of his palace, male musicians, female musicians, he despatched after me to Nineveh.' (Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels, p. 344.) There are but two terms in the O.T. that imply the regular service of women about the sanctuaries; the first is that already referred to, the np, the term applied to the sacred women who officially practised prostitution at the sanctuaries in the service of the gods. The Hebrew laws sternly forbade the intrusion of this Canaanite custom into the service and Temple of Yahweh. This term is a term with a corresponding masculine. The remaining term used of women serving in or about the sanctuary occurs but twice-in Ex. 388, 1 S. 222 b (MT, not LXX). It is a feminine participle used substantively in Ex., adjectively (attached to w) in Sam.: the verb and the cognate noun are used in two passages (Nu. 824, 423) of the work of the Levites during their years of service (from twenty-five or thirty to fiftyone) about the tabernacle; but originally the verb meant to give military service, to war or to fight. We need not here inquire how this curious transition of meaning from war service to liturgical (LXX λeirovрyev) or Temple service took place; but the origin of the term may warn us against inferring that the use of the term of women implies that the women were female priests or Levites, qualified to perform service limited to priests or Levites. What kind of service these women rendered and under what conditions we cannot say, for the two references are to accidental not essential activities. In Ex. 388 we are informed that these female servants about the door of the tabernacle gave their mirrors as an offering out of which the brass laver of the tabernacle was made. In Samuel these women appear only as those with whom the sons of Eli misconducted themselves. Though both references are to early periods in the history of Israel, they cannot be taken directly as evidence of conditions then prevailing, but of the conditions of the somewhat late post-exilic period to which the references belong: of course this does not preclude the possibility, nor perhaps the probability, that such women attendants were also associated with the Temple or sanctuaries in the earlier periods also; but the important point is this, that our only references to them are from a period when references to priests and Levites are abundant, and when the nature of those references are such as to render it impossible that these women were female priests or Levites by profession: Levites by birth they may have been, but even of this there is no evidence nor any great presumption. We have now examined those lines of evidence bearing on the place of women as officials in the Hebrew cult: the direct evidence of the Hebrew records, the philological, the comparative custom of Semitic peoples. What conclusions may we draw? Let me first cite the conclusion of Professor Peritz in his article on 'Woman in the Ancient Hebrew Cult', to which I have already referred. It is as follows (p. 114): 'The Semites in general, and the Hebrews in particular, and the latter especially in the earlier periods of their history, exhibit no tendency to discriminate between man and woman, so far as regards participation in religious practices, but woman participates in all the essentials of the cult, both as worshipper and official:1 and only in later time, with the progress in the development of the cult itself, a tendency appears, not so much, however, to exclude woman from the cult, as rather to make man prominent in it.' Professor Peritz's essay, which is a legitimate protest against certain influential attempts to ignore or underestimate the rights of women in the cult and the participation of women in certain other religious activities, suffers in turn from an imperfect recognition of actual discrimination between men and women; and in particular because he fails to keep sufficiently distinct participation in the cult as worshipper and official, and the distinction-which, if not original, is certainly early-between prophet and priest. With his arguments that woman as worshipper has free access to the cult, and that women were prophets in the same sense and at the same time as men, we are not concerned, and now merely say that they are substantially sound; but the question is, Were women at any period in the history of Hebrew religion priests? For the later period of the religion-from the Exile onwards, and indeed from an even earlier period, we may with confidence assert that women were not admitted to the priestly office or to Levitical service. For this later period we have sufficient records for the bare argument from silence to be weighty, but it can be Italics mine. reinforced, if need be, by such considerations as that the physical disabilities of priestly service are expressed in terms inapplicable to and irrelevant to women. But it is precisely at this period, as we have seen, that in the Phoenician records priestesses appear with frequency alongside of priests, women as well as men occupy the office of priest (and even of arch-priest) or kohen; at this period, then, we can establish an important difference in religious institutions between Israel and Phoenicia. For the earlier period, for which the records are so much scantier, the argument from silence becomes correspondingly less weighty; and, if we wish, passing beyond the facts that the