"Rabbinical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... homiletic with copious use of parable, and legalistic with an eye to the regulation of conduct. Then came the Talmud in two recensions, the Palestinian and the Babylonian, the latter completed about 500 A.D. For some centuries afterwards the Geonim (heads of the Rabbinical Universities in Persia) continued to analyse and define the legal prescriptions and ritual of Judaism, adding and changing in accord with the needs of the day; for Tradition was a living, fluid thing. Then in the eleventh century Isaac of Fez (Alfasi) formulated ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... it is this air or gas, which, retaining the shape of the body, becomes a phantom or ghost, the perfect representation of the deceased. The Greeks called this phantom the image or idol of the soul; the Pythagoreans, its chariot, its frame; and the Rabbinical school, its vessel, or boat. When a man had conducted himself well in this world, his whole soul, that is its chariot and ether, ascended to the moon, where a separation took place: the chariot lived in the lunar Elysium, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... every nail, pin, stone, stair, knife, pot, and in almost every feather of a sacrificed bird could discern strange, distinct, and peculiar mysteries.[3] The same remark applies to the Jewish rabbis, who in their Talmud are full of mysterious shadows. From these rabbinical flints some have thought to extract choice mystical oil to supple the wheels of their fancy—to use a homely expression. Such Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers limped and danced upon one learned leg, to the amazement of all beholders, but not to their edification; their lucubrations ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... You remember the old Rabbinical tradition which speaks a deep truth, dressed in a fanciful shape. It says that the manna in the wilderness tasted to every man just what he desired, whatever dainty or nutriment he most wished; that the manna became like the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... first and second chapter of Luke, that Zacharias, who wrote these chapters, meant to hold himself out as the father of Jesus Christ as well as of John the Baptist. The Jewish idea of being conceived of the Holy Ghost did not exclude the idea of human parentage. The rabbinical commentator on Genesis explains this." He was called "Godless Billy Taylor," but says he: "When I publish my other pamphlet in proof of the great truth that Jesus Christ wrote the 'Wisdom' and translated ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... unlike that produced by mesmerism, and in which many of the same phenomena seem naturally to display themselves; the well-known instance of the young servant girl, related by Coleridge, who, though ignorant and uneducated, could during her sleep-walking discourse learnedly in rabbinical Hebrew, would furnish a case in point. The circumstance of her old master having been in the habit of walking about the house at night, reading from rabbinical books aloud and in a declamatory manner; ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... legend, I know,— A fable, a phantom, a show, Of the ancient Rabbinical lore; Yet the old mediaeval tradition, The beautiful, strange superstition But haunts me and holds me ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... can expect only originality, not profundity. Indeed, his whole life was a protest against the subtleties of the Talmudists and the ceremonies, meaningless to him, which they introduced into Judaism. His object was to remove the petrified rabbinical restrictions (gezerot) and develop the emotional side of the Jew in their stead. He was primarily a man of action, and had little love for the rabbis, their passivity, world-weariness, and pride of intellect. It is said that when he "overheard the sounds of eager, loud discussions ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... its effects on a man, given in the old "Calendrier des Bergiers," The man of choleric temperament has "wine of lion;" the sanguine, "wine of ape;" the phlegmatic, "wine of sheep;" the melancholic, "wine of sow." There is a Rabbinical tradition that, when Noah was planting vines, Satan slaughtered beside them the four animals named; hence the effect of wine in making those who drink it display in turn the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... long and honorable record of literary activity. Our Holy Scriptures, our Rabbinical Literature, our contributions to philosophy, to ethics, to law, our poetry, sacred and secular, our share in the world's history, all become part of the program which you have laid out for yourselves as a means of cultivation. In their due proportion they should (although they do not) ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... though by no means the best is the imaginary Rabbinical legend of Jochanan Hakkadosh (John the Saint), which Browning, with a touch of learned quizzicalness, states in his note[57] "to have no better authority than that of the treatise, existing dispersedly, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... it is said, never himself claimed to be the Messiah, since it is only John who reports his saying to the woman of Samaria, "I that speak unto thee am he." Paul is set aside, as being the author of a rabbinical theology which has no claim upon us; and that, in spite of Christ's own declaration that there were many things which he could not teach while he was here in the flesh, but which he