III.III.

In the Priestly Code the festal cycle is dealt with in two separate passages (Leviticus xxiii; Numbers xxviii., xxix.), of which the first contains a fragment (xxiii. 9-22, and partly also xxiii. 39-44) not quite homogeneous with the kernel of the document. In both these accounts also the three great feasts occur, but with considerable alteration of their essential character.

III. III.1. The festal celebration, properly so called, is exhausted by a prescribed joint offering. There are offered (I.) during Easter week and also on the day of Pentecost, besides the tamid, two bullocks, one ram, seven lambs as a burnt-offering, and one he-goat as a sin-offering daily; (2.) at the feast of tabernacles, from the first to the seventh day two rams, fourteen lambs, and, in descending series, from thirteen to seven bullocks; on the eighth day one bullock, one ram, seven lambs as a burnt offering, besides one he-goat daily as a sin-offering. Additional voluntary offerings on the part of individuals are not excluded, but are treated as of secondary importance. Elsewhere, alike in the older practice (1Samuel i.4 seq.) and in the law (Exodus xxiii.18) it is precisely the festal offering that is a sacrificial meal, that is to say, a private sacrifice.

In Deuteronomy it has been possible to find anything surprising in the joyous meals only because people are wont to know their Old Testament merely through the perspective of the Priestly Code; at most the only peculiar thing in that book is a certain humane application of the festal offering, the offerer being required to invite to it the poor and landless of his acquaintance. But this is a development which harmonises much more with the old idea of an offering as a communion between God and man than does the other self-sufficing general churchly sacrifice. The passover alone continues in the Priestly Code also to be a sacrificial meal, and participation therein to be restricted to the family or a limited society. But this last remnant of the old custom shows itself here as a peculiar exception; the festival in the house instead of "before Jehovah " has also something ambiguous about it, and turns the sacrifice into an entirely profane act of slaughtering almost—until we come to the rite of expiation, which is characteristically retained (Exodus xii.7; comp. Ezekiel xiv.19).

Of a piece with this is the circumstance that the "first-fruits" of the season have come to be separated from the festivals still more than had been previously the case. While in Deuteronomy they are still offered at the three great sacrificial meals in the presence of Jehovah, in the Priestly Code they have altogether ceased to be offerings at all, and thus also of course have ceased to be festal offerings, being merely dues payable to the priests (by whom they are in part collected) and not in any case brought before the altar. Thus the feasts entirely lose their peculiar characteristics, the occasions by which they are inspired and distinguished; by the monotonous sameness of the unvarying burnt-offering and sin-offering of the community as a whole they are all put on the same even level, deprived of their natural spontaneity, and degraded into mere "exercises of religion." Only some very slight traces continue to bear witness to, we might rather say, to betray, what was the point from which the development started, namely, the rites of the barley sheaf, the loaves of bread, and the booths (Leviticus xxiii.).

But these are mere rites, petrified remains of the old custom; the actual first-fruits belonging to the owners of the soil are collected by the priests, the shadow of them is retained at the festival in the form of the sheaf offered by the whole community—a piece of symbolism which has now become quite separated from its connection and is no longer understood. And since the giving of thanks for the fruits of the field has ceased to have any substantial place in the feasts, the very shadow of connection between the two also begins to disappear, for the rites of Leviticus xxiii.are taken over from an older legislation, and for the most part are passed over in silence in Numbers xxviii., xxix. Here, again, the passover has followed a path of its own. Even at an earlier period, substitution of other cattle and sheep was permitted. But now in the Priestly Code the firstlings are strictly demanded indeed, but merely as dues, not as sacrifices; the passover, always a yearling lamb or kid, has neither in fact nor in time anything to do with them, but occupies a separate position alongside.

