United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In this connection it is worth while to reproduce his classification of the contents of the Talmud and his attitude toward them. He enumerates six classes. Passages in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature which must be taken literally.
He knew the "Choice of Pearls," the Midrashic "Stories of King Solomon," the "Maxims of the Philosophers," the "Proverbs of the Wise"; but not "Sendabar" in its Hebrew form. His acquaintance with the language of the Bible was thorough; but he makes one or two blunders in quoting the substance of Scriptural passages.
It is bound up with some of Maimonides' works, several Midrashic tracts, a commentary on the Hagadah by Joseph Gikatilia, and an extract from Abarbanel's commentary on Isaiah; it forms part of the Almanzi collection, which curiously enough was purchased by the British Museum from Asher & Co. in October, 1865, some twenty years after Asher's death.
The first book of the Antiquities ends with the death of Isaac. The second deals with the story of Joseph and of the Exodus from Egypt. The method is the same: partly Midrashic and partly rhetorical embellishment of the Biblical text, conversion of the poetry into prose, and, where occasion offers, correlation of the Scripture with Hellenistic history.
Philo's interpretation of these Bible figures would appear to have behind it an old Midrashic tradition. In the first century the world was becoming incapable of understanding abstract ideas, and required ethics to be concretely embodied in examples of life. Philo found within the Jewish Scriptures what the Christian apostles later transferred to other events.
And we find a parallel also for the creation of the Koran in the Midrashic statement that the Torah is one of the six or seven things created before the world. These parallels alone would not be of much weight, but they are strengthened by other considerations. The Muʿtazilite movement seems to have developed among the ascetic sects, with the leaders of whom its founders were in close relation.
Word Of The Day