Even after the exile, indeed, matters were not different in this respect.  “Ab excidio templi prioris sublatum est Levitis jus suburbiorum,” says R. Nachman (B.  Sotah, 48b), and he is borne out by the silence of Nehemiah x.  The execution of the law was probably postponed to the days of the Messiah; it was not in truth within the power of man, and cannot be seriously demanded in the Priestiy Code itself, which contemplates a purely ideal Israel, with ideal boundaries, and leaves the sober reality so far out of sight that on archaeological grounds it never once so much as mentions Jerusalem, the historical capital of the priests.

The circumstance that these towns lay in partibus infiidelium seems to make them unavailable as a means of fixing the antiquity of the Priestly Code.  It is possible with Bleek to explain the transcendence of history as Mosaicity; such a view is not to be argued against.  But it is also possible with Noldeke to insist that an invention so bold cannot possibly be imputed to the spirit of the exilic and post-exilic time, which in everything is only anxiously concerned to cleave to what is old and to restore it; and such a contention deserves and admits of refutation.  It is not the case that the Jews had any profound respect for their ancient history; rather they condemned the whole earlier development, and allowed only the Mosaic time along with its Davidic reflex to stand; in other words, not history but the ideal.  The theocratic ideal was from the exile onwards the centre of all thought and effort, and it annihilated the sense for objective truth, all regard and interest for the actual facts as they had been handed down.  It is well known that there never have been more audacious history-makers than the Rabbins.  But Chronicles affords evidence sufficient that this evil propensity goes back to a very early time, its root the dominating influence of the Law, being the root of Judaism itself.  Judaism is just the right soil for such an artificial growth as the forty-eight priestly and Levitical cities.  It would hardly have occurred to an author living in the monarchical period, when the continuity of the older history was still unbroken, to look so completely away from all the conditions of the then existing reality; had he done so, he would have produced upon his contemporaries the impression merely that he had scarcely all his wits about him.  But after the exile had annihilated the ancient Israel, and violently and completely broken the old connection with the ancient conditions, there was nothing to hinder from planting and partitioning the tabula rasa in thought at pleasure, just as geographers are wont to do with their map as long as the countries are unknown.