Besides various additions in the Service, and the substitution of one paragraph concerning Sabbath or Festival for the thirteen middle paragraphs of the Amidah, there is another Service inserted between the Morning and the Afternoon Services; it is called Musaph, “the Additional Service,” and corresponds to the additional offering ordained for Sabbath and Festival (Num. xxviii. 9, sqq.). An essential element in the Morning Service is the Reading from the Torah (‏קריאת התורה‎) and the Prophets (‏הפטרה‎). A periodical public reading from the Law was enjoined in the following words: “At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men and women and children, and the stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law; and that their children, which have not known anything, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God” (Deut. xxxi. 10–13). A seven years’ interval would surely have destroyed the impression produced by the reading. The reading was probably repeated throughout the country at shorter intervals. Tradition ascribes to Moses the institution of reading the Law every Sabbath, Monday, and Thursday morning, in order that three days might never pass without Torah. Ezra is said to have added the reading on Sabbath afternoon, and to have made various other regulations with regard to the reading of the Law. Quantity and manner of reading were at first, no doubt, variable. In the course of time certain systems found favour and became the fixed rule. Some completed the reading of the whole Pentateuch in three years, others in one year. The former mode was gradually displaced by the latter, and the attempts which have lately been made to revive it have not succeeded. Traces of the triennial reading may be noticed in the number of sedarim contained in the five books of the Pentateuch. At present, however, the annual course is followed in almost all our Synagogues. The section read on one Sabbath is called sidra; the first, ‏בראשית‎, is read the first Sabbath after the Feast of Tabernacles, and the last sidra is read on Simchath-torah (the 23rd of Tishri). For the Festivals such sections were selected as contained either direct or indirect reference to the Festivals. If these happen to be on a Sabbath, the ordinary reading is interrupted, and that of the Festivals substituted for it.