The small Hebrew tribe of Levi found itself playing a special role in history. The Levites became priests, keepers of historical memory and of the religious tradition of their people; but most importantly, they were the creators of the Bible, a book which had a colossal influence on the spiritual development of civilized humanity. Not only did they preserve and disseminate the cult of Yahweh, but they were also the direct heirs of Moses and his idea of monotheism. The Levites became an important link between the northern and southern Hebrew tribes and their kingdoms, Israel and Judah. No other Hebrew tribe left such a vivid footprint both in their own history and the history of the world as the Levites.
Before the Exodus from Egypt, the Levites were an ordinary Hebrew tribe belonging to the southern tribal group of Jacob. This group also included the three closely related tribes of Reuben, Simeon, and Judah. Among the four southern tribes that composed the ‘house of Jacob’ the tribe of Levi did not stand out in any way. In accordance with the tribal hierarchy, the Levites were regarded as the third tribe in seniority after Reuben and Simeon. Levi was also the smallest tribe of all the tribes that constituted the ‘house of Jacob’. The Levites were initially closest, among other tribes, to the tribe of Simeon. In the pre-Egyptian period these two tribes – Simeon and Levi – collaborated in beating up the people of Shechem, an act which incurred the disapproval of patriarch Jacob, the head of this entire group of tribes. The Levites’ special role only began during the time of Moses, the leader and lawgiver who was one of their number. Moses was taken from this Hebrew tribe when still an infant and raised at the court of the Pharaoh. He received the best education possible at the time and was considered one of the most educated and well-accomplished people of his age. Fortunately for his tribe, Moses did not become a stranger to it, as the Egyptians had hoped, but devoted all his knowledge and strength to serving his own people. He began the lengthy process of writing down the oral narratives about the origin of the ‘house of Jacob’, its history in Canaan, and departure for Egypt; but, most importantly, he left us the idea of monotheism. It was Moses who turned the Levites into the keepers of this idea and of the memories and traditions of their own people; and it was he who inspired them to undertake the many centuries of work that was needed to produce the unique historical, religious, philosophical, and literary creation that is the Bible.
However, the Levites were not the only keepers of the religious tradition or composers and editors of the Bible. No less a part in creating this unprecedented piece of work was played by another group of Yahwist priests, the Aaronites. According to biblical tradition, the Aaronites were the descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron; in other words, they were descended from the same Levites. But analysis of relations between these two groups suggests that they were actually of different origin. The biblical sources incontrovertibly testify that the Aaronites and Levites were separate and substantially different from one other. Both before and during the Egyptian period the Aaronites were priests to the entire ‘house of Jacob’. Judging by the way that the Bible depicts Aaron, he was a key figure among the Hebrew tribes in Egypt. His influence on his people extended far beyond the boundaries of what was possible for any other tribal leader. Only a high priest could have held such power during enslavement in Egypt. Thus the success of Moses’ mission would have been impossible without help from Aaron.
Having spent most of his life outside Egypt and far from his fellow Hebrews, Moses was forced to communicate with them through Aaron, whom they knew better and in whom they had greater trust. Moses’ God, though, was very different from Aaron’s god; the episode with the golden calf clearly demonstrates the gulf between Aaron’s old, pagan Yahwism and the new, monotheistic Yahwism of Moses. However, Moses had only his own tribe to support him, while Aaron enjoyed the support of the majority of the ‘house of Jacob’. It is significant that after the battle following the episode with the golden calf it was Moses who had to move his tent from the common camp, not Aaron. The fact that all the Levites supported Moses and did not split between him and Aaron is evidence that the latter was not actually a blood brother of Moses or a descendant from the tribe of Levi. Had Aaron belonged to the tribe of Levi, as tradition asserts, a split would have occurred within the tribe. Moreover, given that Moses spent a lengthy time staying among the Midianites, Aaron had incomparably greater opportunity to reinforce his influence among the Levites. But nothing of the sort happened. The Bible explicitly underlines that “…all the Levites rallied to [Moses]” (Exodus 32:26). Remarkably, it was Moses who communicated with God, and it was Moses who passed on the ten commandments from the Lord, but, this notwithstanding, it was Aaron alone who carried out the functions of high priest and directed religious worship.
