that they later evolved, was due
to their intense reverence for Scripture, and their modest sense of
their own authority and qualification. "If the men of old were giants
then we are pigmies," said they. They felt and believed that all duty
for the guidance of man was found in the Bible either directly or
inferentially. Their motto was then, "Search the Scriptures," and they
did search them with a literalness and a painstaking thoroughness never
since repeated. Not a word, not a letter escaped them. Every redundancy
of expression was freighted with meaning, every repetition was made to
give birth to new truth. Some of the inferences were logical and
natural, some artificial and far-fetched, but all ingenious. Sometimes
the method was inductive and sometimes deductive. That is, occasionally
a needed law was promulgated by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and then its
authority sought in the Scripture, or the Scripture would be sought in
the first instance to reveal new law.

So while the Jewish code, religious and civil, continued to grow during
the era of the Restoration of the second Temple, to meet the more
complex conditions of later times, still the theory was maintained that
all was evolved from original Scripture and always transmitted, either
written or oral, from Moses from Mount Sinai. It was not, however, till
the year 219 after the Christian era that a compiled summary of the
so-called oral law was made--perhaps compiled from earlier summaries--by
Rabbi Jehudah Hanassi (the Prince), and the added work was called the
Mishnah or Second Law. Mark the date. We have passed the period of the
fall of Judea's nationality. And it was these very academies in which
the Jewish tradition--the Jewish Law was studied, that kept alive the
Jewish people as a religious community after they had ceased to be a
nation. This Mishnah, divided into six _sedarim_ or chapters, and
subdivided into thirty-six treatises, became now in the academies of
Palestine, and later in Babylonia, the text of further legal
elaboration, with the theory of deduction from Scripture still
maintained.

Although the life of denationalized Israel was much narrower and more
circumscribed, with fewer outlets to their capacities, nevertheless the
new laws deduced from the Mishnah code in the academies grew far larger
than the original source, while the discussions which grew around each
Halacha, as the final decision was termed, and which was usually
transmitted with