II. Talmudic Maccabean re volt (165 ;lc.) was undertaken by a small band -of people determined to die rather than give up their ancestral religion. When the victory was obtained their inmost care was devoted to the preservation and the development of the visible symbol of their religion, the Law of God. Thus the Scribes, who are traced back to Ezra, became the undisputed spiritual leaders of Israel. It was one of their number Who com posed the 119th Psalm, arranged so that eight acrostics are devoted to every one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, praising in 176 verses the one all-important topic of the devo tion to God's statutes, commandments, laws, ordinances and testimonies. This devotion to the law became still stronger after the destruc tion of the Temple of Jerusalem (70 A.D.). The law now was the one bond which united the scattered people of Israel. The study of the law was undertaken first with a practical end in view. It was the endeavor of the Scribes to clarify all possible details, and to answer all the questions which emergency might bring before the observant Jew. This habit of going into the minutia: of the law, whose infiniteness was a matter in which the pious scholars prided themselves, led to the habit of developing the law, for the law's sake. The most unlikely, and even impossible, consequences were dis cussed in the schools, because it was meritorous to devote one's life to the expounding of God's will, laid down in his Thorah Over these hair splitting decisions the rabbis did not forget the spiritualizing ideas which were the real object of their Alexandrian coreligionists.
There were two principal methods 'of study ing the word of God. The first, looking upon the law and its practice, is called Halachah, literally, the Walk„ meaning the practice. The second method is called Hagadah,, preaching, and is devoted to the finding of edifying thoughts in the Bible. For a long time these studies were confined to the schoolroom, the teacher expounding the law to his pupils as he had learned it from his teachers, or as he saw fit to present it. The mass of these laws grew. Originally, some made brief notes of their les sons, called Meggillath Setarim, *secret scroll,* or named after the teacher in whose school the notes were taken, as Mishnah of Rabbi Akiba, of Rabbi Meir, of Rabbi Nathan. The name Mishnah became then the technical term for a collection of rabbinical laws. The word means the Second Law, or, more properly, although not literally, a compendium of the law. Ac cording to reliable tradition the first ope to compile these scattered laws into one code and to arrange them according to the 'subject matter was Juda• Hanasi, head of the school of Tiberias, 200. His compendium of what called partly rabbinical law and partly Mosaic law, in rabbinical conception, was called Mishnah, and forms the textbook of the Jewish law, comprising the ritual as well as the civil laws and the penal code. The Dogma is almost entirely missing.
Judah Hanasi's first effort stimulated others into imitation. Other codes were compiled, either following the example of the Mishnah, and arranging the text according to subject matter, or • taking the Pentateuch as text, and commenting upon its laws, showing the rabbin ical interpretation. A work belonging to the
first class is the Tosefta (literally, addition), and to the latter class • belongs the Mekilta (literally methods, namely of scriptural inter pretation, a rabbinical commentary on Exodus, Sifra (T e Book) a rabbinical commentary on Leviticus, Sifre (The Books), a commentary on Numbers and Deuteronomy. Legal discussions continued even after the Mishnah had been recognized as the authorized code of laws. The disciples and successors of Judah Hanasi continued to discuss the text of the Mishnah in the same way in which the text of the Bible had been treated by their predecessors. These glosses soon greatly exceeded the text in vol ume, and they were called Gemara (comple tion). Together with the Mishnah, the Gemara formed one book, called the Talmud. (See article TALMUD in this section). With the growing influence of Christianity, the condi tion of the Jews in Palestine became more and more unfavorable, and a great many emigrated to the more congenial Parthian kingdom in Mesopotamia, which, from the time of the Exile, had had Jewish settlements and so two schools were formed, one being in Palestine, notably in Tiberias, and the other in southern Mesopotamia. Both schools used the same Mishnah as a textbook, but the glosses natu rally differed, although there was a considerable interchange of ideas owing to the fact that some noted Palestine scholar would settle in Babylonia, or some promising Babylonian student went to Palestine to continue his studies. Thus two Gemaras were compiled, one containing the glosses of the Palestinian rabbis, called the Talmud of Jerusalem, and the other containing theglosses of the Baby lonian rabbis, called the Talmud of Babylon. The former was closed about 350, and the latter about 500. These dates, however, are not curate, just as the tradition that Judah Hanasi compiled the Mishnah is not accurate when taken literally. All of these codes have been handled freely, and some of them have been interpolated by authors as late as the cen tury.
The fundamental conception of the Jewish student was that everything worth knowing was contained in the Bible, and notably in the Pentateuch, and so they looked to the Bible, and especially to the Pentateuch, for a con firmation of their conceptions. The contro versies with Christianity, which especially affected the Jews in Palestine, produced quite a literature of homiletical explanations of the Bible. This is called the Midrash investigation). While the Midrash originally applies to both Halachah and Hagadah, it is more specifically understood with regard to the latter. The expositions of the Scripture de livered by various prominent teachers were col lected, and •so a vast •number of Midrashim were compiled, the oldest of which is the Genesis Rabba, about 600. This literature was more subject to arbitrary interpolations and additions, because the subject always dis appeared behind the object, which was to teach the fear of the Lord. Who. bad first made a certain statement, and in what form he had made was from this point of view of no consequence.