The family of Aaron was consecrated once for all in the wilderness, when they offered on eight successive days the sacrifice of initiation.[62] Since that time it had been only renewed, and each new priest began his ministration by a meat-offering,[63] on his presenting which the original unction was imputed to him. This Helon was to do on the following morning, and it fortunately happened that, owing to the delay occasioned by the return of the victorious army, the course to which he belonged entered on duty on this very sabbath.[64] ----- Footnote 62: Lev. viii. ix. Footnote 63: Lev. vi. 20. Footnote 64: 2 Chron. xxiii. 4-8. ----- Elisama offered on this joyful occasion a magnificent thank-offering of several bullocks, and invited the whole course of priests, who gradually arrived to be in readiness to begin their functions, to feast upon the sacrifice. Among the rest he had invited the old man of the temple. He who bore this name was a venerable priest, nearly one hundred years old, of the course of Jojarib, to which the Maccabees also belonged. Engaged, since his twenty-fifth year, in the service of Jehovah, he had now past eighty years in the house of his God, and in the course of them had witnessed very eventful times. He had entered the temple, in the life of the excellent high-priest Onias III., and had endured the alternate yoke of the Syrians and the Egyptians; he had seen Antiochus Epiphanes, and known the victims of his sanguinary fury; he had been one of those who followed the valiant Mattathias to the wilderness; he had admired the heroic deeds of the members of the family of the Maccabees, Judas, Jonathan, Simon, and John Hyrcanus, and had served them in succession. In Egypt, where he had frequently dwelt, he had seen, forty years before, the foundation of the temple of Leontopolis, and he had beheld that of Gerizim levelled with the ground. As a doctor of the law, he was master of all the knowledge of divine or earthly things which Israel then possessed, and had been able to compare his experience with the word of God. He knew accurately the opinions of all the sects into which Israel was divided, and though he joined himself to none of them, yet was honoured by them all, and almost reckoned by all to belong to themselves. For a considerable time, during the last years of the high-priest Simon, and in the first years of Hyrcanus, he had discharged the honourable office of the Wise Man in the Sanhedrim, and in every year of the thirty-four that had elapsed since the new era of Israel’s emancipation began, some important affair had been decided by his counsel. In consequence of his increasing years, he had laid down all his offices, resigned his house and property to his children’s children, and taken up his abode in a single apartment in the temple, where he discharged the duty of a priest of the permanent course, as it was called, that is of those who dwelt in Jerusalem and supplied the place