and so the ancient Hebrews may have known the reason: it was because the good spirits were on this day away in heaven and unable to keep a check on the bad ones. And the reason why the good spirits were all in heaven was that they were participating in fixing the destinies for the coming year.

There is nothing impossible, nothing perhaps very improbable, in the assumption that the ancient Hebrews believed that on the first day of the year evil spirits were abroad, and that they blew trumpets to alarm them, and that the framers of the Law incorporated this ancient custom with some modification in the priestly law-book. But if we turn away from hypothesis and come back to facts, we may say this: in ancient Israel, at the beginning of the year, though whether actually from the first day of it we cannot certainly say, people kept the seven-day festival of Ingathering. Later, whether it was the case earlier or not, they still kept the Feast of Ingathering beginning on the fifteenth day of the New Year, having previously observed with ceremonies the first day of the month, which later still was certainly called New Year's Day. Between New Year's Day and the beginning of the ancient seven-day New Year Festival fell, certainly in later times, the Day of Atonement. And the relation between New Year's Day and the Day of Atonement is, perhaps, as close in thought and purpose as it is in time.

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XX

THE DAY OF ATONEMENT

THE tenth day of the seventh month, Tishri (the Day of Atonement) is the most important of all the holy days.' Such is the statement of a writer so representative of modern Judaism as Friedländer. Nor does he express a merely modern estimate: for the past 1700 years at least the Day of Atonement has been Yoma Rabba, the great day, or Yoma, the day of the Jewish year. In the interest of Christian theologians and students among the holy days of Judaism the Day of Atonement shares with the Passover first place. Yet in the earlier history of the Hebrew religion we find no trace of the day, and, unless appearances deceive us, it is a holy day that gained its place in the sacred calendar relatively late, and, as many have concluded, after the Babylonian exile and not before the fifth century B.C. If the conclusion be correct, a study of this day becomes obviously of the utmost importance in estimating the trend of the Jewish religion.

In the festal calendar of Lev. 23 the peculiar character of the day is suggested, without being emphasized; but in the companion section of Num. 28, 29, the quantity of sacrifices specified for this day do not suggest that the day was, sacrificially, of supreme importance. The prescribed sacrifices are, apart from the sin-offering of atonement—the amount of which is not specified in the calendar, but which we otherwise know not to have been great-the same as the sacrifices required on the first and second days of the seventh month; they are slightly less than on the several days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Booths.

The 'Great Day' of the Jewish year is not then the day on

1 Jewish Religion, p. 495.

2 Cf. Philo, cited by Orelli in PRE 580, 42 ff.

which the largest number of sacrifices was required; nor is it, as its alternative title the Day of Atonement or Expiation might suggest, the day on which the more directly expiatory sacrifices, viz. the sin-offerings, outnumbered other types of sacrifice. Combining with the quantities defined in Num. 28 f. the quantities of the special sin-offerings given in Lev. 16 and in part covered by the phrase 'the sin-offering of Atonement' in Num. 29, we find that the burnt-offerings of the day consisted of seven yearling sheep, three rams, and two bullocks, the sin-offerings of one bullock and three goats. The peculiarity of the day lies rather in certain details of the expiatory ritual, in the range of applicability of this ritual, and above all in the fact that the entire day, from evening to evening, had to be spent fasting. It is this last feature in the observance of the day that marks off the tenth day of the seventh month from all other days, whether in the festival calendar of the Pentateuch or the later Megillath Ta'anith; all other days in these calendars were days of joy on which it was forbidden to fast; on this day fasting was obligatory, to break one's fast on it was mortal sin: 'for every person on that day who doth not mortify himself (i.e. fast) shall be cut off from his father's kin' (Lev. 2329). The tenth day of the seventh month was accordingly known not only as the Day or the Great Day of the Jewish calendar, but also as the Fast (ǹ vŋoteía, Acts 279, Philo, De Septen. 26 (Mangey, ii. 278); ǹ vηστeías čoρτý, Philo, De Septen. 23 (Mangey, ii. 296)) or the Great Fast (87 by PRE, p. 577-1

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Fasts not prescribed in the Law, like many of the feasts, were commemorations of historical events: of these the most stringent, that which fell on the ninth of Ab, commemorated the destruction of the Temple, which according to tradition occurred on this day alike in 586 B. C. and A.D. 70. It is noticeable that the Day of Atonement strongly maintained its institutional character and never took on any well-defined memorial character. This is the more remarkable if the day of the Fast', on which Jerusalem was captured by Pompey in 63 and again by Herod's soldiers in 37 B.C., was the Day of Atonement (see Schürer, loc. cit.). The Book of Jubilees, indeed, provides a mournful occasion for the origin of the feast: The sons of Jacob slaughtered a kid, and Cp. Schürer, E.T. I. i. 322, n. 2, 398.

