2. The preceding survey, it must be admitted, scarcely seems fully to establish the alleged agreement between the Jehovistic law and the older praxis. Names are nowhere to be found, and in point of fact it is only the autumn festival that is well attested, and this, it would appear, as the only festival, as THE feast. And doubtless it was also the oldest and most important of the harvest festivals, as it never ceased to be the concluding solemnity of the year. What has been prosperously brought to close is what people celebrate most rightly; the conclusion of the ingathering, both of the threshing and of the vintage, is the most appropriate of all occasions for a great joint festival,--for this additional reason, that the term is fixed, not, as in the case of the joy of reaping, by nature alone, but is in man's hands and can be regulated by him. Yet even under the older monarchy the previous festivals must also have already existed as well (Isaiah xxix. 1). The peculiarity of the feast of tabernacles would then reduce itself to this, that it was the only general festival at Jerusalem and Bethel; local celebrations "at all threshing floors "--i.e., on all high places--are not thereby excluded (Host ix. 1). But the Jehovistic legislation makes no distinction of local and central, for it ignores the great temples throughout. /1/ Possibly, -- Footnote 1. Exodus xx. 24-26 looks almost like a protest against the arrangements of the temple of Solomon,--especially ver. 26. -- Footnote also, it to some extent systematises the hitherto somewhat vaguer custom; the transition from the _aparchai_ to a feast was perhaps in practice still somewhat incomplete. In the paucity of positive data one is justified, however, in speaking of a substantial agreement, inasmuch as in the two cases the idea of the festivals is the same. Very instructive in this respect are two sections of Hosea (chaps. ii. and ix.), which on this account deserve to be fully gone into. In the first of these Israel is figured as a woman who receives her maintenance from her husband, that is, from the Deity; this is the basis of the covenant relationship. But she falls into error as to the giver of her meat and drink and clothing, supposing them to come from the idols, and not from Jehovah.