show how often this vast legal compilation was the subject of further
commentary, discussion and deduction by yet later scholars. But that
takes us beyond our theme and is another story.
In forming an estimate of these laws, we must first remember that they
belonged to the days when religion and state were one. So we shall find
priestly laws mixed up with police laws, sanitary regulations side by
side with regulations of sanctity, the injunctions teaching political
economy and morality almost in the same line. It should rather then be
compared to codes of law than to religious scriptures, though often
there the comparison would be incomplete, since the religious atmosphere
pervaded even the most secular circumstance of the life of the Jew.
There was no secular. The meanest function in life must be brought in
relation to the great Divine. This must be understood in studying the
Talmud, this must be understood in studying the Jew. As law, it compares
favorably with the Roman code--its contemporary in part. In the
treatment of a criminal it is almost quixotically humane. It abhors the
shedding of blood, and no man can be put to death on circumstantial
evidence. Many of its injunctions are intensely minute and
hair-splitting to the extreme of casuistry. Yet these elements are
familiar in the interpretation of law, not only in the olden time, but
in some measure even to-day. There are instances where Talmudic law is
tenderer than the Biblical; for example, the _lex talionis_ is softened
into an equivalent.
Yet the legal does not form the whole of the Talmud, nor perhaps the
part that would most interest the casual reader or the world at large.
It is the dry, prosaic half. There is a poetic half, let us say a
homiletic half, what we call Agada, as distinct from the legal portion
called Halacha. The term Agada, "narrative," is wofully insufficient to
describe the diverse material that falls under this head, for it
comprehends all the discursive elements that come up in the legal
discussions in the old Babylonian and Palestinian academies. These
elements are occasionally biographical,--fragments of the lives of the
great scholars, occasionally historical,--little bits of Israel's long
tragedy, occasionally didactic,--facts, morals, life lessons taught by
the way; occasionally anecdotic, stories told to relieve the monotony of
discussion; not infrequently fanciful; bits of philosophy, old
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