Israel and Humanity - Design and the Jewish priesthood among the Gentiles
III.
Design of the priesthood among the Jews and the Gentiles.
We said earlier that the Israelite priesthood is closer to the design of the western nations than that of the East. Here is a point on which the agreement is complete.
It has justly observed that the Greeks and Romans differed Orientals in that they knew no college of priests formed as mediators between God and men, jealous custodians and interpreters of mysterious revelations. Each father in the precincts of his house administering sacred things. There was, indeed, the Romans Corporations pundits, like those of the Salian and soothsayers, but both the others were elected by the assemblies or fell in all respects the secular authority. Among the Greeks the resemblance was more striking. There were privileged families invested a priestly office, as at Athens Eumolpidae, others devoted themselves to the consultation of oracles, to guard the shrines, the art of divination, but they did not form hierarchy and all were also submitted to the government.
Mr. Maury said somewhere that the inheritance, by which the Greek priest approaches the Jewish priesthood was often kept in the same family by an effect of the belief existing in Homeric times as necessary under the sacred functions is transmitted through blood and this is especially likely for the Ministry of Prophet and seeing [1]. There is nothing objectionable about the reunion of the two functions in Greece, but in Judaism we know that [2] things were different, the priesthood was hereditary, not the prophecy That was the point, yet the principle, true in itself, the transmission of priesthood, which is the ability spreads and increases even by inheritance, would have applied even more effectively when was all moral and intellectual powers like those of prophets. So why do we find no family in Israel especially for the prophecy as there were some who were exclusively devoted to the priesthood? In fact, the prophecy was also the hereditary priesthood, only instead of only belong to some particular families, it was the privilege of the Semites first, then a more special, the entire Jewish race.
This is fortunately one of those on which modern science's most independent and most Orthodox Jewish doctrine are in complete agreement. It is an accepted fact today that the nabi or prophet, is a Jewish phenomenon that has no parallel in the history of other peoples. So should we judge all the more remarkable ancient and unchanging assertions of Israel in this regard, while science remained silent or seemed rather consider this claim as a silly presumption of Jewish nationalism. Under the general suitability of the race, however, were not left to distinguish the most significant provisions in the prophetic gift in some families who had enjoyed for a series of generations. We have proof in the words of Amos: "I am neither a prophet nor a prophet's son [3]. This last quality was therefore already considered by itself as a favorable condition for the development of religious donation.
Despite the hereditary Jewish priesthood, which seems to give it a higher power than that enjoyed by the Roman priesthood, if we examine closely the functions and prerogatives of the one or the other, we see the contrary, that this advantage of the first was significantly attenuated by a significant disadvantage in the scope of authority. While falling, as citizens, national governments, apart from certain functions that approached the Jewish priesthood, the Roman priests were still others who, while having a religious character, their [4] confer undue influence on public affairs. Not only is their responsibility to set the calendar, setting lucky and unlucky days, elect the high priest and to determine the conditions of purity or impurity legal, but they still had the right to dissolve the assemblies, of annul the public to stop the largest companies with a simple verbal order and repeal the laws published without observing prescribed rites. Of all these powers, there's only one that finds its equivalent in Judaism even if it is not without a significant difference, we mean the right to intervene in the priesthood of the company a war by consulting Urim and Thummim .
