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.
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