But as it is represented to have been instituted in order that the Hebrew first born may be spared in the destruction of those of the Egyptians, this connection betrays the fact that the yearling lambs are after all only a substitute for the firstlings of all animals fit for sacrifice, but in comparison with the cattle and sheep of the Jehovistic tradition and Deuteronomy a secondary substitute, and one for the uniformity of which there is no motive; and we see further that if the firstlings are now over and above assigned to the priests this is equivalent to a reduplication, which has been made possible first by a complete obscuration, and afterwards by an artificial revival of the original custom.

A further symptom also proper to be mentioned here is the fixing of harvest festival terms by the days of the month, which is to be found exclusively in the Priestly Code. Easter falls upon the fifteenth, that is, at full moon, of the first, the feast of tabernacles upon the same day of the seventh month; Pentecost, which, strange to say, is left undetermined in Numbers xxviii., falls, according to Leviticus xxiii., seven weeks after Easter. This definite dating points not merely to a fixed and uniform regulation of the cultus, but also to a change in its contents. For it is not a matter of indifference that according to the Jehovistic-Deuteronomic legislation Easter is observed in "the month of corn ears" when the sickle is put to the corn, Pentecost at the end of the wheat harvest, and the feast of tabernacles after the ingathering; as harvest feasts they are from their very nature regulated by the condition of the fruits of the soil. When they cease to be so, when they are made to depend upon the phases of the moon, this means that their connection with their natural occasion is being lost sight of.

Doubtless the accurate determination of dates is correlated with the other circumstance that the festivals are no longer kept in an isolated way by people at any place they may choose, but by the whole united nation at a single spot. It is therefore probable that the fixing of the date w as accomplished at first in the case of the autumn festival, which was the first to divest itself of its local character and most readily suffered a transposition of a week or two. It was hardest to change in the case of the maccoth festival; the putting of the sickle to the corn is very inconvenient to shift. But here the passover seems to have exerted an influence. For the passover is indeed an annual feast, but not by the nature of things connected with any particular season of the year; rather was it dependent originally on the phases of the moon. Its character as a pannychis [vigil] (Exodus xii.42 [LYL #MWRYM]) points in this direction, as also does the analogy of the Arab feasts.

The verification of the alleged denaturalisation of the feasts in the Priestly Code lies in this, that their historical interpretation, for which the way is already paved by the Jehovistic tradition, here attains its full development. For after they have lost their original contents and degenerated into mere prescribed religious forms, there is nothing to prevent the refilling of the empty bottles in any way accordant with the tastes of the period. Now, accordingly, the feast of tabernacles also becomes historical (Leviticus xxiii.), instituted to commemorate the booths under which the people had to shelter themselves during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. In the case of Easter a new step in advance is made beyond the assignation of its motive to the exodus, which is already found in Deuteronomy and in Exodus xiii.3 seq. For in the Priestly Code this feast, which precisely on account of its eminently historical character is here regarded as by far the most important of all, is much more than the mere commemoration of a divine act of salvation, it is itself a saving deed.

It is not because Jehovah smote the firstborn of Egypt that the passover is afterwards instituted on the contrary, it is instituted beforehand, at the moment of the exodus, in order that the firstborn of Israel may be spared. Thus not merely is a historical motive assigned for the custom; its beginning is itself raised to the dignity of a historical fact upon which the feast rests,—the shadow elsewhere thrown only by another historical event here becomes substantial and casts itself. The state of matters in the case of the unleavened cakes is very similar. Instead of having it as their occasion and object to keep in remembrance the hasty midnight departure in which the travellers were compelled to carry with them their dough unleavened as it was (Exodus xii.34), in the Priestly Code they also are spoken of as having being enjoined beforehand (xii.15 seq.), and thus the festival is celebrated in commemoration of itself; in other words, not merely is a historical motive assigned to it, it is itself made a historical fact. For this reason also, the law relating to Easter is removed from all connection with the tabernacle legislation (Exodus xii.1 seq.

