Abstract
This paper argues that priestly greed is presented in Scripture not as an incidental moral failing of individual priests but as a corruption that strikes the sacrificial system at its root, perverting the very mechanism by which the people approached God. Building on the principle that proximity to the holy raises the standard, and on the prior demonstration that liturgical presumption is the foundational priestly abuse, this study contends that the monetization of priestly office — the seizure of the priest’s portion by force, the front-loading of his share, the contempt for the offerings on which the cult depended — constitutes a distinct and gravely judged abuse-class with a recognizable signature across both Testaments. The argument proceeds in five movements. First, it analyzes the paradigm case of Hophni and Phinehas, who seized the sacrificial meat by force and demanded it raw, in defiance of the LORD’s prescribed portion (1 Samuel 2:12–17). Second, it examines Malachi’s indictment of a priesthood that accepted polluted bread and blemished offerings while despising the table of the LORD (Malachi 1:6–14). Third, it traces the contempt that underlies the greed — the “what a weariness is it” that reveals the heart behind the hands. Fourth, it follows the principle into the apostolic era through Simon Magus and the sin that bears his name (Acts 8:18–23). Fifth, it analyzes the form of the judgment: the reversal of blessing into curse, by which the priest who profited from the offerings is made to bear in his own person the curse pronounced upon them (Malachi 2:1–3). The paper concludes that priestly greed is judged so severely because it turns the instrument of approach to God into an instrument of private gain, corrupting mediation itself.
1. Introduction: When the Mediator Profits
The sacrificial system established in the Mosaic law was, among other things, an economy. The priests had no inheritance of land among the tribes; their portion was the LORD Himself, and in concrete terms this meant that they lived from the offerings (Numbers 18:20–24; Deuteronomy 18:1–5). Specified parts of certain sacrifices were assigned to the priests as their due — the breast and the right thigh of the peace offerings, portions of the grain offerings, the firstfruits, the redemption money, and more (Leviticus 7:28–36; Numbers 18:8–19). This arrangement was not a concession to priestly appetite but a structural necessity: the men who served the altar full-time had to be supported, and God ordained that they be supported from the worship they facilitated. “They which wait at the altar are partakers with the altar,” as the principle would later be summarized (1 Corinthians 9:13).
This arrangement created a permanent structural temptation, and Scripture is candid about it. The priest stood at the exact point where the people’s devotion was converted into the priest’s livelihood. Every offering the worshipper brought was simultaneously an act of approach to God and a contribution to the priest’s table. The mediator profited from the mediation. So long as the priest received only his prescribed portion, in the prescribed manner, after the LORD’s portion had been rendered, the arrangement was holy and the temptation held in check. But the moment the priest began to manipulate the system for his own advantage — to take more than his due, to take it before the LORD’s portion was offered, to take it by force, or to despise the offerings while still consuming them — the entire mechanism of approach was corrupted at its source.[^1]
This paper argues that Scripture treats such corruption as a distinct abuse-class, gravely and repeatedly judged, and that the gravity follows from the principle established in the foregoing papers of this suite. The priest who monetizes his office does not merely sin as any greedy man sins; he sins at the point of nearest approach to God, turning the instrument by which the people came to God into an instrument of his own enrichment. Greed in an ordinary man is a private vice; greed in a priest is the perversion of mediation itself, and it is judged accordingly.[^2] The thesis to be defended is that priestly greed corrupts the sacrificial system at its root because it inverts the direction of the offering: what was given to God for the people’s sake is seized by the priest for his own, and the holy economy is turned into plunder.
The paper proceeds through the two great paradigm texts — the sons of Eli in 1 Samuel 2 and the priesthood of Malachi’s day — before tracing the principle into the contempt that underlies it, its New Testament continuation in simony, and the distinctive form of its judgment.
