Ch. i. 22, etc. Here the sending of the spies is said to have been at the 1,ugg<'st.ion of the people, whereas in Numb. xiii. 1, 8 it is by command from God that the spies are said to be sent. There is, however, no real dip;:crepancy here; the passage in Deuteronomy shnply contains an addition to the narrative in Numbers. The proposal originated with the people, but it was not until authorized by God that Moses carried it into effect. For the rest, the two narratives are in full accordance. Ch. i. 37; iii. 26; iv. 21. In these passages Moses appears as casting the blame of his exclusion from the promised land on the people, whereas in Numb. xx:. 12 it is in consequence of his own defective faith, and in Numb. xx,ii. 14 as a punishment for his rebelliousness, that this is said to have come upon him. But that there is no discrepancy here is rendered certain by the fact that in eh. xxxii. 51 the same cause is assigned for his exclusion as in Numbers. The two statements are easily reconciled. 'l'he immediate reason of the exclusion was Moses' own sin; the ultimate reason was the rebelliousness of the people, which gave occasion to that sin (cf. note on eh. i. 37). In Deuteronomy it is prescribed that sacrifices shall be offered only in one place, whereas the other books say nothing of this, and in one passage express mention is made of many places of worship (Exod. xx. 24). But (1) it is not true that no mention is made of this in the other books, for in Lev. xvii. 8, 9 the law regarding the offering of sacrifice only in the one place, viz. at the door of the tent of meeting, is announced even under more stringent conditions than in Deuteronomy; and (2) the declaration in Exod. xx. 24 was uttered shortly after the giving of the Law on Sinai, when the people had the prospect of moving from. place to place, and of . the sanctuary moving with them, and was intended to assure them that wherever that sanctuary was pitched there worship might be acceptably offered. When Numb. xviii. 20-32 is compared with eh. xiv. 22-29, it is alleged that "it cannot escape any one who makes the comparison without prejudice, that the two laws differ from each other in respect both of content and character." In Numbers it is prescribed that the Levites shall not have any fixed possession amcng the sons of Israel, but shall receive, for the service in the sanctuary binding on them, all the tithes which properly belong to Jehovah, and from these they shall again pay a tenth part to Aaron the priest. In Deuteronomy, on the contrary, the Israelites are enjoined to bring before the sanctuary the tithe of all the }Jroduco of their fields and their cattle, either in kind or in money, and there, in honour of Jehovah, to eat it with their families in joy and festivity; only along with this it is enjoined that they are not to forsake the Levite who has no possession of his own, but each third year they must retain all the tithes of their income and bestow them as a beneficence on the Levite, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan in their gates. These two laws, it is alleged, -liffer so both in cor,.tent and in character that it cannot be supposed that THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY. xxiii
Moses could have enacted l)Oth; and as the enactment in N1lmbers is undoubtedly the original, that in Deuteronomy must belong to a later ago (Blcok). 'fhat these two law:s differ from each other is indisputahl0, anrl tho dilTorence is such that, supposing them to relate to the same object, there is no possibility of harmonizing them; the one must exclude the other. But it is conceivable that Moses, after enacting the general law of tithes as a provision for the Levites, should, in the prospect of the people settling in a rich and fertile land where the produce of their possessions would be great, prescribe the giving of an additional tithe, to be devoted to sacred festivity and for the benefit of the poor and needy, in which benefit the Levite was to share. That such an additional tithe was actually made and rendered by the Israelites in Palestine, appears certain from the testimony of the Talmudists and Josephus ; by the former of whom the ,~~ i~!;), or second tithe, is distinguished from the til',it(:, v.Jl!;), the first tithe-that f~r the Levites; and the latter of whom expressly sajs that, besides the two tithes which were to be levied yearly, one for the Levites and another for feasting, there was to be every third year a third tithe for distribution to the poor and needy ('Antiq.,' iv. 8, 22). In the Book of Tobit the second tithe (oeKa."7 oruTepa) is mentioned (i. 7), and the LXX. refer to the oevT£pov imoiKaTov (eh. xxvi. 11). There seems no doubt, then, as to the existence of a second tithe among the Jews. What is called the "third tithe" (Josephus, I. c.; To bit i. 8), was only "this second tithe converted into the poor tithe, to be given to and consumed by the poor at home" (Ginsburg, 'Kitto's Cyclopredia,' iii. 1012). This being the case, we are justified in regarding the law in Deuteronomy as not exclusive of that in Numbers, but rather as supple- mentary to it, as an additional prescription for the benefit of the Levites, who as a tribe were without possessions in the land, as well as the poor and destitute. As both laws were apparently in operation at a late period, the one obviously does not abrogate or exclude the other, and therefore there is no reason why both should not have been appointed by Moses. Ch. xii. 17, 18. Here the people are enjoined to eat the firstlings of their herds before the Lord, in the place which he shall choose. But in Numb. xviii. 15-18 the flesh of the firstlings is said to belong to the priest: "The flesh of them shall be thine, as the wave breast and as the right shoulder are thine." How, then, it is asked, could the people eat the fi.rst- lings if they were to be given to the priest? There is here, it must be allowed, an apparent contradiction. It is, however, only apparent. The qualifying clause, "as the wave breast and as the right shoulder are thine," indicates that it was not the whole animal that was to be given to the priest; the distribution was to be according to the norm established in the case of the ahelamim, or peace offerings (Lev. vii. 28, etc.), that is, after the fat had been burnt on the altar, the wave breast and the right shoulder were to be the portions of the priest. The rest of the animal, therefore, remained with the offerer, and might be eaten by him. There is thus between the two laws no real ooutradiction (see note in Exposition). "It is not said in Numbers x1.iv INTRODUCTION TO