For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king, and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without sacred stone, and without ephod or idols.
"Without sacrifice ... pillar ..." Matthew Henry, following the LXX, read this "sacrifice or altar,"[26] giving it the meaning of legitimate worship; but we shall interpret it as it appears in our version (ASV). Sacrifice, of course, was authorized and commanded in the true religion of the Jews, but the legitimacy of the sacrifices which Israel at that time was offering to God might indeed have been sinful due to the lack of a legitimate priesthood, their failure to observe the sacred laws pertaining to sacrifices, and to the encroachments of the cultism, leading to the sacrifices being offered not in Jerusalem, but in Dan or Bethel.