priests, Levites so called, and trace their descent from the family of Moses,—­ of which more anon.  But while Eli is a man of distinction, perhaps the owner of the sanctuary, at all events in a position of thorough independence and the head of a great house, Jonathan is a solitary wandering Levite who enters the service of the proprietor of a sanctuary for pay and maintenance, and is indeed nourished as a son by his patron, but by no means treated with special respect by the Danites.

The latter case, it may well be conjectured, more nearly represents the normal state of matters than the former.  An independent and influential priesthood could develop itself only at the larger and more public centres of worship, but that of Shiloh seems to have been the only one of this class.  The remaining houses of God, of which we hear some word from the transition period which preceded the monarchy, are not of importance, and are in private hands, thus corresponding to that of Micah on Mount Ephraim.  That of Ophra belongs to Gideon, and that of Kirjathjearim to Abinadab.  In fact, it appears that Micah, in appointing one to minister at his sanctuary for hire, would seem to have followed a more general practice.  For the expression ML( YDW, which still survived as a terminus technicus for the ordination of priests long after they had attained a perfectly independent position, can originally in this connection hardly have meant anything else than a filling of the hand with money or its equivalent; thus the priestly office would appear in the older time to have been a paid one, perhaps the only one that was paid.  Whom he shall appoint is at the discretion of the proprietor:  if no one else is available, he gives it to one of his sons (Judges xvii. 5; 1Samuel vii. 1),—­ of a “character indelibilis” there is of course in such a case no idea, as one can learn from the earliest example, in which Micah’s son retires again from the service after a brief interval.  David, when he removed the ark, intrusted it in the first instance to the house of Obededom, a captain of his, a Philistine of Gath, whom he made its keeper.  A priest of regular calling, a Levite, is, according to Judges xvii. 13, a very unusual person to find at an ordinary sanctuary.  Even at Shiloh, where, however, the conditions are extraordinary, the privilege of the sons of Eli is not an exclusive one; Samuel, who is not a member of the family, is nevertheless adopted as a priest.  The service for which a stated minister was needed was not that of offering sacrifice; this was not so regular an occurrence as not to admit of being attended to by one’s self.  For a simple altar no priest was required, but only for a house which contained a sacred image; 1

******************************************** 1.  BYT (LHYM, “house of God,” is never anything but the house of an image.  Outside of the Priestly Code, ephod is the image, ephod bad the priestly garment. ********************************************