set aside for purposes of commingled religion and amusement.

Having stated the number of these celebrations, it may be necessary to say something of their nature, in order to show that they were not merely religious observances, but for the most part 'festivals and holydays, in the cheerful and joyous sense which we ourselves assign to those words, and as such strictly entitled to be ranked among the sports, pastimes, and amusements of the people. Of the three high festivals, when all the males of Israel were obliged to assemble at the sanctuary, two lasted seven days, for which sabbatical number the Jews had a particular reverence ;and the third was continued during eight days; but we must guard against the notion that during all this time labour or occupation were interdicted. Such a prohibition, especially to an uneducated people, would have been the severest of all punishments, for no burden is so insupportable to the mass of mankind as that of protracted and compulsory idleness. Only the first and last of these festival days were Sabbaths, on which there was to be no work : on the remaining five the people might labour, or employ themselves in whatever way they thought fit ; and there is reason to believe that in this interval the great fairs of the whole nation were held, when the most business would of course be done, and during the continuance of which we may conclude there was no lack of the pastimes and diversions that characterize similar merry-meetings in our own times.

During the eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles, which was the festival of gratitude for the fruits and vintage, the Israelites dwelt in booths formed of green branches interwoven together, an embowered mode of encamping, which in conjunction with the festive occasion, the beauty of the October weather, and the pleasant excitement of social intercourse upon so extensive a scale, must have naturally predisposed them to indulge in every species of joyful recreation and amusement. They who had been specially ordered to “serve the Lord with gladness, and come into his presence with a song,” thought they could not better solemnize the intermediate days of the high festivals than by offerings, feasts, and dances, accompanied by hymns, in which the bounty of the Deity was celebrated : thus moral.

Deity

izing and sanctifying their pleasures by uniting hem with religion. Their festivals, in short, were days of pleasure, on which they gave or received entertainments, and in the joys of which the poor and the slaves were entitled to participate. Feast-offerings were'not to be frugal every-day meals, but real merry-meetings, intended to supply good cheer to widows, orphans, strangers, and paupers, as well as to the offerer and his friends; and wine, so far from being forbidden by Moses, is expressly appointed for an accompaniment both to blood and to meal-offerings, as if nothing might be wanting that could exhilarate and delight the people on these joyous occasions. Moses commonly terms such banquets, rejoicing before Jehovah, and in order to make the intention of the festal-offerings more fully understood, he sometimes adds that they should rejoice before Jehovah in the intervals of their labours, that is, interrupt neir ordinary occupations by these joyous assemblages, and ighten them by the good cheer of the feasts. It is recorded, to the especial praise and glory of Solomon, that the people of Judah and Israel were numerous as the sand of the sea —“Eating and drinking and making merry. the Scriptures elsewhere sparing in exhortations to “make merry before the Lord.”

Dancing, during which songs of praise were sung, formed a very ancient part of the festal solemnities of the Hebrews. After the passage of the Red Sea the damsels of Israel, with Miriam at their head playing on the tabret, sang and danced in celebration of that miraculous event David himself danced at the induction of the ark into the tabernacle : we learn from the 68th Psalm, that singers, minstrels, and damsels playing on timbrels accompanied the sacred processions, and these probably danced also. The yearly festival held not far from Shiloh, at which the damsels were seized by the Benjamites, consisted of the same amusement. From these authorities, and from the still more explicit terms of Psalm cxlix. 3, and cl. 4, we may reasonably maintain that dancing was expressly commanded by the Lord, and it becomes, therefore, the more difficult to understand how certain gloomy censors and theologians can condemn as sinful a practice which was

*

Nor are

distinctly enjoined under the Old Testament, and is nowhere forbidden by the New. If it were thus prevalent in the public ceremonies of the Hebrews, we cannot doubt that the same recreation, varied by music and singing, constituted one of the principal attractions in their private entertainments, and in the amusements of the domestic circle.

Although the injunction for attending the Israelitish festivals was only imperative upon the males, the fathers, we may presume, gratified their daughters by taking them up to the Holy City upon these occasions, thus affording to the men an opportunity of seeing and dancing with all the young beauties of the nation. By these means marriages were promoted between individuals of the different tribes, family friendships were formed, and a general brotherhood and bond of social love was established among the twelve petty states which constituted the Jewish people. Religion, commerce, and amusement were thus combined in these great annual conventions, which so far resembled in their first elements the Olympic games of the Greeks, and may be equally classed as national sports, although they were immeasurably more august and rational, both as respects their divine origin and the mode of their celebration.

