Dating the list of Mishmarot Kehunah

A few days ago I was privileged enough to hear a fascinating short TED-sized lecture by one of the doctorate students in my department at university. This student, a rabbi in his profession, spoke about his doctoral thesis which just recently he handed in to the university's review board and was pending a verdict from them. The thesis, which I won't discuss at length here for a number of reasons, the main being that it's still pending a verdict from the board (and the others being that for the most part, it's not Tanach-related), focused on the Mishmarot Kehunah of the Second Temple Era and later. The Mishmarot Kehunah were the divisions of priests that served at set times year-round. Each division served for about two weeks every year and everyone served together on Chol Hamo'ed.

Now, I came up to him after the lecture and asked him a question on one aspect of his theory: Per his theory, the four priestly families that came during Shivat Tzion and recreated the priestly divisions were the only ones who were ever allowed during the Second Temple Era to serve in the Temple, and later priests who came to Israel were barred from serving. This even included Ezra, a direct descendant of the last High Priest of the First Temple! This he based on a new way to read the Tosefta in Taanit 2:1, by emphasizing the phrase "לא יהא אחד נדחה מפניו" - there will not be one who shall be rejected because of him, i.e., none of the new priestly divisions will be rejected if one of the old-guard priestly divisions returned from the diaspora. I then asked him as follows: Seeing as later, post-Tanachic listings of the divisions featured them with the names of the old-guard, the divisions from the First Temple - what did this then mean? Did it mean that at some point the original divisions came from the diaspora and did eventually replace the new divisions, or did it mean that the new divisions decided to further punish the old ones by dispossessing them of their divisionary names and fully "succeeding"/replacing them?

He told me that my question becomes irrelevant when considering the view of a scholar named Sarah Yefet who opined that the list of Mishmarot that appears in Chronicles 1:24:7-18 was really listing the divisions from the Second Temple Era, and should therefore be dated to the end of the Persian Era or the beginning of the Hellenistic Era. Now, I was both surprised and a little bothered to hear this from a rabbi, who I later learned also used to (and perhaps still does) teach in a pretty well-known not-liberal National-Zionist yeshiva and currently heads an ulpenah (Orthodox girls' high school). To date a section of Tanach to the Hellenistic Era is very problematic in my view, because of two main reasons:

a. This basically pulls the rug from under the traditional understanding that the main factor in deciding what to be put in the Jewish canon was whether it was written in the era of prophecy or not, and it is agreed in all Chazalic sources that prophecy ended with the death of the last three prophets - Chaggai, Zechariah and Malachi - on the eve of the Greek conquest of Israel. Such a view would mean that the it is wholly unclear per what parameters the canon was decided, which makes it appear random and senseless.

b. Even if we were to say, like many academic scholars out there, that the sages were simply mistaken when they eventually included this portion into the canon of Chronicles and mistakenly misdated it to an earlier era, then we would be faced with an Emunah (faith) problem, which is the assumption that our sages had no idea what was written in the era of prophecy and what wasn't. From there it's all downhill to accepting every nutty theory from the world of Biblical Criticism, from Daniel being written during the Hasmonean Period to there being redactors of the Torah and their removing polytheistic Ugaritic influences from the text to the sages purposefully removing all mention of Beitar from Tanach because they opposed the Bar Kochva Revolt.

There are other reasons, but we won't get into that now. I will note, however, in his defense, that he never explicitly stated that this was his view. He only ever told me that this was other scholars' view.

I pondered his answer, and by that evening already emailed him a few questions on this view. He wrote to me that he did not know how to answer my questions (in any case, this point isn't the main part of his thesis), but he sent me his thesis to read and review. While reading some of it on Shabbat, I thought of another problem with Yefet's theory, and so I thought I would list all issues here to strengthen the common understanding that that list in Chronicles should be dated to the time of David and the rest of the First Temple Era:

1. If the list in Chronicles is to be dated to the Second Temple Era, why is there a difference in the names listed there and in later lists from the Second Temple Era and onwards (post-destruction) and the names that appear in the lists from Nechemiah?

Clarification: There are a few lists of the priestly divisions in Tanach. One, typically dated to the time of David, is the one under discussion here, from Chronicles. But there are three other lists that appear in Nechemiah (10:2-9, 12:1-7, 12:12-24). They all have some differences between one another, but they are generally much more similar than when comparing any one of these lists to the one in Chronicles. Now, it should also be stated that there are other old sources (post-Tanachic) that list the priestly divisions. I listed several of them here. These lists do, in fact, revert back to the names of the list in Chronicles, although some versions feature in addition some of the names of the new divisions from Nechemiah combined with the old names. This is something that had always perplexed me. The possibility that at some point the old-guard were allowed back in seems to be more plausible than stating that all of these lists date to pretty much the same era. They're just too different!

2. Furthermore, the above-mentioned Tosefta (which is apparently considered by a number of scholars to reflect an ancient Persian-Era tradition and hence trustworthy) appears to explicitly consider Yehoyariv a First-Temple division. Now, one could argue that a First-Temple-Era-Priestly-family happened to share a name with a family from the Second Temple Era. That works. But what are the odds that there was another such case? Indeed, the kohen Hakotz, who certainly seems to have fathered the priestly division of Hakotz, apparently lived circa the time of David, per Ezra 2:61 and Nechemiah 7:63 (Barzilai lived in the time of David)!

3. Mathematically, this view does not seem to quite work. The Yerushalmi in Taanit 4:2 states that the division of the divisions between descendants of Elazar and descendants of Itamar, as stated in Chronicles, was so that the first 8 belonged to Elazar, the second 8 to Itamar and the last group of 8 to Elazar once again, and this was hinted at in the name of Chezir which shares the root of חזר, to return. But if each of the four priestly families from Shivat Tzion formed 6 new divisions, how do we get the 2:1 ratio of the Yerushalmi, per the list of Chronicles (bear in mind the Yerushalmi is considered by academics more historically trustworthy than the Bavli. This is not necessarily my opinion, I am merely explaining why this refutation carries weight in academia)?

4. Lastly, what I thought up of today: In the list in Chronicles, there are three names that end in י-ה-ו (Y-ahu):  שכניהו, דליהו, מעזיהו - Sh'chanyahu, Delayahu, Maaziyahu. Now, it was apparently first noted by Rabbi Dr. Reuven Margolies in his book המקרא והמסורה (Hamikra v'Hamesorah - the Bible and the Tradition) that save for two instances, there are no names in Tanach dated to the Second Temple Era that end in י-ה-ו. I have not yet found the second instance (unfortunately he didn't explicitly write which names they were, despite listing all examples of י-ה-ו and י-ה names per era), but one is Hodvayahu, a descendant of Zerubavel, and even he is a questionable case, because the written form (ktiv) is Hodyohu, which ends with י-ו-ה-ו. Rabbi Margolies pointed out that this seems to be sign of a real change in naming style in the Second Temple Era. Whatever the explanation may be, it seems to me that if the list from Chronicles actually dated to the Second Temple Era, then we would not find י-ה-ו names in it, only י-ה names (it's interesting to note that in post-Tanachic versions of the list that do include at least some of the names from Chronicles, we only ever find the shorter י-ה versions of the same names (for example, see the picture below)).

I might come up with more problems with Yefet's view in the coming days, so I'll either update this post or make another at some point. Perhaps I'll also look up where she wrote this idea to understand her reasoning; perhaps she addressed my list of issues.

(text of an inscription containing the list of Mishmarot

found during an archeological dig in an ancient synagogue in Israel.

Image taken from here)