Numbers 8:5-22

THE CONSECRATION OF THE LEVITES, Numbers 8:5-22.

Already have Aaron and his sons, the purely sacerdotal family of the tribe of Levi, been anointed and inducted into their sacred office. It remains now to set apart the rest of the tribe to their calling as the bearers and custodians of the tabernacle and its furniture. They had recently been presented to Aaron, and by him charged with the duties to which they were to be set apart as substitutes for the firstborn males. Numbers 3:5-13, notes. Thus was fulfilled with singular precision the prophecy of Jacob, Genesis 49:5-7. Up to the time of these ordinations the Israelites had worshipped the God of their fathers after their fathers’ manner, the firstborn being priests, the eldest son of each house inheriting the priestly office. Exodus 24:5. The first step toward a change was made in the institution of an hereditary priesthood in the family of Aaron, during the first retirement of Moses to the solitudes of Sinai. Exodus 28:1. The next extension of the priestly order grew out of the terrible crisis of Exodus 32:0. The first, and awful self-consecration of the Levites, was when they rallied at the call of Moses, every man against his idolatrous brother-Hebrew, and thus stemmed the progress of the evil. From this hour the tribe stood forth apart, recognizing in this bloody vindication of Jehovah the spiritual as higher in value than the natural, and therefore they were counted worthy to be henceforth what Ewald styles “an Israel within an Israel.”