Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever. — Taking the words in their simplest literal sense, they find a fulfilment in the strange unlooked-for way in which the name and customs of the Rechabites have cropped up from time to time. The Jewish historian Hegesippus (see Euseb. Hist. Eccl. ii. 23), in his account of the martyrdom of James the Just, names the sons of the Rechabites as looking on in reverential sympathy with one whose life, like their own, carried the Nazarite type to its highest perfection. In the account which Diodorus Siculns (xix. 94) gives of the Nabathæans as neither sowing seed, nor planting fruit-trees, nor building houses, and enforcing this rule of life under pain of death, we can scarcely fail to recognise the Rechabite type. Benjamin of Tudela, in the twelfth century, reports that he found 100,000 Jews who were named Rechabites, and who lived after their fashion near El Jubar, and that they were governed by a prince of the house of David. More recent travellers, Dr. Wolff (Journal, 1829, ii. 334; 1839, p. 389) and Signor Pierotti (Transactions of British Association, 1862), report that they have met tribes near Mecca, on the Dead Sea, or in Yemen and Senaar, who observed the rule of Jonadab, claimed to be his descendants, referred to Jeremiah 35:19 as fulfilled in them, and led the life of devout Jews. It is probable, however, that in these later instances we may trace the effect of the Wahabee ascetic movement among the Mahomedan Arabs, identifying its rule with the old practice of the son of Rechab (Burckhardt: Bedouins and Wahabys, p. 283).
The words “stand before” have, however, in Hebrew a distinct secondary meaning. It was a definitely liturgical expression for the ministrations of the Levites who were chosen to “stand before” the Lord (Deuteronomy 10:8; Deuteronomy 18:5; Deuteronomy 18:7), and a like meaning is prominent in Jeremiah 7:10; Jeremiah 15:19; Genesis 18:22; Judges 20:28; Psalms 134:1. The Targum of this passage, indeed, actually gives “ministering before me” as its paraphrase. The natural inference would be that the Rechabites were by these words admitted, in virtue of their Nazarite character, to serve as Levites in the Temple — to be, in fact, a higher class of Nethinim (see Notes on 1 Chronicles 9:2; Ezra 2:43) — and this view is confirmed (1) by the fact that the LXX. ascribes Psalms 71 to “the sons of Jonadab, the first that were led captive;” (2) that a son of Rechab is associated in Nehemiah 3:14 with priests and Levites and nobles in repairing the walls of Jerusalem; (3) in 1 Chronicles 2:55 the Rechabites have become scribes, and in the Vulgate (evidence of a Jewish tradition as to the meaning of the words), the proper names of the English version, “Tirathites, Shimeathites, and Sucathites,” which add nothing to our knowledge, are represented by “canentes et resonantes et in tabernaculis commorantes” (“singing, and playing instruments, and dwelling in tents”), which unite the functions of Levites with the mode of life of the Rechabites. So Hegesippus (as above) speaks of priests who were of the sons of Rechab in the Apostolic age.