United States or Kyrgyzstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
With the rabbis Philo holds that the Torah was written "in the language of the sons of man," but he believes with them again that it contains all wisdom. And if the ideas of reason do not appear in its literal meaning, then they must be searched out in some inner interpretation.
Then follow queries and answers of the rabbis on this subject: then historical accounts of the Jews: then the fifteen acts of the goodness of God to the Jewish nation, which they make out thus: He led the Jews out of Egypt: he punished the Egyptians: he executed judgment on their gods: he slew their first-born: he gave the Jews wealth: he divided the sea for them: he made them pass through it as on dry land: he drowned the Egyptians in the same: he gave food to the Jews for forty years in the wilderness; he fed them with manna: he gave them the sabbath: he brought them to Mount Sinai: he gave them the law: he brought them to the Laud of Promise: he built the Temple.
An embassy was sent to lay their case before him, and Philo went to Italy at the head of the embassy. "He who is learned, gentle, and modest, and who is beloved of men, he shall be leader in the city." So said one of the rabbis of old, and the maxim is especially appropriate to Philo, who in name and deed was "beloved of men."
This intensely practical work could profitably be preceded or followed by a study of the origin and growth of the different books and groups of Old Testament writings and the gradual stages whereby these Scriptures attained their present form and authority. The guides in this investigation should not be the Jewish rabbis or even the traditions of the Church Fathers.
Dread rumours came of a younger generation that craved almost openly for organs in the synagogue and women's voices in the choir, nay, of even more flagitious spirits devotional dynamitards whose dream was a service all English, that could be understood instead of chanted! Dark mutterings against the ancient Rabbis were in the very air of these wealthier quarters of London.
"Both," he retorted, looking back lingeringly. "I understand now what you mean by pious literature," I said mischievously: "the Song of Solomon." He turned on me with strange earnestness, as if not perceiving my irony. "Ay, indeed," he cried; "but when the Rabbis do read it, they turn it into a bloodless allegory, Jewish demons as they are!
Here, as well as in the articles following it, he does not depart from established tradition. In the very name of the spirit of the Talmud, he demands religious reforms and the abolition of the restrictions that make daily life burdensome. These excessive requirements, he urges, were heaped up by the Rabbis subsequent to the full development of the Law, and in opposition to its spirit.
They thought that because they had been born Jews, and circumcised, and because there was a daily sacrifice going on in the Temple, and because they had Rabbis who could split hairs ad infinitum, therefore they were the 'temple of the Lord, and God's chosen.
From his cradle, let it be remembered, he had heard of the Messiah; at the colleges he had been made familiar with all that was known of that Being at once the hope, the fear, and the peculiar glory of the chosen people; the prophets from the first to the last of the heroic line foretold him; and the coming had been, and yet was, the theme of endless exposition with the rabbis in the synagogues, in the schools, in the Temple, of fast-days and feast-days, in public and in private, the national teachers expounded and kept expounding until all the children of Abraham, wherever their lots were cast, bore the Messiah in expectation, and by it literally, and with iron severity, ruled and moulded their lives.
"Now I can understand," he said, "why the wise rabbis say that the great fish, the leviathan, surrounds the world with its tail in its mouth." Then he looked above. The sun seemed further away than ever. "Heaven is not so near as I thought," he said, and seeing himself but a tiny speck miles above the earth and still further away from the heavens, he grew afraid for the first time in his life.
Word Of The Day