vest, 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."*

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 Exodus, xxiii. 14.

interval between the first and second was

just seven weeks.* "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 meatoffering 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

* Leviticus, xxiii. 15.

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 Passover, must have been of some grain which came in before wheat it was in fact barley.* Now does not this agree in a remarkable, but most incidental manner, with a circumstance mentioned in the description of the Plague of 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 Pharaoh,† and having walked forty years in the wilderness, and being only a hundred and twenty † Exodus, vii. 7.

* See Ruth, ii. 23.

Joshua, v. 6.

years old when he died, 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 first-born (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 knowwas 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 fortunate, inasmuch as it involves a point of evidence, that one of the Plagues chanced to be that of Hail-for it is the

* Deuteronomy, xxxiv. 7.

only one of them all 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.*) 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 * Exodus, ix. 32.