There are just as many contradictions in the relations between the Aaronites and the Levites. The biblical text does not conceal the fact that Aaron and his sons were separate from the Levites and held a higher position. For them the Levites were merely helpers and not a constituent part of their caste. Only the Aaronites could direct religious services and be priests, while the Levites were obliged to serve them and carry out security and domestic functions (Numbers 3:5-10). How could this have been possible if Aaron and Moses were really brothers and identically related to the tribe of Levi? There is another aspect that remains unclear. According to the Bible, Aaron was only three years older than Moses, but for some reason did not share the fate of his younger brother, who was parted from his family at the cruel command of the pharaoh, when the latter demanded that all Hebrew boys be killed. Finally, one minor, but nevertheless important detail is that in Exodus the prophetess Miriam is mentioned merely as the sister of Aaron; there is no mention of her being directly related to Moses. Yet Moses should have been her brother too (Exodus 15:20).
It likewise seems strange that the sons of Moses did not merely not inherit his position as ruler, but were completely unknown, notwithstanding the fact that they were his children born not to a slave or servant or the Cushite concubine who appeared later in his life, but to his lawful wife Zipporah, the daughter of the leader and high priest of the Kenites, who had helped Moses on numerous occasions. All this went against the laws and traditions of the time and required rational explanation in the Bible. The biblical text, however, maintains complete silence on the fates of Moses’ sons. Had they died, it is very unlikely that this would have been concealed by the Bible; on the contrary, the Bible have been bound to mention such an event – as it did in the case of the mysterious deaths of Aaron’s two sons. If this is the case, then why was it the sons of Aaron who inherited Moses’ extremely important priestly responsibilities rather than his own sons? After all, no other ruler in the ancient Near East acted in this way: we know of no case in which a pharaoh, king, or mere leader of a nomad tribe disinherited his own sons and made a mere nephew his heir. The most likely explanation is the special position occupied by the Aaronites: they were descended from the traditional priestly clan within the ‘house of Jacob’, and only they had the right to serve as high priests and to conduct worship of Yahweh. This is why Aaron’s help was essential to Moses’ mission. It was only thanks to the support of the high priest and his powerful clan that Moses, in spite of his lengthy absence in Egypt, was able to establish himself as the political leader of the Hebrew tribes in such a short period of time.
The seriousness of the tensions between the Aaronites and the Levites is shown by the rebellion led by Korah, when a number of Levites made a public stand against the primacy enjoyed by the Aaronites in worship of Yahweh. The fact that this rebellion took place is itself an important argument in favor of the thesis that the Aaronites and the Levites had different provenances. Had the Aaronites really derived from the Levites, there would have been no sense at all in Korah’s rebellion – given that the mutinous Levites were protesting categorically against Aaron and his relatives having a monopoly over the right to hold religious services, but had nothing against Moses or his family. If Aaron really had been the brother of Moses, how are we to explain the different attitudes taken by the Levites towards the two of them, and how are we to understand their rage against Aaron’s relatives, who would then have been their very own relatives at the same time? If, as the Bible states, Aaron was the brother of Moses, then he must also have been a cousin of Korah, the leader of the mutinous Levites (Exodus 6:16-21). Clearly, Aaron and Moses, like their children, were not brothers from the same tribe; this is why the Levites protested so strongly against the Aaronites’ monopoly of religious services.
