This amounts
to a serious increase in the difficulty of the matter, for it is
not one and the same thing to have the abstinence from harvest
spread over seven years and to have it concentrated into one out of
every seven. In like manner a heightening of the demand is also seen
in the circumstance that not merely harvesting but also sowing
and dressing are forbidden. In the original commandment this was
not the case; all that was provided for was that in the seventh
year the harvest should not fall to the lot of the proprietor of the
soil, but should be _publici juris_,--a relic perhaps of communistic
agriculture. Through a mere misunderstanding of the verbal suffix
in Exodus xxiii. 11, as has been conjectured by Hupfeld, a surrender
of the _fruit_ of the land has been construed into a surrender of tbe
land itself--a general fallow year (Leviticus xxv. 4). The
misunderstanding, however, is not accidental, but highly characteristic.
In Exodus xxiii. the arrangement is made for man; it is a limitation,
for the common good, of private rights of property in land,--in fact,
for the benefit of the landless, who in the seventh year are to have
the usufruct of the soil; in Leviticus xxv.
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