ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 163 
individual holding of land, or point more conclusively to a 
collective holding, a holding in common by family groups. 
If each man was to have received his own inalienable posses- 
sion in a certain tract of ground it would have been said * to 
every man thou shalt give his own inheritance.” Instead of 
this we have, as it is literally in the Hebrew, “‘ to many thou 
shalt give his inheritance much, and to few thou shalt give 
his inheritance little”’ The “his” here clearly refers to the 
“family ” in Numbers xxxiii. 54, and probably in Numbers 
xxvi. 54. The full meaning is “ to many thou shalt give their 
family inheritance much, and to few thou shalt give their 
family inheritance little.” This, the only rule laid down for 
the distribution of the land, overlooks the individual alto- 
gether, and has regard to the tribe or clan only, and to its 
component part the sept, or gens, the agnatic group of kins- 
men made up of various related families under a patriarchal 
head. Each head of a house doubtless received his own 
original portion of land, more or less considerable according 
to the number of his descendants and followers. These, 
however, were probably very numerous in most cases, and 
must have become still more so as time went on and the 
family increased with each new generation. There is every 
reason to believe, in view of the genius of the East, where 
the strength of family ties and patriarchal rule forms so strong 
a bond, that these numerous related groups settled each in 
their own village, and held a kind of joint possession of all 
the lands belonging to the family which lay around it, pre- 
cisely as the villagers of Palestine do now. Indeed, all the 
allusions in Scripture look this way. The main features of 
the occupancy of real property amongst Israel are, in all pro- 
bability, preserved in the present practice of holdmg im 
mushaa’, or “common,” amongst the modern fellahheen. | It is 
extremely interesting, especially at a time when the subject 
of the tenure of land is so much in the thoughts of men, thus 
to be able to realise, from the primitive custom existing at 
the present day, the manner in which Boaz, Jesse, Barzillai, 
and the other farmers we read of in the Bible, must have 
held and cultivated the soil in the days of old. 
Nor was this joint tenure of land, with its curious acces- 
sories, merely a Jewish custom. We have many hints that 
it prevailed throughout the East long before Israel existed 
as a separate nation, or came into possession of Palestine. 
When Abraham sought to purchase the field of Macpelah, he 
first approached the community, “the sons of Heth,” that is, 
‘the people of Heth,” who held Hebron and the land round 