Moses’ goal was not merely to free his people from enslavement in Egypt, but also to reform the tribal religion of the ‘house of Jacob’. He succeeded in turning the initially pagan cult of the southern Hebrew tribes into a universal monotheistic religion. However, Aaron’s clan of priests had difficulty in accepting the monotheistic reformation of their old cult, so Moses put his own tribe in the service of the new religion. Wittingly or unwittingly, he created yet another class of priests which was practically a rival to the traditional clan of Aaronite priests. In order to avoid conflicts with this powerful priestly clan, Moses reached an agreement with Aaron: there was to be a division of powers between the Aaronites and Levites, giving the latter secondary functions in the worship of Yahweh. Nevertheless, conflict between the two groups of priests could not be avoided, as we see only too clearly from both the episode with the golden calf and the rebellion led by Korah. It is extremely likely that the mysterious death of Aaron’s two sons due to the fact that they “[…] offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command” (Leviticus 10:1) was actually the result of a clash between the Levites and Aaronites.
The two parties fought not just over who was to have a leading a role in the worship of Yahweh, but also over the character of this worship. With the help of the Levites, Moses consistently upheld monotheistic Yahwism, while Aaron and his clan periodically retreated to the old, pagan interpretation of their tribal cult. Moses’ problem was that he could rely only on his own tribe, one of the smallest of the Hebrew tribes; this meant that his leadership was only possible with the support of the high priest and the leaders of the other tribes, and only during his own lifetime. It comes as no surprise, then, that Moses was unable to pass on his primacy to his own sons and that after his death supreme power was inherited by Joshua, the leader of the northern tribes, while authority in religion passed to Eleazar, the head of the priestly clan of the ‘house of Jacob’. The tensions between the Levites and the Aaronites were exacerbated by a division in the camp of Moses. The two southern tribes, Simeon and Judah, refused to join the northern tribes who were already in Canaan, preferring to linger in the desert with their new allies, who were nomadic tribes of Midianite and Edomite origin. However, most of the tribes left with Moses and Eleazar, Aaron’s son, to conquer central and northern Canaan. Furthermore, a division occurred between both priestly groups. The split was uneven: almost all of the Levites left with Moses, while only a few Aaronites followed the high priest Eleazar. Most of the Aaronites preferred to stay with Judah, to whom they were closer, on the southern border of Canaan. It was thus that the Levites and Aaronites divided among the northern and southern tribes.
Later on, during the period of the judges, the northern Levites managed to take revenge on the Aaronites. Taking advantage of the fact that the latter, after ending up among the northern tribes, had lost the influence which they had previously enjoyed among their own, southern tribes, the northern Levites took control of the worship of Yahweh into their own hands. We have good reason to suppose that Eli, the high priest from the religious center in Shiloh, was in fact a descendant of Moses, not Aaron. The clear predominance of the northern Levites during the period of the judges only exacerbated the tension between the two bodies of priests and led to their geographical and political demarcation. The Levites were the dominant presence in the territory of the northern tribes which subsequently became part of the kingdom of Israel, while the Aaronites prevailed in the lands of the two southern tribes that formed Judah.
During the United Monarchy, when the Levites and the Aaronites were putting together the initial version of the Pentateuch, the two groups, guided by the interests of their shared kingdom, created a unified version of the Hebrews’ return from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan. This version included the experiences of both sides – Joshua’s conquests in central and northern Canaan, on the one hand, and the 40 years of wandering in the deserts and Caleb’s conquests in the south of the country, on the other. For this reason, the compilers of the Bible united the lines of Moses and Aaron, making them brothers from the tribe of Levi. Thus they managed formally to unite the Aaronites and the Levites, the Yahwists of the southern and northern tribes – in just the same way as the southern and northern tribes had previously united to form a single kingdom. However, true unification occurred only two centuries later, after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. It was only then that the two groups of priests, originally of different origins, became one; moreover, the Aaronites yet again assumed the dominant position, while the Levites found themselves in a secondary role. This step suited the interests of both the southern Aaronites and the northern Levites. The former became heirs to the northern dynasty of high priests, while the latter at long last acquired their own home and powerful patrons. As part of the union of these two priestly groups, there was a redistribution of priestly responsibilities at the Temple in Jerusalem: the southern Aaronites conceded a number of their secondary functions to the northern Levites.
