I saw this episode the other day. There is one thing I don't get though. If Bajorans once had a caste system ordained by the Prophets themselves, then how come they essentially ordered (through their Emissary) Bajorans not to follow it? Don't Bajorans see the Prophets as perfect gods? How can a perfect god revise its edicts?
But was the caste system truly ordained by the prophets, or was this just the clergy pushing it to keep the people in line?
I don't think it was really ordained by the prophets. Upper classes of every culture have used religion to justify their position.
I don't recall the episode saying the Prophets ordained the whole djarra system. The vedek did imply that a properly spiritual Bajoran would accept it, but priests of all religions do that. The Prophets seemed quite dismissive of the poet fellow when he mentioned the djarras to him as if they didn't care one way or the other.
Remember that the first Orbs appeared only ten thousand years ago; we don't know of any Prophet/Bajoran communication from before that date ("Emissary"). Yet the Bajoran civilization is hundreds of thousands of years old ("Ensign Ro"), and thus seems to significantly precede contact with the Prophets. The caste system may have been ancient already when the Prophets first told Bajorans something the Bajorans might have mistaken for a divine edict... Apart from that, we don't really learn that the Bajorans would believe that the will of the Prophets is something that can be understood even by priests, let alone ordinary folks. There is nothing comparable to the Ten Commandments in what is known of the Bajoran faith - there aren't even any known common forms of worship. It's all personal, with the priests mainly doing the monk thing in some pretty garden or another, and the ordinary folks living their lives and occasionally having a divine chat. Timo Saloniemi