The Expositor's Bible: The Book of DeuteronomyHarper, Andrew
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
Harper, Andrew
Bible. Deuteronomy -- Commentaries
Further, the verses concerning the Levite also emphasise the
distinction; for few will be able to adopt the view that here in vv.
6 ff. every Levite who chooses is authorised to become a priest, by
the mere process of presenting himself at the central sanctuary.
The author of Deuteronomy must have known, better probably than any
one now considering this matter, that the priests in the central
sanctuary would never consent to divide their privileges and their
income with every member of their tribe who might choose to come
up to Jerusalem. Indeed, if they had received each and every one,
the crowd would have been an embarrassment instead of a help.
As a matter of fact, when the Deuteronomic reform came to be put
in practice, this free admission of every Levite to the service
of the Jerusalem Temple was not adopted, and it is _prima facie_
improbable that the author of it can have meant his provision in
that sense. The meaning seems to be that, as only those Levites who
were employed in the central sanctuary could be _de facto_ priests,
those living in the country were not priests in the same sense;
and the regulation made is that if any Levite came up to Jerusalem
and was received into the ranks of the Temple Levites, _i.e._ the
sacrificial priests, he should receive the same dues as the others
performing the same work did. But though no conditions of admission
to the Temple service are mentioned, obviously there must have
been some conditions, some division of labour, some organisation
involving gradations in rank, and perhaps also some limitation as to
time in the case of such voluntary service as is here dealt with.
For, as Dillmann points out, it is not said that the service of
every Temple Levite is the same; numbers of them may have had no
higher work than the Levites under the laws of the Priest Codex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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