At last they came into a position of co-ordination with the feasts, and became a stated and very important element of the ordinary worship.  In the Priestly Code, the great fast in the tenth of the seventh month is the holiest day of all the year.  Nothing could illustrate more clearly the contrast between the new cultus and the old; fixing its regard at all points on sin and its atonement, it reaches its culmination in a great atoning solemnity.  It is as if the temper of the exile had carried itself into the time of liberation also, at least during the opening centuries; as if men had felt themselves not as in an earlier age only momentarily and in special circumstances, but unceasingly, under the leaden pressure of sin and wrath.  It is hardly necessary to add here expressly that also in regard to the day of atonement as a day sacred above all others the Priestly Code became authoritative for the post-exilian period.  “Ritual and sacrifice have through the misfortunes of the times disappeared, but this has retained all its old sacredness; unless a man has wholly cut himself adrift from Judaism he keeps this day, however indifferent he may be to all its other usages and feasts.”

III.IV. [.1?]

A word, lastly, on the lunar feasts, that is, new moon and Sabbath.  That the two are connected cannot be gathered from the Pentateuch, but something of the sort is implied in Amos viii. 5, and 2Kings iv. 22, 23.  In Amos the corn-dealers, impatient of every interruption of their trade, exclaim, “When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn; and the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat?” In the other passage the husband of the woman of Shunem, when she begs him for an ass and a servant that she may go to the prophet Elisha, asks why it is that she proposes such a journey now, for “it is neither new moon nor Sabbath;” it is not Sunday, as we might say.  Probably the Sabbath was originally regulated by the phases of the moon, and thus occurred on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first (and twenty-eighth) day of the month, the new moon being reckoned as the first; at least no other explanation can be discovered. 2 For that the week should

************************************ 2 George Smith, Assyrian Eponymn Canon, pp. 19, 20.  “Among the Assyrians the first twenty-eight days of every month were divided into four weeks of seven days each, the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eight days respectively being Sabbaths; and there was a general prohibition of work on these days.”  See further Hyde, Hist.  Rel.  Vet.  Pers., p. 239.  Among the Syrians $bbh means the week, just as among the Arabs sanba and sanbata (Pl. sanabit), dim. suneibita) mean a period of time (Lagarde, Ps.  Hieronymi; p. 158), and in fact, according to the lexicographers, a comparatively long one.  But in the sole case cited by the Tag al ’Arus, it means rather a short interval.  “What is youth?  It is the beginning of a sanbata,” meaning something like the Sunday of a week.  According to this it would appear as if the sabbath had been originally the week itself, and only afterwards became the weekly festival day.  The identity of the Syriac word (ta sabbata) in the New Testament) with the Hebrew is guaranteed by the twofold Arabic form. ***************************************