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The influence of Roman law may have suggested the arranging and digesting of the Mosaic Code, as well as several of his variations from the letter of the Bible. A few of his interpretations are noteworthy as comprising either Palestinian or Hellenistic tradition. A late passage in the Talmud, on the other hand, says that all abuse is forbidden save of idolatry.
At the time when our Lord was on the earth, the sacred writings of the Jews were collected in two different forms. The Palestinian collection, so called, was written in the Hebrew language, and the Alexandrian collection, called the Septuagint, in the Greek.
But during all these ages the Palestinian Jews and their successors in other lands were preserving their own Scriptures; it was they who added at a late day probably as late as the sixth century the vowel points, which were invented in Syria; and when, at length, under the impulse of Biblical study which led to the Reformation, Christian scholars began to think of going back to the original Hebrew, they were obliged to obtain from the Jews the copies which they studied.
The Maccabæan rule brought not only a renaissance of national life and national culture, but also a revival of the national religion. Before, however, the deliverance of the Jews had been accomplished by the noble band of brothers, many of the faithful Palestinian families had fled for protection from the tyranny of Antiochus to the refuge of his enemy Ptolemy Philometor.
It was clearly the man's duty to face the music. Not that Barstein expected anything but the music of the Wedding March. He was glad that his original contempt for Sir Asher had been exchanged for sincere respect, and that the bluff Briton was a mere veneer. It was to the Palestinian patriarch that he would pour out his hopes and his dreams.
In this level Babylon, he is homesick for the dear old Palestinian hills, and he is heartsick over the plight of his people. He has been studying Jeremiah's prophecies, and finds there the promise plainly made that after seventy years these exiled Hebrews are to be allowed to return. Go back again! The thought of it quickens his pulse-beats. He does some quick counting. The time will soon be up.
By this time Golda was sufficiently cheered up to meditate her annual theft of the Afkuman, that segment of Passover cake under Aaron's pillow, morsels of which, distributed to each as the final food to be tasted that night, replaced the final mouthful of the Paschal Lamb in the ancient Palestinian meal. But Elijah's goblet stood in the centre of the table untasted.
When our Lord was on earth, the Hebrew was a dead language; it may have been the language of the temple, as Latin is now the language of the Roman Catholic mass; but the common people did not understand it; the vernacular of the Palestinian Jews was the Aramaic, a language similar to the Hebrew, sometimes called the later Hebrew, and having some such relation to it as the English has to the German tongue.
The Palestinian rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory, and legend.
Born in an atmosphere of power and affluence, Philo, who might have consorted with princes, devoted himself from the first with all his soul to a life of contemplation; like a Palestinian rabbi he regarded as man's highest duty the study of the law and the knowledge of God.
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