It is still an accepted opinion of biblical scholarship that the regulation governing the offering of half a shekel in Exodus 30:11–16 belongs to one of the late trends of the Priestly Code. This text in Exodus, which enjoins upon the people of Israel the offering of half a shekel for the service of the tent of meeting in the desert, is thought also to reflect the conditions of the early Second Commonwealth, when an annual tax of half a shekel was collected for the maintenance of the sanctuary.

In the history of Western Christianity — and hence, to a large extent, in the history of Western culture — the Apostle Paul has been hailed as a hero of the introspective conscience. Here was the man who grappled with the problem “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do …” (Rom. 7:19). His insights as to a solution of this dilemma have recently been more or less identified, for example, with what Jung referred to as the Individuation Process; but this is only a contemporary twist to the traditional Western way of reading the Pauline letters as documents of human consciousness.

Americans in “search” of the “goals,” “prospects,” and “purpose” of the United States share an interest in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This was the age of the democratic revolution in Western civilization which produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, those primary and permanent legacies paramount to our national existence. Although remote in time this period is the common experience of Americans because our lives are still regulated by the political instruments it produced.

One spring in the latter half of the month Adar, some time after the death of Salome Alexandra (76–67 B.C.), “there was a certain Onias, who, being a righteous man and dear to God, … in a rainless period prayed to God (ηὔξατο τῷ Θεῷ) to end the drought, and God … heard his prayer and sent rain …” The story of Honi (Onias), so plainly told by Josephus, is reported much more dramatically in the talmudic sources. According to one source, the drought had lasted three years.