Holy Brothers refurbishes an often-overlooked theory on the origins of the Israelite priesthood for a new era of scholarship. Matthew R. Rasure skillfully presents textual, geographical, and comparative evidence in this lucid and learned monograph. Students and scholars alike who are interested in the relationship between early Israelite history and the Hebrew Bible will benefit from Rasure’s careful research and insightful conclusions.

Reed Carlson, United Lutheran Seminary

Matthew Rasure’s book takes up the thesis, best known from the scholar Frank Moore Cross, that the priesthood in ancient Israel was divided into two groups, often at odds with each other: one descended from Moses (Mushite) and the other from Aaron (Aaronide). This thesis has had a wide and controversial reception in modern scholarship, and Rasure provides a comprehensive examination of both thesis and reception in great and searching detail. He argues persuasively that the thesis needs to be explored in three dimensions, as manifest in the Hebrew Bible along with non-biblical sources and modern anthropological analogies: the priesthood in terms of its varied geographical location in ancient Israel; in terms of the genealogical traditions attached to it; and in terms of the biblical narratives about priests, particularly in the Pentateuch, the latter based on Rasure’s nuanced use of the Documentary Hypothesis. The result is a book that offers an extended and probing evaluation of Cross’s priestly duality, affirming its core vision, but with important revisions that bear more broadly on the nature of priestly conception and practice in Israel, on the structure of ancient Israelite society, and on the shape of biblical literature.

Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, emeritus, Harvard University