R,T. Herford “~ The Truth About the Pharisees a Ae ’ Pye ele. Ea >} a] bP OR, Se Si een ae SS aio oh Sn eB Oy ae wee one ee Drie, a men eek. ; > | ee - 28 Se 2 so 4 : + 2 rf ¥ te : é s - - * wig ; E, - Pe be : ay , = = ‘ * ee a = ¢ oa > Menorah Pamphlets : Qo. 3 AERA E foekt Vp Re Ee ev oncdtonconh Oe tate 3 SESS: ae ee ae aS gota ci ; : me Librarian of the Williams Library if id of London; Author of Pharisaism. = — Ce See a : rs — Che Menorah Press INTERCOLLEGIATE MENoRAH ASSOCIATION 167 West 13th Street MI75 eae New York City < | oF SP pice 2o..Gents A i Ht ihe a) i 4 4 ‘ \ j J SS =. Eaeseegee toasts ~— *S a The Truth about the By R. TRAVERS HERFORD Librarian of the Williams Library of London; Author of Pharisaism. Che Menorah Press INTERCOLLEGIATE MENORAH ASSOCIATION 167 West 138th Street New York City Has Pe Ph af Coe Fee ‘5 4) A 7 Vee _ Copyright, 1925, by the i INTERCOLLEGIATE MENORAH ASSOCIATIC The Truth about the Pharisees By R. Travers HeErrForp PHARISAIC: Resembling the Pharisees, an ancient Jewish sect, strict in doctrine and ritual, without the spirit of piety; laying great stress upon the ex- ternal observances of religion and outward show of morality, and assuming superiority on that ac- count; hypocritical; formal; self-righteous.—NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY. When we speak of Pharisaism we mean obedi- ence petrified into formalism, religion degraded into ritual, morals cankered by casuistry.—F'ARRAR’S ST. PAUL. INTRODUCTION | MONG many misconceptions and prejudices commonly held about the Jews none are more strongly felt and deeply rooted than those in regard to Pharisaism. From the time the New Testament was written there has been a black mark against the Pharisees, a mark which succeeding cen- turies have rather deepened than effaced. Most peo- ple think of the Pharisees (so far as they think of them at all) as the leaders of a sect in opposition to Jesus, the assailants whom he most severely de- nounced, a small class of narrow-minded people only [3] interesting or important because of their prominence in the Gospel story, and sufficiently described by the words “Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.” Nor has this common opinion concerning the Pharisees been challenged by the learned world. Indeed there has not been—at least by non-Jewish scholars—until very recently anything approaching a serious attempt to inquire adequately into the actual historical char- acter of the Pharisees, their principles, aims, view- point and method, or to consider them impartially, not according to the representation of their oppo- nents, but in the light of their own literature, the teaching of their own leaders and learned men, and of unprejudiced historical testimony generally. The place of Pharisaism in history is much lar- ger and more important than is commonly under- stood and recognized. Pharisaism originally came into being as the reply of the Jewish people to the challenge of the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B. C. But its viewpoint and teachings gave such complete expression to the beliefs and ideas with which the main body of Jews were in sympathy that Pharisaism succeeded in permanently molding the future character of Judaism. There has been no period in which Judaism as a whole has departed from the main lines first traced by the Pharisees. The distinctive name has been long ago disused; but the Judaism which has come down through the centuries, from the rise of Christianity to the present [4] day, is in its essential features Pharisaism. Chris- tian scholars, therefore, depending usually on the New Testament, display a certain lack of propor- tion when they consider the Pharisees as merely a single small factor concerned in the ministry and death of Jesus, and confine their importance in his- tory to their connection with this one event. For to the Pharisees themselves, with their already long history, the appearance of Jesus and the fate that befell him had no such importance, and was hardly more than a passing incident. Such as they were, they continued to be for long ages after the death of Jesus; and to judge them merely by their rela- tion to that one event is to fail in the first essential of historical justice. This essay, therefore, proposes to treat the Phari- sees as a continuous body, an enduring element in the Jewish people; at first as one party in the nation in rivalry with another party, and later as the sole surviving party, when all the others had been, so to speak, left dead on the field after the last fatal fight with the enemy. The Pharisees alone carried forward the sacred treasure of the Jewish religion after the Temple had been destroyed and the land laid waste. All the Judaism which has come down to the present day owes its existence to the Pharisees, and if there is still abundant vitality in the Jewish religion it is the Pharisees who enabled it to endure. That is what really determines their place in history; and their unbroken continuance from the time of the [5] prophets to the time in which we now live is one indi- cation that their place is not insignificant amongst those who have shaped the course and influenced the doctrines of the human race. I. Historica. DEVELOPMENT OF PHARISAISM HE historical study of the origin and meaning of