would teach, by his Spirit, after his ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... show it to be probable that legends of this kind should arise unhistorically.... That these deeds of Elisha were conceived, doubtless with reference to the passage of Isaiah, as a real opening of the eyes of the blind, is proved by the above rabbinical passage [stating that the Messiah would do all that in ancient times had been done by the hands of the righteous, vol. i., p. 81, note], and hence cures of the blind were expected from the Messiah. Now, if the Christian community, proceeding ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... our literature has not yet been given a name that recommends itself to universal acceptance. Some have called it "Rabbinical Literature," because during the middle ages every Jew of learning bore the title Rabbi; others, "Neo-Hebraic"; and a third party considers it purely theological. These names are all inadequate. Perhaps the only one sufficiently comprehensive ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... may seem rash to pass a hasty sentence of exclusion, even upon the dullest and most despised of the essays which this ample collection offers to the public. There may be among the learned, even now, individuals to whom the rabbinical lore of Hugh Broughton presents more charms than the verses of Homer; and a future day may arise when tracts on chronology will bear as high a value among antiquaries as 'Greene's Groats' Worth of Wit,' or 'George Peele's Jests,' the present respectable ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... vigorous, and here and there imaginative, but generally its tone is prosaic. Its narrative portions are chiefly about scriptural persons, especially those of the Old Testament. Mohammed's acquaintance with these must have been indirect, from rabbinical and apocryphal sources. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christ are acknowledged as prophets. The deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity are repudiated. The miracles of Jesus are acknowledged. Mohammed does not claim for himself ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the saying of Rabbi Akiba some half-century later. When asked where God was to be sought now that the Temple was destroyed, he replied, "In the great city of Rome" (Yer. Taanit, 69a). But the Rabbinical utterance had a very different meaning from the plea ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... title has perplexed the scribbling portion of mankind. We may guess how their invention has been racked by the strange contortions it has produced. To begin with the Hebrews. 'The Lips of the Sleeping' (Labia Dormientium)—what book did you suppose that title to designate?—A Catalogue of Rabbinical Writers! Again, imagine some young lady of old captivated by the sentimental title of 'The Pomegranate with its Flower,' and opening on a Treatise on the Jewish Ceremonials! Let us turn to the Romans. Aulus Gellius ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... synagogue the people assembled to pray, or to hear the Scriptures read and expounded, not to receive religious instruction. The Jewish religion was as full of ceremonials as the pagan, and the intellectual part of it was confined to the lawyers, to the rabbinical hierarchy. But the preaching of the great doctrines of Christianity was made a peculiarly sacred office, and given to a class of men who avoided all secular pursuits. The Christian priest was the recognized head of the society which he taught and controlled. In process of time, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... An Inquiry laid by me it few years ago before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania elicited information as to several of these 'gates' in that State. I have not the work by me, but I believe that FALES DUNLAP, Esq., of New York, asserts on Rabbinical authority, in an appendix to Sod or the Mysteries, that the Hebrew word commonly translated as 'passover' should be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Old Testament in St. Paul had always been a mystery to me. The more I now examined them, the clearer it appeared that they were based on untenable Rabbinical principles. Nor are those in the Acts and in the Gospels any better. If we take free leave to canvass them, it may appear that not one quotation in ten is sensible and appropriate. And shall we then ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... a Rabbinical Divine in England, who was Chaplain to the Earl of Essex in Queen Elizabeth's Time, that had an admirable Head for Secrets of this Nature. Upon his taking the Doctor of Divinity's Degree, he preached before the University of Cambridge, upon the First Verse of the First ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Christian centuries much was owed to the genius and the devotion to medicine of distinguished Jewish physicians. Their sacred and rabbinical writers always concerned themselves closely with medicine, and both the Old Testament and the Talmud must be considered as containing chapters important for the medical history of the periods in which they were ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... religious Jewish centers came together and resolved to submit their differences for final adjustment to Maimonides, born in Spain, A. D. 1130 , and died A. D. 1204—the then greatest living Hebrew theologian and authority on biblical and rabbinical laws. Discarding all side issues, their differences were seemingly incorporated into three questions and ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... he do in Venice? As he grew old enough to be useful, his father employed him in his pawn-shop, and for recreation there was always the synagogue and the study of the Bible with its commentaries, and the endless volumes of the Talmud, that chaos of Rabbinical lore and legislation. And when he approached his thirteenth year, he began to prepare to become a "Son of the Commandment." For at thirteen the child was considered a man. His sins, the responsibility of which had hitherto been ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... word "heaven" in the rabbinical language of that time is synonymous with the name of "God," which they avoided pronouncing. Compare Matt. xxi. 25; Luke xv. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... Council of Illiberis in the beginning of the fourth century, was in course of time much aggravated by the earnest love of the Spanish Jews for the original scriptures of the Old Testament. It was not until the eleventh century that rabbinical tradition gained much hold in the Jewish mind in Spain, but, from the first, Christians had cursed Jews in sincere but blind zeal against the descendants, as they thought, of those who crucified our Lord in Jerusalem. Yet the Sephardim in Spain could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... with a request from the college and school committees, and from Sir Moses, I examined the Rabbinical students for nearly three hours. The result being most satisfactory, Sir Moses consented to become the ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... of Mexico, which bear a surprising resemblance to those used by the followers of the Buddhist superstition. In return for a translation of an Arabic inscription which I made for him, he presented me with a copy of the Cabalistic book Zohar, in the Rabbinical language and character, which on the destruction of the Inquisition at Seville (1820) he obtained from the library of ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... Stone of Foundation, based on these and other rabbinical reveries, are of the most extraordinary character, if they are to be viewed as histories, but readily reconcilable with sound sense, if looked at only in the light of allegories. They present an uninterrupted succession of events, in which the Stone of Foundation takes ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... attention seems to have been paid to the collection of Hebrew books than to those in Coptic and Arabic. Selden, it is true, gave to the University Library 'such of his Talmudical and Rabbinical books as were not already to be found there,' and purchases were made at the Crevenna sale in Amsterdam and at a sale during the present century of the MSS. of Matheo Canonici at Venice. The chief source from which the Bodleian was supplied was the collection formed before 1735 by David Oppenheimer, ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... information and confidence, these forays became more extensive and profitable. It was then the transition period from the shallow though graceful pages of Gillies, Rollin, Russel, and Tytler, and the rabbinical agglomerations of Shuckford and Prideaux to the modern school of free, profound, and laborious investigation, which has reared immortal monuments to its memory in the works of Hallam, Macaulay, Grote, Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Niebuhr, Bunsen, Schlosser, Thiers, ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... priestesses are dedicated to a snake-god and are married to the god.[359] At Rome, it is interesting to note, the serpent was the symbol of fecundation, and as such often figures at Pompeii as the genius patrisfamilias, the generative power of the family.[360] In Rabbinical tradition, also, the serpent is the symbol ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Mahometans and of this opportunity he appears to have made excellent use. On his return to England, after some years of banishment, he published an interesting volume on the Polity and Religion of Barbary, and another on the Hebrew Customs and the State of Rabbinical Learning. He rose to eminence in his profession, and became one of the royal chaplains, a Doctor of Divinity, Archdeacon of Salisbury, and Dean of Lichfield. It is said that he would have been made a bishop after the Revolution, if he had not given offence to the Government ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Benjamin from the Hebrew into French, which he illustrated with notes, and accompanied with dissertations; a work in which his father, as he himself declares, could give him little assistance, as he did not understand the rabbinical dialect. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... was a bogie-name used by the ancient Jews to unruly children. The rabbinical writers tell us that Lilith was Adam's wife before the creation of Eve. She refused to submit to him, and became a horrible night-spectre, especially hostile ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... absurd story is of Rabbinical origin. I have a strong impression on my mind of having read something very like it long ago in the works of Philo ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... never put himself forward; yet he was the most steadfast and cultured champion of the principles represented by the early Congregationalists. Amid all the strife of controversy, he steadily pursued his rabbinical studies. The combination was so unique that many, like the encyclopaedists L. Moreri and J. H. Zedler, have made two Henry Ainsworths—one Dr