Verse 12. "On the fifteenth day of the seventh month" - On this day there was to be a solemn assembly, and for seven days sacrifices were to be offered; on the first day thirteen young bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs. On each succeeding day one bullock less, till on the seventh day there were only seven, making in all seventy. What an expensive service! How should we magnify God for being delivered from it! Yet these were all the taxes they had to pay. At the public charge there were annually offered to God, independently of trespass-offerings and voluntary vows, fifteen goats, twenty-one kids, seventy-two rams, one hundred and thirty-two bullocks, and eleven hundred and one lambs! But how little is all this when compared with the lambs slain every year at the passover, which amounted in one year to the immense number of 255, 600 slain in the temple itself, which was the answer that Cestius, the Roman general, received when he asked the priests how many persons had come to Jerusalem at their annual festivals; the priests, numbering the people by the lambs that had been slain, said, "twenty-five myriads, five thousand and six hundred."-For an account of the feast of tabernacles, see on "Lev. xxiii. 34".
Verse 35. "On the eighth day ye shall have a solemn assembly" - This among the Jews was esteemed the chief or high day of the feast, though fewer sacrifices were offered on it than on the others; the people seem to have finished the solemnity with a greater measure of spiritual devotion, and it was on this day of the feast that our blessed Lord called the Jews from the letter to the spirit of the law, proposing himself as the sole fountain whence they could derive the streams of salvation, John vii. 37. On the subject of this chapter see the notes on Leviticus 12., 16. and 23.