2. The Paradigm Case: Hophni and Phinehas
The clearest narrative portrait of priestly greed is the account of Eli’s sons in 1 Samuel 2:12–17, and it repays close attention because it isolates with unusual precision what makes priestly greed a corruption rather than a mere appetite. The narrator’s introduction is blunt: “Now the sons of Eli were sons of Belial; they knew not the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:12). The designation “sons of Belial” — worthless men, men of ruin — and the charge that they “knew not the LORD” are devastating precisely because these men were priests, the sons of the high priest, the very men whose office was defined by knowing and serving the LORD. The narrator establishes at the outset that their priestly office and their actual relation to God stood in flat contradiction.[^3]
The specific abuse is then described in detail, and the detail matters. Two distinct violations are recorded. First, the sons’ servant would come while the meat was boiling, thrust a three-pronged fork into the pot, and take whatever the fork brought up for the priest — “so they did in Shiloh unto all the Israelites that came thither” (1 Samuel 2:13–14). This was a seizure of more than the priest’s prescribed portion. The law assigned the priest the breast and the right thigh of the peace offering (Leviticus 7:30–34); the fork in the pot took indiscriminately whatever it caught, in excess of and in disregard for the prescribed due. The priest’s share was no longer determined by God’s ordinance but by what could be hooked from the boiling pot.[^4]
The second violation was graver still. “Also before they burnt the fat, the priest’s servant came, and said to the man that sacrificed, Give flesh to roast for the priest; for he will not have sodden flesh of thee, but raw” (1 Samuel 2:15). Here the abuse touches the order of the sacrifice itself. The fat belonged to the LORD and was to be burned on the altar first, before any portion was distributed to the priest (Leviticus 3:16; 7:23–25). By demanding the flesh before the fat was burned, the sons of Eli inverted the order of priority: they took their portion before the LORD received His. The demand for raw flesh “to roast” rather than the boiled portion appears to have been a further refinement of appetite, a preference for the better cut prepared to their own taste, but the decisive offense is the temporal inversion. The priest’s share came before the LORD’s, and when the worshipper protested that the fat should be burned first, the servant answered with a threat: “Nay; but thou shalt give it me now: and if not, I will take it by force” (1 Samuel 2:16).[^5]
The progression in these verses is the anatomy of priestly greed laid bare. It moves from taking more than the prescribed portion, to taking it before the LORD’s portion, to taking it by force against the worshipper’s protest. Each step is a further corruption. The first takes from the priest’s own due by exceeding it; the second takes from the LORD’s due by preempting it; the third takes from the worshipper’s freedom by coercing it. By the end, the offering has been wholly perverted: the LORD is robbed of His portion, the worshipper is robbed of his free act of devotion, and the priest takes by violence what was meant to be received by ordinance. The narrator pronounces the verdict: “Wherefore the sin of the young men was very great before the LORD: for men abhorred the offering of the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:17).
This concluding sentence identifies the deepest harm, and it is the harm this paper means to highlight. The result of the priests’ greed was that “men abhorred the offering of the LORD.” The people came to despise the sacrifice itself, because the men who administered it had made it an instrument of extortion. The greed of the mediators did not merely enrich them unjustly; it poisoned the people’s relation to the worship of God. Those who came to Shiloh to draw near to the LORD encountered instead a racket, and the offering that should have been the means of their approach became something they loathed. This is why priestly greed is a corruption of the system rather than a private sin: it stands at the point of approach and turns the approach itself into an occasion of disgust, driving the people away from the very God the priest was ordained to bring them near.[^6]
3. Malachi’s Indictment: The Despised Table
Centuries later, the prophet Malachi confronts a priesthood whose greed has taken a subtler but equally corrosive form. Where Eli’s sons seized too much, Malachi’s priests give God too little — and the two abuses turn out to be expressions of the same underlying contempt. The LORD’s charge through Malachi is framed as a question of honor: “A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be a father, where is mine honour? and if I be a master, where is my fear? saith the LORD of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my name” (Malachi 1:6).
