Thrice in the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord GOD, the God of Israel.
Thrice in the year shall all your men-children appear before the Lord God - i:e., in the central place of national worship. While the males faithfully obeyed this injunction; in celebrating the national feasts, the absence of the great mass of the population from their families and homes must have left the country defenseless; but they received from the first a distinct assurance, which Providence made good in their subsequent history, that neither intestine nor foreign enemies disturbed the country at these seasons. God fulfilled His part of the conditions by a periodical miracle for three weeks every year; but the 'Israelites neglected theirs, by allowing numbers of the Canaanite population to remain among them: and so the promise, through their sloth or cowardice, was not fully realized (see the notes at Exodus 23:14-17).