Weiss's standpoint with reference to the Pentateuch is the conservative one, maintaining both its unity and its Mosaic authorship. Those passages and accounts in the Bible in which the modern critic discerns traces of different traditional sources, are for Weiss only indicative of the various stages of interpretation through which the [pg 184] Pentateuch had to pass. The earliest stage was a very crude one, as may be seen from the case of Jephthah's vow, for which only a misinterpretation of certain passages in the Pentateuch (Gen. xxii. 2; Num. xxv. 4) could be made responsible. Nor was Jephthah, who felt himself bound to carry out his vow, acquainted with the provision for dissolving vows[143] that was sufficiently familiar to later ages. When, on the other hand, Jeremiah declared sacrifices to be altogether superfluous, and said that God did not command Israel, when he brought them from the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices (vii. 22), he was not in contradiction with Leviticus, but interpreted the laws contained in this book as a concession to popular custom, though not desirable on their own account. This concession, whenever it was of a harmless nature, the prophets carried so far as to permit altars outside the Tabernacle or Temple, though this was against the plain sense of Deuteronomy. Elijah even bewailed their destruction (1 Kings xix. 10). He and other prophets probably interpreted the law in question as directed against the construction and maintenance of several chief sanctuaries, but not against sacrificing in different places on minor occasions. This is evidently a free interpretation, or rather application, of the Law. Occasionally the conception as to when and how a law should be applied took a completely negative form. In this manner is to be explained the action of Solomon in suspending the Fast of the Day of Atonement before the festival he was going to celebrate in honour of the consecration of the Temple (1 Kings viii. 65), the king being convinced that on this unique occasion the latter was of more religious importance than the former. Weiss [pg 185] thinks that the later custom of holding public dances in the vineyards on the 10th of Tishri might have had its origin in this solemn, but also joyful, festival. Ezekiel, again, though alluding more frequently than any other prophet to the laws in the Pentateuch, is exceedingly bold in his interpretation of them, as, for instance, when he says that priests shall not eat anything that is dead or torn (xliv. 31), which shows that he took the verses in Exod. xxii. 30, and Deut. xiv. 20, to have been meant only as a good advice to the laymen to refrain from eating these unclean things, but not as having for them the force of a real commandment.
Starting from this proposition, that there existed always some sort of interpretation running side by side with the recognised Scriptures, which from the very looseness of its connection with the letter of the Scripture could claim to be considered a thing independent in itself, and might therefore be regarded as the Oral Law, in contradistinction to the Written Law, the author passes to the age of the Second Temple, the period to which the rest of the first volume is devoted. In these pages Weiss reviews the activity of Ezra and Nehemiah, the ordinances of the Men of the Great Synagogue, the institutions of the Scribes, the Lives of the so-called Pairs,[144] the characteristics of the three sects, the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, and the differences between the schools of Shammai and Hillel. To each of these subjects Weiss gives his fullest attention, and his discussions of them would form perfect monographs in themselves. To reproduce all the interesting matter would mean to translate the whole of this portion of his work into English. I shall only draw attention to one or two points.
First, this liberal interpretation was active during the whole period referred to. Otherwise no authority could have abolished the lex talionis, or have permitted war on Sabbath, or made the condition that no crime should be punished without a preceding warning (which was chiefly owing to the aversion of the Rabbis to the infliction of capital punishment), or have sanctioned the sacrificing of the Passover when the 14th of Nisan fell on Sabbath. Indeed Shemaiah and Abtalyon, in whose name Hillel communicated this last law, were called the Great Interpreters.[145]
Secondly, as to the so-called laws given to Moses on Sinai.[146] Much has been said about these. The distinction claimed for them by some scholars, viz. that they were never contested, is not tenable, considering that there prevailed much difference of opinion about some of them. Nor is the theory that they were ancient religious usages, dating from time immemorial, entirely satisfactory. For though the fact may be true in itself, this could not have justified the Rabbis in calling them all Sinaitic laws, especially when they were aware that not a few of them were contested by certain of their colleagues, a thing that would have been quite impossible if they had a genuine claim to Mosaic authority. But if we understand Weiss rightly these laws are only to be considered as a specimen of the whole of the Oral Law, which was believed to emanate, both in its institutional and in its expository part, from the same authority. The conviction was firmly held that everything wise and good, be it ethical or ceremonial in its character, whose effect would be to strengthen the cause of religion, was at least potentially contained in the Torah, and that it only required an earnest religious mind [pg 187] to find it there. Hence the famous adage that “everything which any student will teach at any future time was already communicated to Moses on Mount Sinai”; or the injunction that any acceptable truth, even if discovered by an insignificant man in Israel, should be considered as having the authority of a great sage or prophet, or even of Moses himself. The principle was that the words of the Torah are “fruitful and multiply.”
