Their duties involved offering the daily and holiday korbanot "sacrifices" and administering the Priestly Blessing to the people.
The prophets among them had made a stipulation with them, namely, that even if Jehoiariv should come up out of exile, the officiating ward that serves in the Temple at that time should not be rejected on his account, but rather, he is to become secondary unto them."
Many modern scholars treat these priestly courses either as a reflection of practices after the Babylonian captivity or as an idealized portrait of how the Chronicler (writing in c. 350–300 BCE) thought Temple administration ought to occur.
[7] Following the Temple's destruction at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War and the displacement to the Galilee of the bulk of the remaining Jewish population in Judea at the end of the Bar Kochba revolt, Jewish tradition in the Talmud and poems from the period record that the descendants of each priestly watch established a separate residential seat in towns and villages of the Galilee, and maintained this residential pattern for at least several centuries in anticipation of the reconstruction of the Temple and reinstitution of the cycle of priestly courses.
"[11] After which, they would recount the number of years that have passed since the destruction of Jerusalem, and conclude with the words: "May the Merciful One build his house and sanctuary, and let them say Amen."
[12] Historian and geographer, Samuel Klein (1886–1940), thinks that Killir's poem proves the prevalence of this custom of commemorating the courses in the synagogues of the Land of Israel.
In 1962 three small fragments of one Hebrew stone inscription bearing the partial names of places associated with the priestly courses (the rest of which had been reconstructed) were found in Caesarea Maritima, dated to the third-fourth centuries.
Professor Yosef Tobi, describing this inscription (named DJE 23) writes: As for the probable strong spiritual attachment held by the Jews of Ḥimyar for the Land of Israel, this is also attested to by an inscription bearing the names of the miśmarōṯ (priestly wards), which was initially discovered in September 1970 by W. Müller and then, independently, by P. Grjaznevitch within a mosque in Bayt al-Ḥāḍir, a village situated near Tan‘im, east of Ṣanʻā’.