Before the reign of David the main role in the history of Yahwism was played by the northern Levites, and not at all by the southern Aaronites, as was to be the case in the future. It was the Levites who took care of the most important sacred relic, the Ark of the Covenant, and it was they who organized and managed the Yahwist centers known to us from the Bible in Gilgal, Shechem, Mizpah, Shiloh, and Nob. As for the southern Aaronites, they were compelled to wander the deserts around southern Canaan for several decades, together with the tribes of Judah and Simeon, but without the Ark of the Covenant, which at this time was accompanying, together with the northern Levites, Joshua’s conquests in Canaan. After the southern tribes settled on the land, their Aaronites created Yahwist centers of their own; these, however, were undoubtedly inferior to northern Levite centers such as Shiloh.
The Levites – like the Aaronite priests – would not have divided among themselves had a split not occurred among the tribes that left Egypt with Moses. This division among the Levites, a tribe which was in any case small, had the consequence that they ceased to exist as an independent tribe. In both tribal groups (northern and southern) they constituted a class of priests responsible for organizing worship of Yahweh; in the north they played a leading role, while in the south their role was secondary. Each tribe that left Egypt with them committed themselves to sharing with them a part of their land and income. Least of all was contributed by the ‘house of Joseph’, which left Egypt two and a half centuries earlier than Moses and the Levites and did not feel obliged to them in any way. This assumption finds support in the Hebrew Bible: “The Levites received no share of the land [of Manasseh and Ephraim] but only towns to live in, with pasturelands for their flocks and herds” (Joshua 14:4).
The northern Levites retained their primacy among the Yahwists of the Israelite tribes until the time of the judge and prophet Samuel. During the latter’s rule religious leadership passed from the northern Levites to the southern Aaronites. In this respect great significance attaches to the story of high priest Eli of Shiloh. There is no doubt that this story was created by the southern Aaronites in order to justify their taking over the leading role in the worship of Yahweh, which before belonged to the northern dynasty of priests. The episode with the ‘man of God’ who came to warn Eli about forthcoming punishment for the unworthy behavior of his sons was designed to legitimize the elevation of the southern Aaronites and to show that this was due not to the tribulations of human fate, but exclusively to the will of God: “I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who will do according to what is in my heart and mind. I will firmly establish his priestly house, and they will minister before my anointed one always” (1 Samuel 2:35). Hinting at the unenviable position in which the northern Levites found themselves both during the reign of Solomon and following the fall of the Northern Kingdom, the Bible, not without sarcasm, tells us of the sad fate of the northern priestly dynasty: “Then everyone left in your family line will come and bow down before him [the high priest of southern Aaronites] for a piece of silver and a loaf of bread and plead, ‘Appoint me to some priestly office so I can have food to eat” (1 Samuel 2:36). The same is said in the Lord’s words to Samuel when he was a boy helping the high priest Eli conduct religious services. Interestingly, the southern Aaronites were unable to blame Eli himself for anything else but conniving with his sons. Nevertheless, “the guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering” (1 Samuel 3:14). The strictness of this verdict is explained by the fact that otherwise the southern Aaronites would have had to return the primacy to Moses’ direct heirs, the northern priestly dynasty. The sons of Samuel, one of the ‘faithful’ Aaronite priests mentioned in the ‘man of God’ prophecy, actually turned out to be no better than the sons of Eli, and yet for some reason Samuel’s family escaped such severe punishment. There is another remarkable fact: the ‘man of God’ reminds us that from among all the Israelite tribes the Lord chose the house of the forefather of Eli to be his priests, but providently does not mention his name. A later rabbinical tradition adds the name of Aaron as Eli’s forefather; the Bible, however, maintains an eloquent silence on this subject. This is further reason to suppose that the southern Aaronites only acquired supremacy over the northern Levites after the enthronement of the Davidic dynasty and that this was only retrospectively justified in the Old Testament.
