oclaimed, was eminently practical and for practical men.
The period of pedantry, of hair-splitting, of slavery to mere
technicalities, came very late in Jewish history.

It is clear from what has been already said in the chapter on the year,
that the only calendar year in the Old Testament was the sacred one,
beginning with the month Abib or Nisan, in the spring. At the same time
the Jews, like ourselves, would occasionally refer vaguely to the
beginning, or the end, or the course of the year, without meaning to set
up any hard and fast connection with the authorized calendar.

Now it is perfectly clear that the sabbatic year cannot have begun with
the first day of the month Abib, because the first fruits were offered
on the fifteenth of that month. That being so, the ploughing and the
sowing must have taken place very considerably earlier. It is not
possible to suppose that the Hebrew farmer would plough and sow his land
in the last months of the previous year, knowing that he could not reap
during the sabbatic year.

Similarly, it seems hardly likely that it was considered as beginning
with the first of Tishri, inasmuch as the harvest festival, the Feast of
the Ingathering, or Tabernacles, took place in the middle of that month.
The plain and practical explanation is that, after the Feast of
Tabernacles of the sixth year, the farmer would not again plough, sow,
or reap his land until after the Feast of Tabernacles in the sabbatic
year. The sabbatic year, in other words, was a simple agricultural year,
and it did not correspond exactly with the ecclesiastical or with any
calendar year.

For practical purposes the sabbatic year therefore ended with the close
of the Feast of Tabernacles, when the Law was read before the whole
people according to the command of Moses; and it practically began a
year earlier.

The year of Jubilee appears in the directions of Lev. xxv. to have been
most distinctly linked to the sabbatic year.

"The space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee
forty and nine years, . . . and ye shall hallow the fiftieth
year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a Jubile unto you."

It would seem, therefore, that just as the week of days ran on
continuously, uninterrupted by any feasts or fasts, so the week of years
ran on continuously. And as the Feast of Pentecost was the 49th day from
the offering of the first-fru