The Talmud and the Rabbins afford very little assistance for the early periods, but might probably be made to render more service in behalf of the times of the Saviour than has been generally al lowed. The illustrations which Lightfoot and Wet stein have drawn from these sources are uf great value ; and Gfrbrer, in his jahrhundert des Beds (Stuttgart 1838), has made an ample use of the materials they supply in order to draw a picture of the 1st century, a use which the learned author is at no small pains to justify. The compilations of the Jewish doctors, however, require to be em ployed with the greatest caution, since the Rabbins were the depositaries, the expounders, and the apologists of that corrupt form of the primitive faith and the Mosaic institutions which has been called by the distinctive name of Judaism, which comprised an heterogeneous mass of false and true things, the colluvies of the east as well as light from the 131ble, and which, to a great extent, lies under the express condemnation of Christ himself, How easy it is to propagate fables on their autho rity, and to do a disservice to the Gospel records, maybeleamt from the fact that older writers, in their undue trust of Rabbinical authority, went so far as to maintain that no cock was allowed to be kept in Jerusalem because fowls scratched unclean things out of the earth, though the authority of Scripture (which in the case they refused to admit) is most express and decided (Matt. xxvi. 34 ; Mark xiv. 3o, 68, 72). On the credibility of the Rabbins see Ravii Diss. Phil. Theol. a'e eo quoa' Fidel merentur,
etc., in Oelrich's Collect. °pure. Hist. Phil. Theol. ; Wolf, EX. Hebr. 1095 Fabricius, Bibliog..
i. 3, 4 ; Brunsmann, Diss. de yudaica levi tate, Hafnix 1705.
The classic authors betray the grossest igno rance almost in all cases where they treat of the origin and history of the Hebrew people ; and even the most serious and generally philosophic writers fall into vulgar errors and unaccountable mistakes as soon as they speak on the subject. What, for instance, can be worse than the blunder or preju dice of Tacitus, under the influence of which he declared that the Jews derived their origin from Mount Ida in Crete ; that by the advice of an oracle they had been driven out of Egypt ; and that they set up in their temple at Jerusalem as an object of worship the figure of an ass, since an animal of that species had directed them in the wil derness and discovered to them a fountain (Tacit. Hist. v. 1, 2). Dion Cassius (mvii. 17) relates similar fables. Plutarch (Queen'. Sympos. iv. 5) makes the Hebrews pay divine honours to swine, as being their instructors in agriculture, and affirms that they kept the Sabbath and the Feast of Taber nacles in honour of Bacchus. A collection of these gross misrepresentations, together with a profound and successful inquiry into their origin, and a full exposure of their falsehood, may be found in a paper by Dr. J. G. Miiller, recently published in the Theologise/1e Studien und Kritiken (1843, Viertes Eleft. p. 893).—J. R. B. ,