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.

III.III.3.  No notice has as yet been taken of one phenomenon which distinguishes the Priestly Code, namely, that in it the tripartite cycle of the feasts is extended and interrupted.  In the chronologically arranged enumeration of Leviticus xxiii. and Numbers xxviii., xxix., two other feast days are interpolated between Pentecost and Tabernacles:  new year on the first, and the great day of atonement on the tenth of the seventh month.  One perceives to what an extent the three originally connected harvest feasts have lost their distinctive character, when it is observed that these two heterogeneous days make their appearance in the midst of them;—­the yom kippur in the same series with the old haggim, i.e., dances, which were occasions of pure pleasure and joy, not to be named in the same day with fasts and mournings.  The following points demand notice in detail.

In the period of the kings the change of the year occurred in autumn.  The autumn festival marked the close of the year and of the festal cycle (Exodus xxiii. 16, xxxiv. 22; 1Samuel i. 21, 21; Isaiah xxix. 1, xxxii. 10).  Deuteronomy was discovered in the eighteenth year of Josiah, and in the very same year Easter was observed in accordance with the prescriptions of that law—­which could not have been unless the year had begun in autumn.  Now the ECCLESIASTICAL festival of new year in the Priestly Code is also autumnal. 1 The yom teruah (Leviticus xxiii 24, 2;;

******************************************** 1.  In this way Tabernacles comes not before but after new year; this probably is connected with the more definite dating (on the fifteenth day of the month), but is quite contrary to the old custom and the meaning of the feast. *******************************************