The title wab means simply pure one, and the office was defined by that condition rather than by any theological training or vocation in the modern sense. A man entering wab service underwent circumcision, had every hair shaved from his body, and was expected to keep it that way for as long as his term of duty lasted, since body hair and its associated impurity were thought incompatible with proximity to the sacred. Clothing followed the same logic: linen, spun from a plant, was permitted, while wool and leather, animal products, were not, and priests on duty wore sandals of papyrus rather than hide. By the Ramesside period the requirement extended to repeated washing, with priests bathing in a temple's own sacred lake several times over the course of a single day.
None of this purity qualified a wab priest to approach the god directly. The innermost sanctuary and the cult statue itself were reserved for the high priest, acting in the reigning king's own name, or for the king in person on state occasions; a wab priest's own access stopped short of that innermost space. His actual work was the temple's daily physical maintenance and its public rituals: carrying offerings to the god's table, helping bear the sacred bark on his shoulders through festival processions, and keeping the wider precinct in the state of cleanliness his own title named.