Exceptional Priests in the Hebrew Bible

Pre-Mosaic Non-Levitical Priests

Before the Law of Moses was given, several works in the Hebrew Bible already recognize priests outside the line of Levi.

Levitical Non-Aaronic Priests

2. Non-Levitical Priests After Sinai

In each of these cases, the text signals divine approval rather than impropriety — most explicitly through fire consuming the offering, which in the Israelite cultic imagination is the strongest possible marker of acceptance (cf. Leviticus 9:24; 1 Kings 18:38).

3. David's Sons as Priests (2 Samuel 8:18)

2 Samuel 8:16-18 gives a structured list of David's court officials: Joab over the army, Jehoshaphat as recorder, Zadok and Abiathar as priests (kohanim), Seraiah as scribe, Benaiah over the Cherethites and Pelethites — and then, in the same breath, "David's sons were priests (kohanim)."

Several converging observations support reading this in the literal, cultic sense rather than as a loose title for "chief officials":

  1. Structural parity. Every other entry in the list names a specific, technical office. Reading "priests" as a vague catch-all only for David's sons breaks the pattern of the entire list, where everyone else gets a precise title.
  2. Same word, same verse. Kohen is used twice in this one verse — once for Zadok and Abiathar (undisputed cultic priests) and again for David's sons. For the "chief official" reading to work, the word has to silently shift meaning within a single sentence, with no textual signal that it has done so.
  3. Narrative priming. Two chapters earlier, David is shown wearing priestly garb and personally offering sacrifice (2 Samuel 6:14, 17-18). A household already depicted performing priestly actions being called "priests" shortly after is unsurprising.
  4. A parallel case in David's second officer-list. 2 Samuel 20:26 names Ira the Jairite — again alongside Zadok and Abiathar — as "priest to David" (kohen le-David). As with David's sons, there is no indication in the text that Ira was a Levite.1
  5. Ancient discomfort with the plain reading. Some Septuagint manuscripts already soften kohen in this verse toward something closer to "chief" or "courtier" rather than the standard hiereus used for cultic priests elsewhere. Independent ancient traditions feeling the need to "fix" the same detail is better evidence that the plain sense was uncomfortable and needed correcting than evidence that the plain sense was never there in the first place.

Carl Edwin Armerding, a non-LDS biblical scholar, reaches the same conclusion in his study "Were David's Sons Really Priests?" — arguing that since neither David's sons nor Ira are indicated to be Levites, the best explanation is that they belonged to a separate royal priestly order connected to the Jerusalem shrine, one David himself held as monarch under Yahweh. Armerding traces this same royal-priestly pattern forward through Adonijah's sacrifice, Solomon's extensive priestly activity, and Zabud son of Nathan, and connects all of it to Psalm 110 as the theological articulation of that royal priesthood — a priesthood he identifies as belonging to a different order than the Aaronic one.

4. Psalm 110 and the Priesthood "Forever"

Psalm 110:4 has Yahweh declare to the Davidic king: "You are a priest (kohen) forever, in the order of Melchizedek." This verse matters enormously, since it is the very text Hebrews 7 depends on for its entire argument about Christ's priesthood.

Two things indicate the word "priest" here carries full cultic weight rather than a political sense:

First, the comparison to Melchizedek anchors it directly to Genesis 14:18, where Melchizedek is unambiguously a cultic kohen le'El Elyon performing priestly acts toward Abraham. There is no "political official" reading available for Melchizedek himself, so the psalm's explicit modeling on him carries that cultic sense forward. This is precisely how Second Temple literature understood the figure — most strikingly in the Qumran text 11QMelchizedek, which develops Melchizedek into a quasi-divine, eschatological priestly redeemer tied to the Day of Atonement.

Second, the pairing of olam ("forever") with "priest" or "priesthood" is a fixed, technical phrase in the Hebrew Bible, and it only ever occurs in cultic contexts:

This exact construction is never used for a political title anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. When biblical writers wanted to say "permanent political office," they had ready-made vocabulary for it — the throne/kingdom-forever formula used of David's dynasty (2 Samuel 7:13, 16; 1 Kings 9:5) — and they used it. The psalmist had that formula available and did not use it here. He reached for the priesthood-forever formula instead, the same one reserved elsewhere exclusively for Aaron's line and Phinehas.