The specific accusation concerns the quality of the offerings the priests accepted and presented. “Ye offer polluted bread upon mine altar… And if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? and if ye offer the lame and sick, is it not evil?” (Malachi 1:7–8). The law was explicit that sacrificial animals must be without blemish (Leviticus 22:17–25; Deuteronomy 15:21); a blind, lame, or diseased animal was expressly forbidden. The priests, whose office included inspecting the offerings and rejecting the defective, were instead accepting and presenting blemished animals upon the altar. Malachi sharpens the point with a devastating comparison: “Offer it now unto thy governor; will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person? saith the LORD of hosts” (Malachi 1:8). No one would dare present such a gift to the civil governor; yet the priests presented it to God.[^7]
The economic logic behind this abuse is not stated explicitly but is readily inferred and is the reason it belongs in a study of priestly greed. A priesthood willing to accept blemished animals was a priesthood that profited from the arrangement. The worshipper who brought a defective animal kept his sound stock for himself; the priest who accepted it secured his portion without enforcing the standard that would have cost the worshipper more. Both parties gained at God’s expense. The complicity was mutual: the people brought what was cheap, and the priests accepted what was cheap, and the table of the LORD was made the dumping-ground for what no one valued. The priest’s failure to guard the standard was not mere negligence; it was the path of least resistance and greatest convenience, a quiet collusion in which the offerings deteriorated because no one with a stake in the system had reason to defend their quality.[^8]
The LORD’s response moves to an extraordinary statement: “Who is there even among you that would shut the doors for nought? neither do ye kindle fire on mine altar for nought. I have no pleasure in you, saith the LORD of hosts, neither will I accept an offering at your hand” (Malachi 1:10). The line “would shut the doors for nought” exposes the mercenary heart of the priesthood: they would not perform even the smallest service without payment. Everything had its price. The service of the altar, which was to be the priests’ privilege and the people’s blessing, had become a transaction in which the priests did nothing “for nought.” And the LORD’s verdict is the gravest possible for a priesthood: He would rather the doors of the temple be shut altogether than have such worship continue. Better no sacrifice than this corrupted one. The mediation had become so debased that God preferred its cessation to its continuation.[^9]
Malachi’s indictment thus reveals greed in its institutional, low-grade, chronic form — not the dramatic violence of Eli’s sons but the slow collusion of a priesthood that has ceased to value what it handles and profits from the cheapening of the holy. The two paradigms are complementary. Eli’s sons show greed as plunder; Malachi’s priests show greed as collusion. Both corrupt the system at its root, the one by seizing more than is due, the other by accepting less than is required, and both because the priest has come to regard the offerings not as holy things to be guarded but as commodities to be worked for his own advantage.
4. The Contempt Beneath the Greed
It is tempting to treat priestly greed as a sin of the hands — of taking, seizing, accepting — but Scripture locates its source in the heart, in a contempt for the holy things that the greedy handling merely expresses. This section argues that the greed and the contempt are inseparable, and that the contempt is in fact the deeper offense, because it is the contempt that makes the greed possible.
The clearest statement comes again in Malachi, where the LORD reports the priests’ own words: “Ye said also, Behold, what a weariness is it! and ye have snuffed at it, saith the LORD of hosts” (Malachi 1:13). The service of the altar, which the priests should have counted their highest privilege, they counted a weariness, a tedious burden to be discharged with as little cost and effort as possible. The phrase “ye have snuffed at it” conveys a gesture of disdain, a sniff of contempt at the holy things.[^10] This is the heart from which the greed proceeds. A priest who held the offerings in reverence could not have accepted the blind and the lame; a priest who counted the altar’s service a weariness would naturally cut every corner and extract every advantage. The contempt comes first; the greed follows. One does not plunder what one holds sacred, and the capacity to plunder the offerings presupposes that one has ceased to regard them as sacred at all.
The same priority of contempt over greed is visible in the sons of Eli, who “knew not the LORD” before any of their specific abuses are described (1 Samuel 2:12). The narrator establishes the inward condition first — they did not know the LORD — and only then recounts the outward acts of seizure. The structure of the narrative makes the inward contempt the root and the outward greed the fruit. Men who knew the LORD could not have treated His offerings as the contents of a pot to be raided; the raiding was possible only because they did not know Him and therefore did not reverence what was His.[^11]
This analysis matters for the typology of the abuse, because it explains why priestly greed is judged so much more severely than ordinary avarice. Ordinary greed covets what belongs to others; priestly greed despises what belongs to God and then seizes it. The element of contempt for the holy transforms the offense. The sons of Eli and the priests of Malachi were not merely men who wanted more than their share, as any covetous man might; they were men who held the things of God in contempt and expressed that contempt by plundering or cheapening them. The greed was the visible symptom of an invisible disdain for God Himself, for to despise His offerings is to despise Him — “O priests, that despise my name” (Malachi 1:6). This is the link between the third paper and the first: the priest’s defining charge was to distinguish the holy from the common (Leviticus 10:10), and the greedy priest has done the opposite, treating the holy as common, as mere commodity, as something to be weighed by its market value rather than reverenced as set apart to God. Greed is, at bottom, a failure of the priest’s fundamental discernment, a refusal to see the holy as holy.[^12]
5. The New Testament Continuation: Simon and Simony
The corruption of holy office for financial gain does not end with the Old Testament priesthood; it reappears at the threshold of the apostolic church and gives its name to a perennial ecclesiastical sin. The account of Simon Magus in Acts 8:9–24 records the first attempt to monetize the things of God within the new community, and the apostolic response establishes the principle for all subsequent generations.
