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Deuteronomy

About this book
Chapter 18

1 The Levitical priests—indeed,⁠ the entire tribe of Levi—will have no allotment or inheritance with Israel; they may eat the burnt offerings of the Lord and of his inheritance. 2 They will have no inheritance in the midst of their fellow Israelites; the Lord alone is their inheritance, just as he had told them. 3 This shall be the priests’ fair allotment from the people who offer sacrifices, whether bull or sheep—they must give to the priest the shoulder, the jowls, and the stomach. 4 You must give them the best of your grain, new wine, and olive oil, as well as the best of your wool when you shear your flocks.⁠ 5 For the Lord your God has chosen them and their sons from all your tribes to stand and serve in his name permanently. 6 Suppose a Levite comes by his own free will from one of your villages, from any part of Israel where he is living, to the place the Lord chooses 7 and serves in the name of the Lord his God like his fellow Levites who stand there before the Lord. 8 He must eat the same share they do, despite any profits he may gain from the sale of his family’s inheritance. 9 When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, you must not learn the abhorrent practices of those nations. 10 There must never be found among you anyone who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire,⁠ anyone who practices divination,⁠ an omen reader, a soothsayer, a sorcerer,⁠ 11 one who casts spells, one who conjures up spirits, a practitioner of the occult, or a necromancer.⁠ 12 Whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord, and because of these detestable things the Lord your God is about to drive them out from before you. 13 You must be blameless before the Lord your God. 14 Those nations that you are about to dispossess listen to omen readers and diviners, but the Lord your God has not given you permission to do such things. 15 The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you—from your fellow Israelites; you must listen to him. 16 This accords with what happened at Horeb in the day of the assembly. You asked the Lord your God: “Please do not make us hear the voice of the Lord our God anymore or see this great fire anymore lest we die.” 17 The Lord then said to me, “What they have said is good. 18 I will raise up a prophet like you⁠ for them from among their fellow Israelites.⁠ I will put my words in his mouth and he will speak to them whatever I command.⁠ 19 I will personally hold responsible anyone who then pays no attention to the words that prophet speaks in my name. 20 “But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not authorized him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die. 21 Now if you say to yourselves, ‘How can we tell that a message is not from the Lord?’— 22 whenever a prophet speaks in my name and the prediction is not fulfilled, then I have not spoken it; the prophet has presumed to speak it, so you need not fear him.”

Texts in conversation

Compare Deuteronomy 18:1 and Ezekiel 44:15

Hebrew Bible

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Summary

Deuteronomy calls the entire tribe of Levi priests and lets any Levite serve at the central sanctuary. Ezekiel uses the same language but now restricts the priesthood to the descendants of Zadok and bans the rest from the altar.

Passages

Deuteronomy 18:1

Hebrew Bible
1 The Levitical priests—indeed, the entire tribe of Levi—will have no allotment or inheritance with Israel; they may eat the burnt offerings of the Lord and of his inheritance. 2 They will have no inheritance in the midst of their fellow Israelites; the Lord alone is their inheritance, just as he had told them. 3 This shall be the priests’ fair allotment from the people who offer sacrifices, whether bull or sheep—they must give to the priest the shoulder, the jowls, and the stomach. 4 You must give them the best of your grain, new wine, and olive oil, as well as the best of your wool when you shear your flocks. 5 For the Lord your God has chosen them and their sons from all your tribes to stand and serve in his name permanently. 6 Suppose a Levite comes by his own free will from one of your villages, from any part of Israel where he is living, to the place the Lord chooses 7 and serves in the name of the Lord his God like his fellow Levites who stand there before the Lord.
750–400 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Deuteronomy

Ezekiel 44:15

Hebrew Bible
14 Yet I will appoint them to keep charge of the temple, all its service, and all that will be done in it. 15 “‘But the Levitical priests, the descendants of Zadok who kept the charge of my sanctuary when the people of Israel went astray from me, will approach me to minister to me; they will stand before me to offer me the fat and the blood, declares the Sovereign Lord. 16 They will enter my sanctuary and approach my table to minister to me; they will keep my charge.
600–501 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in Ezekiel

References

... The consistent manner in which Deuteronomy speaks about ‘the Levitical priests’ is an effort to defend the sacerdotal rights of the Levites; the rule that every Levite who joins the Jerusalem priesthood shall have an income equal to that of the other priests is quite explicit on this score (Deuteronomy 18:6–8). Not all priests were on the side of Deuteronomy. As a spokesman of the priestly elite from Jerusalem who was deported to Babylonia in 597, Ezekiel took a very different position toward the Levites. In his visionary design of the new temple (Ezekiel 40–48), Ezekiel distinguishes between ‘the Levitical priests descended from Zadok’ (Ezekiel 44:15) and the other Levites. In the view of Ezekiel, the Zadokite priests were the ones who maintained the service of the temple at the time Israel went astray from Yahweh (Ezekiel 44:15). They had thereby earned the right to act as sole priests. ...
Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 93.
... This commonly accepted dating of sources yields an apparently smooth development of the offices of high priest (not apparent in H or Ezekiel; named as such in the late sixth-century prophetic books of Haggai and Zechariah; summed up in P’s legislation as Aaron; and fully represented in Zadokite form by the Chronicler); of priest (all Levites being priests in Deuteronomy; then priesthood being restricted to named family groups: sons of Zadok in Ezekiel, sons of Aaron in P and Chronicles); and of Levites (acceptable as priests in Deuteronomy, demoted by Ezekiel’s plans; reduced to status of clerus minor by P, the Chronicler; Ezra and Nehemiah following this with some variations). This historical process was accompanied by conflicts and bitter disagreements between various priestly groups (sons of Zadok, sons of Aaron, sons of Ithamar) ...
C. T. Robert Hayward, “Priesthood, Temple(s), and Sacrifice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 337–338.

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Deuteronomy 18:1 and Ezekiel 44:15

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