Exclusively of the minor festivals, which were all observed with a similar hilarity, civil feasts and entertainments were commonly kept at the weaning of children, at the making of covenants, at marriages, at the shearing of sheep, and on other amicable occasions. meetings they seem to have appointed a symposiarch, whose duty it was to promote the general hilarity.--" If thou be made the master of the feast,” says the author of Ecclesiasticus,*

* “ take diligent care for them-and when thou hast done all thy office, take thy place that thou mayst be merry with them, and receive a crown for thy well ordering of the feast.—Pour not out words where there is a musician; and show not forth wisdom out of time. A concert of music in a banquet of wine is as a signet of carbuncle set in gold. As a signet of an emerald set in a work of gold, so is the melody of music with pleasant wine. There, take thy pastime and do what thou wilt, but sin not by proud speech.” The Hebrews, in fact, so far from being an aus.

At these merry

tere or unjoyous people, seem to have eagerly seized every opportunity that afforded them a reasonable excuse for festive hospitality. That this natural cheerfulness sometimes pushed them to excess, even in their religious festivals, is sufficiently attested by the mode in which they celebrated the feast of Purim, which it must, however, be recollected was not of Mosaic institution. After several strange and not very decorous indignities heaped upon the effigy of Haman, they were accustomed to spend the rest of the day in feasting, sports, and dissolute mirth, each sex dressing themselves in the clothes of the other, and practising a variety of mad frolics, while the rabbins, pretending that Esther obtained the deliverance of her countrymen by intoxicating Ahasuerus, allowed the people to stupify themselves with drink. Excesses such as these, especially in connexion with religious observances, it is not intended to vindicate ; they are merely adduced as tending to exculpate the Jews from the charge of ascetical severity to which they have been sometimes subjected.

Such importance seems to have been attached by Moses to the universal unrestricted enjoyment of these festivals, and of the periodical respite from labour prescribed by the Sabbath, that he has carefully extended his benevolent regulations in this respect to the lowest classes of human beings, and even to the labouring animals and beasts of burthen. Scripture expressly tells us that one design of the Sabbath was to give a day of rest to slaves ;-and the Israelites, in order to make them the inore compassionate in this respect, are reminded of their own servitude in Egypt, when they longed in vain for days of repose.* At all the high festivals and great entertainments they were ordered not to eat the tithes, firstlings, or offerings within their gates, but to make them a public banquet, to which the male and female slaves should be invited, as well as · the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.t Such occasions were, therefore, a sort of saturnalia for the lower orders; “and we cannot but extol the clemency and humanity of that law which procured them, twice or thrice a year, a few days' enjoyment of those luxuries which they would doubtless relish the more the poorer their ordinary food might be.”

corn.

It has been thought by some that the statute which prohibits muzzling the ox while threshing the corn, was meant to be extended to servants, who were not to be tantalized with the preparation of food which they were not allowed to taste.

When Job wishes to describe the avarice and hardheartedness of the wicked, he says, “ They take away the sheaf from the hungry, which make oil within their walls, and tread their wine-presses and suffer thirst :"* and in proof that this construction of the Mosaic ordinance is supported by the practices of the ancient Jews, Michaelis (art. 130) quotes the following rabbinical doctrine :-" The workman may lawfully eat of what he works among: in the vintage he may eat of grapes; when gathering figs he may partake of them; and in harvest he may eat of the ears of

Of gourds and dates he may eat the value of a denarius.” Moses has not even forgotten the poor wanderers who were exposed to casual hunger, in which case he seems to have imagined that the natural right of food superseded all laws of property, and has allowed the eating of fruits and

grapes in other peoples' gardens and vineyards without restraint.

Not content with these ordinances, so obviously meant to secure to all animated beings stated periods of rest, and an equal enjoyment of the produce of the earth and the blessings of existence, Moses extended his benevolent regulations even to inanimate nature, by ordering that in every seventh year the land itself should remain untilled, that it might enjoy the Sabbath of the Lord. During this fallow year the corn-fields were neither sown nor reaped ; the vines were unpruned, and there were no grapes gathered : the whole of Palestine continued a perfect common, and every thing reverted, as it were, to a state of nature. This repose of the soil was to be consecrated to God, who declared that all his creatures, both of the human and inferior species, might then assert an equal right to the spontaneous produce of the earth. Whatever grew, instead of being the property of any individual, belonged alike to all, to the poor, the bondman, the day-labourer, the stranger, the cattle that ranged the fields, and the very game, which no man

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