The priests operated according to a shift system called Mishmeret Cohanim or the Priestly Shift. There were twenty-four shifts divided among all the Cohamin families.
Each shift lasted one week. When a priest’s shift came up, strong in his belief that he had been called to do God’s duty, he moved to Jerusalem to take his turn as servant of the Temple, sharing Temple duties with all others who had been selected for each twenty-four weekly shifts.
It is important to invest some time to understanding the shifts system as it is that system that allowed Yeshua, at least while he was in Jerusalem, a great supply of temple priests with whom to debate the points of the Torah on which he focused his ministry, as well as which points in the Books of the Prophets touched on the matter of the coming of Messiah, a descendant from the House of King David.
Interestingly, whether Yeshua was the son of Yosef or the son of another man, he knew he could not claim such ancestral lineage.
In a quirky clash of purpose, though Christian clerics were intent on establishing a connection to King David through ‘a’ father to posit Yeshua as the Messiah prophetized in the Old Testament of the Jews, they were equally attached to the idea of Yeshua being the product of a virgin birth.
“Each of these 24 groups was further divided into 6 clans, or family branches. Every day of the week was presided over by one family group, and on the Sabbath the week’s entire priestly shift worked together.” [1]
It was assumed that each priest was infused with desire to serve his God during his shift and that they would have rivalled against each other, vying for the ‘holiest’ of responsibilities, if it hadn’t been for a very elaborate systems of draws that, presumably according to divine decree, fated each priest with a specific function to perform, thus sparing them any unholy stratagems among themselves.
Unfortunately for headstrong Yeshua, these temple Priests were reputedly a quarrelsome lot who did not believe in the resurrection of anyone. Other points of dispute were the interpretations of words, lines and sections from the Torah and Prophets. Quarrelling and ‘knit-picking’ over scriptures is an all-consuming activity among clerics that has not yet gone out of fashion.
In the name of Jesus, Matthew wrote a wonderful commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, an order lifted directly from the Torah which warns in Leviticus 19:17-18:18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.’
But there is the additional mitzvah command ‘To love all human beings who are of the covenant.’ (Lev. 19:18) which might explain why, though Yeshua’s controversial teaching of the Torah was about the importance of caring for one’s neighbor as for a kin, he felt no spiritual obligation to care about the Romans, the pagan occupiers of his country, let alone to discuss the finer points of Judaism with them, which was all he that preoccupied him. Yeshua didn’t have much time for the local Samaritans either, though they and the Jews had a common root in Abraham.
Politically speaking, Yeshua was a separatist, not very different from the Orthodox Jews who, today, live in the Mea Sharim ghetto, a suburb of Jerusalem.
Religious mythology aside, a worthwhile question to pose is If Jesus was the credibly kind, compassionate man enhanced by divine energy, why did he attract so many enemies? Why was he made to die a violent death and why was he abandoned by all except a couple of women weeping within sight of his cross?
———————————————————————–
1. http://www.templeinstitute.org/day_in_life/24_shifts.htm