“Strangers and their progeny are adjudged to be aillts; also a reputed son who shall be denied and his progeny, and evildoers of federate country and their progeny, unto the end of the ninth descent.”[160]
i.e., the tenth man would no longer be reckoned an aillt but a free Cymro.
The issue of a stranger obtains the privilege of a tribesman in the fourth person by legitimate marriages.[161] But the aillt or stranger, who dwells in Cymru, does not attain until the end of the ninth descent.
So too inversely:—
The title to inherit by kin and descent in the tribal land and rights of his ancestors does not become extinct till the ninth man. The ninth man in descent from a banished tribesman coming home and finding his title as representative of his family seemingly [pg 069] extinguished, is to raise an outcry that from a proprietor he is becoming a nonproprietor, and the law will shelter him and adjudge him an equal share with the occupants he finds on the land. This is called the “outcry across the abyss.” The tenth man's outcry cannot be heard. “Others say” that the ninth man is too late to raise the cry.[162]
This is exactly parallel to the case of the stranger resident in Cymru. For nine generations he is a stranger, and in the tenth a Cymro. Here for nine generations is the Cymro abroad a tribesman, and in the tenth he is a stranger.
The same rule amongst the Israelites.
From a passage in Deuteronomy it would appear that the qualifications for admission as a full tribesman amongst the Israelites were identical with those just mentioned.
The Israelites had purified themselves of the ancestor worship, that so long survived in Greece, and had, if one may say so, amalgamated all their minor deities and tribal superstitions in their one great monotheistic religion. Even then their tribal minds could not carry back their theology behind the known history of their own ancestors. Their God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and was in their conception the greatest of Gods—i.e., greater than the Gods of other peoples, the existence of which their own beliefs did not preclude. Thus where in Attic writers we have mention of the religious rites of the family (which a stranger or polluted man might not [pg 070] approach), and of the partaking therein as proof of the whole admission and pure blood of those present, so in Deuteronomy the expression “the Congregation of the Lord,” is used to denote that sacred precinct, forbidden to all save pure tribesmen of Israel.
It may be inferred from the following passage that if a stranger resided in Israel, and his family continued to do so for nine generations, the tenth generation would in any ordinary case be admitted to the Congregation of the Lord as full Israelites.