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Updated: May 14, 2025
This is the ancient story; and in accord with it, I say that it is God's peculiar work to do good, and the creature's work to give Him thanks." Now this legend and moral appear in another form in the collection of Midrash, the Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, which apparently had ancient sources that have disappeared.
I might have cited Achimaaz's account of an amusing incident in the synagogue at Venosa. There had been an uproar in the Jewish quarter, and a wag added some lines on the subject to the manuscript of the Midrash which the travelling preacher was to read on the following Sabbath. The effect of the reading may be imagined.
This, however, seems to have been the function of private messengers, who were not in the strict sense letter-carriers at all. It may be well, in passing, to recall one or two other means of communication mentioned in the Midrash. Thus we read how Joshua, with twelve thousand of his warriors, was imprisoned, by means of witchcraft, within a sevenfold barrier of iron.
He felt called upon to reveal to his brethren the grandeur of the world beyond the dingy ghetto, to tell them the stories not contained in the Midrash, Josippon, or the biographies of rabbis and zaddikim. He translated Campe's Discovery of the New World, compiled a history of ancient civilization, and narrated the epochal event of the nineteenth century, the conflict between Russia and France.
Beautiful ethical intuitions and profound guesses at theological truth abound; anything like a definite system of ethics and theology is not to be found, whence it is said, "Do not argue with the Haggadah." Even more so is this the case with the bulk of the Midrash.
Whether because prophetic of its subsequent popularity, or for some other reason, this particular dialogue in which Rabbi Jose bore so conspicuous a part is repeated in the Midrash Rabba alone not less than four times, besides appearing in other Midrashim. It will be as well, then, to reproduce the passage in a summarized form, for it may be fairly described as the locus classicus on the subject.
At the same time the Wisdom and the Word were not unknown to the Palestinian Midrash, and the hierarchies of angels to the Alexandrian, for the suggestion of the different subordinate powers had been evolved before the two traditions had become independent. The doctrine of angels never indeed won recognition from the rabbis, but it was for centuries an element of popular belief.
That Song of Hate at the Red Sea was wiped out, for example, by the oft-quoted Midrash in which God rebukes the angels who wished to join in the song. "How can ye sing when My creatures are perishing?"
The "Questions and Answers" are essentially Hebraic in form, designed for Jews who knew and studied their Bible; and we can feel in them the influences of a training in traditional Mishnah and Midrash; but Philo passed from them to a more artistic expression and a more thoroughly Hellenized presentation of the philosophy of the Bible.
They are a type of Midrash in its elementary stage, the explanation of the teacher to the pupil who has difficulties about the words of the law: at once like and unlike the old Tannaitic Midrash; like in that they deal with difficulties in the literal text of the Bible; unlike in that the reply of Philo is Agadic more usually than Halakic, speculative rather than practical.
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