thigh to rot", that is, vitiate or destroy the organs of conception and thenceforth condemn her to the curse and shame of barrenness; but if she were innocent, "she would be free and conceive seed." In the former case, she "bore her iniquity"; the disgrace, the separation from her husband, and the disease that bofell her, were deemed sufficient punishment; in the latter case, the mutual and conjugal confidence was fully restored, and the husband could not be blamed for having exposed his wife to so awful an ordeal; for he did not act, as Philo observes, "like a falso accuser or treacherous enemy, seeking to gain the victory by any means whatever, but as a man may do who wishes accurately to ascertain the truth without any sophistry", and had accused his wife "not out of insult, but with an honest intention", and perhaps from the ardour of his love. It cannot be denied that the procedure here prescribed falls virtually into the category of ordeals; the fact that, after its completion, the human judges took no action in the matter, while this was usually done after ordeals, constitutos no Ossential difference: the principal point is the supernatural mode of discovering the quilt; this was perfectly analogous in both cases, while the punishment was in our instance left to God, in other ordeals carried out by human tribunals. The Talmud believes that the test was applicable only if the husband had been absolutely faithful to his wife of which condition the Biblical text is altogether silent; and that it ceased to be effectual when adulterers increased which may be a convenient mode of accounting for constant failures of an exporiment dangerous to the authority of the Pentateuch. The rite was abolished by Jochanan bon Saccai about the beginning of the Christian era a commendable measure whether suggested by enlightenment or prudence. From that time, divorce alone was customary among the Jews in cases of manifest and well-proved faithlessness.

XVII. THE PASCHAL SACRIFICE.

1

Ir requires no proof that the paschal lamb, even that killed in Egypt, was in roality a sacrifice; it is in the Pentateuch distinctly called. "an offering of the Lord", and "service" or "worship";' it was prescribed to be male and faultless, the ordinary requirements of the holiest sacrifices; it was to be eaten at once and entirely, or if anything remained it was to be burnt the same night; in later times, it was to be killed at the common Sanctuary, and consumed in the holy town, and the

1 Num. IX. 7, 13 (comp. 1 Cor. V. 7). 2 Exod. XII. 25, 26.

5

blood was to be sprinkled upon the altar. Nor can it be doubted that the paschal sacrifice, though in some respects entirely singular and exceptional, must be classed among the thank-offerings, to which it is analogous not only in the name and in the disposal of the portions left on the morrow of the sacrifice,' but its flesh, even including the breast and right shoulder, was eaten by the Israelites who offered it, and was thus marked as distinct both from the holocausts and the expiatory offerings. Some have indeed laboured to represent it, either fully or conditionally, as a sin-offering designed to atone for the idolatry practised by the Hebrews during their sojourn in Egypt: but the term pesach never signifies absolution or expiation, whatever its meaning in Arabic; and the blood of the lamb, which in Egypt was put on the lintels and the door-posts, did not symbolise the unworthiness of the Hebrews of being exempted from the calamity that was to afflict the Egyptians, but it signified the occupation of the houses by Hobrews and the belief of the latter in God's promise of rescue. And in the later forin of the Passover sacrifice, the blood, so ominently essential in sin-offerings, was of such subordinate importance, that its use and application were not even specified in the Law. Jewish tradition distinctly marked the Pesach as a thank-offering by declaring that while it was killed the Israelites chanted the great hymn consisting of the Psalms CXIII to CXVIII. The rites by which it was attended difforod indeed from those observed in ordinary shelamim; but those very doviations sorve to recall its true character more strikingly. It was by the Hobrow historian, who placed its origin in the time of the exodus from Egypt, ovidontly conceived • as a sacrifice of covenant in a double senso to typify the alliance between God and the people of Israel, and to cement the union between the members of the Hebrew households. For it was to be killed by the head of every family; its blood, to be put on the lintel and the doorposts, was to sanctify the house to God; it was to be roasted entire, without any part or member being cut off; for which reason nothing, not even the fat, was burnt on the altar; nor did the priests receive any portion; it was to be eaten in family groups, and to be consumed completely in the night of the fourteenth day of Nisan, without anything being left to the following day. But this character which the paschal sacrifice bore at its first institution, was naturally modified in subsequent periods of Hebrew history, and especially after the settlement in the promised land. Then the Israelitos proporly presented it as a

Comp. 2 Chr. XXXV. 11; see Comm. on Exod. p. 137. 7 Comp. Exod. XII. 10 and Lev. VII. 15-17.

8 See Comm. on Exod. pp. 134, 135, 148; and generally the same treatise pp. 131-142.

thank-offering for the miraculous redemption of their ancestors from Egyptian bondage, and in grateful remembrance of the mercy which God had manifested in choosing and accepting them as His own people;' they considered it indeed as an annual renewal of the national convention between God and themselves; but joy and gratitude obtained a chief, if not predominant share in its performance. Thus the history of the paschal sacrifice exhibits the same change in its nature, which the shelamim generally soom to have undergone in the course of centuries. How and for what reasons the sacrifices of the firstborn wore, from holocausts, converted into thank-offerings, will be explained elsewhere.2

XVIII. THE DOCTRINE OF VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

It is impossible to doubt that the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice was entertained by the Hebrews, as it was held by other nations, both ancient and modern. If the principle of substitution be not at once apparent in holocausts and thank-offerings presented as an acknowledgment of God's sovereignty and beneficence, it is plainly obvious in expiatory sacrificos. It is unmistakably implied in that important passage which some have oven regarded as the very foundation of all sacrificial laws, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes an atonement by the soul", where the soul of the offerer is clearly placed in juxtaposition with the soul of the victim employed as a means of expiation. That principle is also certain and manifest in the imposition of the hands as commanded with regard to the scapo-goat, "And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, and shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send it away by the hand of an appointed man into the wilderness; and the goat shall bear upon it all their iniquities into a land not inhabited"; wherefore the messenger who had driven away the goat was unclean and forbidden to come within the camp till he had bathed and washed his garments. 5 It is embodied in the narrative of the intended sacrifice of Isaak, instead of whom a ram was offered as a holocaust, and in the law concerning the heifer killed at or near the place of an undiscovered murder; and it is symbolised by the dissected animals at the conclusiou of covenants, foreshadowing the deserved fate of the transgressor.

