The institution of sanctuary, for persons guilty of a criminal or questionable act, was thus turned to the best account for the ends of public justice. He who, having stained his hands with blood, had sought the protection of a "city of refuge," had by no means placed himself in a situation to defy the Law. He was only safe there until he could be brought to "stand before the congregation in judgment." Should circumstances (the principles for estimating which, are described in some detail,) then be found to indicate that the assault had been malicious, he was brought out to abide the vengeance of him to whom his life became forfeit. Should it prove that the fatal blow had been only accidental, that sentence declared his life inviolable, provided he continued to claim the protection offered, till the high-priest should die; the Law aiming to enforce a salutary caution against all occasions of fatal accident, by subjecting even the unintentional destroyer of life to the serious inconvenience of a long separation from his home. The last regulation recorded in this book, is consequent upon one, of which we read a few chapters further back.* The effect of the law, that, when there were no sons, daughters might inherit land, would have been, that, if they married into another tribe, the territorial possession of their own would have been transferred to that into which they were adopted. Solicitous about such a result, the heads of the tribe, to which those females belonged, at whose solicitation the previous rule had been arranged, represented the inconvenience, which would follow, to Moses, who was directed to provide against it by ordaining,† that heiresses should not tection, there might always be one within convenient distance.—With 30, compare Deut. xvii. 6, and see my remarks thereupon. * Numb. xxvii. 1-11. xxxvi. 1-13. "And when the jubilee of the children of Israel marry out of their own tribe. In reading of such successive provisions, the later originating and grounded in the earlier, one sees strong reason to allow, that they were recorded by one, who witnessed their successive enactment, as the occasions, that led to them, successively arose. shall be" &c. (4); that is, even when a jubilee shall arrive, still their estate will continue to belong to another tribe; even then it will not revert to the tribe, of whose district it was originally designed to be a part. By the Attic law, a female under the circumstances here defined, had the same rights and obligations. See Passow's and Stephanus' Lexicons, Art. ἐπίκληρος. "These are the commandments . . . . . which the Lord commanded. . . . . in the plains of Moab" &c. (xxxvi. 13); that is, as he had commanded others, thirty-eight years before, by Sinai. Compare Lev. xxvii. 34. LECTURE XVIII. DEUTERONOMY I. 1. - XI. 31. OCCASION AND DESIGN OF THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY.-ITS Au- AND ESPECIALLY TO ABSTAIN FROM - OF A YEAR before the time came for invading Canaan, Moses had been informed, that he was not to be permitted to remain at the nation's head, when they should take possession of that country.* Of the reasons for his being apprized of that fact so long beforehand, it is natural to suppose that this was one; That he might have opportunity to make deliberately and fully, before his death, such arrangements for the people as remained unmade, and such communications and representations to them as would be for their advantage after his departure, and would impress their minds all the more profoundly, on account of the circumstances under which they would remember them to have been delivered. I understand him, accordingly, to have partly employed himself, during this interval, in preparing what was to * Numb. xx. 1, 12. be to them his last legacy of instruction and counsel; and that the result of these cares of his has been transmitted to us in his book now known by the name of Deuteronomy. It divides itself into three parts, each of which I shall make the subject of a Lecture. Whether the first of these, which is chiefly, and the third, which is in great part, of a hortatory character, were committed to writing before or after their oral delivery, I think we are unable confidently to decide. That the second, which contains a promulgation and revision of various laws, was prepared beforehand, and communicated as a written composition, appears to be a reasonable inference from the nature of its subject matter. One, who has seen reason to conclude, that the preceding books were the work of Moses, will scarcely hesitate to refer this, with an equal degree of confidence, to the same origin. Without the conclusion, which this book presents, the history begun and prosecuted in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, is left incomplete; and, on the other hand, regarded in any other light than as a sequel to those books, Deuteronomy is nothing else but a disconnected, immethodical (I might almost say, unmeaning) fragment. What pervading difference of style, between the books respectively, is observable, is precisely that which ought to be looked for, upon the supposition of their common origin. The one being professedly a set historical composition, the other professedly a spoken address, we ought (if the received theory be correct) to find (what we actually do find) the former to be characterized by the comparatively dry manner of an annalist, the latter by the more full and earnest style of oral discourse; and whatever degree of copiousness and repetition remains unexplained by this consideration, was naturally incident to the advanced age which the speaker is represented to have reached. Events, recorded in full in the previous books, are referred to in this, cursorily and briefly, in a way which would be natural for one who had made the previous record, but by no means equally so for any other writer; and the whole matter, form, and tone of the address are such as undoubtedly have a perfect suitableness to the office, the temper, and the present position of Moses, as exhibited in the previous books, a suitableness such as it is very difficult to represent to ourselves as the result of any artifice of imitation.* * See my notes on pp. 75-77, for proof that Deuteronomy, as well as the preceding parts of the Pentateuch, is referred to, in the later books, under the names of "the Law," "the book of Moses," &c. Compare Josh. viii. 30-32, with Deut. xxvii. 1-6; 2 Kings xiv. 6, and 2 Chron. xxv. 4, with Deut. xxiv. 16; Nehemiah xiii. 1, with Deut. xxiii. 3. — That at the Christian era the quinpartite arrangement of the composition ascribed to Moses, already existed, (though in another point of view it was considered as only one, the New Testament habitually calling it "the Law,") may be seen in the extract from Josephus given above, p. 25, note †. The same two-fold view is presented in the Jewish name 'wpan pn, the Five Fifths of the Law. See Buxtorf's "Lex. Chald. and Rab." Art. pin. So the Rabbins say, that the Law formerly made but one word, or one verse, (Eichhorn, "Einleitung in das A. T.” I. 174,) indicating the original undivided sequence of the matter, which is now laid off into the chapters and verses of the five books. But how ancient these forms of expression are, it must be owned, that we do not know. In a careful examination of the arguments against the common origin of Deuteronomy and the preceding books, as they are urged by De Wette, Bertholdt, and Vater, I have been unable to find any thing which strikes me as weighty. The most plausible is, I think, that which is founded on a few different expressions, used, in the same connexion, in the books respectively. And of these, that which appears to me the most specious, is that which Vater first presents, (" Abhandlung über Moses und die Verfasser des Pentateuchs, § 40,) the use of the name Horeb, in Deuteronomy, for the mountain where the Law was promulgated, which, in the earlier books, is called Sinai. But Horeb also occurs in Exodus (iii. 1; xvii. 6; xxxiii. 6), and Sinai, on the other hand, in Deuteronomy (xxxiii. 2); and, if it were not so, the inquiry might be made, whether there is any thing extraordinary in a person's employing one name of a place in one part of a composition, or at one period of his life (for it is very probable, that nearly forty years elapsed between the writing of Exodus and |