their priesthood, by abusing it to preside over the cultus of the high places, which the prophet regards as idolatry and hates in his inmost soul.  Naturally those Levites are exempted from the penalty who have discharged their functions at the legal place,—­the Levites the sons of Zadok,—­namely, at Jerusalem, who now remain sole priests and receive a position of pre-eminence above those who hitherto have been their equals in office, and who are still associated with them by Ezekiel, under the same common name, but now are reduced to being their assistants and hieroduli.

It is an extraordinary sort of justice when the priests of the abolished Bamoth are punished simply for having been so, and conversely the priests of the temple at Jerusalem rewarded for this; the fault of the former and the merit of the latter consist simply in their existence.  In other words, Ezekiel merely drapes the logic of facts with a mantle of morality.  From the abolition of the popular sanctuaries in the provinces in favour of the royal one at Jerusalem, there necessarily followed the setting aside of the provincial priesthoods in favour of the sons of Zadok at the temple of Solomon.  The original author of the centralisation, the Deuteronomic lawgiver, seeks indeed to prevent this consequence by giving to the extraneous Levites an equal right of sacrificing in Jerusalem with their brethren hereditarily settled there, but it was not possible to separate the fate of the priests from that of their altars in this manner.  The sons of Zadok were well enough pleased that all sacrifices should be concentrated within their temple, but they did not see their way to sharing their inheritance with the priesthood of the high places, and the idea was not carried out (2Kings xxiii. 9).  Ezekiel, a thorough Jerusalemite, finds a moral way of putting this departure from the law, a way of putting it which does not explain the fact, but is merely a periphrastic statement of it.  With Deuteronomy as a basis it is quite easy to understand Ezekiel’s ordinance, but it is absolutely impossible if one starts from the Priestly Code.  What he regards as the original right of the Levites, the performance of priestly services, is treated in the latter document as an unfounded and highly wicked pretension which once in the olden times brought destruction upon Korah and his company; what he considers to be a subsequent withdrawal of their right, as a degradation in consequence of a fault, the other holds to have been their hereditary and natural destination.  The distinction between priest and Levite which Ezekiel introduces and justifies as an innovation, according to the Priestly Code has always existed; what in the former appears as a beginning, in the latter has been in force ever since Moses,—­an original datum, not a thing that has become or been made./1/ That the prophet should know

********************************************** 1.  “If by reason of their birth it was impossible for the Levites to become priests, then it would be more than strange to deprive them of the priesthood on account of their faults,—­much as if one were to threaten the commons with the punishment of disqualification to sit or vote in a house of lords” (Kuenen, Theol.  Tijdschr., iii. 465). *********************************************