XVII. THE MONTH ABIB AND THE PASSOVER

Amongst the institutions established or confirmed by the Almighty whilst the Israelites were on their march, for their observance when they should have taken possession of the land of Canaan, this was one—“Three times thou shalt keep a feast unto me in the year. Thou shalt keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread—thou shalt eat unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded thee, in the time appointed of the month Abib; for in it thou camest out from Egypt; and none shall appear before me empty:—and the Feast of Harvest, the first-fruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in thy field:—and the Feast of In-gathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field.” [Exod. 23:14.]

Such then were the three great annual feasts. The first, in the month Abib, which was the Passover. The second, which was the Feast of Weeks. The third, the Feast of In-gathering, when all the fruits, wine, and oil, as well as corn, had been collected and laid up. The season of the year at which the first of these occurred is all that I am anxious to settle, as bearing upon a coincidence which I shall mention by and by. Now this is determined with sufficient accuracy for my purpose, by the second of the three being the Feast of Harvest, and the fact that the interval between the first and second was just seven weeks [Lev. 23:14.] : “And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath” (this was the Sabbath of the Passover), “from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave-offering; seven Sabbaths shall be complete. Even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall ye number fifty days, and ye shall offer a new meat-offering unto the Lord. Ye shall bring out of your habitations two wave-loaves, of two tenth-deals, they shall be of fine flour, they shall be baken with leaven. They are the first-fruits unto the Lord.”

At the Feast of Weeks, therefore, the corn was ripe and just gathered, for then were the first-fruits to be offered in the loaves made out of the new corn. If then the wheat was in this state at the second great festival, it must have been very far from ripe at the Passover, which was seven weeks earlier; and the wave-sheaf, which, as we have seen, was to be offered at the Pass-over, must have been of some grain which came in before wheat—it was in fact barley [See Ruth 2:23.] . Now does not this agree in a remarkable, but most incidental manner, with a circumstance mentioned in the description of the Plague of the Hail? The hail, it is true, was sent some little time previous to the destruction of the firstborn, or the date of the Passover, for the Plague of Locusts and the Plague of Darkness intervened, but it was evidently only a little time; for Moses being eighty years old when he went before Pharoah [Exod. 7:7.] , and having walked forty years in the wilderness [Joshua 5:6.] , and being only a hundred and twenty years old when he died [Deut. 34:7.] , it is plain that he could have lost very little time by the delay of the plagues in Egypt, the period of his life being filled up without any allowance for such delay. I mention this, because it will be seen that the argument requires the time of the hail and that of the death of the firstborn (or in other words the Passover) to be nearly the same. Now the state of the crops in Egypt at the period of the hail we happen to know—was it then such as we might have reason to expect from the state of the crops of Judea at or near the same season?—i. e. the barley ripe, the wheat not ripe by several weeks?

It is well, inasmuch as it involves a point of evidence, that one of the Plagues proved to be that of Hail—for it is the only one of them of a nature to give us a clue to the time of year when they came to pass, and this it does in the most casual manner imaginable, for the mention of the hail draws from the historian who records it the remark, that “the flax and the barley were smitten, for the barley was in the ear and the flax was bolled; but the wheat and the rye were not smitten, for they were not grown up” (or rather perhaps, were not out of sheath [Exod 9:32.] ). Now this is precisely such a degree of forwardness as we should have respectively assigned to the barley and wheat—deducing our conclusion from the simple circumstance that the seasons in Egypt do not greatly differ from those of Judea, and that in the latter country wheat was ripe and just gathered at the Feast of Weeks, barley just fit for putting the sickle into fifty days sooner, or at the Passover, which nearly answered to the time of the hail. Yet so far from obvious is this point of harmony, that nothing is more easy than to mistake it; nay, nothing more likely than that we should even at first suspect Moses himself to have been out in his reckoning, and thus to find a knot instead of an argument. For on reading the following passage [Deut. 16:9.] , where the rule is given for determining the second feast, we might on the instant most naturally suppose that the great wheat-harvest of Judea was in the month Abib, at the Passover—“Seven weeks shalt thou number unto thee, begin to number the seven weeks from such time as thou beginnest to put the sickle to the corn.” Now this “putting the sickle to the corn” is at once perceived to be at the Passover, when the wave-sheaf was offered, the ceremony from which we see the Feast of Weeks was measured and fixed. Yet had the great wheat-harvest been here actually meant, it would have been impossible to reconcile Moses with himself; for he would then have been representing the wheat to be ripe in Judea at a season when, as we had elsewhere gathered from him, it was not grown up or out of the sheath in Egypt. But if the sickle was to be put into some grain much earlier than wheat, such as barley, and if the barley-harvest is here alluded to as falling in with the Passover, and not the wheat-harvest, then all is clear, intelligible, and free from difficulty.

In a word then, my argument is this—that at the Passover the barley in Judea was ripe, but that the wheat was not, seven weeks having yet to elapse before the first-fruits of the loaves could be offered. This I collect from the history of the Great Jewish Festivals. Again, that at the Plague of Hail (which corresponds with the time of the Passover to a few days), the barley in Egypt was smitten, being in the ear, but that the wheat was not smitten, not being yet bolled. This I collect from the history of the Great Egyptian Plagues. The two statements on being compared together, agree together.

I cannot but consider this as very far from an unimportant coincidence, tending, as it does, to give us confidence in the good faith of the historian, even at a moment when he is telling of the Miracles of Egypt, “the wondrous works that were done in the land of Ham.” For, supported by this circumstantial evidence, which, as far as it goes, cannot lie, I feel that I have very strong reason for believing that a hail-storm there actually was, as Moses asserts; that the season of the year to which he assigns it was the season when it did in fact happen; that the crops were really in the state in which he represents them to have been—more I cannot prove—for further my test will not reach: it is not in the nature of miracles to admit of its immediate application to themselves. But when I see the ordinary circumstances which attend upon them, and which are most closely combined with them, yielding internal evidence of truth, I am apt to think that these in a great measure vouch for the truth of the rest. Indeed, in all common cases, even in judicial cases of life and death, the corroboration of the evidence of an unimpeached witness in one or two particulars is enough to decide a jury that it is worthy of credit in every other particular—that it may be safely acted upon in the most awful and responsible of all human decisions.