future or unfinished tense ; except that ver. 6 paren- thetically relates, in the perfect tense, how the people humbled themselves according to the opening part of the Lord's directions, whereas the rest of these direc- tions may never have been carried out after the inter- cession of Moses was completed.
(6.) Passing to the other class of alleged contradic- tions, in uhiih the four earlier boohs are placed on the one side and Deuteronomy on the other, as if it belonged to a later age than the latest of them, and betraj'cd certain differences of belief and sentiment, it deserves to be noticed that a great deal used to be said of the historical contradictions ; whereas the wisest of the destructive critics now concede that notliing can be made of these, especialh' when the oratorical nature of Deuteronomy is considered, and weight is assigned to the form which narratives would assume in a dis- course whose object was exhortation. The onlv cases which require consideration are those in which the laws as laid down in Deuteronomy are said to be dif- ferent from some in the three preceding books. We ad- mit willingly that there are modifications, within cer- tain comparatively narrow limits, and easily enough explained bj' recollecting that forty j'ears elapsed be- tween the covenanting in Horeb and that in the land of Moab (Deut. xxix, 1 [xxviii, 69 in Hebrew]) ; the latter also taking into consideration the new circum- stances of the people when they should be settled in their own land. The chief instance of this is the per- mission to the people to eat flesh anywhere throughout the land of Canaan, if only they took care to pour out the blood upon the earth (Deut. xii, 15, 16, 20^25), for the previous law upon the subject in Lev. xvii became physically impracticable as soon as the people ceased to live together in the camp. In connection with this, there is the account of the priests' share of the sacri- fices (Deut. xviii, 3), which differs from the account in Leviticus and Numbers of the parts of sacrifices which were assigned to the priests. But this statement of "the priests' dues from the people," is in addition to "the oflFerings of the Lord made \>y fire," which have already been mentioned at ver. 1 ; it is a plausible conjecture that these additional dues were assigned to them on purpose to indemnify them for losses sustained by the repeal of the law in Lev. xvii, and in fact there seems to be a reference to this particular statute in Deuteronomy in the account of the evil conduct of Eli's sons in 1 Sam. ii, 13-16. There is also another class of cases in which the alleged contradiction is probably the result of our ignorance, and can be at least hypothetically met and removed. A good ex- ample of this is the difficultly alleged to exist in Deut. XV, 19, 20, as if it gave to the people at large the right to eat the firstlings of their flocks and herds in holj' feasts, whereas the earlier legislation had given these firstlings to the priests (Numb, xviii, 15-18); for it is plain that the author of Deuteronomy did not contem- plate any contradiction of tlie divine law in this ar- rangement, to which he had made repeated allusion already (ch. xii, 6, 17 ; xiv, 22, 23). But, in point of fact, nothing is simpler than to understand the law in Deuteronomy as addressed to the collective Israelites as if they were a single individual, "thou shalt sanc- tify . . . thou shalt eat," etc., leaving the priests and the rest of the people to adjust their respective duties and privileges by the well-known directions of the law in Numbers ; and along with this to remember that the earlier law naturallv suggests that the priests should make a sacred feast of the first-born animals given to them, at which feast none could more reasonably he expected to be guests than the persons to whom these animals had belonged.
The most important allegation of contradiction be- tween the legislation in the middle books and that in Deuteronomj' has reference to the three great orders in the theocracy — tlie prophetic, the priestly, and the kingl}'. The first and last must be passed over almost
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