God's Chosen or good perfume?

What does it mean to be anointed? When someone or something is anointed it means they are smeared with perfumed oil. Theologically, in simple terms, to be anointed means to be made holy. More specifically, it is an object or person that has been set aside for divine use. To be anointed meant that you had been empowered to accomplish his task and that no one was allowed to harm you. People of authority, both of the temple and state, were also anointed to signify their responsibility to God and the people. As Deborah Green points out, those that were anointed would have been segregated from the general population. Those who had been anointed, priest and rulers, would have been identifiable by their smell if not by their appearance (71). It seems to me that this would create a kind of religious hierarchy. It seems to stress that some are more important to God than others and that they should be favored and distinguished. I think it is amazing that classes can be created just by a smell and its significance. Was the creation of a smell-hierarchy the intention? Is there still a hierarchy in Rabbinical Judaism?

Green discusses the importance of the precise process of making the anointing oil and how incense and perfume made by priests were completely segregated from the perfumes meant for “common” use. Such specificity and separation speak to the exclusivity of being anointed, meaning being chosen by God to do his work. How powerful this smell must have been to signify that a person was God-chosen. What I find particularly interesting is how by simply searching for images online to illustrate someone being anointed I was bombarded with sales images. Even when typing in Holy anointing oil I get images like this:

I will mention that in Christianity to be anointed no longer necessarily involves oil. More commonly someone is said to be anointed by the Holy Spirit, meaning someone who is a representation of who God asks us to be as people; servant of Jesus. This makes sense because, as Green discusses, many modern denominations of Christianity have traded the sensual and corporeal for the spiritual and transcendental (9). This may explain why anointing oil, even incense candles,  has become commercialized: perhaps it is that people desire to practice some of the older Biblical Jewish tradition so they must figure out how to do it by themselves.