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