inally became the head of a sacerdotal
theocracy.[1965]

+1068+. While the Babylonian and Assyrian priesthoods were not so highly
organized as the Egyptian, and never attained great political power,
they were nevertheless very influential. Astronomy and astrology, the
interpretation of omens and portents, the science of magic and
exorcisms, the direction of the religious life of kings and people were
in the hands of the priests; the great temples were rich, there were
various classes of temple-ministers, all well cared for, and the chief
priest of an important shrine was a person of great dignity and power.
The interpretation of sacrificial phenomena was made into a science by
the priests, and, passing from them to Greece and Italy, exerted a
definite influence on the religious life of the whole Western
world.[1966]

+1069+. The process of organizing the Hebrew priesthood began under
David and Solomon, at first, under Solomon (who favored the Zadok
family), affecting only the Jerusalem temple. In the Northern kingdom
(established about 930 B.C.) there seems to have been a similar
arrangement. As long as the old royal governments lasted (the Northern
kingdom fell in the year 722 B.C., the Southern in 586) the priests were
controlled by the kings. On the building of the Second Temple (516) and
the reorganization of the Judean community they became, under Persian
rule, independent of the civil government and finally, in the persons of
the high-priests, the civil heads of the Palestinian Jews. The Maccabean
uprising resulted in the establishment of the Asmonean priest-dynasty,
in which the offices of civil ruler and religious leader were united.
After the fall of this dynasty (37 B.C.) the priestly party (the
Sadducees, that is, the Zadokites), forming an aristocracy, conservative
of ritual and other older religious customs and ideas, was engaged in a
constant struggle with the democratic party (the Pharisees), which was
hospitable to the new religious ideas (resurrection, immortality,
legalism). The latter party was favored by the people, and with the
destruction of the temple (70 A.D.) the priests disappeared from
history. From the beginning they appear to have been not only religious
ministrants and guides but also civil judges; their great work was the
formulation of the religious law, as it appears in the Pentateuch, and
it is probable that the shrines (especially that of Jerusalem) were
centers of general literary a