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dipped the coat of Joseph in the blood and sent it to Jacob on the tenth of the seventh month. And he mourned all that night, for they had brought it to him in the evening... and all the members of his house were grieving and mourning with him all that day.... For this reason it is ordained for the children of Israel that they should afflict themselves (i.e. fast) on the tenth of the seventh month and... that they should make atonement for themselves thereon with a young goat on the tenth of the seventh month, once a year, for their sins: for they had grieved the affection of their father regarding Joseph his son. And this day has been ordained that they should grieve thereon for their sins, and for all their transgressions and for all their errors, so that they might cleanse themselves on that day once a year.' But we may remark (1) that this theory of a commemorative element in the observance of the Day of Atonement appears to be merely an extreme illustration of the inveterate habit of the author of Jubilees to invent historical circumstances to explain Jewish holy days; (2) his theory appears to have had little, if any, influence; (3) even in Jubilees the institutional character of the Day somewhat obviously eclipses its historical character: the observance is not mainly to commemorate Jacob's sorrows, but in order that the children of Israel may once a year cleanse themselves from their sins.

With regard to this chief day of the Jewish sacred year I propose to consider first and briefly its history; secondly the separate rites and their antiquity; and thirdly the ideas reflected or promoted by the observance of the day and their place in Jewish religion.

According to the theory of the Pentateuch the Day of Atonement and its ritual is of Mosaic origin. The occasion of the law was the death of Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu for having presented strange fire before Yahweh-Lev. 101-7, 161. As we have already seen, the author of Jubilees assigned an earlier and different origin to the Day. But it is, of course, the theory of the Pentateuch that prevailed till the age of the critical examination of the Pentateuch. So soon and so far as the theory that the Priestly Code is of post-exilic origin was accepted, the theory of the Pentateuch itself that the Day of Atonement was an institution of Mosaic antiquity became untenable: for outside the

Priestly Code the Day of Atonement is never mentioned in the Pentateuch, nor, indeed, in the rest of the Old Testament. Literary criticism did not indeed itself disprove the antiquity of the institution, for an institution may be older, even centuries older, than the date of the first records of it in literature, for the simple reason that literature of a kind likely to mention it may not have existed for centuries after the institution had come into existence; but literary criticism raises the problem: was the Day of Atonement an institution of great antiquity, and is it merely by accident that it is never mentioned in pre-exilic literature? Or was it of late origin and, therefore, of necessity unmentioned in the earlier literature? Mere lack of mention is inconclusive in such cases: it is, for instance, of not the slightest significance that whereas the Day of Atonement is mentioned in the festal calendars of Lev. 23, Num. 28 and 29, it is not mentioned in the law of the pilgrimage-festivals in the early lawbooks; for the Day of Atonement is an 'appointed season' and therefore appropriately finds its place in the calendar; it is not aan and therefore could have had no place in the law of the pilgrimage-festivals. If it was a prominent institution in early Israel it might perhaps be expected to be regulated by law elsewhere in the early law-books, though it would be unwise to press even this point very far. The strength of the positive argument against an ancient observance of the tenth day of the seventh month as a Day of Atonement, and also against the existence of any completely similar institution on some other day of the year, rests on two passages which, so far from merely omitting to mention it, appear to exclude it. The first of these is Ez. 4518ff.; Ezekiel here provides for two annual 'unsinnings' (Non v. 18) or expiations for ( v. 20) the sanctuary (р v. 18) or the Temple (nan) ; the one of these falls on the first day of the first month, the other on the first day of the seventh month; expiation is made by means of the blood of a bullock, which is applied to (by ¡n) the doorposts of the Temple, to the four corners of the ledge of the altar, and to the posts of the gate of the inner court, The bullock is thus the stated offering for these annual days of Atonement. In the following verses we have the stated offerings for the great yearly festivals and for sabbaths and new moons. the tenth day of the seventh month is not mentioned among the

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