unity, for an end that was altogether remote from its interest?  What power could then have been able in those days, when every man did what was right in his own eyes, to compel the individual to pay?  But even when actually, under the pressure of circumstances, a political organisation had arisen which embraced all the tribes, it could hardly have occurred to the priests to utilise the secular arm as a means for giving to themselves a place of sovereignty; and still less could they have succeeded WITHOUT the king on whom they were so completely dependent.  In short, the claims they make in the Law would in the pre-exilic period have been regarded as utopian in the strict sense of that word; they allow of explanation only by the circumstances which from the beginning of the Chaldaean rule, and still more that of the Persians, lent themselves to the formation of a hierocracy, to which, as to the truly national and moreover divine authority, the people gave voluntary obedience, and to which the Persians also conceded rights they could not have granted to the family of David.  At the very beginning of the exile, Ezekiel begins to augment the revenues of the priests (xliv. 28-30), yet he still confines himself on the whole to the lines of Deuteronomy, and makes no mention of tithes and firstlings.  Of the demands of the Priestly Code in their full extent we hear historically in Nehemiah x. for the first time; there it is stated that they were carried through by men who had the authority of Artaxerxes behind them.  This was the most difficult and at the same time the most important part of the work Ezra and Nehemiah had to do in introducing the Pentateuch as the law of the Jewish Church; and that is the reason why it is so specially and minutely spoken of.  Here plainly lies the material basis of the hierocracy from which the royal throne was ultimately reached.

For all these dues, apart from sacrificial perquisites, flowed into a common coffer, and benefited those who had the control of this, viz., the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem, whom it helped to rise to a truly princely position.  The ordinary priests, and especially the Levites, did not gain by all this wealth.  The latter indeed ought, according to law, to have had the tithes, and to have handed over the tithes of these again to the sons of Aaron, but as the general tendency of the time was to depress the Levites, this legal revenue was also gradually withdrawn from them and appropriated by the priests.  Afterwards the chief priests claimed the tithes for themselves alone, while their inferior brethren had to suffer severe privation and even hunger itself (Josephus, Ant., xx. 8, 8; 9, 2).