Excerpt from The Levitical Priests: A Contribution to the Criticism of the Pentateuch The author of the following work has made him self thoroughly acquainted with the writings of the chief representatives of this theory, and seeks by means of sober arguments to show - (l) that the history of the people of Israel, as it lies before us in the historical books, presupposes a distinction in rank between the priests and the Levites, which reaches back to the time of Moses, and existed throughout all the periods of Israelitish history; (2) that the post exilic books are in no way favourable to the opinion that the priestly hierarchy is a product of the time of Ezra (3) that Deuteronomy, where it treats of reli gions privileges, does indeed assign them to the tribe of Levi, but yet so that these privileges - without contradicting the older legislation, which Deuteronomy recapitulates in an abridged form, and accommodates to changed circumstances - may be relatively distri buted to the sons of Aaron and the Levites. He shows -and this deserves special attention - that the post exilic Chronicles contain passages which in a Deutero nomic manner entirely obliterate the distinction between priests and Levites, while other passages emphasize it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.