In Samuel’s vision it is said that the Lord is “[…] about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears about it tingle” (1 Samuel 3:11). This impressive ‘something’ was that the office of high priest was to be transferred from the northern Levites to the southern Aaronites, the Ark of the Covenant was to be moved to Jerusalem, and the religious center at Shiloh was to suffer a drop in status. A factor in the transfer of primacy from the northern Levites to the southern Aaronites was the political and military situation at the time. The defeat of the army of the northern tribes in the battle of Ebenezer, the seizure of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines, and the probable destruction of the religious center in Shiloh by the latter all led to the high priesthood passing to a southern Aaronite, Samuel, while the northern Levites had no choice but to settle temporarily in Nob and remain forever without Yahwism’s most important relic. Subsequently, the Philistines returned the Ark of the Covenant not to its rightful owners, the Levites of Shiloh, but to the Aaronites of the southern tribes; this, as the Philistines had hoped, sparked clashes between the two priestly groups and tensions between the Hebrew tribes. It might have been expected that the strengthening of Saul, the northern king, would restore the Levites to their former position; history, however, had other ideas. Saul ordered the Ark of the Covenant to be moved from Kiriath-Jearim, which was situated in the territory of the southern tribe of Judah, again not to the Levites, but to his own residence in Gibeah, in the region occupied by his own tribe of Benjamin. Offended by this, the Levites helped David during his flight from Saul, thus sealing the latter’s displeasure with them. As a punishment for their helping David, Saul executed 85 Levite priests and destroyed their center in Nob. Abiathar, the surviving son of the head of the northern priestly dynasty, had no other option but to join David. Thus was formed an unexpected and purely temporary alliance between the northern Levites and the claimant to the throne from among the southern tribes.
There was another reason for Saul’s discontent with the priestly dynasty of the northern Levites: Saul’s family and clan were closely connected with the cult of Baal. Some members of his family – for instance, his son Ishbaal (Ish-bosheth) had names that incorporated the name of the pagan god. As his power grew, Saul increasingly had no need for the support of the Yahwists and more and more favored the cult of Baal, whose priests provided him with every possible kind of support. His main rival, David, was known as a faithful Yahwist and could count on help from both the southern Aaronites and the northern Levites. Aware of this, Saul did not trust the Levites and suspected them of sympathizing with the Yahwist David, although the latter was descended from the southern tribes.
The first Israelite king, Saul, who represented the northern tribes, agreed to unite with the southern tribes on terms that were very similar to the agreement between Moses and Aaron. Saul was to possess supreme authority, while Samuel, ruler of the southerners, was to be the religious leader. This alliance impinged upon the interests of the northern Levites and forced them to cede the limelight to the southern Aaronites. King David was more careful and far-sighted than Saul. Taking into account the fact that during his conflict with Saul the northern priestly dynasty had demonstrated loyalty to him, he endeavored not to violate their interests and to maintain the fragile balance between the northern Levites, the southern Aaronites, and the Jebusite priesthood of Jerusalem. David remembered the northern Levites’ resistance to his decision to move the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and, in order to avoid further exacerbating relations with them, he even renounced the idea of building the Temple of Jerusalem. However, Solomon, David’s son, did not feel in any way indebted to the northern Levites; moreover, the Levites’ support for David’s other son, Adonijah, Solomon’s main rival, badly strained relations between them and the future king. Accordingly, as soon as Solomon managed to overcome his rival, he lost no time in sending Abiathar, the leader of the northern priestly dynasty, into exile, back to his home city of Anathoth; Abiathar’s powers and authority were given to the southern Aaronites who had supported Solomon from the very beginning.
Subsequently, King Solomon, unlike his father, failed to take into consideration the interests of the northern Levites, infringing them on repeated occasions during his reign. The construction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the transfer of exclusive rights to control religious worship at the Temple to the southern Aaronites banished the Levites to the shadows once and for all. Unsurprisingly, the northern Levites lent their full support to Jeroboam, the leader of the tribe of Ephraim, in his attempt to terminate the alliance with the southern tribes and to break free from the control of the Davidic dynasty. Like all the northern tribes, the Levites felt deprived and disadvantaged in Solomon’s United Monarchy, where supreme power belonged to the Davidides and religious authority to the Aaronites. The biblical account of prophet Ahijah of Shiloh promising Jeroboam control of the ten northern tribes is circumstantial evidence of the absolute support provided by the northern Levites.
