upon whom the lot fell to be senators; for the session-house of
the Sanhedrim was first in the court of the tabernacle, and
afterward in that of the Temple, where it came to be called the
stone chamber or pavement. If this were the ballot of Israel,
that of Venice is the same transposed; for in Venice the
competitor is chosen as it were by the lot, in regard that the
electors are so made, and the magistrate is chosen by the
"suffrage of the great Council or assembly of the people." But
the Sanhedrim of Israel being thus constituted, Moses, for his
time, and after him his successor sat in the midst of it as
prince or archon, and at his left hand the orator or father of
the Senate; the rest, or the bench, coming round with either horn
like a crescent, had a scribe attending upon the tip of it.
This Senate, in regard the legislator of Israel was
infallible, and the laws given by God such as were not fit to be
altered by men, is much different in the exercise of their power
from all other senates, except that of the Areopagus in Athens,
which also was little more than a supreme judicatory, for it will
hardly, as I conceive, be found that the Sanhedrim proposed to
the people till the return of the children of Israel out of
captivity under Esdras, at which time there was a new law made --
namely, for a kind of excommunication, or rather banishment,
which had never been before in Israel. Nevertheless it is not to
be thought that the Sanhedrim had not always that right, which
from the time of Esdras is more frequently exercised, of
proposing to the people, but that they forebore it in regard of
the fulness and infallibility of the law already made, whereby it
was needless. Wherefore the function of this Council, which is
very rare in a senate, was executive, and consisted in the
administration of the law made; and whereas the Council itself is
often understood in Scripture by the priest and the Levite, there
is no more in that save only that the priests and the Levites,
who otherwise had no power at all, being in the younger years of
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