), and the difficuity that now in the case of the passover the sanctuary which elsewhere in the Priestly Code is indispensable must be left out of sight is got over by divesting it as much as possible of its sacrificial character./1/

— Footnote 1. The ignoring of the sanctuary has a reason only in the case of the first passover, and perhaps ought to be regarded as holding good for that only. The distinction between the PSX MCRYM and the PSX HDWRWT is necessary, if only for the reason that the former is a historical fact, the latter a commemorative observance. When it is argued for the originality of the passover ritual in the Priestly Code that it alone fits in with the conditions of the sojourn in Egypt, the position is not to be disputed. — Footnote

In the case of Pentecost alone is there no tendency to historical explanation; that in this instance has been reserved for later Judaism, which from the chronology of the Book of Exodus discerned in the feast a commemoration of the giving of the law at Sinai. But one detects the drift of the later time.

It has been already pointed out, in what has just been said, that as regards this development the centralisation of the cultus was epochmaking. Centralisation is synonymous with generalisation and fixity, and these are the external features by which the festivals of the Priestly Code are distinguished from those which preceded them. In evidence I point to the prescribed sacrifice of the community instead of the spontaneous sacrifice of the individual, to the date fixed for the 15th of the month, to the complete separation between sacrifices and dues, to the reduction of the passover to uniformity; nothing is free or the spontaneous growth of nature, nothing is indefinite and still in process of becoming; all is statutory, sharply defined, distinct. But the centralisation of the cultus had also not a little to do with the inner change which the feasts underwent.

At first the gifts of the various seasons of the year are offered by the individual houses as each one finds convenient; afterwards they are combined, and festivals come into existence; last of all, the united offerings of individuals fall into the back ground when compared with the single joint-offering on behalf of the entire community. According as stress is laid upon the common character of the festival and uniformity in its observance, in precisely the same degree does it become separated from the roots from which it sprang, and grow more and more abstract. That it is then very ready to assume a historical meaning may partly also be attributed to the circumstance that history is not, like harvest, a personal experience of individual households, but rather an experience of the nation as a whole. One does not fail to observe, of course, that the festivals—which always to a certain degree have a centralising tendency—have IN THEMSELVES a disposition to become removed from the particular motives of their institution, but in no part of the legislation has this gone so far as in the Priestly Code.

While everywhere else they still continue to stand, as we have seen, in a clear relationship to the land and its increase, and are at one and the same time the great days of homage and tribute for the superior and grantor of the soil, here this connection falls entirely out of sight. As in opposition to the Book of the Covenant and Deuteronomy, nay, even to the corpus itself which forms the basis of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., one can characterise the entire Priestly Code as the wilderness legislation, inasmuch as it abstracts from the natural conditions and motives of the actual life of the people in the land of Canaan and rears the hierocracy on the tabula rasa of the wilderness, the negation of nature, by means of the bald statutes of arbitrary absolutism, so also the festivals, in which the connection of the cultus with agriculture appears most strongly, have as much as possible been turned into wilderness festivals, but most of all the Easter festival, which at the same time has become the most important.

III. III.2. The centralisation of the cultus, the revolutionising influence of which is seen in the Priestly Code, is begun by Deuteronomy. The former rests upon the latter, and draws its as yet unsuspected consequences. This general relation is maintained also in details; in the first place, in the names of the feasts, which are the same in both,—pesah, shabuoth, sukkoth. This is not without its inner significance, for asiph (ingathering) would have placed much greater hindrances in the way of the introduction of a historical interpretation than does sukkoth (booths). So also with the prominence given to the passover, a festival mentioned nowhere previously—a prominence which is much more striking in the Priestly Code than in Deuteronomy. Next, this relation is observed in the duration of the feasts. While Deuteronomy certainly does not fix their date of commencement with the same definiteness, it nevertheless in this respect makes a great advance upon the Jehovistic legislation, inasmuch as it lays down the rule of a week for Easter and Tabernacles, and of a day for Pentecost.

The Priestly Code is on the whole in agreement with this, and also with the time determination of the relation of Pentecost to Easter, but its provisions are more fully developed in details. The passover, in the first month, on the evening of the 14th, here also indeed begins the feast, but does not, as in Deuteronomy xvi.4, 8, count as the first day of Easter week; on the contrary, the latter does not begin until the 15th and closes with the 21st (comp. Leviticus xxiii.6; Numbers xxviii.17; Exodus xii.18). The beginning of the festival week being thus distinctly indicated, there arises in this way not merely an ordinary but also an extra-ordinary feast day more, the day after the passover, on which already, according to the injunctions of Deuteronomy, the pilgrims were required to set out early in the morning on the return journey to their homes./1/

— Footnote 1. It is impossible to explain away this discrepancy by the circumstance that in the Priestly Code the day is reckoned from the evening; for (1.) this fact has no practical bearing, as the dating reckons at any rate from the morning, and the evening preceding the 15th is always called the 14th of the month (Leviticus xiii. 27, 32); (2.) the first day of the feast in Deuteronomy is just the day on the evening of which the passover is held, and upon it there follow not seven but six days more, whereas in the Priestly Code the celebration extends from the 14th to the 21st of the month (Exodus xii. 18). When the MXRT H#BT: is made to refer, not as in Josh. v. 11 to the 14th, but as in Jewish tradition (LXX on Leviticus xxiii. 11) to the day following the 15th of Nisan, thee 16th of Nisan is added to the 14th and 15th as a special feast day. — Footnote

Another advance consists in this, that not only the passover, as in Deuteronomy, or the additional first day of the feast besides, but also the seventh (which, according to Deuteronomy xvi.8, is marked only by rest), must be observed as miqra qodesh in Jerusalem. In other words, such pilgrims as do not live in the immediate neighbourhood are compelled to pass the whole week there, an exaction which enables us to mark the progress made with centralisation, when the much more moderate demands of Deuteronomy are compared. The feast of tabernacles is in the latter law also observed from beginning to end at Jerusalem, but the Priestly Code has contrived to add to it an eighth day as an `acereth to the principal feast, which indeed still appears to be wanting in the older portion of Leviticus xxiii. From all this it is indisputable that the Priestly Code has its nearest relations with Deuteronomy, but goes beyond it in the same direction as that in which Deuteronomy itself goes beyond the Jehovistic legislation.

In any case the intermediate place in the series belongs to Deuteronomy, and if we begin that series with the Priestly Code, we must in consistency close it with the Sinaitic Book of the Covenant (Exodus xx.23 seq.).

After King Josiah had published Deuteronomy and had made it the Book of the Covenant by a solemn engagement of the people (621 B. C.), he commanded them to "keep the passover to Jehovah your God as it is written in this Book;" such a passover had never been observed from the days of the judges, or throughout the entire period of the kings (2Kings xxiii.21, 22). And when Ezra the scribe introduced the Pentateuch as we now have it as the fundamental law of the church of the second temple (444 B. C.), it was found written in the Torah which Jehovah had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel were to live in booths during the feast in the seventh month, and further, to use branches of olive and myrtle and palm for this purpose, and that the people went and made to themselves booths accordingly; such a thing had not been done "since the days of Joshua the son of Nun even unto that day " (Nehemiah viii.14 seq.). That Josiah's passover rests upon Deuteronomy xvi.and not upon Exodus xii.

is sufficiently proved by the circumstance that the observance of the festival stands in connection with the new unity of the cultus, and is intended to be an exemplification of it, while the precept of Exodus xii., if literally followed, could only have served to destroy it. We thus find that the two promulgations of the law, so great in their importance and so like one another in their character, both take place at the time of a festival, the one in spring, the other in harvest; and we also discover that the festal observance of the Priestly Code first began to show life and to gain currency about two hundred years later than that of Deuteronomy. This can be proved in yet another way. The author of the Book of Kings knows only of a seven days' duration of the feast of tabernacles (1Kings viii.66); Solomon dismisses the people on the eighth day. On the other hand, in the parallel passage in Chronicles (2Chronicles vii.9) the king holds the `acereth on the eighth, and does not dismiss the people until the following day, the twenty-third of the month; that is to say, the Deuteronomic use, which is followed by the older author and by Ezekiel (xiv.

25) who was, roughly speaking, his contemporary, is corrected by the later writer into conformity with that of the Priestly Code in force since the time of Ezra (Nehemiah viii.18). In later Judaism the inclination to assert most strongly precisely that which is most open to dispute led to the well-known result that the eighth day of the feast was regarded as the most splendid of all (John vii.37).

On this question also the Book of Ezekiel stands nearest the Priestly Code, ordaining as follows (xiv.21-25):— "In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, ye shall keep the passover, ye shall eat maccoth seven days; on that day shall the prince offer for himself and for all the people of the land a bullock for a sin-offering, and during the seven days he shall offer a burnt-offering to the Lord, seven bullocks and seven rams daily for the seven days, and a he-goat daily for a sin offering; and he shall offer as a meal-offering an ephah for every bullock and every ram and a hin of oil for the ephah. In the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month, in the feast shall he do the like for seven days, according to the sin-offering, according to the burnt-offering, and according to the meal-offering, and according to the oil." Here indeed in details hardly any point is in agreement with the prescriptions of the ritual law of Leviticus xxiii., Numbers xxviii., xxix. Apart from the fact that the day of Pentecost is omitted (it is restored in the Massoretic text by an absurd correction in ver.

11), in the first place there is a discrepancy as to the DURATION of the feasts; both last seven and not eight days, and the passover is taken for the first day of Easter, as in Deuteronomy. Further, the offerings differ, alike by their never-varying number and by their quality; in particular, nothing is said of the passover lamb, but a bullock as a general sin-offering is mentioned instead. From the minha the wine is wanting, but this must be left out of the account, for Ezekiel banishes wine from the service on principle. Lastly, it is not the CONGREGATION that sacrifices, but the prince for himself and for the PEOPLE. But in spite of all differences the general similarity is apparent; one sees that here for the first time we have something which at all points admits of correlation with the Priestly Code, but is quite disparate with the Jehovistic legislation, and half so with that of Deuteronomy. On both hands we find the term fixed according to the day of the month, the strictly prescribed joint burnt-offering and sin-offering, the absence of relation first-fruits and agriculture, the obliteration of natural distinctions so as to make one general churchly festival.

But Ezekiel surely could hardly have had any motive for reproducing Leviticus xxiii.and Numbers xxviii.seq., and still less for the introduction of a number of aimless variations as he did so. Let it be observed that in no one detail does he contradict Deuteronomy, while yet he stands so infinitely nearer to the Priestly Code; the relationship is not an arbitrary one, but arises from their place in time. Ezekiel is the forerunner of the priestly legislator in the Pentateuch; his pence and people, to some extent invested with the colouring of the bygone period of the monarchy, are the antecedents of the congregation of the tabernacle and the second temple. Against this supposition there is nothing to be alleged, and it is the rational one, for this reason, that it was not Ezekiel but the Priestly Code that furnished the norm for the praxis of the later period.

For, as the festival system of the Priestly Code absolutely refuses to accommodate itself to the manner of the older worship as we are made acquainted with it in Hos. ii., ix. and elsewhere, in the same degree does it furnish in every respect the standard for the praxis of post-exilian Judaism, and, therefore, also for our ideas thence derived. No one in reading the New Testament dreams of any other manner of keeping the passover than that of Exodus xii., or of any other offering than the paschal lamb there prescribed. One might perhaps hazard the conjecture that if in the wilderness legislation of the Code there is no trace of agriculture being regarded as the basis of life, which it still is in Deuteronomy and even in the kernel of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., this also is a proof that the Code belongs to a very recent rather than to a very early period, when agriculture was no longer rather than not yet. With the Babylonian captivity the Jews lost their fixed seats, and so became a trading people.