It will probably be said that the laws of clean and unclean, and such like, have proved rather too prolific; but if we read Weiss carefully, we shall be reminded that it was by the same process of propagation that the Rabbis developed from Deut. xxii. 8, a whole code of sanitary and police-laws which could even now be studied with profit; from the few scanty civil laws in Exod. xxi., a whole corpus juris, which might well excite the interest and the admiration of any lawyer; and from the words “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children,” a complete school-system on the one hand, and on the other the résumé of a liturgy that appears to have sufficed for the spiritual needs of more than fifty generations of Israelites.
Before we pass to the age of the Tannaim,[147] the subject of Weiss's second volume, we must take account of two important events which have greatly influenced the further development of Tradition. I refer to the destruction of the Temple and the rise of Christianity. With the former event Judaism ceased to be a political commonwealth, and if “the nation was already in the times of Ezra converted into a church,”—an assertion, by the way, which has not the least basis in fact,—it became the more so after it had lost the last remains of its independence. But it was a church without priests, or, since such a thing, as far as [pg 188] history teaches us, has never existed, let us rather call it a Synagogue.
From this fact diverse results flowed. A Synagogue can exist not only without priests, but also without sacrifices, for which prayer and charity were a sufficient substitute. With the progress of time also many agricultural laws, as well as others relating to sacerdotal purity, gradually became obsolete, though they lingered on for some generations, and, as a venerable reminiscence of a glorious time, entered largely into Jewish literature. This disappearance of so many laws and the weakening of the national element, however, required, if Judaism was to continue to exist, the strengthening of religion from another side. The first thing needed was the creation of a new religious centre which would not only replace the Temple to a certain degree, but also bring about a greater solidarity of views, such as would render impossible the ancient differences that divided the schools of Hillel and Shammai. The creator of this centre was R. Johanan ben Zaccai, who founded the school of Jamnia, and invested it with the same authority and importance as the Sanhedrin had enjoyed during Temple times. The consciousness that they were standing before a new starting-point in history, with a large religious inheritance from the past, actuated them not only to collect the old traditional laws and to take stock of their religious institutions, but also to give them more definite shape and greater stability. As many of these traditions were by no means undisputed, the best thing was to bring them under one or other heading of the Scriptures. This desire gave the impulse to the famous hermeneutic schools of R. Akiba and R. Ishmael.
