Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezra 1-2.
I was going to write about Cyrus’ proclamation, but I decided to start writing about the list of people who joined Zerubbabel in initially returning to Jerusalem and Judah. First, you have a group of six hundred fifty-two people who descended from one or more of three people who could not be found in the genealogies which the Exiles had. Then you have a unspecified number of people whose traditions said they were descended from priests, whose listed ancestors could also not be found in the genealogies. It appears that the first group was allowed to participate just like any other non-Levitical (or priestly) descendants of Israel, despite being able to clearly establish their descent. The ones who believed they were descended from priests were told that they could not participate in any priestly function, or eat any of the food from the priests’ share of sacrifices, with a caveat. The caveat was that when there was a priest ministering with the Urim and Thummim, that priest could inquire of God as to whether they were true priests. This led me to do some searching to see what they knew about the Urim and Thummim, since when I last looked for information about them I could find only speculation about how they worked. I found that Talmudic scholars disagree with when the Urim and Thummim were last seen. Some claimed they were around until the Maccabees, but had not worked since the destruction of Solomon’s temple. Others said that they disappeared sometime between the death of King David and the fall of Jerusalem. Considering that Jerusalem was sacked several times before the Babylonians destroyed it and that several of those occasions were during the reign of kings who did not worship God, that seems likely. I find it interesting that they chose to relegate determining if these people could serve as priests to the recovery of the Urim and Thummim, rather than using another way to determine God’s will concerning them. And I wonder if it was appropriate for them to do so. Perhaps this was a case of them really saying, “you cannot serve as priests unless God presents us with incontrovertible proof He desires otherwise.” When is it appropriate to do something like that?
I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.