Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
It is significant in this regard that the Haggadah is remarkable for the number of foreign words which it contains, Greek, Persian, and Roman terms jostling with Hebrew and Aramaic.
For while the Halakah was the production of the Palestinian and Babylonian schools alone, the Haggadah brought together the harvest of all lands; and scraps of Greek philosophy found their way to Palestine before the Alexandrian school developed its systematic allegory.
The "Sayings of the Fathers" are typical of the finest and most concentrated wisdom of the Haggadah, and exhibit thought in its impulsive, unsystematic, gnomic expression, neither logical nor illogical, because it knows not logic.
The floating poetical ideas of the Haggadah are woven by him into the fabric of a Jewish philosophy and a Jewish theology, and knit together with the rational conceptions of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" and Plato's "Timæus."
Not only does he freely paraphrase the Septuagint version of the Bible, but, more especially in the earlier part of the work, he incorporates pieces of Palestinian Haggadah and to a smaller extent of Alexandrian interpretation, and he omits many episodes that did not seem to him to redound to the glory of his people.
For the Haggadah was not committed to writing till many generations had known its influences, and it was not finally compiled till many generations more had handed it down with continuous accretions. The Haggadah in fact is part of the permanent spirit of the race going back to a hoary past, and stretching down "the echoing grooves of time" to the tradition of Judaism in our own day.
The whole universe is thus seen as the orderly manifestation of one principle. Philo, expanding a favorite image of the Haggadah, illustrates God's creation by the simile of a king founding a city. "He gets to him an architect, who first designs in his mind the parts of the perfect city, and then, looking continually to his model, begins to construct the city of stones and wood.
Neither must we think that we moderns are the first to peer through this sham, for what the Israelites thought of these laws appears from the bitter criticism of Moses and Aaron, which the Haggadah put into the mouth of the rebel Korah.
The three Matzoth Shimmurim used in the Haggadah Service were made with especial care, and in medieval times were denominated Priest, Levite, Israelite, in order to discriminate among them. Picard, by an amusing blunder, speaks of a gateau des levites; he, of course, means the middle cake.
Having no idea of the Alexandrian School and of the works of Philo and his relation to some theosophic passages in the Haggadah, he made no distinction between Midrash and Bible, and read Plato and Aristotle in both alike, as we shall see more particularly later. Maimonides's detailed criticism of Aristotle we shall see later.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking