Abstract
This paper argues that the corruption of the priest’s teaching office constitutes a distinct abuse-class whose gravity derives from its downstream effect: because the priest’s lips were to guard knowledge and instruct the people in the distinctions God had made, the corruption of his teaching corrupts the people themselves, so that the abuse propagates outward from the sanctuary into the whole nation. Building on the principle established across this suite, and especially on the priest’s defining charge to distinguish the holy from the common and to teach the statutes of the LORD (Leviticus 10:10–11), this study contends that false teaching, partiality, flattery, and the blurring of God’s distinctions are judged as a corruption of the priest’s most far-reaching function. The argument proceeds in four movements. First, it examines Malachi’s portrait of the priest as the messenger of the LORD of hosts whose lips should keep knowledge, and the indictment of priests who corrupted the covenant of Levi by partiality in the law (Malachi 2:6–9). Second, it analyzes Hosea’s principle “like people, like priest” and the mechanism by which the rejection of knowledge by the priest produces the destruction of the people (Hosea 4:6–9). Third, it traces the prophetic indictment of a comprehensive falsity reaching “from the prophet even unto the priest” (Jeremiah 6:13; 8:10), in which the healing of the people’s hurt is done slightly and peace is proclaimed where there is no peace. Fourth, it returns to Ezekiel’s charge that the priests hid their eyes from the Sabbaths and put no difference between holy and profane (Ezekiel 22:26), reading it as the teaching-office form of the failure to distinguish. The paper analyzes the form of the judgment — the priest “made contemptible and base before all the people” — and concludes that corrupt teaching is judged as the most far-reaching of priestly abuses because it reproduces the priest’s corruption in the people he was ordained to instruct.
1. Introduction: The Office That Reproduces Itself in Others
The priestly abuses examined in the preceding papers — liturgical presumption, greed, sexual exploitation — share a structure: each is a corruption of the priest’s ordained relation to God or to the people, and each is judged in proportion to the priest’s nearness to the holy. But there is among the priestly functions one that differs from the others in a consequential respect. The priest’s teaching office does not merely express his own relation to God; it shapes the relation of the entire people to God. Through his teaching, the priest reproduces in the people his own understanding of the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean, the lawful and the forbidden. When his teaching is sound, the people are instructed in the distinctions God has made; when it is corrupt, the people are formed in his corruption. The teaching office is the office that reproduces itself in others, and this is what makes its corruption the most far-reaching of priestly abuses.[^1]
The priest’s teaching role was not incidental to his office but central to it. The charge given to Aaron after the strange fire bound the priest’s two great functions together: he was to distinguish the holy from the common and the clean from the unclean, “and that ye may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the LORD hath spoken unto them by the hand of Moses” (Leviticus 10:10–11). The distinguishing and the teaching are one charge in two aspects. The priest discerns the distinctions God has made, and then he instructs the people in them, so that the whole nation may live within the order God established. This teaching function recurs throughout the law and the prophets as a defining mark of the priesthood: it was the priest’s part to teach Jacob God’s judgments and Israel His law (Deuteronomy 33:10), to give torah, to render the verdicts that resolved the people’s questions about clean and unclean, lawful and forbidden.[^2]
This paper argues that the corruption of this teaching office is judged in Scripture as a distinct and especially grave abuse-class, because its harm does not stop with the priest but propagates into the people he instructs. The thesis can be stated as a principle of transmission: the corruption of the teacher corrupts the taught, and so the priest who teaches falsely does not sin alone but reproduces his sin in the whole community that learns from him. The judgments on this abuse, accordingly, concern not only the priest’s own standing but the ruin of the people, and they expose the teaching office as the channel through which priestly corruption flows outward to become national corruption. The paper proceeds through the great prophetic indictments — Malachi, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — each of which illumines a different facet of the corruption of teaching, before analyzing the form of its judgment.
