It is true that the tariffs of Carthage and Marseilles belong to a late period. But they embody regulations and usages which were common to the Semitic world of Western Asia, as we may gather from a comparison of them with the ritual of Babylonia, and which therefore must have been—at least in substance—of great antiquity. Two conclusions result from this fact. On the one hand the Levitical legislation cannot have been the invention of the Exilic age, as some adventurous critics have believed; on the other hand, it is based on customs and ideas which must have been prevalent in Israel long before the birth of Moses. The Hebrew legislator did but develop, modify, and define existing rites; the Levitical Code is not a new creation, but a body of religious and ritual laws which has been formed deliberately and with individual effort out of older customs and habits of thought. Doubtless there are laws and regulations which were the immediate creation of the lawgiver; from time to time new cases arose for which special legislation was needed, and of which the cases of Nadab and Abihu (Lev. x. 1-3), of the son of Shelomith and the Egyptian (Lev. xxiv. 10-16), and of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numb. xxvii. 1-11) are examples. To assume that such cases originated in the laws which they illustrated, and not the reverse, is a gratuitous supposition which is contradicted by the history of modern European law.[212] Whether the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets on the first of each seventh month and the Year of Jubilee were also new creations of the lawgiver, may be questioned. The special legislation connected with them, as well as their association with the Exodus out of Egypt, was certainly peculiar to the Levitical code, but the same is true of the three older feasts of the Semitic calendar. These too were made to illustrate the events of Israelitish history, and new regulations were laid down for their observance. The Day of Atonement, however, had its counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. There also in periods of danger or distress, days of humiliation and fasting were prescribed, and prayers and offerings were made to the gods that they might forgive the sins of the people. When at the beginning of Esar-haddon’s reign Assyria was threatened by the Kimmerian invasion, ‘religious ordinances and holy days’ were proclaimed by the priests for ‘a hundred days and a hundred nights,’ and the sun-god was besought to remove the sin of his worshippers.[213] So, again, after the suppression of the Babylonian revolt, Assur-bani-pal tells us that ‘by the command of the prophets I purified their sanctuaries and cleaned their streets which had been defiled. Their wrathful gods and angry goddesses I tranquillised with prayers and penitential hymns. Their daily sacrifice, which had been discontinued, I restored in peace and established again as it had been before.’ The Feast of Trumpets reminds us that in Babylonia the first