Armerding independently arrives at the same reading of Psalm 110 as a scholar working entirely outside any LDS framework: he identifies the psalm as an enthronement hymn linking the older Canaanite Melchizedek royal-priesthood tradition to the Davidic monarchy, describes this royal priesthood as unlike Levitical priesthood in that it is not conferred by human investiture and is irrevocable, and traces its theological development from Melchizedek through Moses and Samuel to David and Solomon, and ultimately to how the author of Hebrews frames Christ's priesthood "after the order of Melchizedek." This is significant precisely because it is not a Latter-day Saint apologetic argument — it is a mainstream biblical-studies conclusion that a royal priesthood distinct from the Aaronic order runs through the Old Testament narrative.

5. The Uzziah Distinction

None of this erases a real distinction in the tradition. When King Uzziah entered the sanctuary specifically to burn incense on the altar — a duty exclusively reserved for Aaronic priests within the Temple precincts — he was struck with leprosy (2 Chronicles 26:16-21).

This suggests the biblical material distinguishes between two different things: broad participation in offering/sacrifice (attested widely for kings and other non-Levites, and apparently acceptable) and specific unauthorized entry into the exclusive Aaronic role of incense-offering within the sanctuary itself (not acceptable). This is a more precise line than "kings were never really priests," and it accounts for both the Uzziah episode and the wider pattern above without contradiction.

6. Scriptural Passages Distinguish "Priests" from "Levites" — and Anticipates Gentile Priests

If "priest" simply meant "Levite" as a matter of biblical vocabulary, the terms should be interchangeable and largely redundant when paired. But several passages explicitly list "priests" and "Levites" as two distinct categories side by side, which only makes sense if "priest" was never treated as coextensive with "member of the tribe of Levi":

This pattern of consistently distinguishing "priests" from "Levites," rather than treating the second term as a mere gloss on the first, weakens the assumption that "priest" in the Hebrew Bible is by definition shorthand for "Levite." At minimum, it shows the biblical writers themselves did not always collapse the two categories the way the "Levites-only" claim requires.

Further, Isaiah 66:19-21 depicts Adonai declaring that he will gather the nations and take some from among the Gentiles themselves to serve in priestly roles. This is a forward-looking, prophetic anticipation of a priesthood extending beyond Israel's own tribal structure entirely.

Conclusion

The claim that "the Old Testament limits priesthood to Levites under the Law of Moses" is true only of a narrow strand within the Pentateuch's priestly material — it is not true of the Hebrew Bible taken as a whole. Multiple texts, across multiple genres and periods, depict non-Levites exercising real priestly functions with divine sanction, distinguish "priest" from "Levite" as separate categories, and even anticipate priesthood extending to Gentiles. Even mainstream, non-LDS biblical scholarship (Armerding) independently concludes that a distinct royal priesthood, separate from the Aaronic line, runs through Israel's history from Melchizedek through David, Solomon, and their court. Hebrews 7's argument about the permanence of Christ's own priesthood, meanwhile, is a claim about succession (Christ never dies and so never needs a successor), not a claim that forecloses any form of delegated priestly authority operating under Him.

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1

Some lexical sources note that the Septuagint, Lucian, and Syriac traditions read Ira's title differently — as "the Jattirite" (a resident of the town of Jattir, cf. 1 Samuel 30:27) rather than "the Jairite" (a descendant of Jair the Manassite, cf. Numbers 32:41). If the Jattirite reading is correct, Ira's tribal background becomes less certain rather than clearly Manassite. Response: This textual uncertainty is worth conceding honestly — Ira's specific tribal identity is not airtight either way. But this uncertainty cuts both directions and doesn't rescue the "Levites only" claim: nothing in either reading (Jairite/Manassite or Jattirite/Judahite-adjacent) identifies Ira as a Levite, and the argument in Section 3 doesn't depend on Ira alone. David's sons remain the clearer and better-attested case, with Ira serving as corroborating rather than load-bearing evidence.