2. The Messenger Whose Lips Should Keep Knowledge
The fullest positive statement of the priest’s teaching office, set immediately against its corruption, comes in Malachi’s recollection of the covenant of Levi. Having indicted the priests for the greed examined in the preceding paper, the prophet turns to their teaching, and he frames it by recalling what the priesthood was meant to be. “My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, and was afraid before my name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips: he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity” (Malachi 2:5–6). The ideal Levite is portrayed as a man in whose mouth was the law of truth, whose teaching turned many from iniquity — a teacher whose instruction had its effect in the moral transformation of the people.[^3]
The text then states the principle that governs the priest’s teaching office, and it is one of the most important statements in Scripture concerning the relation of the priest to knowledge: “For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts” (Malachi 2:7). Three things in this verse define the office. First, the priest’s lips should keep knowledge — he is the custodian of the knowledge of God’s law, the one charged with guarding it and holding it secure. Second, the people should seek the law at his mouth — he is the authorized source to whom the people resort for instruction in God’s requirements. Third, and most weighty, he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts — the priest in his teaching speaks not on his own authority but as the bearer of God’s message to the people. The title “messenger” places the priest’s teaching in the gravest possible light: when he instructs, he stands as the mouthpiece of God, and his words carry, or should carry, the authority of the One whose message he bears.[^4]
Against this exalted conception the indictment falls with crushing force: “But ye are departed out of the way; ye have caused many to stumble at the law; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the LORD of hosts. Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, according as ye have not kept my ways, but have been partial in the law” (Malachi 2:8–9). The contrast is total. The ideal Levite turned many from iniquity; these priests have caused many to stumble. The ideal Levite kept the law of truth in his mouth; these have been partial in the law. The very faculty that defined the office — the lips that should keep knowledge — has been turned to the people’s ruin.[^5]
The specific corruption named is partiality: “ye… have been partial in the law” (Malachi 2:9). The phrase indicates the showing of favor, the rendering of instruction and judgment that bends to the standing or the interest of the person rather than holding to the truth of God’s law. The priest who is partial in the law teaches and judges not according to what God has said but according to whom he wishes to please. This is the corruption of the teaching office at its most insidious, because it preserves the form of teaching while emptying it of truth. The priest still instructs, still renders verdicts, still occupies the seat of the teacher; but his instruction is bent to favor, and the law in his mouth has become a thing he shapes to his own ends rather than a truth he faithfully transmits. The messenger of the LORD of hosts has begun to deliver his own message under the cover of God’s authority, and the people who seek the law at his mouth receive partiality dressed as torah.[^6]
The flattery that accompanies partiality is its natural companion, for the priest who shows favor must commend those he favors, and the teaching office becomes a means of cultivating the powerful rather than instructing the people in truth. The corruption thus serves the priest’s own advantage: by partiality and flattery he secures the goodwill of those who can benefit him, and his teaching, which should have been a fearless transmission of God’s law without respect of persons, becomes an instrument of his self-interest. Here the link to the preceding paper on greed becomes visible: partiality in the law is often greed’s accomplice, the bending of instruction to serve the priest’s material and social advantage. The teaching office and the economic office of the priesthood are corrupted together, and by the same disposition to prefer self-interest to faithful service.[^7]
3. Like People, Like Priest: The Mechanism of Transmission
If Malachi states the principle of the teaching office, Hosea exposes the mechanism by which its corruption destroys the people, and in doing so supplies the phrase that names this paper. The prophet’s indictment of the priesthood of the northern kingdom is among the most penetrating in the prophetic literature, and it traces with precision the path by which a corrupt priesthood produces a corrupt and ruined nation.
