worship 53
Egypt), and the priests of Judaea and Galilee were divided into twenty-
four groups or ‘courses’ which took turns at stints in charge of the
Temple service.^21
That service was immensely complex, and a great deal of training
must have been needed to perform the stipulated actions for animal
slaughter with the required precision. The animal had to be checked for
imperfections which might invalidate the offering. The Bible sometimes
refers to the sacrifices as God’s food, but the showbread was simply put
on display, and the oxen, cattle, calves, sheep and goats offered, ‘from
the herd or from the flock’, along with doves and pigeons, were burned
to make ‘an offering by fire of pleasing odour to the Lord’, along with
meal offerings of grain and oil, libations of wine, and incense. The bib-
lical texts in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, and (even more) the
tannaitic rabbinic texts such as the Mishnah and Tosefta, went into
great detail about the procedure to be followed in each different offer-
ing. There were precise rules for sprinkling, daubing and pouring the
animals’ blood, and for distributing the food between the altar, where it
was burned, and the priests and the worshippers, who in the case of
‘peace’ offerings enjoyed what was in essence a sacred meal in which
priests shared, with only certain parts of the meat burned on the altar.^22
The primacy of the Aaronide priestly caste in the Temple by the time
of Josephus had almost certainly been achieved over the centuries only
after some struggle. The Pentateuch preserves a tradition that all the
tribe of Levi, of which the Aaronides in the Second Temple period were
a sub- group, were eligible to carry out the sacrificial service in the des-
ert: ‘the Lord set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the ark of the covenant
of the Lord, to stand before the Lord to minister to him, and to bless in
his name, to this day’. But by the late Second Temple period, the Levites
were relegated to minor duties in the Temple as gate keepers and musi-
cians, responsible for the psalms and instrumental accompaniment,
having displaced other categories of temple servants, such as the nethinim
who made repairs and looked after the fabric of the building in the time
of Nehemiah. A struggle over status continued right to the end: as late as
the 60s ce, the Levites petitioned to be allowed to wear white clothes
like the priests. Josephus, as a priest, considered this disgraceful, and
blamed this innovation in liturgical practice for causing the destruction
of the Temple in 70 ce by provoking divine retribution.^23
The expertise of priests, and their right to a privileged proximity to
the divine service in the Temple, gave them a special status within Jew-
ish society, even if (as the number of priests increased) a decreasing