Pharisaism is rendered intricate and difficult by the scarcity of first-hand written documents about the period. ‘The Pharisees, we know, certainly arose within the times covered by the Old Testament writ- ings, for the actual composition of some of these writings and the collection and arrangement of them all as we now have them is their work. But the name Pharisee does not occur in the Old Testament. Our only sources, therefore, are Josephus, the New Testament and the Talmud, together with the rab- binical literature in general. None of these, cer- tainly not the first two, date back to the period of the rise of Pharisaism. The New Testament, more- over, describes them from the outside, and as seen by observers who did not love them. Josephus speaks of them in terms adapted to his Roman readers (and if he did not say so himself it would be hard to guess that he himself was, or had been, a Pharisee). The Talmud, however, is pure Phari- saism from end to end. Specific statement in the ‘Talmud about the actual origin of the Pharisees is, [6] to be sure, scanty and legendary; but it is not diffi- cult to piece together from the many clues given in its pages a fair account of the early history of Pharisaism. For the Talmud is a self-revealed pic- ture of the Pharisees, of the ideals to which they looked up, the principles which they held and the modes of their thought and action. By inference from these we should be able to discover some in- dication of the way they came to be such as they are there beheld. Pharisaism was the reply made by the Jewish peo- ple to the challenge of the Babylonian captivity. The sharp discipline of the Exile taught the Jew that the Jewish religion, the worship and service of one God, must be kept free from idolatry, from the taint of the heathen cults of the neighboring peo- ple. This lesson was not at all new, since all the great prophets had taught it in their turn before the Exile. But the people whom the prophets ad- dressed had paid little attention; Yaveh might be all the prophets proclaimed him to be; but the peo- ple went after other gods also, and “burned incense to the Queen of Heaven.” But those who came back from Babylon came back with hearts purged of all desire to go astray after false gods. Few in num- ber and incapable of great achievement as the Jew- ish community in Palestine after the return was, yet its members seem to have done what they could to keep before their eyes the ideal of the pure religion of Yahveh. [7] FULL century passed before the man arose who effectively drove home the lesson of the Exile to the mind and heart of his countrymen. That man was Ezra and he is the real founder of Judaism in the strict sense of the term. The conventional judgment on Ezra is incorrect, according to which he turned away from the religion of the prophets and set the religious life of the Jewish people on the down-grade from the heights which the prophets had reached. For, in the first place, the people as a whole had never reached those heights; and in the second, Ezra never disowned for a moment the prophetic teaching. In fact his whole life work was to convince the people that they must obey those very teachings which the prophets had been unable to make them follow. It is Ezra’s achievement that, with some help from Nehemiah, the energetic governor of Jerusalem, and in the face of the severe opposition of the aristocracy, he was able finally to enlist a considerable majority of the Jewish community on his side for a thoroughgoing reconstruction of Jewish life. Ezra’s effort was first to establish the community as a “closed corporation” within a barrier which should separate them from their Gentile neighbors ; and, second, to proclaim for their guidance the reve- lation of the will of God made through Moses. This divine revelation was that contained in the five books ascribed to Moses, what is usually but quite wrongly called the Law. T'orah does not mean Law; it [8] means ‘Teaching and it includes (as understood by Jews) all that God has taught, revealed to man in general as well as to Israel, through Moses. (This article will therefore not allude to the five books of Moses as the Law. Instead the Hebrew designa- tion Torah will be left untranslated.) Ezra publicly read the books containing the Torah of Moses, and the people, through their chief rulers and heads of families, solemnly pledged themselves to accept it and obey its precepts. This is the famous assembly described in Nehemiah ix, an event of enormous importance for the subsequent history of the Jewish people and marking the definite triumph of the principles and policy of Ezra. When Ezra passed from the scene he left behind him in the minds of a majority of the community the set- tled purpose of living separate from the Gentiles under the consecration of the Torah. Although the name Pharisee does not appear un- til three centuries after the time of Ezra it was not without reason that the Pharisees looked upon Ezra as their “patron saint.” For Pharisaism when it did appear served only to bring out into greater clearness and with more emphasis the principles of exclusion and of the supremacy of the Torah—was, indeed, only an improved technique for the fullest development of these ideals. These three centuries between the time of Ezra and the definite appearance of the Pharisees under that name were devoted to the working out of the practical application of Ezra’s [9] principles to the daily life of the people. The Torah had been declared the supreme authority and the guide of life, but it was necessary that it be inter- preted, correlated, explained so as to make its teach- ing applicable to changing conditions of life and circumstances not expressly provided for. 