ISRAEL. 
13 
agency, and tlie general influence of human weakness and wisdom. But the first legislative 
act of Joshua was altogether supernatural. It was the division of Palestine among 
the people. 
This event has had no example in human annals. In the ages of heathen conquest, and 
still later, in the feudal era, there have been arbitrary allotments of territory, on condition 
of service; but none bear a comparison with the great Jewish division, in its extent, its 
personal advantages, and its national security. By the Divine command, Palestine was 
divided into twelve provinces, one for each tribe, and the partition reached downward, until 
every family was provided for; and this provision was not merely for life, but for ever. 
Debt, which formed the misery of the lower classes in heathenism, and, in its heavier 
pressure, sank them into hopeless slavery, could weigh down no man in Palestine; every 
seven years brought a full discharge of the debtor, and a full release of the bondsman. 
The alienation of estates, which in later ages embitters life, and extinguishes families, could 
not take place in Israel; for at the end of every fifty years, on the proclamation of 
the jubilee, all estates reverted to their original owners. The most ample and studied 
preparation was made for passing existence in rational, healthful, and elevated enjoyments. 
The national occupation was wholly in the garden and the field; all Judea was one vast 
scene of agriculture; man was not self-condemned to darkness, exhaustion, and disease, in 
those wasting and melancholy labours, which later necessities inflict on him in the 
manufactory and the mine. The man of Israel was a free, cheerful, and vigorous being; 
a proprietor of the land which he cultivated; retaining it by a title which no human 
power could enfeeble; sitting under the forest and the fruit tree which he had planted 
with his own hands, and secure of transmitting his innocent and lovely wealth to 
his remotest posterity. His soil luxuriant, his climate the finest in the world, his 
country divinely shielded from foreign force and domestic convulsion; what could add 
to the substantial happiness of this favourite of Heaven ? 
But, independently of the enjoyments which every man might find for himself 
in the animation and the abundance of pastoral life; the year was a succession of great 
festivals, some solemn and magnificent, some cheering and graceful, and all interesting 
from their variety, their beauty, and their vivid connexion with the memory of their 
forefathers. Of the three chief celebrations, the Passover, the Pentecost, and the 
Feast of Tabernacles, each was fixed at the gathering of a peculiar harvest,— the 
barley, the wheat, and the vine,— seasons in all lands instinctively devoted to enjoyment. 
Besides those, they had the Feast of Trumpets and the Feast of Expiation. But this 
principle of relieving the mind of the nation from the possible monotony of a merely rural 
life, and fixing it on higher things, was still more powerfully sustained in one great 
institution, at once more immediate, and extending over a larger space of national 
existence — the SABBATH, constantly recurring, occupying the seventh part of the 
life of every man, and given declaredly to recur till the end of time, and as the 
perpetual pledge of a still more illustrious Rest. The impression was reiterated: 
every seven years witnessed another sabbath of a year, when not only the labourer 
and his beast of burthen rested, but the land itself was free from toil; an ordinance 
which demanded a stupendous miracle, and which, by the produce of a triple crop 
in the sixth year, showed that Jehovah was still the father of his people. 
