of the Sabbath (Exod. XX. 10; Deut V. 14). The "Book of the Covenant" not only confirms this privilege, but speaks of him almost with the same regard and tenderness as our passage: "The stranger thou shalt neither vex nor oppress, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt", and "you know the heart of the stranger" (Exod. XXII. 20; XXIII. 9). The Deuteronomist pathetically supports the same injunctions with the reason that "God loves the stranger" (Deut. X. 18, 19; XXIV. 14); he assigns to him a share in the gleanings of fields, vineyards, and orchards (Deut. XXIV. 19-22); and he repeatedly exhorts the tribunals to judge him with the strictest impartiality (Deut. I. 16; XXIV. 17; XXVII. 19). The middle Books of the Pentateuch repeat the older provisions with respect to the relief and sustenance of the stranger; they forbid the Hebrews to take from him interest on loans, which they should readily grant; they secure to him all the rights of the cities of refuge in case of homicide; and our verses almost summarise all the preceding enactments on the subject (Lev. XIX. 9, 10, 33, 34; XXV. 35-37; Num. XXXV. 15). The historians and great prophets of the Babylonian period allude to the stranger also with the warmest affection. The first Book of Kings, in the prayer attributed to Solomon, writes, “As to a stranger who is not of Thy people Israel, but comes from a distant country for Thy name's sake (for they shall hear of Thy great name, and of Thy strong hand, and of Thy stretched out arm); when he shall come and pray towards this House; hear Thou in heaven Thy dwelling-place, and do according to all that the stranger entreats of Thee"

...

(1 Ki. VIII. 41-43). Ezekiel, in describing his ideal commonwealth, ordains, "You shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance to you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, . . . and they shall be to you as born in the country among the children of Israel; ... and in what tribe the stranger sojourns, there shall you give him his inheritance, says the Lord God" (Ezek. XLVII. 21-23). And the second Isaiah, writing about a generation later, and also delineating the future organisation of the restored commonwealth, declares, "Let not the son of the stranger that has joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, The Lord has indeed separated me from His people"; for "the sons of strangers that join themselves to the Lord to be His servants, every one that keeps the Sabbath from polluting it, and observes My covenant, even them will I bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My House of prayer; their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon My altar; for My House shall be called a house of prayer for all people" (Isai. LVI. 3, 6, 7) which sentiments are hardly less remarkable than that beautiful utterance of the earlier Isaiah (XIX. 24), "In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the earth; whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My inheritance". We can well understand, how such noble germs, in the course of time, budded forth into the noteworthy command, "Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself".

But in proportion to the stran

ger's rights, his obligations also were extended. If he desired to enjoy any of the religious prerogatives, he was, from early times,obliged to be circumcised, and thus to recognise the personal sign of the Hebrew's covenant with God (Exod. XII. 44, 48); he had to pledge himself to the faithful fulfilment of the Law, as far as it concerned him, and to attend its public reading on the Feast of Tabernacles every seventh year (Deut. XXIX. 10-14; XXXI. 10-14); he had especially to submit to all the civil and moral statutes, as the "law of retaliation" (Lev. XXIV. 22), and to the precepts of chastity (XVIII. 26); he had,above all,to shun every idolatrous practice, and the profanation of the name of Israel's God (XX. 2; XXIV. 16); he had to conform to all the sacrificial ordinances whenever he desired to present offerings, and to the ceremonies of purification connected with the ashes of the "red cow" (Lev. XVII. 8, 9; XXII. 18; Num. XV. 14 – 16; XIX. 10); he had to abstain from blood, and as his position became more and more defined, also from and

(Lev. XVII. 10, 12, 15; comp. Deut. XIV. 20); he had to keep the Passover (Num. IX. 14), and to fast on the Day of Atonement (Lev. XVI. 29); and Talmudists declared, that any of strangers who infringed "the seven laws of the children of Noah", deserved death (Sanh. 57; see supra pp. 9, 10). Many of these points remained indeed long subject to fluctuations, but all tended ultimately towards amalgamating the Hebrews with their non - Hebrew neighbours. Nothing would, therefore, be more incorrect and more unjust than to reproach the Israelites with hatred of the stranger, whom, on the contrary,

they befriended to the full extent permitted by considerations of policy and religion. These limits and the position of the various classes of strangers have been explained elsewhere (see Comm. on Exod. pp. 431-433). It must have appeared particularly important to the young and small colony of Zerubbabel and his successors to secure the good-will of the heathen population that had settled in the country; and they hoped to attain this end best by establishing the closest possible ties of social and religious community. Pseudo-Phocylides expresses indeed our mand faithfully (ver. 39, "Estwoay δ ̓ ὁμότιμοι ἐπήλυδες ἐν πολιήταις), but instead of supporting it, as our text does, by a fact of Hebrew history, he adduces a general and speculative reason: "For we all lead a restless life in a strange country; and in their native land men find no firm footing".

