Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRIESTHOOD Priesthood among the primitive Hebrews, as pointed out in the third chapter, consisted primarily in the guardianship of a shrine and of its sacred contents. It has also been pointed out that, in addition to this, the primitive priests were seers,1 or oracle men. Moses seems to have accepted these functions of the priesthood, which he found already in existence. The center of religious worship was the Ark, the representation of deity. It was a function of the priests to guard this Ark, but not the only function. Moses, himself a priest, was not the guardian of the Ark. This duty was assigned to Joshua. Our earliest historical documents show us the Ark, after the occupation of Canaan, housed in a sanctuary at Shiloh. But although having thus a local habitation, it continued, at least until the time of Solomon, to go out to battle with the Israelites, and on such occasions its guardian went with it. The guardian priests of the Ark, after the settlement in Canaan, were Eli and his sons, descendants of Phinehas, the son of Aaron (1 Sam. i ff.). But the guardianship of the Ark was not confined to this one family. Samuel, an Ephraimite, when dedicated by his mother to the service of God, is admitted, like Joshua, into the circle of the guardians of the Ark, and sleeps in the sanctuary (1 Sam. iii). When the Ark comes to Kiriath-jearim, after its sojourn in the country of the Philistines, a guardian from the peopleof that place is at once set apart, or dedicated, for the service of the Ark (1 Sam. vii). At the outset the Ark was the sole sanctuary of the Israelites, and its guardians were, therefore, the priests par excellence. But with the occupation of Canaan other sanctuaries sprang up or were adopted by the Israelites from the Canaanites, ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.