Henry Ainsworth, a learned biblical commentator; the other H. Ainsworth, an arch-heretic and "the ringleader of the Separatists ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and Religion of the Ancient Hebrews cannot boast of a great variety of materials, because what of the subject is not known to the youngest reader of the Bible must be sought for, in the writings of Rabbinical authors, who have unfortunately directed the largest share of their attention to the minutest parts of their Law, and expended the labour of elucidation on those points which are least interesting to the rest of the world. It is to be deeply ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the Cabala, I am not ignorant of the date of the oldest Rabbinical writings which contain or refer to this philosophy, but I coincide with Eichorn, and very many before Eichorn, that the foundations of the Cabala were laid and well known long before Christ, though not all the fanciful superstructure. I am persuaded that new light might be ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We may find anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of our Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the Prophets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the Incarnation is distinct from all this. ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... reasonings be just, no poet has ever triumphed over greater difficulties than Milton. He received a learned education: he was a profound and elegant classical scholar: he had studied all the mysteries of Rabbinical literature: he was intimately acquainted with every language of modern Europe, from which either pleasure or information was then to be derived. He was perhaps the only great poet of later times who has been distinguished by the excellence of his Latin verse. The genius of Petrarch was scarcely ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... presided over thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in consequence, inspired the greatest awe. That awe they put into the name, the pronunciation of which, like the origin of their traditions, they afterward forgot. In subsequent rabbinical writings it became Shem, the Name; Shemhammephoresh, the Revealed Name, uttered but once a year, on the day of Atonement, by the high priest in the Holy of Holies. Mention of it by anyone else was deemed a capital offence, though, permissibly, it might be rendered El Shaddai, the Almighty. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... easy, and My burden is light"? But if Christ's law of love is simpler it is also far more exacting than the old law which it superseded. It has meshes far finer than any that Pharisaic ingenuity could weave. Rabbinical law can secure the tithing of mint and anise and cumin, the washing of cups and pots, and many such like things; it can regulate the life of ritual and outward observance; and after that it has no more that it can do. But Christ's law of love is a mentor that searches out ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... Greek, it is not a common word; nor can the proper meaning, fornication, be strictly applied to matrimonial sin. In a figurative sense, how far, and to what offences, may it be extended? Did Christ speak the Rabbinical or Syriac tongue? Of what original word is the translation? How variously is that Greek word translated in the versions ancient and modern! There are two (Mark, x. 11, Luke, xvi. 18) to one (Matthew, xix. 9) that such ground of divorce was not excepted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... fine series of Talmudical and Rabbinical books; nearly 200 volumes of Fathers of the Church, as well as liturgical books of the different ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... bodies and live again. Thus people were ready to accept John the Baptist as being Elias in a new form. Perhaps these rather fragmentary ideas of the Jews are traceable to Egyptian and ultimately to Indian teaching about transmigration. That belief is said to crop up occasionally in rabbinical writings but was given no ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... earnings for "Z'dakah," the religious term in common use for charity, which, significantly enough, in biblical Hebrew means "justice." The idea that charity is an essential part of worship has been bred into them by long tradition, and continues to be regarded as such, wherever rabbinical Judaism survives in full force. From childhood every Jew knows the saying of Simon the Just, one of the last men of the ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... In the rabbinical literature several successes of the apostles are noticed, especially at Capernaum and Capersamia. One of them is most remarkable, viz., the conversion of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcan by the apostle James. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... discern the historical importance of writers, worthless in themselves, who form important links. In theology and in philosophy it is much the same: he must not read the Bible and say what he feels about it; he must unravel Rabbinical and Talmudic tendencies; he must acquaint himself with the heretical leanings of a certain era, and the shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition. In philosophy he is still worse off, because ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... into the Adam-Kadmon, or Primeval Element, here strangely brought into relation with the Nifl and Muspel (Darkness and Light) of the antique North, it may be enough to say, that its correctness of deduction, and depth of Talmudic and Rabbinical lore have filled perhaps not the worst Hebraist in Britain with ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Commissioners, and took his place beside his brethren. The subject under discussion was the text, Matt. xviii. 