Comp. Exod. XIII. 14-17.

2 See the Treatise on Priesthood, ch. 3.

3 Lev. XVII. 11, and notes in' loc.

4 Lev. XVI. 21, 22; see Comm. in loc.

5 lbid. ver. 26; comp. ver. 28.

0 Gen. XXII. 13; see infra Sect. XXI. 3. 7 Deut. XXI. 1-9.

It involves a deep consciousness of sin and guilt, and marks a decided progress in the path of spiritual religion.

The doctrine of vicariousness has been acknowledged and adopted by many Rabbins and Fathers of the Church, who held that the Bible sanctioned the principle of "life for life", and supposed the killing and burning of the victim to imply that the blood of the offerer ought to have been shed, and his body burnt, on account of his sins, had not the mercy of God accepted from him, as a substitute and atonement, the life and the blood of the animal; and it has been defended by the majority of orthodox writers and critics, though it has by some been either opposed or wrongly understood.

This doctrine is, however, widely different from the so-called juridical view, which considers the sacrifico as a penalty or fine; for the Pentateuch cannot possibly be said to start from the principle, "man offers the sacrifice in order to escape from punishment, bocause without punishment the disturbed relation between God and man caunot be restored": this would not be a covering of the sin or wiping out of it, no pardon and no mercy, in which the sacrificial system is centred. Moreover, in expiatory offerings not the killing of the animal, but the proceeding with the blood was the principal act, which effected atonement. Hence the priest, the representative of God, did not necessarily execute the slaying, but he invariably performed the sprinkling of the blood. And though the victim gavo up its life for the life of the offeror, it was not laden with his sins; hence the flesh, so far from being impuro, became most holy, and was, in certain cases, eaten by the priest who had been instrumental in the offering. The scape-goat alone, on the Day of Atonement, which bore the sins of the people, was not "most holy", but was sent into a desert land to perish far away from the abodes of men.

The subject may, therefore, briefly be thus summed up. The animal dies to symbolise the death deserved by the offerer on account of his sins; while its blood which represents its life and existence, is put on the altar and on other parts of the Sanctuary to typify the Divine atonement solicited and granted. The death of the animal is far from unessential, for it involves the indispensable preliminary or the negative side of the sacrifice, the remission of the punishment; after which the sprinkling of the blood follows as the emblem of the positive effect or end, the remission of the guilt, the restoration of peace and grace, the sanctification or the re-union with God. Thus understood, the sacrifice is not "merely an external, a formal, and mechanical act", and still loss "an act of ponal exocution." It is, morcover, obviously

erroneous to deny all significance to the killing of the animal, and to look upon it simply as an act of transition and a moans for obtaining the blood: if so, it would not have been so rogularly recorded in the text, nor would the mode have been so characteristically varied in different sacrifices. The ceremony was entrusted, or rather left, to the offering Israelites, and not confided to the priests, because the former were to testify, in the most signal manner possible, their submission, their ready gratitude, or their death-deserving guilt. It could not well be performed on the elevated altar itself; it was sufficiently connected with this holy structure by being necessarily performed near it. And the sprinkling of the blood was lawful and effectual only if the blood was obtained by killing the animal, not if it flowed from a wound or even a vital organ.

3

Simultaneously with the principle of substitution of animals for men, the notion of substitution of men for men began to gain ground. Traces of it aro met with at different periods of Hobrow history. It is indirectly implied in the narrativo concerning the sovon descendants of Saul "hangod up boforo the Lord" as an atonement for tho unjust warfare allogod to havo boen waged by Saul against the Gibeonites;' it renders intelligible the story of the death of the child of David and Bath-sheba, intended as an expiation for the king's crime; it is almost distinctly expressed in the adages, "The wicked shall be a ransom for the righteous, and the transgressor for the upright", and, "The rightcous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked comes in his stead";' it underlies the description of the servant of God "who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, who suffered chastisement for our salvation, and by whose stripes we are healed, upon whom the Lord has laid the iniquity of us all, and who was stricken for the transgressions of the people, who delivered up his soul to death, bore the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." In the time after the exile, it was developed with more and more distinctness; and it gave birth to the idea of the Messiah or the son of God suffering death to socure atonement and salvation for mankind. 6

28; Mark X. 45; XIV. 24; Luke I. 76, 77; VI. 51; XXII. 19, 20 (comp. Exod. XXIV. 8); John I. 29; X. 15; Acts X. 43; Rom. III. 24, 25; VIII. 32; V. 8, 10, 11; 1 Cor. V. 7; XV. 3; 2 Cor. V. 18, 19, 21; Gal. I. 4; Eph. I. 7; V. 2; Col. I. 14, 20, 21; 1 Tim. II. 6; Hebr. I. 3; IX. 13, 15; XIII. 11, 12; Til. II. 14; 1