the Day a peculiarly vivid power and a unique place in the life and imagination of the Jews. It is obvious that a very mechanical and unethical view of sin and forgiveness might be fostered by the day; if the danger of such an association always threatened and often befell the practice of expiatory sacrifice, which was conspicuous on this day, the danger was heightened by the association, on this day, of expiatory sacrifice with the ritual of the scape-goat. We have seen that it would be unfair to charge the framers of the law with a merely mechanical and unethical view of sin and forgiveness, overlooking the direct action in expiation which the law attributes to God. We have seen also that the confession given in the ritual of Yoma emphasizes and indeed alone takes account of God's part in expiation. But an allusion in the same Mishnah tract shows us, what we might in any case have expected, that many of the less instructed seized hold on the primitive and still strong significance of the scape-goat, and therefore, to make doubly sure that their sins would be carried away, unloaded their sins individually and directly on the goat. They constructed', we read in Yoma 64,' an easy path (w) for the goat on account of the Babylonians'; that by the Babylonians is meant the Alexandrine Jews, as the Gemara would have it, is altogether improbable; more probably it means the crowd, but we need not settle the point here, but merely mark the reason given for constructing the easy escape for the goat: for, the Mishnah continues, 'they used to tear out the goat's hair and say Take (viz. our sins) and begone, take and begone.' We may perhaps compare with this the statement in the Epistle of Barnabas 78 that all the congregation spat upon the goat and pricked it. In this popular, as distinct from the solemn priestly Temple, treatment of the goat we may well have a survival of the ancient popular rites which the priesthood has attempted to purge; or, given a scape-goat, such treatment might not unnaturally originate afresh. In any case the action of the Jewish populace, and we may pretty safely add their thought of sin-transference, was closely similar to practices of sin and disease transference cited by Sir James Frazer, of which one may be quoted: 'In some parts of Breadalbane it was formerly the custom of New Year's Day to take a dog to the door, give him a bit of bread and drive him out, saying, "Get away, you dog! Whatever death of men or loss of cattle would happen in this house to the end of the year, may it all light on your head."'1 2 In another respect the Day of Atonement was liable to foster in certain minds a view of expiation which neither the law nor its custodians intended. A man might say: I will sin and the Day of Atonement will expiate my sin: but for such an one the Day of Atonement secures no expiation.' Again, the Day of Atonement might be regarded as acting so mechanically as to eliminate the need for reparation as between man and man: hence also the Mishnah: For sins between a man and his neighbour, it does not atone, until the man satisfy (¬) his neighbour.' · Every ritual of expiation, every symbol of forgiveness, every theory of atonement, is liable to abuse and to foster an unethical and unspiritual conception of God's attitude to sin; and it would not be difficult, were there time, to parallel from other religions such abuses as we have observed of the Jewish Day of Atonement, and also of such protests in favour of a more worthy one. It remains to remark that while naturally the concentration of thought on the Day of Atonement, on sin and the need for its expiation, gave to the Day a sombre colour unlike the joy of the annual festivals, yet even this day led up to its own particular joy in the expiation accomplished. So perhaps we may account for that very remarkable custom, a survival, perhaps, from an earlier and different observance of the day, according to which, as on the tenth day of Ab of which we have spoken, the maidens of Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement went clad in white to dance in the vineyards. On the Day of Atonement the expiatory rites of the Jewish sacrificial system culminate. If the conclusion is correct that the Day as described in Lev. 26 is a post-exilic institution, it will follow that in the later as contrasted with earlier religion, the sense of sin and the need for expiation were heightened, and with this an outlook on life in some respects less bright yet deeper secured. But expiatory rites were anything but a complete novelty in post-exilic religion; and in that religion right down to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the older festivals of joy, even if somewhat modified, maintained their place. It may be that in some modern presentations both the joyous side of pre2 Yoma 8°. The Scapegoat, p. 