is an old story," he writes, "composed by the sages
and handed down by memory from age to age.... They say that,
when God had finished the world, he asked one of the angels
if aught were wanting on land or in sea, in air or in
heaven. The angel answered that all was perfect and
complete. One thing only he desired, speech, to praise God's
works, or to recount, rather than praise, the exceeding
wonderfulness of all things made, even of the smallest and
the least. For the due recital of God's works would be their
most adequate praise, seeing that they needed no addition of
ornament, but possessed in the sincerity of truth the most
perfect eulogy. And the Father approved the angel's words,
and afterwards appeared the race gifted with the muses and
with song. This is the ancient story; and in accord with it,
I say that it is God's peculiar work to do good, and the
creature's work to give Him thanks."[306]

Now this legend and moral appear in another form in the collection of
Midrash, the Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, which apparently had ancient sources
that have disappeared. There it is told: "When the Holy One, blessed
be He, consulted the Torah as to the completeness of the work of
creation, she answered him: 'Master of the future world, if there be
no host, over whom will the King reign, and if there be no creatures
to praise him, where is the glory of the King?' And the Lord of the
world was pleased with her answer and forthwith He created man."[307]

The Haggadah is rich also in allegorical speculation, of which there are
traces in the Biblical books themselves. In the book of Micah, for
example, we find that the patriarchs are taken as types of certain
virtues, Abraham of Kindness, [Hebrew: hsd], and Jacob of Truth,
[Hebrew: 'mt] (vii. 20). And when the ideas of the people expanded
philosophically in Palestine and in Alexandria, the profounder
conceptions were attached to Scripture by the device of allegorical
interpretation, and certain rabbis attributed a higher value to the
inner than to the literal meaning. Thus Akiba, who wrote an elaborate
allegorical work upon the Song of Songs,[308] held that the book was the
most profound in the Bible, and Rabbi Judah similarly regarded the book
of Job.[309] The Palestinian allegorists took to themselves a wider
field than the Alexandrian, and looked for the deeper meanings rather in
the Wisdom Literature tha