However, the dissolution of the union with the southern tribes and the formation of the Northern Kingdom failed to live up to the Levites’ hopes. The main religious centers in Bethel and Dan, which had been intended to rival the Temple in Jerusalem, were never transferred to them. The temple in Dan remained in the hands of the southern Levite priestly dynasty, which had joined forces with the tribe of Dan in the 12th century BCE, when the Danites had been compelled to leave the south of the country and move to its far north, to upper Galilee, under pressure from the Philistines. Another, more important, temple in Bethel was operated by local priests. It is probable that the god initially worshipped there was El, whose cult in time merged with the old pagan form of Yahwism that existed before Moses’ monotheistic revolution. The golden calves from Bethel and Dan were possibly similar to the calf sculpted by Aaron in the desert during Moses’ lengthy absence. But Bethel had a special significance: it was one of the first and oldest religious centers in Canaan and was highly regarded by the Hebrew tribes during the pre-Egyptian period. At Bethel Abraham had often prayed and offered sacrifices; and it was there that his grandson Jacob saw the famous dream of the ladder leading to the sky. It is not accidental that Jacob said of Bethel: “Surely the Lord is in this place” (Genesis 28:16). The Bible tells that Jacob prayed there both before departing to visit his relatives in Haran and after his return. After Joshua’s conquests Bethel – then known by its old name of Luz – fell into the hands of the tribe of Ephraim, and the priests from this tribe were in charge of conducting religious services there. The southern part of Bethel belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, and Benjaminite priests also took part in holding the religious services. The Levites initially made no claim to own this religious center; at any rate, neither during Joshua’s time, nor during the period of the judges did they make such demands; it was clearly not the cult of Yahweh that prevailed there.
The situation changed when the United Monarchy fell apart and an acute need arose for a worthy alternative to the Temple of Jerusalem. The best known and most respected religious center on the territory of the northern tribes was that in Bethel; Jeroboam decided to make it a Yahwist temple by proclaiming it the Temple of the God who had led the Israelites out of Egypt. At this point there occurred two problems to which a resolution could not be found right up until the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Having proclaimed Bethel a Yahwist center that offered an alternative to the Temple of Jerusalem, Jeroboam was supposed to hand it over to the Levites, who represented the cult of Yahweh in the lands of the northern tribes. The latter status had originally been given the Levites in the agreement between Moses and Joshua and had been observed both during the period of the judges and during the United Monarchy. But Jeroboam could not, and did not want to, enter into conflict with his own tribe, which was the leader among the tribes which had broken away. The possession of a respected religious center such as Bethel gave the tribe of Ephraim substantial political and economic benefits; moreover, the Levites, who represented the ‘house of Jacob’, were regarded as foreigners by the ‘house of Joseph’ and were perceived as rivals by the local priests. The Levites saw Jeroboam’s refusal to give them Bethel as an act of betrayal by someone they had supported at great risk to themselves when confronting the Davidides and Aaronites. Another problem was the golden calves in Bethel and Dan: these were too closely associated with the notorious calf of Aaron. According to the old pre-monotheistic views of Yahwism that Aaron presented, the young bull was an embodiment of the cult of Yahweh; however, an identical symbol was used in Canaan in the worship of El and Baal. Clearly, a new syncretic cult, a combination of features of the cults of Yahweh, El and Baal, had come into existence in Bethel. Their merging was facilitated by their use of the same symbols – the symbol of the calf, for instance – and of similar epithets for god. Thus Bethel had become an attractive location for supporters of both El and Yahweh on the one hand and Baal on the other.
