‘In the temple of Baal the following tariff of offerings shall be observed which was prescribed in the time of the judge ...-Baal, the son of Bod-Tanit, the son of Bod-Ashmun, and in the time of Halzi-Baal, the judge, the son of Bod-Ashmun the son of Halzi-Baal, and their comrades. For an ox as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive ten shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a full-offering, the priests shall receive besides this three hundred shekels’ weight of flesh. And for a prayer-offering they shall receive besides the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bullock which has horns, but is not yet broken in and made to serve, or for a ram, as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive five shekels of silver for each beast, and if it be a full-offering they shall receive besides this one hundred and fifty shekels’ weight of flesh; and for a prayer-offering the small joints (?) and the roast, but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a sheep or a goat as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive one shekel of silver and two zar for each beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a lamb or a kid or a fawn as a full-offering, whether it be a prayer-offering or a full thank-offering, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two zar for each beast; and in the case of a prayer-offering they shall have besides this the small joints (?) and the roast (?), but the skin and the haunches and the feet and the rest of the flesh shall belong to the offerer. For a bird, whether wild or tame, as a full-offering, whether it be shetseph or khazuth, the priests shall receive three-fourths of a shekel of silver and two zar for each bird, and [[211]]
The general resemblances between these regulations and those of the Levitical law are obvious. In both we have the same kind of sacrifices and offerings—the ox, the sheep and the goat, the lamb and kid, birds and cakes, meal and oil. Silver shekels were to be paid to the priests, like the silver shekels of the sanctuary exacted in certain cases from the Israelite (Lev. v. 15, xxvii. 25), and the blood and the fat were to be offered to the gods. The necessities of the poor man were remembered as they were in the Levitical law (Lev. v. 7, xii. 8, xiv. 21), and whatever was ‘leprous or scabby or lean’ was forbidden to be brought to the altar. The firstborn could be claimed by Baal as they were claimed by Yahveh, and the offerer was not permitted to taste of the blood of the slain beast (compare Lev. vii. 26, 27). The ‘full-offerings’ of the Phœnician tariffs mean that the whole of the victim had been given to the gods, and so correspond with the burnt sacrifices of the Mosaic Code. It is unfortunate that we cannot fix with certainty the exact signification of the words denoting the parts of the animal which were the due of the priests, and consequently cannot be sure whether or not they answer to the breast and shoulder of the peace-offering, which under the Levitical legislation were assigned to the sons of Aaron (Lev. vii. 33, 34).
It is true that the tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to a late period. But they embody regulations and usages which were common to the Semitic world of Western Asia, as we may gather from a comparison of them with the ritual of Babylonia, and which therefore must have been—at least in substance—of great antiquity. Two conclusions result from this fact. On the one hand the Levitical legislation cannot have been the invention of the Exilic age, as some adventurous critics have believed; on the other hand, it is based on customs and ideas which must have been prevalent in Israel long before the birth of Moses. The Hebrew legislator did but develop, modify, and define existing rites; the Levitical Code is not a new creation, but a body of religious and ritual laws which has been formed deliberately and with individual effort out of older customs and habits of thought. Doubtless there are laws and regulations which were the immediate creation of the lawgiver; from time to time new cases arose for which special legislation was needed, and of which the cases of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. x. 1-3), of the son of Shelomith and the Egyptian (Lev. xxiv. 10-16), and of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numb. xxvii. 1-11) are examples. To assume that such cases originated in the laws which they illustrated, and not the reverse, is a gratuitous supposition which is contradicted by the history of modern European law.[[212]]
Whether the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets on the first of each seventh month and the Year of Jubilee were also new creations of the lawgiver, may be questioned. The special legislation connected with them, as well as their association with the Exodus out of Egypt, was certainly peculiar to the Levitical code, but the same is true of the three older feasts of the Semitic calendar. These too were made to illustrate the events of Israelitish history, and new regulations were laid down for their observance. The Day of Atonement, however, had its counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. There also in periods of danger or distress, days of humiliation and fasting were prescribed, and prayers and offerings were made to the gods that they might forgive the sins of the people. When at the beginning of Esar-haddon’s reign Assyria was threatened by the Kimmerian invasion, ‘religious ordinances and holy days’ were proclaimed by the priests for ‘a hundred days and a hundred nights,’ and the sun-god was besought to remove the sin of his worshippers.[[213]] So, again, after the suppression of the Babylonian revolt, Assur-bani-pal tells us that ‘by the command of the prophets I purified their sanctuaries and cleaned their streets which had been defiled. Their wrathful gods and angry goddesses I tranquillised with prayers and penitential hymns. Their daily sacrifice, which had been discontinued, I restored in peace and established again as it had been before.’ The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that in Babylonia the first day of each month was kept as a Sabbath, and the Babylonian analogy is still more manifest in the case of the Feast of Pentecost, on ‘the morrow after the seventh Sabbath,’ after the offering of the firstfruits. This ‘seventh Sabbath’ is the Babylonian Sabbath, on the 19th of the month, forty-nine days after the first Sabbath of the preceding month. The Year of Jubilee was a Babylonian institution of exceeding antiquity. We learn from classical writers[[214]] that once each year in the month of July the feast of Sakea was held at Babylon, when the slave changed places with his master, and for five days lived and was clothed as a free man. We can now carry the history of the institution back to the age of the third dynasty of Ur. Gudea, the high-priest of Lagas, B.C. 2700, states in his inscriptions that after he had finished building the temple of E-ninnu, he celebrated a festival; and ‘for seven days no obedience was exacted; the female slave became the equal of her mistress, and the male slave the equal of his master; the subject became the equal of the chief; and all that was evil was removed from the temple.’[[215]]
The Year of Jubilee, it is clear, was but an adaptation and improvement of one of the oldest institutions of Babylonian culture. To assert that, together with the other holy days of the Levitical Code, it was borrowed from Babylonia in the age of the Exile, is to assert what not only cannot be proved, but is in the highest degree improbable. In the age of the Exile, Babylonia had become a second Egypt to the Jews, and the religious party among them regarded with abhorrence all that was specifically Babylonian. The feasts consecrated to ‘Bel and Nebo,’ the rites associated with the worship of the Babylonian gods, were the last things that would be adopted or adapted by a pious Jew. Moreover, we now know that the culture which had been carried from Chaldæa to the west long before the period of the Exodus included the gods and sacred rites of the Babylonians. So distinctive a characteristic of it as ‘the feast of Sakea,’ or days of prayer and humiliation for ‘the removal of sin,’ would not be forgotten when Anu and Moloch and Ashtoreth and Nin-ip made their way to Canaan.
There are passages in the Levitical Code which look back very distinctly to Egypt. Thus marriage with a sister, whether a full sister or a half-sister, is forbidden (Lev. xviii. 9). This was one of ‘the doings of the land of Egypt’ (Lev. xviii. 3) which had been consecrated there both by the civil and by the religious law, and continued in force down to the time of the Roman conquest. So, too, tattooing the flesh, and shaving the head or lacerating the flesh for the dead, were prohibited (Lev. xix. 27, 28, xxi. 5), all of them practices which are still common in the valley of the Nile. But, on the whole, it is remarkable how entirely Egypt is ignored. The Mosaic legislation seems intentionally to close its eyes to all things Egyptian, and, wherever it is possible, to make enactments which tacitly contradict or set aside the beliefs and customs of Egypt. Even the doctrine of the resurrection, as Bishop Warburton long ago observed, is carefully dropped out of sight. There is no reference to it, no sign that obedience to the laws of Yahveh will benefit the Israelite in any other world than this. On any theory of the age and authorship of the Levitical law such a silence is remarkable. Indeed, if the law is as late as the epoch of the Babylonish exile the silence would be more than remarkable, since the doctrine of a future life and of the power of the god Merodach to raise the dead to life had been firmly established for centuries among the Babylonians. A belief in the resurrection, or at all events, in a life beyond the grave, could not but have betrayed itself in the atmosphere of the Exile. For those, however, who had the Egyptian house of bondage immediately behind them, and who feared lest the tribes in the desert might again lust after the flesh-pots and green pastures of the Delta, the silence is intelligible. The doctrine was closely associated with Egyptian idolatry, with Osiris and Anubis, with the assessors of the dead, and with the pictured polytheism of the Egyptian monuments.
The Levitical legislation was accompanied by a census of the people. What credit we are to attach to the numbers which have been handed down is a question that has been much debated. On the one hand it has been shown that the vast multitude presupposed by them could not have moved about in the desert, as it is represented to have done, and that many of the regulations in the Levitical Code could not have been carried out with a nomad population of over two millions.[[216]] On the other hand, the 600,000 men above twenty years of age who were ‘able to go forth to war’ are specified again and again, and the same number is implied in all the calculations that are made of the numerical strength of Israel. It is also the sum of the numbers assigned to the fighting men of the individual tribes. Throughout the history the ciphers are consistent with one another. If the number is exaggerated, it it is an exaggeration which has been consistently adhered to. We must either accept it, or believe that it belongs to an artificial system which has been framed with deliberate intention. But the same may be said of the chronology of the early patriarchs as well as of the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah, and in both instances we know that the system is wrong. In the case of the chronology of the early patriarchs, indeed, there are at least three rival systems, all equally complete and self-coherent, while the chronology of the kings involves such hopeless anachronisms as have long since caused it to be rejected by the historian. The difficulties presented by the census of the Israelites in the wilderness are similar in character to the anachronisms presented by the chronology of the kings, and the same reasons which lead us to reject the one ought equally to induce us to reject the other.
Nevertheless, the chronology of the kings is not wholly incorrect. The length of reign assigned to the several kings is usually right. It is only the system into which it has been fitted that is at fault. And probably this is also the case as regards the numbering of the tribes of Israel. It may be that the 8580 Levites and the 22,273 firstborn males are authentic, and that the increase of the population by 3550 (Exod. xxxviii. 26; Numb. i. 46) a few months after the flight from Egypt, and its decrease by 1820 at the end of the wanderings (Numb. xxvi. 51), rest on a foundation of fact. Even the traditional number of 600,000 may have better support than its being a multiple of the Babylonian soss and ner.[[217]] Perhaps it originally represented the whole body of fugitives from Egypt.
At all events, some light may be thrown on the matter by a comparison of the numbers given in the Pentateuch with those of the Libyans and their allies as recorded in the inscription of Meneptah. Of the Libyans, 6365 men were slain and 230 (including 12 women) were captured; of their allies, 2370 fell on the field of battle, and 9146 were taken prisoners, while no less than 9111 bronze swords were taken from the Maxyes. We gather from the history of the battle that few, if any, of the enemy escaped. The whole force of fighting men, therefore, would not have amounted to very much over 25,000. And yet this was one of the most formidable hosts that had invaded Egypt; and its male population had not been decimated by the tyranny of an Egyptian king. On the other hand, a population of 2,000,000 in the land of Goshen is inconceivable, and there would hardly have been room in the eastern Delta for 600,000 able-bodied brickmakers. The Sweet-water Canal was dug by only 25,000 fellahin, though 250,000 worked at the Mahmudîya Canal, and for some years 20,000 fresh labourers were sent monthly to excavate the Suez Canal. Even in the desert, moreover, the Egyptians required a considerable number of troops to guard the serfs or convicts who worked for them. At Hammamât, for example, in the reign of Ramses IV., the 2000 bondservants of the temples who effected the transport of the stone were attended by 5000 soldiers, 800 mercenaries, and 200 officers; and provisions for this large body of men were carried across the desert in ten waggons, each drawn by six pairs of oxen, and laden with bread, meat, and cakes.[[218]] For 600,000 Israelites the whole Egyptian army would not have sufficed. According to Manetho, the Hyksos, when driven from Egypt, did not number more than 240,000 in all.
We cannot, then, look upon the numbers that have come down to us as exact. The occupants of the Israelitish camp, continually under the personal supervision of Moses, and constantly required to assemble before the tabernacle, could not have been a very large body of men. Had the fighting population amounted to anything like the number recorded, there would have been no need of avoiding ‘the way of the land of the Philistines,’ lest the people should ‘see war,’ or of doubting the issue of the combat at Rephidim with the Bedâwin tribes.