The indictment opens with the consequence and works back to the cause: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children” (Hosea 4:6). The structure of the verse is the structure of the abuse. The people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; but the lack of knowledge is laid at the priest’s door, for it is the priest — addressed in the singular “thou” — who has rejected knowledge and forgotten the law of God. The priest was the custodian of knowledge, the one whose lips should keep it and from whose mouth the people should seek it; when the priest rejected knowledge, the people were left without it, and they perished for the lack. The destruction of the people is the direct downstream effect of the corruption of the priest’s teaching office.[^8]
The mechanism of transmission is what makes this passage decisive for the argument. The priest does not merely fail himself by rejecting knowledge; he fails the people, who depend upon him for the knowledge they cannot otherwise obtain. The flow of knowledge in Israel was meant to run from God, through the priest, to the people; the priest was the conduit. When the conduit is corrupted, the flow stops, and the people are left in the ignorance that destroys them. The priest’s sin is therefore not contained; it propagates through the channel of his office, and the whole people bear the consequence of the corruption that began in the priest’s rejection of knowledge.[^9]
Hosea then states the principle that gives the abuse its name: “And there shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punish them for their ways, and reward them their doings” (Hosea 4:9). The phrase “like people, like priest” is dense and bears at least two complementary meanings, both of which serve the argument. In one direction, it indicates that the people have become like their priests — corrupted by the corrupt teaching they received, formed in the priest’s own faithlessness, so that the rejection of knowledge at the top has reproduced itself as a rejection of knowledge throughout the nation. The priest’s corruption has become the people’s character. In the other direction, the phrase indicates that priest and people will share a common judgment — that the priest will not escape the ruin he brought upon the people, but will be punished together with them, “like people, like priest” in condemnation as in corruption. Both meanings express the principle of transmission: the priest and the people are bound together, the one having formed the other, and they stand or fall together.[^10]
This is the mechanism that makes corrupt teaching the most far-reaching of priestly abuses. The greedy priest harms those who bring offerings; the exploitative priest harms those within his reach; but the corrupt teacher harms the whole people, and harms them at the deepest level, by forming their understanding of God and His requirements in the image of his own corruption. The people become like the priest. A nation cannot rise above the knowledge of its teachers, and when the teachers have rejected knowledge, the nation is destroyed for the lack of it. The judgment that the priest and people share is the just answer to a corruption the priest transmitted and the people received. “Like people, like priest” is the epitaph of a nation ruined by its teachers, and the warning that the teaching office, more than any other, carries the destiny of the people in its keeping.[^11]
4. From the Prophet Even Unto the Priest: Comprehensive Falsity
Jeremiah extends the indictment of corrupt teaching into a portrait of comprehensive falsity, in which the corruption is not confined to the priesthood but pervades the entire leadership class charged with speaking for God, and in which the specific form of the falsity is the false reassurance that masks impending ruin. The prophet’s repeated charge binds priest and prophet together in a single condemnation: “For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely” (Jeremiah 6:13; repeated at 8:10). The scope is total — from least to greatest, from prophet to priest — and the indictment names two corruptions in tandem: covetousness and false dealing, greed and corrupt teaching, the two abuses that this and the preceding paper have shown to be natural companions.[^12]
The specific form of the false dealing is then exposed, and it is one of the most penetrating diagnoses of corrupt teaching in all of Scripture: “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14; 8:11). The image is of a physician who treats a grave wound superficially, dressing it lightly and pronouncing it healed when it is not, so that the patient, falsely reassured, neglects the wound and perishes of it. This is the form corrupt teaching takes when the people are in danger: the teachers, who should have warned of the coming ruin and called the people to repentance, instead proclaim peace and security, telling the people what they wished to hear rather than what they needed to know. The corruption is not always the teaching of overt falsehood; it is often the withholding of the hard truth and the substitution of a comforting lie, the “peace, peace” that soothes the people toward their destruction.[^13]
This form of corrupt teaching is closely related to the partiality and flattery analyzed in Malachi. The priest who is partial in the law, who cultivates the favor of those he teaches, will naturally prefer to proclaim peace, for the message of peace is welcome and the message of warning is resented. Flattery and false reassurance are the teaching-office’s path of least resistance, the way the corrupt teacher secures the goodwill of his hearers while betraying the trust of his office. The teacher who should keep knowledge and deliver God’s message faithfully instead delivers the message the people want, and the people, reassured, walk on toward the ruin the faithful message would have warned them to avoid. The slight healing of the hurt is the teaching office turned from its purpose: instead of forming the people in truth, it confirms them in a false security that hastens their destruction.[^14]
Jeremiah adds a note that exposes the heart of the corrupt teacher: “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush” (Jeremiah 6:15; 8:12). The loss of shame is the mark of the thoroughly corrupted teacher. He has so accommodated himself to his false dealing that he no longer feels its wrongness; the conscience that should have recoiled from delivering “peace, peace” over a mortal wound has been seared into insensibility. This is the terminal condition of the corrupt teaching office: not merely the delivery of false teaching but the inability any longer to recognize it as false, the loss of the capacity to blush at the betrayal of the trust. The messenger of the LORD of hosts has become a deliverer of comfortable lies and has lost even the awareness that he has done so.[^15]
5. Hiding the Eyes from the Sabbaths: The Failure to Distinguish
Ezekiel’s indictment, examined in the first paper of this suite as the negative image of the priest’s defining charge, must be revisited here in its specific bearing on the teaching office, for it exposes corrupt teaching as fundamentally a failure to distinguish — the same failure that the first paper identified as the root corruption of the priesthood. “Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them” (Ezekiel 22:26).
