(6) Holy times.—Jahweh is Lord also of all time. Hence the employing of time in any pursuit that brings profit amounts to an encroaching upon God’s right of property. He permits, however, of such encroachment, upon condition that special portions of the whole time are set apart and ‘hallowed,’ z.e. withdrawn from profane use, as belonging to God. The essential point is thus abstention from work. It is only in a secondary way that P thinks of the spending of holy days in Divine worship or pri- vate meditation. On ordinary holy days it is only professional work that is forbidden (Lv 237 21. % etc.), but on the Sabbath and the Great Day of Atonement it is work of every kind (vv.*»), The standpoint of P comes out, above all, in the motives he assigns for the festivals. The original agrarian character of these (cf. above, p. 662 ff.) still sur- vives—apart from the dedication of the firstling sheaf at the Mazzéth festival, Lv 23°%—only in the Feast of Weeks, as the occasion when the firstling loaves are presented. On the other hand, the Passover, as an independent festival, precedes the seven (formerly six) days of Unleavened Bread. Already instituted in Egypt (Ex 12), it is meant for all time, in grateful remembrance of the sparing of Israel the night before the Exodus, when God smote all the firstborn of the Egyptians. The manifestly primitive form of the celebration (the eating of the lamb in the houses, and the besprink-
ling of the doorposts with its blood) could be re- tained by P only through giving up the sacrificial character of the festival; for otherwise it could not have been celebrated except (as in Dt 16") at the central sanctuary. In the case of the Mazzéth festival it is repeatedly emphasized that the strict prohibition of leaven was given at the very Exodus itself, thereby conferring upon this festival also the character of a theocratic memorial ordinance. With the Feast of Tabernacles (now an eight days’ instead of a seven days’ festival), which was origin- ally the joyous feast of the fruit- and wine-gather- ing, the same result was reached by giving to the ancient custom of dwelling in booths during the festival the stamp of a memorial of the wilderness journeyings. This giving up of the original motive of the festivals, namely, the course of the various harvests, permits also of an exact dating of them. Thus the Passover falls on the evening of the 14th Nisan, Mazzéth extends from the 15th to the 21st of the first month, Tabernacles from the 15th to the 22nd of the seventh month, while the Feast of Weeks falls on the fiftieth day after the offering of the firstling sheaf, which was always to be pre- sented the day after the Sabbath of the Mazzéth- week. Of new festivals we have: the Feast of Trumpets at the new moon of the seventh month [otherwise the New Moon, to which such import- ance was attached in early times, is signalized in P only by a multiplication of the official offerings], and the Great Day of Atonement on the 10th day of the same month. Once more it is significant that the latter festival, which is undoubtedly of very late origin, and whose motives are purely theocratic, should have become the most important and the holiest of all. By the way, it is only in the case of seven of these days (the lst and 7th days of Mazzéth ; the Feast of Weeks; the 1st, 10th, 15th, and 22nd days of the seventh month [but, accord- ing to Lv 23%, also every Sabbath]) that a ‘holy convocation’ of the whole people is required at the sanctuary—a demand which is intelligible only if one thinks of the people as living in the neighbour- hood of the sanctuary, as was actually the case during the first period after the Return from the Exile.
All the festivals hitherto enumerated recurred every year. But the underlying idea of all the festal seasons made its way to a further realization in the setting apart, as hallowed to God, of seasons within larger divisions of time. This led to the expansion of the idea of the Sabbath by the separa- tion and hallowing of every seventh year as the close of a year-week, and of the fiftieth year after the termination of a cycle of seven year-weeks. The celebration of these is based upon a renuncia- tion of the use of the soil. Since in this instance the theory of sacred ¢zme is in the closest contact with that of sacred space, we have already (p. 717”) had to speak of the Sabbatical year and the great year of jubile.
(c) The consecrated character of all members of the people ; ‘holy persons’ in the narrower sense (Priests and Levites).—(a) The fact that Jahweh by mighty acts ‘redeemed’ the people from the bond- age of Egypt, constituted Israel the property of Jahweh alone (Lv 25°); and henceforward it was to be a people consecrated to Him, and thus —in harmony with His superiority to every kind of stain—an absolutely pure people. This idea finds expression on the one hand in the purificatory act of circumcision, and on the other in the numer- ous regulations about cleanness (cf. especially Lv 11-15), which furnish instructions as to the pre- cautions to be taken to avoid defilement, and as to the atoning acts necessary when Levitical purity has been lost. In so far as these acts consist of sacrificial transactions, we shall have to speak of