Holiness and Ministry
Ordination is an ancient and venerable profession. The records of ordained priests reach back into the earliest periods in the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamian writing, we read of priests serving the sacred by maintaining the temple, performing rituals, and delivering omens in order to care for the gods and to transmit holiness to humans.1 The same was true in ancient Egypt. The Egyptian priests were essential to the earliest development of Egyptian religion and culture, where they played a crucial role in maintaining cosmic harmony, while also providing contact between the sacred and the profane realms.The focus on the sacred continued in the Canaanite and ancient Israelite religions, where the ordained protected the purity of holiness in the temple, while also mediating its health benefits to profane humans.
| Year: | Publisher: Oxford University Press, Inc | ISBN: 978-0-19-536733-1 | Language: english |
| Edition: | Hard Cover: | Digital: | Class: Free |
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