ery man,
and he who failed to live up to the precepts of the devotees of the Law,
the Pharisean fellowships, was scorned as belonging to the lower class,
_am haaretz_. Every morning the pious Jew, first thanking God for the
light of day, followed this up by thanking Him for the Torah, which
illumines the path of life. "The welfare of society rests upon the study
of the Law, divine service and organized charity," was a saying of Simon
the Just, a high priest of the beginning of the third pre-Christian
century.(1149) Thus learning and teaching became leading occupations for
the Jew, and the two main departments of Jewish literature,
correspondingly, are _Torah_ and _Talmud_, that is, the written Law and
its exposition. Indeed, the highest title which the rabbis could find for
Moses was simply "Moses our Teacher." Nay, God Himself was frequently
represented as a venerable Master, teaching the Law in awful
majesty.(1150)

4. Later under the successive influence of Babylonian and Greek culture,
the wisdom literature was added to the Prophets and the Psalms, giving to
the whole Torah a universal scope, like that claimed for Greek philosophy.
The Jewish love of learning led to an ever greater longing for truth by
adding the wisdom of other cultured nations to its own store of knowledge.
This motive for universalism became all the stronger, as the faith became
more centered in the sublime conception of God as Master of all the world.
As the God of Israel appeared the primal source of all truth, so the
revealed word of God was considered the very embodiment of divine
wisdom.(1151) In fact, the men of hoary antiquity described in the opening
chapters of Genesis were actually credited with being the instructors of
the Greeks and other nations.(1152) We read a strange story by a pupil of
Aristotle that the great sage admired a Jew, whom he happened to meet, as
both wise and pious, so that the little Jewish nation was often
considered, like the wise men of India, to be a sect of
philosophers.(1153) Indeed, Judaism became a matter of curiosity to the
pagan world on account of the Synagogue, which attracted them as a unique
center of religious devotion and instruction, and especially because of
the Bible, which was read and expounded in its Greek garb from Sabbath to
Sabbath. The Jewish people raised themselves to be a nation of thinkers,
and largely through association with Greek thought. For example, in the
Greek translation of the