Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/353

 ference to such a body. The command of God is, "Thou shalt come unto the priests, the Levites, and unto the judge that shall be in those days, and inquire." It is not said to the judges, but to the judge. To these, and not to the Sanhedrin, Moses requires absolute obedience, and that for a just and sufficient reason, because, as we have shown in Number 2, they had the means of obtaining an infallible answer by means of the Urim and Thummim. It was the privilege of Israel to be able to ask counsel immediately of God; and it was therefore only rational to expect unconditional obedience to the command of the Almighty. Such decisions were absolutely unchangeable as God himself, for "He is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent;" and no man in his senses would have thought of getting a sentence of this kind reversed. These words can therefore by no means apply to a tribunal fallible in judgment, and as changeable in its opinions as in the persons of which it was composed: but if this passage does not apply, there is no other in the Bible which requires us to receive the decision of the Sanhedrin as of divine authority, nor in the oral law either, for it supposes that this council was capable of mistake. Consequently, the Sanhedrin's approval of the new order and new religion of the rabbies is of no weight whatever. The Bible does not command us to believe that they were always in the right; and they themselves tell us that they might be in the wrong, and therefore might be in the wrong in their approval of the rabbies.

But the truth is, that neither the Bible nor history gives us any warrant whatever for regarding the Sanhedrin as a Mosaic institution. In the first place, it is never once mentioned either in the Law or in the Prophets. The word Sanhedrin is Greek, and so far as it goes would lead us to suppose that this tribunal was not instituted until some time after the building of the second temple, and after the Greek occupation of the land, when the Jews had become acquainted with the Greek language. This Greek word would lead us even to suppose that the Sanhedrin was instituted by the Greek rulers, and that they gave the tribunal its name. If it had been an old Mosaic institution, the Jews themselves, who hated the Greeks, and that with good reason, would never have given it a Greek name: and even if the Greeks had assigned this name to a Jewish tribunal, which had previously existed, the Jews would not have adopted it. It is true that there is also a Hebrew name for this tribunal, , "The great house of judgment," but if this had been the original name, it is not at all likely that the Greek name would have supplanted it; whereas if it was a Greek institution, and therefore had a Greek name, it is not to be wondered at that that name should have obtained general currency, or that it should also be translated into Hebrew. The Hebrew