After King Josiah had published Deuteronomy and had made it the Book of the Covenant by a solemn engagement of the people (621 B.C.), he commanded them to “keep the passover to Jehovah your God as it is written in this Book;” such a passover had never been observed from the days of the judges, or throughout the entire period of the kings (2Kings xxiii. 21, 22).  And when Ezra the scribe introduced the Pentateuch as we now have it as the fundamental law of the church of the second temple (444 B.C.), it was found written in the Torah which Jehovah had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel were to live in booths during the feast in the seventh month, and further, to use branches of olive and myrtle and palm for this purpose, and that the people went and made to themselves booths accordingly; such a thing had not been done “since the days of Joshua the son of Nun even unto that day " (Nehemiah viii. 14 seq.).  That Josiah’s passover rests upon Deuteronomy xvi. and not upon Exodus xii. is sufficiently proved by the circumstance that the observance of the festival stands in connection with the new unity of the cultus, and is intended to be an exemplification of it, while the precept of Exodus xii., if literally followed, could only have served to destroy it.  We thus find that the two promulgations of the law, so great in their importance and so like one another in their character, both take place at the time of a festival, the one in spring, the other in harvest; and we also discover that the festal observance of the Priestly Code first began to show life and to gain currency about two hundred years later than that of Deuteronomy.  This can be proved in yet another way.  The author of the Book of Kings knows only of a seven days’ duration of the feast of tabernacles (1Kings viii. 66); Solomon dismisses the people on the eighth day.  On the other hand, in the parallel passage in Chronicles (2Chronicles vii. 9) the king holds the _`acereth_ on the eighth, and does not dismiss the people until the following day, the twenty-third of the month; that is to say, the Deuteronomic use, which is followed by the older author and by Ezekiel (xiv. 25) who was, roughly speaking, his contemporary, is corrected by the later writer into conformity with that of the Priestly Code in force since the time of Ezra (Nehemiah viii. 18).  In later Judaism the inclination to assert most strongly precisely that which is most open to dispute led to the well-known result that the eighth day of the feast was regarded as the most splendid of all (John vii. 37).

On this question also the Book of Ezekiel stands nearest the Priestly Code, ordaining as follows (xiv. 21-25):—­ “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, ye shall keep the passover, ye shall eat maccoth seven days; on that day shall the prince offer for himself and for all the people of the land a bullock for a sin-offering, and during the seven days he shall offer a burnt-offering to the Lord, seven bullocks