. Another, like him again, finds the motive of the command to
bore the ear of the slave who will not leave his master at the seventh
year of redemption, in the principle that men are God's servants, and
should not voluntarily throw away their precious freedom. So, too, the
Haggadah agrees in numerous points with Philo's stories about the
patriarchs.[303] If one were to go through the Midrashic
interpretations of the Five Books of Moses, he would find in nearly
every section interpretations reminiscent of Philo. In some cases,
however, there are striking contrasts in the two commentaries. Thus
the Midrash[304] tells that the four rivers of Eden symbolize the four
great nations of the old world; to Philo, they represent the four
cardinal virtues established by Greek philosophers. The Palestinian
commentators were prone to see an historical where Philo saw a
philosophical image.

The question may be asked, Who is the originator and who the borrower
of the common tradition? And it is a question to which chronology can
give no certain answer, and for which dates or records have no
meaning. For the Haggadah was not committed to writing till many
generations had known its influences, and it was not finally compiled
till many generations more had handed it down with continuous
accretions. The Haggadah in fact is part of the permanent spirit of
the race going back to a hoary past, and stretching down "the echoing
grooves of time" to the tradition of Judaism in our own day. The
Hebrew Word means, and the thing is, "what is said": the utterances of
the inspired teacher, some tale, some happy play of fancy, some moral
aphorism, some charming allegory which captivated the hearers, and was
handed down the generations as a precious thought. It is significant
in this regard that the Haggadah is remarkable for the number of
foreign words which it contains, Greek, Persian, and Roman terms
jostling with Hebrew and Aramaic. For while the Halakah was the
production of the Palestinian and Babylonian schools alone, the
Haggadah brought together the harvest of all lands; and scraps of
Greek philosophy found their way to Palestine before the Alexandrian
school developed its systematic allegory. In the Mishnah, the earliest
body of Jewish lore which was definitely formulated and written down,
one section is Haggadic, the passages we know as the "Ethics of the
Fathers." Now, we cannot place the date of this compilation before the
first century,[