One of the books I picked up at the SBL this year was Missing Priests: The Zadokites in Tradition and History by Alice Hunt. The book focuses on the evidence (or lack thereof) for a Zadokite priesthood in the preexilic, exilic, and postexilic periods. Given my research on the history of the priesthood, I wanted to offer a review.

Hunt begins by surveying the consensus concerning the Zadokites. The prevailing view is that prior to the time of David, two main priestly lines were active in Israel: Zadok and Abiathar. Both functioned under David, but Abiathar was banished to Anathoth due to his support of Adonijah as king instead of Solomon. This left only the Zadokites in control, and they were the predominant priestly line in Jerusalem until its destruction in 587 BCE. Ezekiel, who was from the Zadokites, promoted the Zadokites as not only the main priests but the only priests, demoting all other Levites to secondary status. This made the Zadokites the only priestly line in the postexilic period up until the time they were replaced by the Hasmoneans.

Hunt surveys the biblical evidence for the Zadokites and find them strangely missing from the preexilic literature. There is a priest named Zadok in the time of David, but none of the priests who are mentioned in DtrH are called Zadokites, even those that clearly are descended from him. In Chronicles, she notes that the emphasis is always on their being descended from Aaron. Zadok is included in that line, but little is made of him. The stress is always on Aaron. The only place where the phrase “sons of Zadok” shows up in the OT is in Ezekiel 40-48, and she places little importance on this material.

She also looks at evidence for the Zadokites in extrabiblical texts, primary Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. She rejects the idea that the Zadokites were fundamental in the founding of Qumran, seeing them as a later addition to the community. In this, she has text critical evidence to support her claim.

Hunt’s review of scholarship comes across as rather preachy. In each instance, she notes that a particular scholar has seen the Zadokites as the predominant priesthood in preexilic times, but says that the scholar has simply assumed it without any evidence. She then moves to another scholar that has seen the Zadokites as the predominant priesthood in preexilic times, but says that this scholar too has simply assumed it without any evidence. It gets very repetitive, and the reader is tempted to skim over that part. In the next section, she takes scholars to task for not paying attention to currents in historical writing, which is odd considering how much has been written about biblical historiography in the last two decades. Reading this section is much like listening to a sermon where the preacher’s point is clear in the first two minutes but has nothing to do with you. The sermon goes on for quite some time.

Given all of her focus on historiography, it is interesting that her own conclusion pays little attention to it. She draws on one work, Gerhard Lenski’s Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, and this forms the basis for her reconstruction of the place of the Zadokites in the Hasmonean period. Nothing is said about the early postexilic period, let alone the preexilic period. Having surveyed the material from the Bible, she then drops it completely, apparently thinking it is of little value.

In the end, the book seems rather incomplete. It provides a summary of scholarship on the Zadokites, but doesn’t really engage it other than to say it rests on presuppositions. What she fails to recognize is that all historical writing is a hermeneutical circle: we read the data, draw up theories to explain the data, and then use those theories to make sense of even more data. While it is fine to criticize the theories, she seems to take scholar to task just for using theories to explain data. But if we say only what the data says, then we are not actually writing history. It is also interesting that in her conclusion she uses a theory to explain the data, and it is a theory drawn from sociology instead of from the textual data. Sociological theory is great and helps us understand the Bible, but she seems to be using it in a rather non-critical way.

In the end, I would like to have seen a few more chapters that explore the idea of the priesthood in preexilic and early postexilic times. Perhaps the Bible does not call them “sons of Zadok,” but so be it. Clearly many of them were descended from Zadok, and this seems to be an important point. If we have a priesthood descended from Zadok, and they are the only ones who can exercise priestly prerogatives in Jerusalem, surely this is important. This is what scholars mean by Zadokites. Is it the same as the Zadokites in the Hasmonean period? Of course not. But Hunt wants to limit the term to that period. Certainly we must recognize the difference between the groups (as well as the connections!), but that is no reason to ignore the evidence that we do have for priests descended from Zadok in the preexilic period.

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