Deuteronomy 18:8

They shall have Sam. LXX: he shall have.

beside that which cometh of the sale of his patrimony a paraphrase of the difficult Heb.: beside his sales, or realised values, or prices, on the fathers(LXX, πλὴν τῆς πράσεως τῆς κατὰ πατριάν). EVV."s paraphrase is generally accepted; cp. Jeremiah 32:6-15; Jeremiah 37:12 (R.V.), which shows a priest from a rural sanctuary, who had removed to Jerusalem, possessing money of his own and by right of redemption able to buy land which a relative desired to sell. Dillm., rejecting the usual interpretation as too obvious, proposes -the money which he realised on such dues as had fallen to him from the families to whom he ministered at his home." A certain solution of the difficulty is hardly possible. Either we have an abbreviated legal formula the meaning of which is lost, or the text is corrupt. By small emendations, Steuern. ingeniously reads: -except those who are idolatrous priests and necromancers." This is agreeable to the spirit of D, guards against an easy abuse of the law and is in harmony with the next law; but it has to be forced out of even the emended syntax.

This law of D, establishing the rural Levites, who come to Jerusalem, in equal rank and privilege with their fellow-tribesmen already ministering there, was not carried out. 2 Kings 23:9 states that the priests of the high places came not up to the altar of Jehovah at Jerusalem but they did eat unleavened bread among their brethren. Apparently the Jerusalem priests succeeded from the first in keeping off the rural Levites from the priestly function of sacrifice on the ground that the cults which they had served were idolatrous (high places); and exclusion from the altar involved of course exclusion from the priest's share of the offerings. That they ate unleavened bread(the attempts to emend this text are unsatisfactory) with their brethrenmay imply some peculiar privilege of the priests; yet unleavened bread was not their food alone, and so the phrase more probably means that though shut out from priestly functions the rural Levites were not excommunicated from eating at the Passover, with their brother Levites and other Israelites. Ezekiel (Ezekiel 44:10-14) excludes -Levites" from the priesthood (confined by him to the sons of Zadok) and degrades them to inferior services about the Temple. We have already seen (on Deuteronomy 10:8 f.) how this inferiority was confirmed by P.