to assume a historical meaning may partly also be attributed to the circumstance that history is not, like harvest, a personal experience of individual households, but rather an experience of the nation as a whole.  One does not fail to observe, of course, that the festivals—­which always to a certain degree have a centralising tendency—­have IN THEMSELVES a disposition to become removed from the particular motives of their institution, but in no part of the legislation has this gone so far as in the Priestly Code.  While everywhere else they still continue to stand, as we have seen, in a clear relationship to the land and its increase, and are at one and the same time the great days of homage and tribute for the superior and grantor of the soil, here this connection falls entirely out of sight.  As in opposition to the Book of the Covenant and Deuteronomy, nay, even to the corpus itself which forms the basis of Leviticus xvii.-xxvi., one can characterise the entire Priestly Code as the wilderness legislation, inasmuch as it abstracts from the natural conditions and motives of the actual life of the people in the land of Canaan and rears the hierocracy on the tabula rasa of the wilderness, the negation of nature, by means of the bald statutes of arbitrary absolutism, so also the festivals, in which the connection of the cultus with agriculture appears most strongly, have as much as possible been turned into wilderness festivals, but most of all the Easter festival, which at the same time has become the most important.

III.III.2.  The centralisation of the cultus, the revolutionising influence of which is seen in the Priestly Code, is begun by Deuteronomy.  The former rests upon the latter, and draws its as yet unsuspected consequences.  This general relation is maintained also in details; in the first place, in the names of the feasts, which are the same in both,—­pesah, shabuoth, sukkoth.  This is not without its inner significance, for asiph (ingathering) would have placed much greater hindrances in the way of the introduction of a historical interpretation than does sukkoth (booths).  So also with the prominence given to the passover, a festival mentioned nowhere previously—­a prominence which is much more striking in the Priestly Code than in Deuteronomy.  Next, this relation is observed in the duration of the feasts.  While Deuteronomy certainly does not fix their date of commencement with the same definiteness, it nevertheless in this respect makes a great advance upon the Jehovistic legislation, inasmuch as it lays down the rule of a week for Easter and Tabernacles, and of a day for Pentecost.  The Priestly Code is on the whole in agreement with this, and also with the time determination of the relation of Pentecost to Easter, but its provisions are more fully developed in details.  The passover, in the first month, on the evening of the 14th, here also indeed begins the feast, but does not, as in Deuteronomy xvi. 4,