This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[30]
For our forefathers did not only appoint the best of these priests,
and those that attended upon the Divine worship, for that design from the
beginning, but made provision that the stock of the priests should continue
unmixed and pure; for he who is partaker of the priesthood must propagate
of a wife of the same nation, without having any regard to money, or any
other dignities; but he is to make a scrutiny, and take his wife's genealogy
from the ancient tables, and procure many witnesses to it. 1
And this is our practice not only in Judea, but wheresoever any body of
men of our nation do live; and even there an exact catalogue of our priests'
marriages is kept; I mean at Egypt and at Babylon, or in any other place
of the rest of the habitable earth, whithersoever our priests are scattered;
for they send to Jerusalem the ancient names of their parents in writing,
as well as those of their remoter ancestors, and signify who are the witnesses
also. But if any war falls out, such as have fallen out a great many of
them already, when Antiochus Epiphanes made an invasion upon our country,
as also when Pompey the Great and Quintilius Varus did so also, and principally
in the wars that have happened in our own times, those priests that survive
them compose new tables of genealogy out of the old records, and examine
the circumstances of the women that remain; for still they do not admit
of those that have been captives, as suspecting that they had conversation
with some foreigners. But what is the strongest argument of our exact management
in this matter is what I am now going to say, that we have the names of
our high priests from father to son set down in our records for the interval
of two thousand years; and if any of these have been transgressors of these
rules, they are prohibited to present themselves at the altar, or to be
partakers of any other of our purifications; and this is justly, or rather
necessarily done, because every one is not permitted of his own accord
to be a writer, nor is there any disagreement in what is written; they
being only prophets that have written the original and earliest accounts
of things as they learned them of God himself by inspiration; and others
have written what hath happened in their own times, and that in a very
distinct manner also.
Flavius Josephus. The Works of Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo. John E. Beardsley. 1895.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.