'To do this work arose the Sopherim, the Scribes, a title borne by Ezra himself. | The earliest Sopherim were probably for the most part priests, with whom were associated some Levites, and their first teaching must have been of the sim- plest character, hardly more than a statement of the lesson to be deduced from such and such a text. But it served its purpose if it brought the practical needs of life, religious and civil, individual and so- cial, into relation with the word of the Torah. Moreover, since unrelated individual interpretations by single scribes would obviously lack consistency, agreement, and therefore authority, an effort was early made at some co-operation and consultation among them. What organized form this collabora- tion took is not known. If there was nothing as definite as a constituted assembly or council, at least there must have been some means for attaining agreement of authority. This is what probably underlies the allusions in the rabbinical literature to the Men of the Great Synagog, who in one passage at all events (‘Tanhuma, Beshall, p. 42*) are expressly identified with the Sopher. At any rate the So- pherim, whatever their organization, carried on their [10] work for several generations after Ezra. The death of Simon the Just, 270 B. C., marked the end of the period of the Sopherim and there is no clear evi- dence to show what was done in the matter of reli- gious teaching until the establishment of the San- hedrin, or Supreme Council, some time about the year 196 B. C. HE formation of the Sanhedrin, which included laymen as well as priests and Levites and which dealt with political as well as religious questions, brought into view a certain significant divergence in the way the Torah had come to be regarded. On the one hand there were the priests, anxious to maintain ther own privileges as monopolists of re- ligious teaching, and the rulers, faced with the ne- cessity of dealing with political questions and bent on preserving their own authority from the encroach- ments of the Torah; and these two groups united in an endeavor to limit the scope of the Torah to the explicit statements of the written text, under- stood in their literal meaning. ‘The people’s oath bound them to obey these and only these. ‘Things not contained in the Torah, yet needful or desirable, were provided for by ordinances, gazeroth, issued by the priests from time to time, by virtue of the authority conferred upon them in the Torah itself (Deut. xvii, 3). The consequence of this tendency would have been to make the Torah obsolete, since with the lapse of time its precepts would become more [11] and more impossible of fulfilment. The real au, thority would then pass into the hands of the priestly clique and the ruling class. An opposing party, however, formed by reaction from the principle just described, held that the true meaning of the Torah was not defined by the text taken literally but could only be ascertained when the text was rightly interpreted, and, fur- ther, that the right interpretation was to be found in unwritten or oral tradition. ‘This liberal concep- tion of the Torah was supported chiefly by the com- mon lay members of the community, who had no share in political affairs and whose chief concern was the religious welfare of the common people through the adoption of the Torah as a practical guide and rule of life. Conditioned by this practical necessity the Torah was to be made flexible enough to apply to all the changing conditions of the life of the com- munity. In consequence the Torah was saved from dying of mere old age; it was transformed from an ancient record into a living force; it was exalted so as to become the vehicle of the whole revelation which God had given to Israel and the means by which the line of communication between God and Israel was kept open for all time. These two tendencies or schools of thought did not emerge as definite political parties with distin- guishing names until the establishment of the inde- pendent Jewish national state (about 150 B. C.) as [12] the result of the Maccabean revolt against the rule and influence of Hellenism. When Jonathan, Simon, and especially John Hyrcanus, all of the Maccabean family, destroyed the domination of the Greeks, they left the Jews free to solve their own political and religious problems in their own way, and in the light of their own best traditions. The two tenden- cies already discussed were representative of the most complete theories of Jewish life and formed an ob- vious contrast; they became at once, therefore, the two most important and powerful parties in the state, and held that position until the final catastrophe in the war of Bar-Cochba in the year 135 C. E. The names of the two opposing parties were the Saddu- cees and the Pharisees. ‘The Sadducees were those who combined respect for the Torah, the ancient text literally