Simon had been a practitioner of magic in Samaria, a man who had amazed the people and been called “the great power of God” (Acts 8:9–10). He believed and was baptized under Philip’s preaching (Acts 8:13). But when Peter and John came down and the Holy Spirit was given through the laying on of their hands, Simon saw an opportunity: “And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost” (Acts 8:18–19). Simon proposed to purchase the power of God, to acquire as a commodity what could only be received as a gift, and to do so evidently with a view to the profit and prestige such power would bring — for he had lived by exactly such power before, and had grown great by it.[^13]
Peter’s response is among the most severe in the book of Acts: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God” (Acts 8:20–21). The severity is instructive and parallels exactly the severity directed at priestly greed in the Old Testament. Peter does not treat Simon’s proposal as a misunderstanding to be gently corrected but as a sin that threatens Simon’s standing before God altogether. The phrase “thy money perish with thee” binds the man’s fate to his money, as though the love of gain that prompted the offer were a thing that would drag him to destruction. And the diagnosis — “thy heart is not right in the sight of God” — reaches past the outward act to the inward condition, exactly as the analysis of contempt in the preceding section would predict. Simon’s offer was the symptom; the unrighteous heart was the disease. Peter calls him to repentance, naming his condition “the gall of bitterness, and… the bond of iniquity” (Acts 8:22–23).[^14]
The episode established a category. The word “simony,” derived from Simon’s name, came to denote the buying or selling of sacred offices, ministrations, or spiritual benefits, and the church across its history has identified simony as a grave offense precisely because it repeats Simon’s error: the treatment of the things of God as purchasable commodities.[^15] The continuity with the Old Testament priestly greed is exact at the level of principle. Whether the priest seizes the offering by force, accepts the blemished animal for convenience, or offers money for the power of God, the underlying corruption is identical: the holy is treated as a means to gain, the gift is converted into a transaction, and the office that exists to bring people to God is turned to the officeholder’s profit. The apostolic generation faced the same temptation the Aaronic priesthood faced, met it with the same severity, and bequeathed to the church a permanent name for the abuse.
6. The Form of the Judgment: Blessing Reversed into Curse
The judgments on priestly greed exhibit a distinctive form, and attending to that form deepens the understanding of the offense. Where the judgment on liturgical presumption was immediate fire from the divine presence, the judgment on priestly greed takes the shape of reversal: the blessing the priest was ordained to pronounce and to mediate is turned back upon him as a curse, so that the man who profited from the offerings is made to bear in his own person the curse pronounced upon them. The punishment fits the crime with exact and terrible appropriateness.
The clearest statement of this form is Malachi’s pronouncement against the greedy priesthood: “And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you. If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart” (Malachi 2:1–2). The phrase “I will curse your blessings” is precise and devastating. The priest’s office was supremely the office of blessing; the Aaronic benediction was the priest’s to pronounce over the people — “The LORD bless thee, and keep thee” (Numbers 6:22–27). The priest stood as the channel through which God’s blessing flowed to the nation. The judgment reverses this exactly: the channel of blessing becomes the object of curse, and the very blessings the priest pronounces are cursed at their source. The man whose office was blessing becomes the bearer of curse.[^16]
The reversal is then made grotesquely concrete: “Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it” (Malachi 2:3). The imagery is deliberately offensive and exactly fitted to the offense. The priests had defiled the altar with blemished offerings; now the refuse of those very offerings — the dung of the sacrificial animals, the waste of “your solemn feasts” — is spread upon their faces. The faces that should have shone with the dignity of priestly service are smeared with the excrement of the corrupted cult. The priest who profited from the offerings is made to wear the offal of the offerings, and is carried out with the refuse as something to be disposed of. The judgment takes the matter of the priest’s greed and turns it back upon him in the most degrading possible form.[^17]
This form of judgment — reversal, the blessing turned to curse, the profit turned to filth — communicates the nature of the offense with peculiar force. The greedy priest had inverted the proper direction of the offering, taking for himself what belonged to God and to the people. The judgment answers inversion with inversion: the honor of his office is turned to shame, the blessing he channeled is turned to curse, the offerings he exploited are turned into the instrument of his degradation. There is a grim justice in the form. The man who made the holy serve his gain is made to serve as a warning, smeared with the waste of the holiness he despised.
