GruntGod 2.5.4: 500 Years Before They Were Born
John, Jesus, and the Priestly Order of Abijah
This is drawn from my revision of God Is a Grunt—cut from the main chapter because it stops the narrative flow, but too interesting to abandon entirely.
Luke opens his gospel with the most detailed backstory of any New Testament writer. Before Joshua+ (AKA “Jesus”) is born—before Mary gets her visit from Gabriel—we meet Zechariah and Elizabeth. This is not throat-clearing. Luke is laying theological track, and if you follow it, John and Joshua’s relationship goes back five centuries before their birth.
Here's the setup. Zechariah "belonged to the priestly order of Abijah" (Luke 1:5). Abijah was one of the twenty-two priests and Levites who returned from captivity in Assyria with Zerubbabel to rebuild the temple—listed in Nehemiah 12:1. First Chronicles 24 establishes the rotation of priestly duties in the second temple: out of twenty-four priestly lots, Abijah's descendants were assigned the eighth rotation. Jeshua—also written Yeshua, a shortened form of Yehoshua, which we Anglicize as Joshua—was ninth.
That means Zechariah's rotation—and therefore John's priestly lineage—falls immediately before the lot once reserved for the high priest who built the second temple. John precedes and prepares the way for Joshua.
Luke's readers would have caught this. Modern readers generally don't, because we've lost the familiarity with priestly rotation systems that was common knowledge among first-century Jews. But the implication is significant: the relationship between John and Jesus isn't improvised or coincidental. Luke is showing that their families have been collaborating—through priestly order and descent—for five hundred years before either of them was born. The forerunner and the messiah have been structurally linked since the return from exile.
Luke uses military language to describe this priestly work—a detail worth pausing on. Zechariah's "section was on duty" (Luke 1:8). The rotation of priestly responsibilities functions like a work detail: you have your assigned time, you rotate in, you rotate out. Luke's language is institutional, hierarchical, and orderly. This is a structured organization with accountability, not a spontaneous spiritual movement from out of the blue. Luke is telling his audience “This was a looooong time coming.”
When John shows up in the Jordan wilderness calling everyone a brood of vipers, he is the institutional heir to this structure. He is eighth in rotation. His entire ministry is preparation. And when soldiers show up and ask “What about us?” they are asking precisely the question his ministry exists to answer: how do people embedded in systems of power live lives of repentance?
When soldiers asked John the Baptist "What about us?"—they weren't asking permission to quit. They were asking how to serve faithfully. He answered them. Jesus baptized them. The New Testament never told them to choose.
This canteen cover decal carries the question military families have been asking in church pews for generations. Stick it where it belongs: somewhere people will have to reckon with it.
Pairs well with its namesake essay 😉
John doesn't answer by dissolving the system. He answers by reforming behavior within it. That's important for how we read his answer to the soldiers—don't extort, don't shake people down, be content with your pay—as something other than a reluctant concession to an irredeemable profession. He's doing what his ancestors have always done: organizing people into better versions of their institutional selves.
The soldiers asking John what to do aren't outliers. They're participants in a five-hundred-year story of a priestly line that has always been about preparing the way—for whoever comes ninth.
