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 RABBI

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RABBI

priests; but in time a large body of lay teachers came to swell the ranks of the scribes. As gradually the spell of Hellenistic fashions fell upon the priesthood, the lay scribes found themselves more and more the only guardians and exponents of the Law. When t he Pharisees began to be recognized as a distinct sect (about 150 B. c.) the scribes as a rule adhered to them as being the most scrupulous observers of the Law (yet Mark, ii, 16; Luke, v, 30, and Acts, xxiii, 9, seem to imply that some scribes belonged to the party of the Sadducees). At any rate, from that time "on- wards the scribes were accepted as the accredited teachers of the people. Until the fall of Jerusalem they were chiefly congregated in Judea; but in later times we hear of their presence in Northern Palestine, even in Rome, and in every important centre of the Dispersion.

From the earliest times the scribes seem to have conceived an exalted opinion of their merits: "The wisdom [knowledge] of the scribe comet h bv his time of leisure: and he that is less in action [less steeped in business] shall receive wisdom. \\'ith what wis- dom shall he be furnished [what knowledge can he acquire] that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth the oxen therewith, and is occupied in their labours, and his whole talk is about the offspring of bulls?" (thus Hebrew; Ecclus., xxx\'iii, 25, 26). Evidently the scribe in his own estimation belonged to a higher caste. And so it was under- stood by the people who, after the time of Hillel, in- troduced the custom of saluting them "Rabbi". The w-ord, derived from the Hebrew Rab, "great", originally seems to have been equivalent to "my lord"; when it became the distinctive title of the scribes the specific force of its pronoun was lost, and "Rabbi" was used very much like our "Doctor". That this title was far from unpleasant in the ears of the scribes we know from Matt., xxiii, 7. In point of fact a pupil never would omit it when speaking to or of his teacher (Berach., .\.wii, 1), and it became a universal usage never to mention the name of a doctor of the Law without prefixing "Rabbi". Nay more, in order to show the person greater honour, this title was intensified into "Rabban", "Rabboni", so that in the course of time custom established a kind of hierarchy among these various forms: "Rabbi", the doctors said, "is more than Rab, Rabban more than Rabbi, and the proper name more than Rabban." The latter part of this traditional regulation has particularly in view the two great Doctors Hillel and Shammai, always designated by their unqualified proper names; the successors of Hillel, as Gamaliel, were titled Rabban, and so also was by exception Johanan ben Zakkai; Palestinian doctors are commonly known as Rabbi So-and-so, yet Rabbi Judas the Saint, who composed the Mishna, is not infrequently called merely Rabbi {par ex- cellence); in the same manner, Rab, without the propername, designates Abba Arika(d. A. D. 247), the founder of the School of Sora, while Rab is the title prefixed to the names of the Amoras of Babylon.

The Law, of course, must be the exclusive study of a Rabbi, as it is the one source of religious knowledge, the perfect embodiment of the will of God, and the people's sole binding rule of daily life. But the Law does not cover exijlicitly every possible ease; yet, as it is a Divinely-given Law, it must, in the mind of the leajned Rabbi, participate in the infinitude of the Divine Lawgiver; therefore, not only the sentences but the individual words, even the number of letters, nay more, the "jots and tittles", must convey amean- ing, since God willed every one of them, and since in all that He does He acts for a reason: thus does the Law apply itself to all possible occurrences. Hence arose in the schools tliat immense mass of inferential teaching deduced from the written word according to tiie rules of a special process of reasoning, handed

down for generations in the esoteric teaching of the faithful scribes as the official interpretation of the Law, and finally committed to writing, particularly in the Mishntis and Talmuds. Under this parasitic vegetation of traditional teaching the Law- itself came gradually almost to be entirely lost sight of and stifled; yet every word designating the tradition was calculated to reniind the Rabbi of the connexion of this tradi- tion with the Law. Mishna moans "repetition of the Law": its sources were the sayings of the Tannaite or "repeating" doctors; a baraitha is a saying of some early doctor not included in the Mishna; the barai- thoth are gathered either into the Tosephta (addition) or in the Ghemara (complement), the Mishna and the Ghemara coastituting the Talmud or "teaching" (of the Law). This teaching is either halaka (way) or "customary law", or agada, "information", given by or about the Law. The Law is therefore under- stood to be at the root of every tradition, even when, in practice, tradition as good as makes void the letter of the Law (Matt., xv, 1-6; Mark, vii, 8-13); nay more, we hear of Ra,bbis pretending to prove by the Law itself (Ex., xxxiv, 37) that oral traditions should be preferred to the wTitten word (Megill., iv, 74d; cf. Sanhedr., xi, 3). This exaggerated authority these oral traditions obtained on account of the origin at- tributed to them. They generally purported to have been handed down from Esdras, who received them by Divine inspiration as esoteric wisdom to be imparted to the initiated disciples. Some claimed for them a still higher antiquity, going back to Moses himself (thus at least is usually understood the open- ing sentence of the "Pirqe Abhoth"; cf. "Peah", tr. Schwab, ii, 37), even in part to the twelve Patriarchs, Enoch, and Adam. This voluminous body of exeget- ical traditions, the logical system according to which inferences are drawn and the theological conceptions upon which this whole oral teaching is grounded, are commonly designated as a whole by the name of Rabbinism. What has been said above of its theo- logical basis may suffice to show the two radical errors which lie at the bottom of it : infinity of the Scriptures, and necessity of interpreting them in every detail in accordance with that severe precision which alone is worthy of Ciod.

A few words on the principles of Rabbinical logic may not be useless to help form a judgment of the whole system. The traditional exegesis was of two kinds. The one, the Halaka, was legal and casuistic: the Halaka it was that so "fenced about the Law" as to render it impossible; the other, the Hagada, was illustrative and practical, embracing innumerable legends and allegories intended to illustrate and en- large Biblical history, but in reality obscuring it in a maze of idle and fanciful inventions. Hillel is credited with having codified the rules of the Halaka; his orig- inal seven rules were later on enlarged to thirteen by R. Israel. Some of these rules are excellent, as when, for instance, it is stated that the meaning of a word is determined by the context, and the sentence by the scope of the passage (rule 12); others, good in them- selves, do not sufficiently take into account the vast differences of times which separate the inspired writers and the dissimilar religious and social conditions which prevailed at different periods; others, finally, are the expression of a somewhat fallacious mode of reasoning. As a whole the Halaka is an artificial sj-stem, jaundiced by its evident purpose to offer the means of engrafting the tradition on the stem of Scripture (Mielziner). The Hagada method, still more extravagant, was elaborated by R. EHezer into thirty-two rules, on which it is useless to dwell at any length.

From the Halaka and Hagada were subsequentlj- de- rived the Peshat. or determination of the literal sense, and the Sodh,oT determination of the mystical or alle- gorical sense. The Peshat, used in ancient times only