understood, with an active concern for political affairs and closer relation with the Gentiles. The Pharisees were those who maintained the reli- gion of Torah as the one supreme concern of vital importance for the Jews, who looked with disfavor upon foreign entanglements and secular interests in conflict with Torah. In principle and theory the Pharisees as they finally and definitely emerged were the inevitable consequence of earlier religious teaching; the name of the party, however, presents considerable diffi- culty and is probably after all only an accidental accretion, since it is in no particular sense an ex- pression of the main Pharisaic principles. How then [13] did the name Pharisee originate? First, it should be noted that while the Pharisees were rivals and op- ponents of the Sadducees, their distinctive name had no reference whatever to the Sadducees or to their rivalry with that party. Second, the Pharisees themselves did not use the name habitually to de- scribe themselves. They usually referred to them- selves as The Wise or The Wise of Israel. The word Pharisee—in Hebrew pharush, in Aramaic pharish— means “separated.” But apparently the term does not refer to the general Pharisaic principle of sepa- ration, but to an individual application of that prin- ciple in a single historical instance. ‘This event was the formation under the impulse of John Hyrcanus (135-106 B. C.) of a voluntary association of re- ligious-minded persons pledged to the strict obsery- ance of many then frequently violated principles of the Torah. ‘There were four grades in this asso- ciation in accordance with the strictness of their ob- servance. ‘The lowest grade was called that of the Perushim or Pharisees. And they were obviously so called because, being of the lowest grade in the as- sociation and thus nearest to the common people, the Am-ha-aretz, they marked the line of separation between the strict observer and the ordinary people of the land. Later, by a natural transition the name was used in the more general sense of a follower of the Torah, in contrast to an adherent of priestly and leviatical ordinances. [14] HE Pharisees became, then, the repositories of the religious ideals of the community. They were never a party in the sense of a group of men interested in national aggrandizement and _ political achievement. They were rather an association pledged to the perpetuation and dissemination of religious sentiments and moral practices. And al- though the Pharisees very seldom held supreme power in the state, they represented a substantial, continuous and enduring element which, in the com- plete ruin of the political and national parties of the Jewish state, still had enough numerical strength and steadfastness of heart to ensure the perpetua- tion of Judaism purely as a religious community. From the defeat of Bar-Cochba to very recent times , national and political ideals have held very little in- | terest for the Jewish people; Judaism as it has sur- vived through the ages has been _ essentially Pharisaism. The success of Pharisaism in educating a great number of the Jewish people in practices which made for isolation from the pagan world and consecration to the Torah was due to a large extent to their con- nection with the institution of the Synagog; it was through this that the Pharisees were enabled to come into close relations with the main body of the com- mon people. The Pharisees were, it is true, not the founders of the Synagog; that institution probably originated as early as the Exile (586 B. C.). But when the Pharisees began to emerge as a definite [15] group in the state they were quick to recognize the close bond of sympathy between their own ideals and those of the Synagog, as well as its great pos- sibilities for the future. For the Synagog, too, had always aimed to be the home and center of the re- ligion of Torah. Those who gathered in its walls came with two objects: to worship God by praise and prayer; and to study the Torah, by learning or teaching the lessons to be derived from it. The Synagog made no attempt to imitate the Temple, and had always a different aim in view. There was only one Temple; there were scores and hundreds of synagogs, and they were to be found in every town and village in the land. ‘The Temple, as long as it stood, was the visible expression of the religion of the whole Jewish people collectively; but the Synagog was the expression of their religion day by day and week by week for Jews not collectively, but as friends and neighbors, dwellers in the same locality. ‘The Temple was in far-away Jerusalem; the Synagog was at their very door. Therefore, it could and did exert a powerful influence in de- veloping the religion of the ordinary people by bringing it to bear upon the common concerns and experiences that made up their daily life. As this was precisely what the Pharisees were most desirous of doing it was only natural that the Pharisees should be the warmest friends and strongest sup- porters of the Synagog. The Pharisees, indeed, to- gether with the Scribes, soon took over its develop- [16] ment, arranged the order of its services, collected its sacred books (those books which together we now call the Old Testament), and gave religious teach- ing to the people assembled to hear. The Synagog