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35,36. It is commonly admitted, that the administrative organisation, the police supervision, and the execution of penal decrees, were most imperfect among the ancient Hebrews, and that they form the chief defects of the secular legislation of the Pentateuch. In proportion as these drawbacks were felt, moral teachers deemed it imperative to lessen their dangerous effects by emphatically enjoining as private virtues what could not be enforced as public duties. The prophet Amos reproaches the sellers of corn, evidently without being able to threaten them with a legal punishment, that they "make the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsify the balances by deceit, in order to buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes,

and to sell the refuse of the wheat" (Am. VIII. 5). Micah announces the most fearful calamities, scourges of nature, and the direct judgment of God, exclaiming, "Are there yet treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and a scant measure that is abominable? Can I be pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weight-stones?" (Mic. VI. 10, 11; comp. Hos. XII. 8). The Book of Proverbs contains a number of sentences declaring, "that a false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight" (Prov. XI. 1); or "a just weight and balance are the Lord's, all the weightstones of the bag are His work” (XVI. 11; comp. XX. 10, 23). And the Deuteronomist begins with fully enjoining the precept, "Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small; thou shalt not have in thy house divers measures, a great and a small; thou shalt have a perfect and a just weight, a perfect and a just measure shalt thou have"; and then he adds as an inducement for the observance of the precept a promise which has almost a pathetic force,and is appended to the fifth Commandment also: "that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God gives thee" (Deut. XXV. 13-15). Yet Ezekiel deemed it expedient to give fresh directions on the same subject; and he was not satisfied with simply declaring, "You shall have just balances, and a just ephah, and a just bath", but he fixed the size of the chief measures and the standard of the chief weights (Ezek. XLV. 10-12). And lastly, our author, after introducing the com

mand in a very comprehensive form,he tries to impress it upon the Hebrews by bidding them remember, that God delivered them from Egyptian bondage by His great mercy, and that it is, therefore, not too much to expect from them strict justice. The Rabbins worked out the subject with the utmost earnestness; they recommended the appointment of public overseers of weights and measures,and enjoined the severest punishment of any fraud; they forbade merchants to employ for weights materials liable to become lighter by wear or rust; to be quite safe, they advised sellers to give in a certain quantity; and they taught, that "the crime of illegal weights and measures is more heinous than that of incest; that it is, in fact, equivalent to the heresy of denying the Divine redemption from Egypt" (comp. Philo, De Just. II. 9; Talm. Bab. Mets. 61b; Bab. Bathr. 88-90; Maimon. Hilch. Genev. vII. vIII; Chosh. Mishp. § 231; Hotting. 1. c. pp. 332 - 334, 395397). On ephah and hin, two principal measures for dry goods and for liquids respectively, see Comm. on Exod. pp. 296, 297.

The Hindoo law imposes the highest fines not only upon those who falsify scales or measures, but upon official examiners of coins who pronounce a good piece bad or a bad piece good; it inflicts heavy penalties, and partially corporeal chastisement, upon those who overreach customers, give short measure or light weight, adulterate goods, or try to give them a deceptive appearance; and with respect to a trader in counterfeited gold, it enacts that "by order of the king he must be cut in pieces with

not mention the marriage with the mother and the full sister, the granddaughter, and the mother-in-law; it introduces indeed a new element by specifying in each instance the penalties of the transgressor; but the author, had he been the same who composed the former code (ch. XVIII), would have inserted those penalties in this code or affixed them to it (comp. XVIII. 29). How, then, is this strange irregularity to be accounted for? The compiler, having concluded the ceremonial ordinances, intended, in this division of the Book, to put together the chief moral injunctions which appeared to him necessary to ensure a holy life (see supra p. 383); he gave the first place, and not without good reason, to the laws of chastity (ch. XVIII); he then joined with them a variety of precepts drawn from various sources, and so comprehensive that they might well be regarded as an expansion of the Decalogue (ch. XIX); and these two sections, forming indeed in themselves a small digest of laws, were soon held to be inseparably united. We may well imagine that the subjects of consanguinity and affinity, of matrimony and of sexual intercourse in general, engaged the Hebrew legislators at an early period. A few directions are given by the Deuteronomist (XXVII. 20-23; XXII. 22; XXIII. 1, 18); but fuller outlines were drawn up by a thoughtful and more advanced writer deeply imbued with the mission of the Israelites as a holy nation, and fearing the dangers of immorality which threatened their very independence, as it had destroyed that of the pagan Canaanites. Those outlines were no doubt the groundwork both of the systematic survey embodied in a preceding section (ch. XVIII), and of the less exhaustive but more rigor

which we have reason to believe is the older of the two (see on ver. 18; comp. supra pp. 263, 264), and which, just on account of the spirit of inexorable severity that pervades it, was naturally employed as a welcome addition by the final reviser of the Book, unconcerned at the repetitions and incongruities thus inevitably arising. In this manner the analogies as well as the differences of the two chapters may be best accounted forboth of them, besides interdicting marriage between certain relatives, contain the prohibitions of adultery and of intercourse with menstruating women, of sodomy, of coition with beasts,and of human sacrifices offered to Moloch; and both of them enforce their commands by the same menace, conveyed in analogous terms, namely, that immoral or idolatrous practices on the part of the Hebrews will most certainly result in the forfeiture of their conquered land: but the one, the eighteenth, simply states the laws, and merely calls attention to their sacredness by repeatedly adding, “I am the Lord,"yourLawgiver; whereas the other,the twentieth, less complete, and different in arrangement, mentions penalties of the offenders in intelligible gradations-death by stoning and burning or by the direct vengeance of God, penal inflictions imposed by the judges or childlessness. Again, the former warns the Hebrews rather negatively, not to follow the iniquities of the Canaanites, whereas the latter positively and with increasing emphasis exhorts them to strive after the holiness of God, and thus to prove that they merit the distinction of being His elected people.

PHILOLOGICAL REMARKS. It is not enough to acknowledge a double authorship of the 18th and 20th chapters; it is necessary to explain the numerous and peculiar coinci