The charge is precisely the inversion of the Levitical commission. The priest was to distinguish the holy from the common and the clean from the unclean (Leviticus 10:10); these priests “have put no difference” between them. The priest was to teach the people God’s distinctions; these priests, by failing to make the distinctions themselves, have failed to teach them, and the people are left without the discernment the priest’s teaching should have supplied. The teaching-office dimension of the charge is the phrase “neither have they shewed difference” — they have not displayed, not taught, not made known to the people the distinctions God established. The failure is not merely the priest’s private failure to discern; it is the failure to instruct, the abandonment of the teaching function by which the people were to learn the distinctions they could not discern for themselves.[^16]
The clause “have hid their eyes from my sabbaths” identifies a particular instance of the failure and is especially illuminating. The Sabbath was among the clearest of the distinctions God had made — the division of time into the holy seventh day and the six common days, the sign of the covenant, the marker that set apart the people of God. To hide the eyes from the Sabbaths is deliberately to refuse to see and to teach this distinction, to let the holy day blur into the common days, to abandon the instruction that would have kept the distinction alive among the people. The priest who hides his eyes from the Sabbaths does not merely neglect his own observance; he fails to guard and teach the distinction on which the people’s covenant identity depended, and so the distinction erodes among the people for want of the teaching that should have preserved it.[^17]
The consequence is stated with terrible economy: “and I am profaned among them.” The failure of the priest to distinguish and to teach the distinctions results in the profanation of God Himself among His people. When the holy is no longer distinguished from the common, when the Sabbath is no longer set apart, when the priest no longer teaches the difference, the very holiness of God is treated as common, and God is profaned in the midst of the people who should have honored Him. This is the deepest harm of the corrupt teaching office, and it returns the argument to the principle of the first paper. The priest’s charge to distinguish was the guardianship of God’s holiness among the people; the corruption of his teaching, his failure to distinguish and to instruct, profanes that holiness throughout the nation. The people are not merely left ignorant; they are formed in a profanation of God, taught by the priest’s failure to treat as common what God had set apart.[^18]
Ezekiel thus completes the portrait. Corrupt teaching is, at its root, the failure to distinguish — the abandonment of the priest’s defining charge in its teaching aspect. Whether it takes the form of Malachi’s partiality, Hosea’s rejection of knowledge, or Jeremiah’s false reassurance, the underlying corruption is the priest’s failure to guard and transmit the distinctions God made, with the result that the people lose those distinctions and God is profaned among them. The teaching office was the channel by which the holiness of God was to be preserved in the life of the people; its corruption is the channel by which that holiness is lost.
6. The Form of the Judgment: Made Contemptible and Base
The judgment on corrupt teaching takes a distinctive form, and attending to it confirms the nature of the offense. Where liturgical presumption drew immediate fire and greed drew the reversal of blessing into curse, the corruption of the teaching office draws a judgment fitted to its specific character: the priest who debased the holy in his teaching is himself debased before the people, made contemptible in the eyes of those he was ordained to instruct. The judgment answers the offense by reversing the honor proper to the teaching office.