became a layman’s church, free from the domination of priests, functionnmg in fact without anything which can be called a clergy. And it was because of the Pharisees’ many services to the Synagog that the people felt a bond between themselves and the Pharisees; reverenced, loved and followed them as their teachers and leaders and friends. It was these people of the Synagog, steadfast in the life of Torah which the Pharisees had taught them, who saved Judaism when the nationalist policy ended in vain and Palestine as a political entity disappeared. HE crisis which finally led to the adoption by the Jewish people of the ideals which were to guide them for centuries to come was precipitated by the reign of Herod (87-4 B. C.). Under his long, masterful, and unsympathetic rule a number of widely divergent groups had sprung up, pre- senting a much more complicated situation than the earlier simple rivalry between Pharisee and Saddu- cee. These new groups, moreover, were not anta- gonistic in the sense of parties fighting for political control of the state, but were opposed only because they represented different reactions against the tyranny of Herod. Their policies were but theories of defense and survival, with the purpose of enabling [17] the Jew to survive in the face of a common and cruel enemy. ‘The Pharisees, still a large and pow- erful group true to their ancient traditions, offered the non-political solution of non-resistance, and fol- lowed the line of the older Hassidim in insisting that the continued life of the Jew depended on his pur- suing in peace and quietness the religious life in ac- cordance with the Torah. ‘They were in the truest sense a peace party. ‘Their policy of patient sub- mission however did not satisfy all. There was a group, later called the Essenes, who deeming it im- possible to endure when no prospect of relief was to be seen, withdrew into lonely desert places where they could live in peace and give themselves to un- disturbed piety, unremitting devotion to the Torah, and a life of strict asceticism. At the other ex- treme from the pacific attitude of the Pharisees were the Zealots, passionate followers of the Torah, too, but men who gloried in the tradition of the Maccabeans and believed that the time had come to fight. ‘The Torah, they said, must and could be defended, but only by throwing off the yoke of the Edomite king and defying all Gentile oppressors— even Rome itself, if need be, in the name of the God of Israel. The “wild men” of the Jewish community, they spoke constantly of war; and fired by a fana- tical devotion to the national religion and the dream of national freedom, against which all argument was powerless, they called the nation again and again to arms. ‘ [18] The Pharisees, as is the fate of the more level- headed parties in time of great national excitement, found their authority considerably weakened by de- fections to the more extreme and active groups. At no time however, so writes Josephus after the fall of Jerusalem, did they lose the esteem and reverence of the majority of the people. They used all their influence to prevent a war with the Romans; and when they were finally dragged into it against their will by the Zealots they could only wait till the fury of the storm had spent itself. And so it was in the last rash adventure, when Bar-Cochba led the Jews in their desperate attempt to win back their freedom, in that glorious but fatal revolt that marked the total overthrow of the Jewish state. The national life of the Jews and with it all possibility of existence under normal political ideals disappeared in that disaster; and if Israel had fol- lowed the example of other conquered peoples, the Jewish civilization might easily have vanished. In that great crisis Judaism was saved from dissolution only because the Pharisees were able to offer an al- ternate way of life, capable of perpetuating Jewish civilization without the political sovereignty that the Jews no longer possessed. The Judaism which has come down through the centuries is substantially the Judaism of the Phari- sees. Judaism has undergone many changes in these centuries, has developed new forms, produced new results, adapted itself to new conditions, but [19] it has remained throughout true to one fundamental vital principle—that of applying the divine reve- lation of the Torah to the whole range of life. What was once the Jewish community settled in its own land is now a scattered multitude dispersed through well nigh every country in the civilized world. No political bond holds them together ; there is no means by which they can formulate or carry out a common policy even if they should wish to do so. Least of all are they the powerful secret society which some have supposed them to be. They have no such united political influence, nor would the thought of exerting such an influence ever possess any attraction for them. ‘That which has enabled them to survive is the old religious ideal to which the Pharisees first gave full expression, and this en- abled them to survive in undiminished strength be- cause their ideal was not dependent on political or- ganization for its fulfilment. Thus the Jews have remained, persecuted but not destroyed, victims of the manifold dislike and _ ill- will of the nations in whose midst they lived, pursu- ing aims which were seldom understood, with pecu- liarities of observance which exposed them to ridicule, doubtless with some faults and failings of their own —what people has not?