The sacrificial priesthood
We saw last week how in ancient Israel checks were introduced to prevent the priesthood being over-powerful. At the same time, it was not all corrupt: we are given the shining example of Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson, who was “zealous for the honour of his God” [Numbers 25:10-13].
If the priests were expected to teach and to exhort the people, then, as the sacrificial system grew, they had precious little time for these things. Even allowing for exaggeration, the dedication of the Temple under Solomon [1 Kings 8:63] required 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep and goats. And we think we had problems with mad-cow disease! You have only to look at the sacrificial requirements for the autumn Feast of Tabernacles [Numbers 29:12-34] to see that priests were in danger of being reduced to holy butchers.
We know that many priests resented these onerous duties. After all, Melchizedek, the first described in the Bible as a “priest”, did not offer sacrifice at all; he gave a blessing to Abraham [Genesis 14: 18-19].
So the Biblical texts are ambivalent about the idea of sacrifices. Some Psalms [notably Psalms 50, 51], stress that the real sacrifice is spiritual, of the heart, even ridiculing the idea of animal sacrifices. Yet others [Psalm 66: 13-15] extol the offerings of animals in the Temple.
As the demands of the cult grew, so priests tended to cut corners. Several of the prophets complain about this – the priests do not teach [Jeremiah], the priests offer defective animals [Malachi]. It is the ancient equivalent of gabbling through Mass in 15 minutes.
More importantly, so much stress on the things sacrificed detracted from the idea of the blessing, in which the people, as they made their offerings to God, came into a deeper relationship with him.
Despite these problems, the sacrificial priesthood in Israel lasted 1000 years, interrupted only by the exile in Babylon. But shortly after the Temple was definitively destroyed by the Romans (70AD), it was no more. And the all-important notion of blessing passed back to its ancient locations, the Jewish home and the Jewish meeting-house or ‘synagogue’, where in such things as the Sabbath service and Sabbath meal, and the Passover meal, the Jews keep alive their age-old sense of being a “people whom the Lord has blessed”.