on under Josiah on the
basis of the Deuteronomic code rested in the last analysis on the fact
that the priests of the house of Zadok at Jerusalem were placed in the
service of the higher prophetic teaching by being rendered the guardians,
executors, and later, in conjunction with the Levites, the teachers of the
Law, as it was presented in the book of the law of Moses, soon afterward
completed. The priesthood, deprived of everything that might remind one of
the former idolatry and heathenish practices, was, in its purer and holier
character, to lead the priest-people to true moral holiness through its
connection with the sanctuary and its ancient cult. Still the impulse for
the moral rebirth of the nation, for the establishment of a priest-people,
did not emanate from the Temple priesthood, nor even from the sacred soil
of Palestine; but from the Synagogue, which began in the Exile, under the
influence of the prophetic word and the Levitical song, in the form of
public worship by the congregation of the pious. Here arose a generation
of godly men, a class of singularly devout ones, living in priestly
holiness, who consecrated their lives to the practice of the law, and whom
the exile seer had designated as the true Israel, the servant of the Lord,
and these formed the nucleus of the renewed Israel.

4. That which the prophet Ezekiel had attempted in his proposed
constitution(1106) was accomplished in a far more thorough manner by the
Holiness Code, which emanated from his school and became the central
portion of the Mosaic books, and by the so-called Priestly Code, which
followed later. The object was to bring about the sanctification of the
entire people upon the holy soil of the national land, through
institutions embodying the ideal of the holiness of God in the life and
cult of the people. Circumcision, idealized by the prophetic author of
Deuteronomy,(1107) was to be made the sign of the covenant to mark as holy
the progeny of Abraham;(1108) strict laws of marriage were to put an end
to all heathenish unchastity; the Sabbath rest was to consecrate the
labors of the week, the Sabbatical month and year the produce of the
soil.(1109) The prohibition of unclean foods, heretofore reserved, as
among other nations, for the priests and other consecrated persons, was
now applied to the whole community in order that Israel should learn "to
set itself apart from all other nations as a holy people."(1110) Even
their apparel was