The next cause that contributed to give a more determinate [pg 189] expression to the Law was the rise of Christianity. This is not the place to give an account of the views which the Rabbis entertained of Christianity. Suffice it to say they could not see in the destruction of the Law its fulfilment. They also thought that under certain conditions it is not only the letter that killeth, but also the spirit, or rather that the spirit may sometimes be clothed in a letter, which, in its turn, will slay more victims than the letter against which the loudest denunciations have been levelled. Spirit without letter, let theologians say what they will, is a mere phantasm. However, the new sect made claims to the gift of prophecy, which, as they thought, placed them above the Law. It would seem that this was a time of special excitement. The student of the Talmud finds that such marvels as predicting the future, reviving the dead, casting out demons, crossing rivers dry-shod, curing the sick by a touch or prayer, were the order of the day, and performed by scores of Rabbis. Voices from heaven were often heard, and strange visions were frequently beheld. Napoleon I. is said to have forbidden the holy coat of Treves to work miracles. The Jewish legislature, however, had no means of preventing these supernatural workings; but when the Rabbis saw their dangerous consequences, they insisted that miracles should have no influence on the interpretation and development of the Law. Hence the saying with regard to Lev. xxvii. 34, that no prophet is authorised to add a new law. And when R. Eliezer b. Hyrkanos (about 120 a.c.) thought to prove the justice of his case by the intervention of miracles, the majority answered that the fact of this or that variation, effected at his bidding, in the established order of nature, proved nothing for the soundness of his argument. Nay, [pg 190] they even ignored the Bath-Kol[148] (the celestial voice), which declared itself in favour of R. Eliezer, maintaining that the Torah having once been given to mankind, it is only the opinion of the majority that should decide on its interpretation and application. Very characteristic is the legend connected with this fact. When one of the Rabbis afterwards met Elijah and asked him what they thought in heaven of the audacity of his colleagues, the prophet answered, “God rejoiced and said, my children have conquered me.”
Into such discredit did miracles fall at that period, whilst the opinion of the interpreting body, or the Sanhedrin, became more powerful than ever. These were merely dogmatical consequences. But new laws were enacted and old ones revived, with the object of resisting Christian influences over the Jews. To expand the Oral Law, and give it a firm basis in the Scriptures, were considered the best means of preserving Judaism intact. “Moses desired,” an old legend narrates, “that the Mishnah also (that is Tradition) should be written down;” but foreseeing the time when the nations of the world would translate the Torah into Greek, and would assert their title to rank as the Children of God, the Lord refused to permit tradition to be recorded otherwise than by word of mouth. The claim of the Gentiles might then be refuted by asking them whether they were also in possession of “the Mystery.” The Rabbis therefore concentrated their attention upon “the Mystery,” and this contributed largely towards making the expository methods of R. Akiba and R. Ishmael, to which I have above referred, the main object of their study in the schools.
It would, however, be a mistake to think that the Sanhedrin [pg 191] now spent their powers in “enforcing retrograde measures and creating a strange exegesis.” I especially advise the student to read carefully that admirable chapter (VII., of Vol. II.) in which Weiss classifies all the Ordinances, “Fences,” Decrees, and Institutions, dating both from this and from earlier ages, under ten headings, and also shows their underlying principles. The main object was to preserve the Jewish religion by strengthening the principle of Jewish nationality, and to preserve the nationality by the aid of religion. But sometimes the Rabbis also considered it necessary to preserve religion against itself, so to speak, or, as they expressed it, “When there is time to work for the Lord, they make void thy Torah.” This authorised the Beth Din[149] to act in certain cases against the letter of the Torah. “The welfare of the World” was another great consideration. By “World” they understood both the religious and the secular world. From a regard to the former resulted such “Fences” and Ordinances as were directed against “the transgressors,” as well as the general injunction to “keep aloof from what is morally unseemly, and from whatever bears any likeness thereto.” In the interests of the latter—the welfare of the secular world—they enacted such laws as either tended to elevate the position of women, or to promote the peace and welfare of members of their own community, or to improve the relations between Jews and their Gentile neighbours. They also held the great principle that nothing is so injurious to the cause of religion as increasing the number of sinners by needless severity. Hence the introduction of many laws “for the benefit of penitents,” and the maxim not to issue any decree which may prove too heavy a burden to the majority of the community. [pg 192] The relaxation of certain traditional laws was also permitted when they involved a serious loss of property, or the sacrifice of a man's dignity. Some old decrees were even permitted to fall into oblivion when public opinion was too strong against them, the Rabbis holding that it was often better for Israelites to be unconscious sinners than wilful transgressors. The Minhag, or religious custom, also played an important part, it being assumed that it must have been first introduced by some eminent authority; but, if there was reason to believe that the custom owed its origin to some fancy of the populace, and that it had a pernicious effect on the multitude, no compunction was felt in abolishing it.