Such fables are used in the Talmud to point religious or even political morals, very much as the parables were. The fable, however, took a lower flight than the parable, and its moral was based on expediency, rather than on the highest ethical ideals. The importance of the Talmudic fables is historical more than literary or religious. Hebrew fables supply one of the links connecting the popular literature of the East with that of the West. But they hardly belong in the true sense to Jewish literature. Parables, on the other hand, were an essential and characteristic branch of that literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Midrash.
Schiller-Szinessy.—Encycl. Brit., Vol. XVI, p. 285.
Graetz.—II, p. 328 [331] seq.
Steinschneider.—Jewish Literature, pp. 5 seq., 36 seq.
L.N. Dembitz.—Jewish Services in Synagogue and Home (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1898), p. 44.
Fables.
J. Jacobs.—The Fables of Æsop (London, 1889), I, p. 110 seq.