NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. i 49 



Such efforts as these culminated fitly in the rabbinical decla- 

 ration that each passage in the law has seventy distinct mean- 

 ings, and that God himself gives three hours every day to their 

 study. 



After this the Jewish world was prepared for anything, and it 

 does not surprise us to find such discoveries in the domain of 

 ethical culture as the doctrine that for inflicting the forty stripes 

 save one upon those who broke the law the lash should be 

 braided of ox-hide and ass-hide ; and, as warrant for this con- 

 struction of the lash, the text, " The ox knoweth his owner, and 

 the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know " ; and, as the 

 logic connecting text and lash, the statement that Jehovah evi- 

 dently intended to command that " the men who know not shall 

 be beaten by those animals whose knowledge shames them." 



By such methods also were revealed such historical treasures 

 as that Og, King of Bashan, escaped the deluge by wading after 

 Noah's ark. 



There were, indeed, noble exceptions to this kind of teaching. 

 It can not be forgotten that Rabbi Hillel formulated the golden 

 rule, which had before him been given to the extreme Orient by 

 Confucius, and which afterward received a yet more beautiful 

 emphasis from Jesus of Nazareth ; but the seven rules of interpre- 

 tation laid down by Hillel were multiplied and refined by men 

 like Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Eleazar until they justified every 

 absurd subtlety.* 



An eminent scholar has said that while the letter of Scripture 

 became ossified in Palestine, it became volatilized at Alexandria ; 

 and the truth of this remark was proved by the Alexandrian 

 Jewish theologians just before the beginning of our era. 



This, too, was in obedience to a law of development, which is 

 that, when literal interpretation clashes with increasing knowl- 

 edge or with progress in moral feeling, theologians take refuge in 

 mystic meanings a law which we see working in all great re- 

 ligions, from the Brahmans finding hidden senses in the Vedas to 

 Plato and the Stoics finding them in the Greek myths ; and from 

 the Sofi reading new meanings into the Koran, to eminent Chris- 

 tian divines of the nineteenth century giving a non-natural sense 

 to some of the plainest statements in the Bible. 



The great early master in this evolution was Philo ; by him 

 came as never before the use of allegory. The garden of Eden 



* For a multitude of amusing examples of rabbinical interpretations, see an article in 

 Blackwood's Magazine for November, 1882 ; for a more general discussion, see Archdeacon 

 Farrar's History of Interpretation, lect. i and ii, and Rev. Prof. H. P. Smith's Inspiration 

 and Inerrancy, Cincinnati, 1893, especially chap, iv ; also Reuss, History of the New Testa- 

 ment, English translation, pp. 527, 528. 