By setting up the calf in Bethel and refusing to hand over this religious center to the Levites Jeroboam inflicted two blows on them: he committed a profanation of Yahwism and created serious competition to the Levites’ own religious centers. Furthermore, Jeroboam broke the historical agreement between Moses and Joshua regarding the division of powers, in accordance with which the Levites were to receive all religious authority within the union of Israelite tribes. This was the origin of the notorious ‘sins of Jeroboam’– sins for which all the Israelite kings were blamed (admittedly, without much success).
The book of Chronicles notes an interesting detail: during the reign of Judahite King Rehoboam many Levites from the Northern Kingdom “[…] abandoned their pasturelands and property and came to Judah and Jerusalem, because Jeroboam and his sons had rejected them as priests of the Lord, when he appointed his own priests for the high places and for the goat and calf idols he had made” (2 Chronicles 11:14-15). It is likely that the Levites who came to the Southern Kingdom had previously served at those very ‘high places’ and conducted services before the same ‘goat’ and ‘calf’ idols, and that the real problem was not in where and to whom the services had been carried out, but in the question of by whom. Jeroboam quite rightly regarded the Levites as potential allies of the Yahwists from the Southern Kingdom and preferred to rely on the priests from the northern tribes. The fact that some of the Levites departed for Judah only proves their conflict with the new king and is a sign that the influence of Yahwism in the kingdom of Israel had waned, especially taking into account the fact that the northern tribes, particularly the ‘house of Joseph’, were historically closer to the Canaanite gods than to Yahweh.
Unlike in later times, the priestly castes of the Levites and Aaronites were not groups of kinsmen that were closed to outsiders. On the contrary, right up until the time of the Second Temple the Levites and Aaronites were periodically refreshed by influxes of priests from clans belonging to other peoples of Canaan. Indirect evidence of this is to be found in the Bible. The book of Exodus, for instance, in giving the entire family tree of the Levites and Aaronites following the departure from Egypt, names only three families – those of Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. On the other hand, the much later book of Chronicles, talking about the times of King Hezekiah of Judah, adds another four Levite clans to those given above: Elizaphan, Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun. The latter four had nowhere been mentioned prior to this; at least, we may say that during the period of the Exodus from Egypt nothing was known about them. Even if we try to trace one of them, the clan of Elizaphan, to Uziel, who came from the clan of Kohath, that still leaves three Levite clans that were previously unknown. However, if the new clans were derived from old ones, the Bible would probably have mentioned this.
What peoples could the new priestly clans who joined the Levites and Aaronites have come from, and at what historical stage did this happen? We may suppose that the new priests did not come from among hostile peoples who had been subdued by force, but only from those ethnoses who were historical allies of the Hebrews and whose religion could have been similar to early Yahwism. Above all, such were the Kenites and the Kenazzites - or ‘shasu Yahweh’ – who joined the southern tribes of Judah and Simeon of their own free will even before the conquest of Canaan. The other likely candidates were the Jebusites – the traditional allies of the southern tribes, who naturally merged with the Judahites following King David’s conquest of Jerusalem. It cannot be ruled out that Zadok, one of David’s two high priests, had previously been the Jebusites’ principal priest – especially since the Jebusites’ religion was very similar, if not identical, to the new faith of the patriarch Abraham.
Finally, it should not be ignored that the priests of the southern Hivites, stalwart allies of the tribe of Judah, also joined the Levites. However, it was not just that priests from other peoples joined the ranks of the Yahwist priests, but that the latter themselves gradually assimilated with the Canaanite population around them. Confirmation of this is provided by Ezra, the lawgiver and evidently the principal and last editor of the Bible. In his book Ezra tells us that noble people had complained to him that “The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices, like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them. And the leaders and officials have led the way in this unfaithfulness” (Ezra 9:1-2). Ezra goes on to adduce a long list of priests who have taken wives from neighboring peoples for themselves and their sons. If such a thing happened in the 5th century BCE, when Yahwism became a truly monotheistic religion, then we may imagine how considerable the mixing of Levites and Aaronites had been several centuries previously.