The same reversal appears in the judgment on the house of Eli, though in a different register. Because Eli honored his sons above the LORD by failing to restrain their greed (1 Samuel 2:29), the LORD declares that the priesthood will be taken from his house, that his descendants will be reduced to begging for a priestly office merely to have bread to eat: “every one that is left in thine house shall come and crouch to him for a piece of silver and a morsel of bread, and shall say, Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests’ offices, that I may eat a piece of bread” (1 Samuel 2:36). Here the reversal is economic and exact. The house that grew fat on the offerings, that seized the meat by force, is reduced to crouching for a morsel of bread. The priests who took more than their due will have descendants who beg for the barest sustenance. The greed that gorged itself is answered by a hunger that begs.[^18]
The connection between greed and judgment-by-reversal is not accidental but principled. Greed is the disordering of a holy economy, the turning of God’s provision into private plunder. The fitting judgment is the disordering of the greedy man’s own economy, the turning of his blessing into curse, his abundance into want, his honor into filth. As the eighth paper of this suite will argue at greater length, the form of each judgment exposes the nature of each abuse, and nowhere is this clearer than here, where the punishment is the offense turned back upon the offender.
7. Conclusion: The Corruption of Mediation
This paper has argued that priestly greed is judged in Scripture as a corruption of the sacrificial system at its root, because it stands at the point of the people’s approach to God and turns the instrument of that approach into an instrument of private gain. The paradigm of Eli’s sons displays greed as plunder — the seizure of more than the prescribed portion, before the LORD’s portion, by force against the worshipper — with the result that “men abhorred the offering of the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:17). The paradigm of Malachi’s priesthood displays greed as collusion — the acceptance of blemished offerings and the refusal to serve “for nought” — with the result that God would rather the temple doors be shut than the corrupted worship continue (Malachi 1:10). Beneath both lies a contempt for the holy things, the “weariness” and the “snuffing” that reveal a heart that no longer reverences what it handles, so that greed is finally a failure of the priest’s fundamental charge to distinguish the holy from the common. The principle continues into the apostolic age in Simon’s attempt to purchase the gift of God, which gave the church a permanent name for the abuse and met it with apostolic severity. And the judgment takes the form of reversal: the blessing the priest mediated is turned to curse, his profit to filth, his abundance to begging, the offense turned back upon the offender with exact and terrible justice.
The deepest reason for the severity of these judgments is the one named at the outset. The priest was the mediator, the man who stood between God and the people at the point of approach. When the mediator profits illegitimately from the mediation, he does not commit a sin contained within himself; he corrupts the channel through which an entire people comes to God. The worshipper who brought his offering to Shiloh and met the fork in the pot, or who brought his animal to the temple and saw the priest accept the neighbor’s blemished beast without complaint, learned to abhor the offering of the LORD — and in abhorring the offering, was turned from the God the offering was meant to reach. This is the harm that priestly greed uniquely inflicts and the reason it is judged as a corruption of the system rather than a fault of the man. The priest who handles the holy for gain teaches the people to despise the holy, and there is no graver injury one who stands near to God can do to those who come to God through him. The fat belonged to the LORD and the portion to the priest in its order; when the order is inverted and the holy is made to serve the appetite of its guardian, the guardian himself becomes the thing that must be carried out with the refuse, that the worship of God might be cleansed of him.
Notes
[^1]: On the priestly portions and the economic structure of the cult (Leviticus 7:28–36; Numbers 18:8–24; Deuteronomy 18:1–5), see Milgrom (1991, pp. 473–481) and the treatment of priestly maintenance in Nurmela (1998, pp. 23–48). The structural temptation created by the mediator’s dependence on the offerings is the premise of this paper’s argument.
[^2]: On the distinction between greed as private vice and greed as corruption of mediation, developed here from the placement of the priest at the point of approach, compare the discussion of priestly responsibility in Beale (2004, pp. 33–80) and the analysis of 1 Samuel 2 in Firth (2009, pp. 60–68).
