afterwards in the town life of Athens and Rome, had been broken up and the spirit of self-interest and personal responsibility had been developed. No doubt the Hebrew village communities still remained as the social organisation of the ʾam-hââretz, or "common folk of the land." But, just as the village communities in India became subordinated to the Bráhmans, so the Hebrew clansmen seem to have sunk perhaps even into serfdom under the rule of their priests and nobles.
But, though communal ideas might have lost something of prestige by thus becoming the peculiar property of impoverished if not degraded freemen, they remained the great ideals of Hebrew thought; and side by side with Ezekiel's priestly and aristocratic individualism we have clear signs of this old Hebrew social spirit. If in his utterances personal responsibility is, as we have seen, stated with startling distinctness such as no earlier nâbî approximates, in none also can we find the same social conception of national unity under the figure of an ideal clan communion. As in days of Spartan decline the idea of a fresh distribution of lands became a kind of echo from old Doric communal life, so does the mind of Ezekiel recur to the primitive allotments and village communes of early Hebrew life. Even in this return, however, there is a mark of the cosmopolitan spirit which the associations of Babylon were stirring in the Hebrew soul; the "stranger" is also to have his lot among the clansmen of the chosen people. "So you shall divide this land into lots for you, for the tribes of Yisrâêl; and it shall be that you shall allot it by portion to yourselves and to the resident strangers (gêrim) among you, who have begotten children among you, and they shall be for you as native among the sons of Yisrâêl. … And it shall be that in the tribe where the stranger resides you