language contains no feminine for 'priest' and that there is no record of any priestly act performed by women, we are driven to rely on inference and analogy, and either to assert or to deny that in early Israel women were priests. Some of the arguments from analogy on which Peritz relies in asserting or suggesting that there were female priests not merely break down, but, for what they are worth, turn in the other direction. He argues that in Semitic religion generally women priests are a natural corollary to female divinities; and we may add that when we can discover women priests they are—as in Phoenicia-especially given to the service of female divinities. But this call for women priests vanishes from the religion of Israel-from the distinctive religion of Israel, that is to say, apart from heathen cults to which some or many of the Hebrews were from time to time addicted; for the religion of Israel recognized no other god beside Yahweh, least of all any female deity with a right to be worshipped in Israel. The absence from the language of a feminine of kohen corresponds to the absence of a feminine for El, Eloah, or Elohim, though feminines of these too occur in the cognate languages. Again, in arguing from the analogy of Arabic heathenism, Peritz remarks (p. 116): 'Arabic heathenism has two chief cultic officials: sadin, the temple watchman, and ḥâjib (door-keeper), the temple-servant or priest: and kahin, the seer or prophet. In the latter class women are numerous; but of the woman sâdin there is not a single instance that I can find'. And now it is precisely this second negative fact which is much more significant for the question at issue than Peritz seems to realize: and it points away from the conclusion that Peritz seeks to establish. Female seers or prophets in Israel there certainly were: we do not need, though it is interesting to have, the Arabic parallel to this fact. But were the Hebrew female seers closely associated with the cult? Or were the temple-keepers and the administrators of the cultus exclusively men as the Arabic sadins or hajibs appear to have been? That there were many Arabic female kahins is no proof that there were Hebrew female kohens; with the difference in function covered by the same terms in the two languages there may have gone difference in sex-limitation in practice. The question ultimately turns on the use which we wish to make of the term 'priest' in relation to early Israel and the differentiation between 'priest' and 'seer'. Without closing these other questions at present, I will merely state my own judgement on the question whether female priests were ever recognized in the Hebrew religion thus: in the later periods the priestly and Levitical classes were closed orders; at an earlier period the priestly class was, as is now at least commonly believed, open, not limited by particular descent; from the time at which the orders became closed, however early we place that development, women were not admitted to the priesthood, and though of course women reckoned their descent from Levi, they did not exercise the special cultic Levitical service. With regard to the period prior to the closing of the orders nothing further can be satisfactorily said at the present point, though I shall have the opportunity of briefly returning to the subject in subsequent lectures. XIII THE MOSAIC PRIESTHOOD. Moses and Aaron were among his priests, And Samuel among them that called upon his name; In the pillar of cloud he spake unto them. Ps. 99 f. MOSES the law-giver and Moses the prophet are familiar conceptions: Moses the priest much less so, and yet, in spite of some ambiguities of construction and meaning, these lines of Psalm 99 clearly appear to assert that Moses was a priest of Yahweh, and perhaps even, by mentioning him even in this connexion before Aaron, to imply that he was pre-eminent among the priests. But the passage is unique: nowhere else in the O.T.1 is Moses entitled priest. Whether and to what extent without being entitled he is yet implied to have been a priest, in what his priestly character or functions consisted, and the significance of this for the history of the religion of Israel are the questions with which the present lecture is concerned. The antiquity of Psalm 99 which entitles Moses 'priest' is uncertain: but we may most safely assign it to at least some part of the post-exilic period, and in any case to a period sufficiently remote from the age of Moses for its statements to have little value as testimony to the historical realities of the Mosaic age. It does not follow that, because this Psalm says so, Moses 1 Outside the O.T. cp. very clearly Philo, De Vita Mosis, ii.) iii.) 39 § 292 (Μ. p. 179) τοιαύτη δὲ καὶ ἡ τελευτὴ τοῦ βασιλέως καὶ νομοθέτου καὶ ἀρχιερέως καὶ πроþýτον Mwüσéws: iii. 1-22 is devoted to the priestly aspect of the life of Moses yet the exposition really describes Moses less (if at all) as priest than as priest-maker. Moses receives instructions relative to the priestly dress, functions, &c., of others whom he is to initiate into the office of priest of his own priestly activity Philo finds nothing to say. According to Manetho, cited by Jos. (Cont. Ap. i. 26), Moses Osarsiph was a priest of Heliopolis in Egypt, to which statement Haupt (ZDMG 63. 522) is so far inclined to attach importance as to surmise that not Joseph but Moses was son-in-law of the priest of On. = |