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