—and certainly with others bred in them by the treatment they have received at the hands of professing Christians. Beneath all the external appearance of Judaism, unlovely and repellent as it may sometimes appear to the outsider, [20] there has always dwelt and still dwells in its inmost heart, cherished there with devout and reverent love, the Torah as God’s most precious gift to his people and the hope and longing for that day when in the recognition and faithful service of all his children on earth “the Lord shall be One and his name One.” Il. Tue Pornt or View or THE PHARISEES AVING traced the historical development of Pharisaism, a fuller understanding requires a more careful and detailed examination of what might be called the Pharisaic attitude to life: its impulses and motives, its intentions, its procedure and policies, and their consequences for the history of the Jews and the religious development of man- kind. Necessities of space exclude many questions that might properly call for attention in a mono- graph of the Pharisees; but there are certain as- pects of the subject which seem especially worthy of consideration, the more so since it is on those points that common opinion is least favorable to the Pharisees. What precisely did the Pharisees set themselves to achieve and how did they go about accomplishing their self-assigned duty? ‘Their main task, as they conceived it, was, specifically, to establish the au- thority of the Torah as the full and inexhaustible revelation made by God to man. By the Torah they [21] meant, of course, not merely the written word of the “Five Books of Moses” but the inner meaning of what was there written; and the source of that right interpretation was held by the Pharisees to be oral tradition, assumed to have been imparted to Moses and unfolded into fuller detail by successive teachers ever since. In addition, the other Scriptures now forming the Old Testament were held to be further elucidations of the Torah, minor rays of the heavenly light whose chief focus was the Five Books. ‘This divine revelation, moreover, was not conceived to have ceased with its formulation in the words of the Scriptures, but was thought of as always fresh and always growing because God enlightened the minds of men in every age to receive more of what he would teach. This theory of the Torah was expressed under the form of interpretation of the ancient text and it was made effective by means of an exegesis which defied all ordinary rules of grammar and syn- tax. Nevertheless it was done in all sincerity and done for the purpose of harmonizing the ancient text with the deeper insight and higher thoughts of the Jewish mind as it increased in wisdom and knowl- edge of God. This liberal and evolutionary concept of the authority of the Scriptures was perhaps the most distinctive contribution of the Pharisees jto the common stock of the religious thought of man- kind at large. It belongs to the irony of history that the Phari- sees should be charged with a bigoted and_ stiff- [22] necked hardening and sterilizing of the religion of the Jews when it was they, as contrasted with the Sadducees and other literalists, and they alone, who gave it the flexibility and adaptability of spirit that enabled it to live and to survive. | Rea tase area as this conception was merely as an intellectual contribution, the Pharisees were not satisfied to allow it to remain a mere thought without practical application, a purely speculative opinion having no direct bearing on life. Their chief interest had been from the beginning a prac- tical one; the chief end of man was, they insisted, not merely to know what the Torah contained, to have a perception of the existence of a divine com- mand, but rather to recognize the supreme duty of doing the will of God as expressed in the injunctions of the Torah. Actual day by day observance of the precepts of the Torah was taken to be the chief responsibility both of the community as a whole and of every member in particular. Obviously much study, interpretation and instruction was necessary before the Torah could serve as a complete guide for life. The first step, in what was a long process, was to take specific note of the actions which were expressly stated in so many words: ‘Thou shalt’ or “Thou shalt not.” These definite precepts, posi- tive or negative, are called Mitzvoth, and it was the duty of the Jew who would live in obedience to the Torah to fulfil all the Mitzvoth which came his way. [23] His feeling was: ‘Under these circumstances I am commanded in the Torah to do so and so. It is God’s will that I should do so; in doing this particular thing in the appointed way I am obeying God.” But suppose no direction was given in the Torah as to how the Mitzvah was to be performed? Or again, suppose a case arose for which there was no express command, no precise Mitzvah? How was the Torah to be obeyed, how was the will of God to be done in such a case? Answers to such questions were found by interpreting the Torah, by inferring, from what it did say in one case, what it would have said in another case, if it had happened to deal with that other case. Here is precisely the point at which Pharisee and Sadducee parted company. ‘The Sad- ducee said the Torah had nothing more to teach than the literal meaning expressed in its written words. Things not stated in the ancient text might be done by special ordinance of the priests; but such ordinances were not Torah and did not claim to be. The Pharisees, on the other hand, admitted no distinction in degree of authority between the Torah itself and the interpretation of the Torah added by unwritten tradition. For the process of making the written text clear and precise where it was vague and indefinite seemed to the Pharisee, in- tent always on his ethical purpose, as necessary and as holy as the original transcription of the Torah. The duty of man was to obey God; therefore there must be for every act of his life a way, discoverable [24] to man by careful thinking and mature deliberation, of fulfilling the will of God by some specific rule of right conduct. The results of the interpretations of the Torah made in this spirit were formulated in rules; such a rule of right conduct was called a Halachah. The word halach in Hebrew means “to walk”; one of its commonest uses in the Old Testa- ment is in phrases where the duty of a man who would serve God is said to be ‘to walk’ in his statutes or according to his Torah. The transition is an obvious one. ‘To the Pharisee any direction given by a competent authority intended to teach a man how he should “walk” if he would obey the Torah was a Halachah, a rule of right conduct. The Halachah was never determined by an in- dividual by himself, no matter what his wisdom. The Halachah was declared only after a consultation among the teachers, and decided by a vote of the majority in order that in a matter of so great im- portance, affecting the life and actions of the whole community, the final decision should represent the opinion and carry the authority of the wisest, most learned and most experienced scholars, acting in their capacity as trustees of the people. Furthermore, it was so obviously to the interest of the community to preserve the Halachah, when defined by compe- tent authorities, as guides for future «generations, that a number of such definitive judgments came to be remembered and handed down from one generation of teachers to another. This procedure, dating from the [25] very early days of the Sopherim, was the beginning of a tradition of Halachah (referred to in the New Testament as the “Tradition of the Elders”) which was later embodied in the Mishnah and its commen- tary, the Gemara, both together forming the Tal- mud. The Scribes of the Pharisees, as they are termed in the New Testament, that is, the accredited teachers of the Pharisees, were instrumental also in producing another work, similar in method but dif- ferent in content, the Haggadah. ‘The Halachah dealt, it will be remembered, with only one element in the Torah, viz: its precepts, commands, injunc- tions. But the Torah contained also teachings on other subjects, as the nature of God, his providence, and other phases of religious doctrines as contrasted with precept. The interpretation of these passages in the Torah formed the basis of this other work called the Haggadah, from the Hebrew word mean- ing “announcement,” “declaration.” Haggadah is probably the more general and earlier term, and in that case it referred to all interpretation of the Torah until the time when a special term—Hala- chah—was devised for the preceptive teaching. The initiating of these great works, both animated by the same spirit, was the most important specific achievement of the Pharisees. Through them they were enabled to enlarge and to develop the Torah so asi to make the teaching therein contained of im- mediate practical service in the religious life of the Jewish community. [26] The impulse and motives underlying Pharisaism should be by now so clear as to make further dis- cussion necessary. But there is a persistent mis- conception that it worth the moment’s notice sufh- cient to refute it. The chief desire of the Phari- sees was, one hears repeatedly, superciliously to with- draw from contact with humanity at large; their impulse a_ self-righteous, holier-than-thou disdain for-rival cultures. ‘That the Pharisees preached iso- lation is true, but the separation they sought was more than an attitude cherished for its own intrinsic worth. Separation was for them a practical mat- ter of self-defense impelled by their burning desire to preserve the existence of the Jew and safeguard his splendid heritage, the Torah. ‘The Torah was to the Pharisee a possession of such precious worth and the duty of abiding by its precepts a duty of such supreme concern that he dared not risk the in- filtration of pagan customs and practices inevitable in close association with the Gentile world. ‘The motive that animated the Pharisaic policy of isola- tion was exactly the same as that from which all its activities sprung—the desire to make manifest the divine revelation of the Torah in the daily business of man. HAT, finally, were the ultimate effects of the Pharisaic spirit and policy of Judaism? ay ; a, * : 4 abit 5 nf t qt ‘ ¥ + . ag °y . . J t i ‘ “ 5 Wye “4 : BM175 .P4H55 1 vi — - Waser minary—Speer Library | sii i | 1012 00031 3