Verses 7-9
The priests’ marriages and home life were to be in keeping with their holy vocation.
"Very awful is your responsibility if you diminish your zeal, love, spirituality, by marrying one who has more of earth and a present world in her person and spirit, than of heaven and a coming eternity." [Note: Bonar, p. 375.]
Priests could not marry prostitutes or divorced women but only virgins or widows of spotless character. One scholar argued that the prohibition against priests marrying non-virgins had to do with contracting ceremonial impurity, not morality. [Note: Joe M. Sprinkle, "Old Testament Perspectives on Divorce and Remarriage," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40:4 (December 1997):540-41.] But marrying a non-virgin did not necessarily render a man ceremonially unclean.
"However innocent the divorced woman was in fact, her reputation was likely to have been affected by the divorce." [Note: Wenham, The Book . . ., p. 291.]
The bride of a priest could not be a Canaanite or an idolater, but she could be a foreigner. The priests’ children were to lead upright lives too.
"The conduct of the family is noticed by the world, and they lay the blame of their [the children’s] misdeeds at the door of their parents. . . . They [the children] hinder the usefulness of their father, who loses influence in the eyes of the world if his counsels and walk have not succeeded in drawing his own family to God [cf. 1 Timothy 3:11; Titus 1:6]." [Note: Bonar, p. 376.]
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