secret and slowly advancing desecrations were actually removed from the entire community. Hence this universal festival of penance and expiation was established in order that even all these might be expiated as far as human labor could avail, and that the community, as free as possible from all guilt, might celebrate with joyous feelings the great happy festival of the year which immediately followed. Both this origin and purpose, and also its name, feast of expiation, show its genuine Mosaic character. Here, more than in any other, the entire purpose and the absolute stringency of the higher religion found expression, and it was certainly this religion which first founded the festival. Only in one of its rites, which, strictly speaking, is hardly essential, do we find a remnant of pre-Mosaic belief and life. The festival, then, was by no means to be principally of a domestic character, like the Passover; rather, in contradistinction to the latter, was it to become a thoroughly public festival. Accordingly, the people were not to offer any of the regular sacrifices, but a new one, which should go deeper and reach a more sensitive point in taming man's sensuous nature than the regular offerings. This was to be a rigid fast from the evening of the ninth to that of the tenth; the solitary fast which Jahveism annually required. The whole structure of Jahveism did indeed require that a sacrifice of the ordinary kind should be offered on this day, as its peculiar importance demanded; but this continued to be purely sacerdotal. It was a great expiatory offering, to be made by the high-priest or his representative. Not only the human members of the community, including the priests, were now deemed impure and in need of expiation, but even the visible sanctuary as well, as though, like a wall between the nation and its God, it received all the stains of impiety which were incurred in the realm. Hence the high-priest employed expiatory offerings of two kinds: one, purely sacerdotal and serving especially for the atonement of the sanctuary, and another, which had special reference to the share of the community, and must therefore also proceed from it. The latter bore quite a national stamp, and evidently forms that portion of the usages which was derived from a pre-Mosaic time, and still retained subsequently." ("The Antiquities of Israel," by H. Ewald, pages 361 to 364, which see.)
It seems to us that Ewald's opinion is not altogether right. We do not agree that this festival shows more of the Mosaic character than any other festival, nor with his opinion about the he-goat destined for Azazel, which he considers a pre-Mosaic rite. He is also not correct in saying that there were no regular sacrifices on that day, only new ones [vide Num. xxix. 7, 8], for the simple reason, if such was the case it would have been observed at the beginning of the second Temple, at least, when the entire Law, as we now have it, was discovered by Ezra; but, as stated above, the observance of that day with pomp and celebration (see Appendix) was begun some time during the middle period of the second Temple.
On the contrary, from the great preparations and parade of
