Were there Levites in the Second Temple?

Since the late nineteenth century, scholarship has built up several models of the Levites' history. These models have, of course, been related to the various models that exist in scholarship as to the development of the bible itself, as well as the actual history of early Israel and have changed along with the scholars' understanding of that history. At present, I think that it is fair to say that most scholars tend to assume that since the Levites are prominent in such books as Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, in some of the parts of the Pentateuch attributed to the priestly writers, and in some parts of Deuteronomy and its related literature, and present trends tend to attribute these texts to the late-Persian or the Hellenistic periods, then that is where we should look for the origins of the Levites as well. In other words, at least one current school of thought is that the entire biblical picture of the Levites as second-tier temple personnel is a product of the early Second Temple Period, which was retrojected by the biblical authors into a largely mythical past. In this paper, I would like to continue my examination of the idea that the Levites are largely a Second-Temple phenomenon.