209. exilic and the sombre side of post-exilic religion have been overemphasized. On this latter point I would conclude, summarizing this and previous lectures thus: In the Jewish religion, in the time of our Lord, the Day of Atonement with its stress on sin and expiation, with its fasting and solemn rest and inactivity, was the supreme day of the year: yet it was but one day; within the year some twenty days of full festival joy also occurred, and some forty other days were observed as happy memorials of the works which God had wrought, especially in relatively recent times, on behalf of His people. In any estimate of Jewish religious life in the time of our Lord these feasts should not be overlooked, nor their significance depreciated. XXI THE SHEAF PASSOVER and Unleavened Bread had by the first century of our era become so closely and indissolubly connected that either name could be, and was, applied either to the whole of the festival week or to the first day of it, which was distinguished by the offering on it of the actual Paschal victim. But an examination of the earlier laws of the O.T. raises serious doubts whether this close association existed much, if any, earlier than the Exile. Before pursuing this question further and going forward to the meaning attached at different times to the familiar rites of the Paschal victim and the taboo on all that was leavened, it will be well to consider a third rite that was a sufficiently conspicuous feature of the festival week as long as the Temple stood, which has left its mark on the Jewish Liturgy in the ritual known as the Counting of the Omer, and which is observed from Easter or Passover to Whitsuntide or Pentecost, but which is less familiar to Christian students of the Bible. Whereas Passover and Unleavened Bread are referred to and even described with frequency both in the O.T. and in the N.T., the sheaf is mentioned, and that with brevity and some ambiguity, but once in the O.T. and never in the N.T. In compensation we have accounts of the practice in the first century of our era in Philo, who wrote before the destruction of the Temple, and Josephus, whose account was written less than twenty-five years after that event. In connexion with these a good deal of the detail in the Mishnah (Mn. x.) may be accepted as genuine tradition preserving some vivid details of the practice in form prior to the destruction of the Temple. I will first describe the practice of this period and draw attention to one or two questions raised by the accounts of it, and then turn back to the earlier and briefer account given in the Pentateuch. Philo (De Septen. ii. 20), after describing Passover, the fourth festival of his scheme, and Unleavened Bread as the fifth, yet as he remarks combined (ovváπTEL) with Passover, continues, 'there is also a festival-oprn-which falls immediately after the first day of the festival (of PassoverἙορτὴ δὲ ἔστιν ἡ μετὰ τὴν πρώτην εὐθὺς ἡμέραν), and this is called, on account of what takes place on it, Spáyμa (the Sheaf). For this (sheaf) is brought to the altar as the aparche, both of the country which fell by lot to the (Jewish) nation separately, and of the whole race of mankind in common; the reason for this being, that as the priest is to the city, so is the Jewish people (ë0vos) to the whole world (oikovμévnv). . . . Now it has been shown how the sheaf is made an aparche both of our native land and of the whole earth in gratitude for abundant good harvests which both the (Jewish) nation and the whole human race desire to enjoy. It is also fitting not to overlook that many other useful ends are served by the aparche. Firstly, it is a memorial of God, than which it is impossible to find a more perfect good, and then it is a most perfect requital (ảμoɩßń) to the real cause of fertility. The sheaf of the aparche consists of barley.1 It will be convenient to note certain features here that are clear and unambiguous: 1. The offering is made on the second day of Passover, i.e. the 16th of Nisan. The day of the month is not indeed stated, and the phraseology, 'a festival which is immediately after the first day', may ultimately be due to the ambiguous phraseology in Lev. 23 which has given rise to so much discussion; at the same time Philo does not appear to be so much committing himself to a particular interpretation of a disputed phrase as stating the actual practice of his time. 2. The offering is of barley. 3. The word used by Philo, as also by Josephus, to describe the amount and character of the barley offered is Spáyμa; though in later Greek usage this was scarcely confined to its earlier meaning of 'so many stalks of corn as can be grasped in the hand', a small bundle or sheaf was suitably expressed by it, and this appears to be the meaning of л, the term used in the Mishnah, [ Mangey, ii. 294.] |