[^3]: On “sons of Belial” and “knew not the LORD” as a deliberately devastating introduction to men who were priests, see Tsumura (2007, pp. 155–160) and Firth (2009, pp. 61–63). The contradiction between office and condition is the narrator’s opening move.
[^4]: On the fork-in-the-pot abuse as a seizure exceeding the prescribed portion of Leviticus 7:30–34, see Tsumura (2007, pp. 158–161) and Bergen (1996, pp. 73–76). The indiscriminate taking replaces divine ordinance with appetite as the measure of the priest’s share.
[^5]: On the demand for flesh before the burning of the fat as an inversion of the sacrificial order (Leviticus 3:16; 7:23–25), and the threat of force, see Tsumura (2007, pp. 160–162) and Klein (1983, pp. 24–26). The temporal inversion — priest’s portion before the LORD’s — is identified here as the decisive offense.
[^6]: On “men abhorred the offering of the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:17) as identifying the deepest harm, the poisoning of the people’s relation to worship, see Firth (2009, pp. 63–64) and Brueggemann (1990, pp. 21–24). The argument that priestly greed drives the people from God is drawn from this verse.
[^7]: On Malachi’s indictment of blemished offerings against the law of Leviticus 22:17–25 and Deuteronomy 15:21, and the comparison with the civil governor, see Hill (1998, pp. 173–186) and Stuart (1998, pp. 1295–1310). The priests’ failure to guard the standard is the institutional form of the abuse.
[^8]: On the inferred economic logic of mutual complicity between worshipper and priest in accepting cheap offerings, see Verhoef (1987, pp. 222–230) and the discussion of the priesthood’s collusion in Hill (1998, pp. 183–190). The “collusion” reading is developed here as the complement to the “plunder” reading of 1 Samuel 2.
[^9]: On “would shut the doors for nought” (Malachi 1:10) as exposing the mercenary heart, and on God’s preference for closed doors over corrupted worship, see Stuart (1998, pp. 1305–1310) and Verhoef (1987, pp. 226–230).
[^10]: On “what a weariness” and “ye have snuffed at it” (Malachi 1:13) as expressions of contempt, see Hill (1998, pp. 191–195) and the lexical discussion in Verhoef (1987, pp. 232–235). The gesture of disdain is identified here as the heart from which the greed proceeds.
[^11]: On the narrative priority of “knew not the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:12) before the specific abuses, establishing inward contempt as root and outward greed as fruit, see Firth (2009, pp. 61–63) and Tsumura (2007, pp. 155–157).
[^12]: On the link between greed and the failure of the priest’s fundamental charge to distinguish the holy from the common (Leviticus 10:10), see the first paper of this suite and compare Beale (2004, pp. 33–46) on the priest’s guardianship of the sacred.
[^13]: On Simon’s offer (Acts 8:18–19) as the attempt to purchase as a commodity what is received only as a gift, with a view to profit and prestige, see Bock (2007, pp. 332–338) and Peterson (2009, pp. 285–290).
[^14]: On the severity of Peter’s response and the diagnosis of the heart (Acts 8:20–23), paralleling the Old Testament severity toward priestly greed, see Bock (2007, pp. 336–340) and Marshall (1980, pp. 159–162).
[^15]: On the derivation of “simony” from Simon Magus and its definition as the buying or selling of sacred things, see the historical survey in Peterson (2009, pp. 288–290) and the entry on simony in standard reference works; the principle, not the later canonical history, is what concerns this paper.
[^16]: On “I will curse your blessings” (Malachi 2:1–2) as the reversal of the priest’s office of blessing (Numbers 6:22–27), see Hill (1998, pp. 197–205) and Stuart (1998, pp. 1311–1318). The judgment-by-reversal form is the focus of this section.
[^17]: On the dung imagery of Malachi 2:3 as a judgment exactly fitted to the offense of defiling the altar, see Verhoef (1987, pp. 240–245) and Hill (1998, pp. 201–207). The degradation answers the defilement in kind.
[^18]: On the judgment against the house of Eli (1 Samuel 2:27–36), and the economic reversal by which the house that gorged is reduced to begging for bread, see Tsumura (2007, pp. 167–175) and Firth (2009, pp. 66–68). On Eli’s honoring his sons above the LORD (2:29) as the root of the judgment, see Bergen (1996, pp. 76–79).
References
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