antecedent works: wherefore, no one can have the least doubt of its being the oldest book now possessed by the western nations.”[I-4] The descendants of our first parents--and, first of all, the Hebrew people, who, as a nation historically considered, must occupy our foremost attention--devoted all their energy to agricultural labour. The chief of the tribe of Judah as well as the youngest son of the tribe of Benjamin followed the plough, and gathered corn in the fields. Gideon was thrashing and winnowing his corn, when an angel revealed to him that he should be the deliverer of Israel;[I-5] Ruth was gleaning when Boaz saw her for the first time;[I-6] King Saul was driving his team of oxen in the ploughed field, when some of his court came and apprized him that the city of Jabesh was in danger;[I-7] and Elisha was called away to prophesy while at work with one of his father’s ploughs.[I-8] We could multiply these incidents without end, to prove what extraordinary interest the Jews took in agricultural occupations. Moses regarded agriculture as the first of all arts, and he enjoined the Hebrews to apply themselves to it in preference to any other: it was to the free and pure air of the fields, to the strengthening, healthy, and laborious country life, that he called their first attention. The sages of Greece and Rome held the same opinion: in those republics the tradesman was but an obscure individual, while the tiller of the soil was considered as a distinguished citizen. The urban tribes yielded precedence to the rustics, and this latter class supplied the nation with its generals and its magistrates.[I-9] Our present ideas on this point have materially changed with the times, and our modern Cincinnati very seldom return to the field to terminate the furrow they have commenced. The Israelites did not possess this excessive delicacy: they preserved the taste for agriculture with which their great legislator, Moses, had inspired them, and which the distribution of land naturally tended to strengthen. No one, in fact, was allowed to possess enough ground to tempt him to neglect the smallest portion; nor had any one the right to dispossess the Hebrew of his father’s field,--even he himself was forbidden to alienate for ever land from his family.[I-10] This wise disposition did not escape the notice of an ancient heathen author,[I-11] and various states of Greece adopted the same plan; amongst others, the Locrians, Athenians, and Spartans, who did not allow their fathers’ inheritance to be sold.[I-12]