ether, literally true to fact, and at the same time full of
hidden meanings.

The working of these and other laws governing the evolution of sacred
literature is very clearly seen in the great rabbinical schools which
flourished at Jerusalem, Tiberias, and elsewhere, after the return of
the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and especially as we approach
the time of Christ. These schools developed a subtlety in the study of
the Old Testament which seems almost preternatural. The resultant system
was mainly a jugglery with words, phrases, and numbers, which finally
became a "sacred science," with various recognised departments, in which
interpretation was carried on sometimes by attaching a numerical
value to letters; sometimes by interchange of letters from differently
arranged alphabets; sometimes by the making of new texts out of the
initial letters of the old; and with ever-increasing subtlety.

Such efforts as these culminated fitly in the rabbinical declaration
that each passage in the law has seventy distinct meanings, and that God
himself gives three hours every day to their study.

After this the Jewish world was prepared for anything, and it does not
surprise us to find such discoveries in the domain of ethical culture as
the doctrine that, for inflicting the forty stripes save one upon those
who broke the law, the lash should be braided of ox-hide and ass-hide;
and, as warrant for this construction of the lash, the text, "The ox
knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not
know"; and, as the logic connecting text and lash, the statement that
Jehovah evidently intended to command that "the men who know not shall
be beaten by those animals whose knowledge shames them."

By such methods also were revealed such historical treasures as that Og,
King of Bashan, escaped the deluge by wading after Noah's ark.

There were, indeed, noble exceptions to this kind of teaching. It can
not be forgotten that Rabbi Hillel formulated the golden rule, which
had before him been given to the extreme Orient by Confucius, and which
afterward received a yet more beautiful and positive emphasis from Jesus
of Nazareth; but the seven rules of interpretation laid down by Hillel
were multiplied and refined by men like Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Eleazar
until they justified every absurd subtlety.(462)

(462) For a multitude of amusing examples of rabbinical interpretations,
see an article in Blackwood's Ma