15-17, as bearing upon the question respecting excommunication. Selden arose, and in a long and elaborate speech, and with a great display of minute rabbinical lore, strove to demonstrate that the passage contained no warrant for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but that it related to the ordinary practice of the Jews in their common civil courts, by whom, as he asserted, one ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... group of Epistles—Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians—are steeped in ideas which belong to Greek philosophy and the Greek mystery-religions. It would be impossible to translate them into any Eastern language. The Rabbinical disputes with the Jews about justification and election have disappeared; the danger ahead is now from theosophy and the barbarised Platonism which was afterwards matured in Gnosticism. The teaching is even more Christocentric than before; and the Catholic doctrine ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit. If I wish to discuss a question of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of talking the men of to-day have lost. They either lecture, dispute, or twaddle. A Rabbinical story relates that twelve baskets of chit-chat fell from heaven, and that Eve secured nine while Adam was picking up the other three. Since then, Eve seems to have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Empire and in the Orient of old. The masses regarded these beds of decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death, with a fear that was almost religious. The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... caught him up! the Lord knows where, And gave him his Rabbinical degree Unknown to foreign university.—Absalom ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Spirit of God" are, in the original Hebrew "rouah AElohim," which is literally "the Breathing of God"; and similarly, the ancient religious books of India, make the "Swara" or Great Breath the commencement of all life and energy. The word "rouah" in Genesis is remarkable. According to rabbinical teaching, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a certain symbolic significance, and when examined in this manner, the root from which this word is derived conveys the idea of Expansive Movement. It is the opposite of the word "hoshech," translated "darkness" ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... and developed doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a certain continuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that in his splendid attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The essence of Christianity was meant to be a tabula rasa. Christ bade men trust ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... upon the formation and institutions of the Christian Church. The author has employed in its composition the writings of every sect, and has condensed in it the result of a thorough study of the entire literature relating to the Old Testament and the rabbinical writings. He writes with the greatest impartiality, and in the interest of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... freedom comparable to that of the old Jews. They were, to use our modern phrase, the only constitutional people of the East. The burdensomeness of Moses' law, ere it was overlaid, in later days, by Rabbinical scrupulosity, has been much exaggerated. In its simpler form, in those early times, it left every man free to do, as we are expressly told, that which was right in his own eyes, in many most important matters. Little seems to have been demanded ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... who edited Broughton's works in 1662, entitled them as follows:—"The Works of the great Albionen Divine, renowned in many Nations for rare Skill in Salem's and Athens' Tongues, and familiar acquaintance with all Rabbinical ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... commands that were revealed later, even the Rabbinical injunctions, as, for instance, the one relating to the limits of a Sabbath day's journey, wherefor his reward was that God disclosed to him the new teachings which He expounded daily ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... caliphate. The Resch-Glutha, or Prince of the Captivity, lived in all the state and splendour of an oriental potentate, far outshining in his pomp his rival sovereign in Tiberias. The most celebrated of the rabbinical sovereigns was Jehuda, sometimes called the nasi or patriarch. His life was of such spotless purity that he was named the Holy. He was the author of a new constitution for the Jewish people, for he embodied in the celebrated Mischna all ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... souls are immortal, but those of the good only pass into other bodies, while those of the bad suffer eternal punishment. This attribution of the doctrine of metempsychosis and eternal punishment is another piece of Hellenization, or a reproduction of a Hellenistic misunderstanding; for the Rabbinic records nowhere suggest that such ideas were held by the Pharisees. "The Sadducees, on the other hand, deny fate entirely, and hold that God is not concerned in man's conduct, which is entirely in his own ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich |
