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Updated: May 16, 2025
The most sympathetic aspects of the Jewish spirit in that epoch are revealed in the moral and poetic elements of the Talmud, in the Agada. They are the receptacles into which the people poured all its sentiments, its whole soul. They are a clear reflex of its inner world, its feelings, hopes, ideals.
W. Bacher's Agada der Tannaiten, ii, pp. 168-170, will be found important notes on some of these passages. I have freely translated the story of Solomon's daughter from Buber's Tanchuma, Introduction, p. 136. It is clearly pieced together from several stories, too familiar to call for the citation of parallels. With one of the incidents may be compared the device of Sindbad in his second voyage.
Concern for maintaining the unity of God in its absolute purity is seen in the care with which the men of the Agada forbid any prayer which may have a semblance, however remote, of dualism. The freedom of the will is clearly stated in the Rabbinic expression, "All is in the hands of God except the fear of Heaven."
The collective work of the nation and the trend of history have left much plainer traces in the Agada than in the dry, methodical Halacha. In the Agada the learned jurist and formalist appears transformed into a sage or poet, conversing with the people in a warm, cordial tone, about the phenomena of nature, history, and life.
Like every other special legislation, the Halacha is bound to definite conditions and times, while the Agada concerns itself with the eternal verities. The creations of the philosophers, poets, and moralists are more permanent than the work of legislators. Beautiful as the Agada is, and with all its profundity, it lacks breadth. It rests wholly on the national, not on a universal basis.
But it is clear from the names of these doctrines that they centered about the creation story in Genesis and the account of the divine chariot in Ezekiel, chapters one and ten. Besides the Halaka and Agada are full of interpretations of Biblical texts which are very far from the literal and have little to do with the context.
The ascetic literature bears unmistakable traces of having been influenced by the Halaka and the Agada. Moreover, there is a Mohammedan tradition or two to the effect that the doctrine of the creation of the Koran and also of the rejection of anthropomorphism goes back to a Jew, Lebid-ibn Al-Aʿsam.
The reader is often thrown into amazement by the depth of thought and the loftiness of feeling manifested in the Agada. Involuntarily one pays the tribute of reverence to its practical wisdom, to its touching legends pervaded by the magic breath of poesy, to the patriarchal purity of its views. But these pearls are not strung upon one string, they are not arranged in a complete system.
The same vivacious, versatile spirit is revealed in the Midrashim literature, directly continuing the Agada up to the end of the middle ages. These two species of Jewish literature, the Agada and the Midrashim, have a far greater absolute value than the Halacha. The latter is an official work, the former a national product.
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