worship is to dwell as much as possible apart on its own soil and territory, which shall serve them for separate houses to sanctify them, as is expressly remarked for the priests (xiv. 4), and in an inferior degree holds good also, of course, for the Levites beside them.  Here everything starts from, and has its explanation in, the temple.  Its original is unmistakably the temple of Solomon; its site is beside the capital, in the heart of the sacred centre of the land between Judah and Benjamin; there the sons of Zadok have their abode, and beside them are the Levites whom Josiah had brought up from all the country to Jerusalem.  Obviously the motives are not here far to seek.  In the Priestly Code, on the other hand, which was not in a position to shape the future freely out of the present, but was compelled to accept archaeological restrictions, the motives are historically concealed and almost paralysed.  The result has remained, namely, the holding of separate territory by the clergy, but the cause or the purpose of it can no longer be recognised on account of the sanctuary being now an abstract idea.  Jerusalem and the temple, which, properly speaking, occasioned the whole arrangement, are buried in silence with a diligence which is in the highest degree surprising; and on the other hand, in remembrance of the priesthoods scattered everywhere among the high places of Israel in earlier days, forty-eight fresh Levitical cities are created, from which, however, their proper focus, a temple to wit, is withheld only in the circumstance that precisely the thirteen cities of Judah and Benjamin happen to fall to the lot of the sons of Aaron, does the influence of Jerusalem unconsciously betray itself.

V.II.2.  Apart from this historical fiction, the other claims that are made for the endowment of the clergy are, however exorbitant, nevertheless practicable and seriously meant.  So far as the circumstances of their origin are concerned, two possibilities present themselves.  Either the priests demanded what they could hope to obtain, in which case they were actually supreme over the nation, or they set up claims which at the time were neither justified nor even possible; in which case they were not indeed quite sober, yet at the same time so sane prophetically, that centuries afterwards the revenues they dreamed of became in actuality theirs.  Is it to be supposed that it was (say) Moses, who encouraged his people as they were struggling for bare life in the wilderness to concern themselves about a superabundantly rich endowment of their clergy?  Or is it believed that it was in the period of the judges, when the individual tribes and families of Israel, after having forced their way among the Canaanites, had a hard fight to maintain their position, get somehow settled in their new dwelling-places and surroundings, that the thought first arose of exacting such taxes from a people that was only beginning to grow into a national