The form is stated explicitly in Malachi: “Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all the people, according as ye have not kept my ways, but have been partial in the law” (Malachi 2:9). The logic of the judgment is exact. The priest’s teaching office carried honor; the people sought the law at his mouth and regarded him as the messenger of the LORD of hosts. His standing among the people rested on the trust that his teaching was true and his judgment impartial. When he corrupted that teaching by partiality, he forfeited the ground of his honor, and the judgment makes the forfeiture manifest: he is made contemptible and base before all the people. The honor he abused is stripped away, and the contempt he showed for the truth of God’s law is answered by the contempt the people come to feel for him. The teacher who debased the holy is debased; the messenger who corrupted the message is dishonored before those to whom he delivered it.[^19]
This form of judgment is peculiarly fitting because the teaching office depends entirely upon credibility. A priest whose teaching is not trusted cannot teach; the office collapses the moment the people cease to regard him as a reliable custodian of knowledge. The judgment that makes the corrupt teacher contemptible before the people therefore strikes at the very root of his function. It does not merely punish him; it disables the office he abused, for an office of teaching exercised by one whom the people hold in contempt is an office in name only. The judgment thus has a protective dimension as well as a retributive one: by exposing the corrupt teacher as contemptible, it warns the people against the teaching they should no longer trust, breaking the channel through which the corruption flowed. The “like people, like priest” transmission is interrupted when the priest is made contemptible, for the people who hold him in contempt are no longer formed in his image.[^20]
The shared judgment of Hosea — “I will punish them for their ways, and reward them their doings” (Hosea 4:9) — supplies the complementary form. Where Malachi’s judgment falls on the priest’s standing, Hosea’s falls on priest and people together, the common ruin of those bound together in corruption. Both forms express the principle of transmission from the side of judgment. Because the corruption passed from priest to people, the judgment encompasses both; because the corruption rested on the priest’s abused honor, the judgment strips that honor away. The eighth paper of this suite will treat the slow judgment of being made contemptible as one of the recognizable forms of divine reckoning with priestly abuse, and the corruption of teaching is its clearest instance, for here the contempt is not merely the priest’s punishment but the undoing of the very office he corrupted.
7. Conclusion: The Far-Reaching Abuse
This paper has argued that the corruption of the priest’s teaching office is judged in Scripture as the most far-reaching of priestly abuses, because its harm propagates from the priest into the whole people he was ordained to instruct. The priest’s lips should keep knowledge, for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts and the people seek the law at his mouth (Malachi 2:7); when he becomes partial in the law, he is made contemptible before the people whose trust he abused (Malachi 2:9). Hosea exposes the mechanism: the priest’s rejection of knowledge leaves the people destroyed for lack of it, and “like people, like priest,” the corruption of the teacher reproduces itself in the taught and binds them in a common judgment (Hosea 4:6–9). Jeremiah shows the corruption’s characteristic form in times of danger — the slight healing of the people’s hurt, the “peace, peace” proclaimed where there is no peace, delivered by teachers who have lost the capacity to blush (Jeremiah 6:13–15; 8:10–12). And Ezekiel reveals the root: corrupt teaching is the failure to distinguish, the hiding of the eyes from the Sabbaths, by which God Himself is profaned among the people who were not taught His distinctions (Ezekiel 22:26).
The deepest reason for the gravity of this abuse is the one with which the paper began. The teaching office is the office that reproduces itself in others. The priest who teaches falsely does not sin in isolation; he forms an entire people in his falsehood, and the people become like the priest. A nation rises no higher than the knowledge of its teachers, and when the custodians of knowledge reject it, the people are destroyed for the lack. This is why the prophets, surveying the ruin of Israel and Judah, lay so much of the blame at the door of the priesthood: the corruption that destroyed the nation had flowed through the channel of the teaching office, transmitted from the priests who rejected knowledge to the people who perished without it. The priest stood at the headwaters of the nation’s knowledge of God, and when he poisoned the spring, the whole stream was poisoned. The judgment that makes him contemptible before the people, and that binds him with them in a common ruin, answers the abuse by exposing the corrupt teacher and breaking the channel of his corruption. The lips that should have kept knowledge, that should have turned many from iniquity, instead caused many to stumble at the law; and the messenger of the LORD of hosts, who bore the gravest honor a man may hold, is brought to the deepest contempt, that the people he corrupted might at last cease to be formed in his image.
Notes
[^1]: On the teaching office as the function that shapes the people’s relation to God, and thus as uniquely far-reaching among priestly functions, developed here from the charge of Leviticus 10:10–11, see the treatment of priestly instruction in Schniedewind (2013, pp. 118–134) and the discussion of torah-instruction in Milgrom (1991, pp. 615–617).
[^2]: On the priest’s teaching role across the law and prophets (Deuteronomy 33:10; Leviticus 10:10–11), see Begg (1994, pp. 4–14) and the survey of the priestly torah-function in Blenkinsopp (1995, pp. 80–98).
