university text on the archaeology of Israel that supports this claim for Tell Qasile. Amihai Mazar who excavated at Tell Qasile in the early 1970s and is thus an expert on the site gives no such indication. What we see in the conjecture about a destruction by King David is the height of the biblical archaeology.

Judahite?? You must remember that Lachish was the most important city in the area until its destruction by the Assyrians. Judah doesn't enter into history as we know it until not long before that time -- when it is first registered as paying tribute to the Assyrians.

And this doesn't seem like speculation to you?

All the information is true but it fails to note that this was a double temple, so should have been to two deities.

Another conjecture with the warped vision of someone avoiding the obvious: Lachish was not second to Jerusalem. It was bigger and better defended. Lachish was the most important city in the area. One cannot make assumptions about the temple in that city based on inverse logic.

Sadly Ephraim Stern's comments here are vacuous.

Why not?


spin

semiopen

Your comments were fascinating, and after looking at them closely didn't see any obvious errors.

The high places seem to imply that a full time priest wasn't around and if there wasn't, who would kill the animals? My understanding is that meat had to be ritually slaughtered before being eaten, where Deuteronomy 12 discusses the situation where the temple is too far. The ritual slaughtering seems to be pre exilic.