, but
only mentions among others the fast of the seventh month as
having subsisted for seventy years. Even in 444 B.C., the year
of the publication of the Pentateuch by Ezra, the great day of
atonement has not yet come into force. Ezra begins the reading of
the law in the beginning of the seventh month, and afterwards the
feast of tabernacles is observed on the fifteenth; of an atoning
solemnity on the tenth of the month not a word is said in the
circumstantial narrative, which, moreover, is one specially
interested in the liturgical element, but it is made up for on the
twenty-fourth (Nehemiah viii., ix.). This _testimonium e silentio_
is enough; down to that date the great day of the Priestly Code
(now introduced for the first time) had not existed. /1/ The term is
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1. "If Leviticus xvi. belongs to the original of the Priestly Code,
and the entire Pentateuch was published by Ezra in the year 444,
and yet the day was not then celebrated, then it has _ipso facto_
been conceded that it is possible that there can be laws which
yet are not carried into effect.
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