[^3]: On the covenant of Levi and the ideal Levite of Malachi 2:5–6, see Hill (1998, pp. 207–215) and Stuart (1998, pp. 1318–1328). The portrait of the teacher who “turned many from iniquity” supplies the standard against which the indictment is measured.
[^4]: On Malachi 2:7 and the threefold definition of the teaching office — custodian of knowledge, authorized source, messenger of the LORD of hosts — see Hill (1998, pp. 215–220) and Verhoef (1987, pp. 245–252). On the weight of the title “messenger” (malʾak), see Petersen (1995, pp. 194–198).
[^5]: On the total contrast between the ideal Levite and the indicted priests in Malachi 2:8–9, see Hill (1998, pp. 220–226) and Stuart (1998, pp. 1328–1335).
[^6]: On “partial in the law” (Malachi 2:9) as the bending of instruction to favor rather than truth, see Verhoef (1987, pp. 250–255) and the discussion of judicial and instructional partiality in Hill (1998, pp. 224–228).
[^7]: On the connection between partiality, flattery, and the priest’s self-interest, and the link to greed treated in the preceding paper, see Stuart (1998, pp. 1330–1336) and Petersen (1995, pp. 198–202).
[^8]: On Hosea 4:6 and the structure by which the people’s destruction for lack of knowledge is laid at the priest’s door, see Macintosh (1997, pp. 138–150), Stuart (1987, pp. 75–80), and Garrett (1997, pp. 117–125).
[^9]: On the priest as the conduit of knowledge from God to people, and the propagation of his corruption through the channel of his office, see Macintosh (1997, pp. 140–148) and Dearman (2010, pp. 156–165).
[^10]: On the dual meaning of “like people, like priest” (Hosea 4:9) — the people made like the priest, and the common judgment of both — see Macintosh (1997, pp. 152–158), Garrett (1997, pp. 123–128), and Wolff (1974, pp. 78–85).
[^11]: On the principle that a nation cannot rise above the knowledge of its teachers, and the binding of priest and people in corruption and judgment, see Dearman (2010, pp. 160–168) and Stuart (1987, pp. 78–82).
[^12]: On the comprehensive scope of Jeremiah 6:13 and 8:10 (“from the prophet even unto the priest”), binding greed and false dealing together, see Lundbom (1999, pp. 432–440) and Thompson (1980, pp. 260–266).
[^13]: On the “peace, peace; when there is no peace” of Jeremiah 6:14 and 8:11 as the false reassurance that masks impending ruin, see Lundbom (1999, pp. 435–442), Thompson (1980, pp. 263–268), and Brueggemann (1998, pp. 70–78).
[^14]: On the relation between flattery, false reassurance, and the teaching-office’s path of least resistance, see Brueggemann (1998, pp. 72–80) and the discussion of the false prophets and priests in Lundbom (1999, pp. 438–445).
[^15]: On the loss of shame (Jeremiah 6:15; 8:12) as the terminal condition of the corrupt teacher, see Thompson (1980, pp. 265–270) and Lundbom (1999, pp. 440–446).
[^16]: On Ezekiel 22:26 as the inversion of the Levitical commission in its teaching aspect (“neither have they shewed difference”), see Block (1997, pp. 723–728), Duguid (1994, pp. 78–86), and the discussion in the first paper of this suite.
[^17]: On “hid their eyes from my sabbaths” as the refusal to guard and teach the Sabbath distinction, see Block (1997, pp. 725–729) and the treatment of Sabbath and covenant identity in Greenberg (1997, pp. 462–468).
[^18]: On “I am profaned among them” as the consequence of the failure to distinguish and teach, returning to the principle of the first paper, see Block (1997, pp. 726–730) and Duguid (1994, pp. 82–88).
[^19]: On “made you contemptible and base before all the people” (Malachi 2:9) as a judgment fitted to the abuse of the teaching office’s honor, see Hill (1998, pp. 224–230) and Verhoef (1987, pp. 252–257).
[^20]: On the protective dimension of the judgment — the breaking of the channel of corruption by exposing the corrupt teacher — developed here from the credibility-dependence of the teaching office, compare the discussion of the slow judgment of contempt in the eighth paper of this suite and the treatment of priestly discredit in Petersen (1995, pp. 200–205).
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