I, and the TQPT of Exodus
xxxiv. 22, 1Samuel i. 20, and closes a cycle of festivals here
for the first time indicated.
2. The preceding survey, it must be admitted, scarcely seems fully
to establish the alleged agreement between the Jehovistic law
and the older praxis. Names are nowhere to be found, and in point
of fact it is only the autumn festival that is well attested,
and this, it would appear, as the only festival, as THE feast.
And doubtless it was also the oldest and most important of the
harvest festivals, as it never ceased to be the concluding
solemnity of the year. What has been prosperously brought to
close is what people celebrate most rightly; the conclusion of the
ingathering, both of the threshing and of the vintage, is the most
appropriate of all occasions for a great joint festival,--for this
additional reason, that the term is fixed, not, as in the case of
the joy of reaping, by nature alone, but is in man's hands and
can be regulated by him. Yet even under the older monarchy the
previous festivals must also have already existed as well (Isaiah
xxix. 1). The peculiarity of the feast of tabernacles would then
reduce itself to this, that it was the only general festival at
Jerusalem and Bethel; local celebrations "at all threshing floors
"--i.
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