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"He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye therefore do greatly err." Would it have been possible that He should deign to call Himself the God of dust and ashes? How new, how luminous, how profound a principle of Scriptural interpretation was this! The Sadducees had probably supposed that the words simply meant, "I am the God in whom Abraham and Isaac and Jacob trusted;" yet how shallow a designation would that have been, and how little adapted to inspire the faith and courage requisite for an heroic enterprise! "I am the God in whom Abraham and Isaac and Jacob trusted;" and to what, if there were no resurrection, had their trust come? To death, and nothingness, and an everlasting silence, and "a land of darkness, as darkness itself," after a life so full of trials that the last of these patriarchs had described it as a pilgrimage of few and evil years! But God meant more than this. He meant and so the Son of God interpreted it—that He who helps them who trust Him here, will be their help and stay for ever and for ever, nor shall the future world become for them "a land where all things are forgotten."1

1 R. Simeon Ben Eleazar refuted them by Numb. xv. 31 (Sanhedrin, 90, 6). It is, however, observable that the intellectual error, or dopaoía, of the Sadducees was not regarded by our Lord with one-tenth part of the indignation which He felt against the moral mistakes of the Pharisees. Doubt has been thrown by some modern writers on the Sadducean rejection of the resurrection, and it has been asserted that the Sadducees have been confounded with the Samaritans; in the above-quoted passage of the Talmud, unless it has been altered (Geiger, Urschrift, 129 n), the reading is ", not D" (Derenbourg, Hist. de Palest. 131). Some writers have said that the Sadducees merely maintained that the resurrection could not be proved from the Law (nn); if so, we see why our Lord drew His argument from the Pentateuch. That some Jewish sects accounted the Prophets and the Kethubhim of much less importance than the Law is clear from Midr. Tanchuma on Deut. xi. 26. (Gfrörer, i. 263.)

CHAPTER LII.

THE GREAT DENUNCIATION.

Prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy."-EZEK. xxxiv. 2.

The

ALL who heard them even the supercilious Sadduceesmust have been solemnised by these high answers. listening multitude were both astonished and delighted; even some of the Scribes, pleased by the spiritual refutation of a scepticism which their reasonings had been unable to remove, could not refrain from the grateful acknowledgment, "Master, thou hast well said." The more than human wisdom and insight of these replies created, even among His enemies, a momentary diversion in His favour. But once more the insatiable spirit of casuistry and dissension awoke, and this time a scribe, a student of the Torah, thought that he too would try to fathom the extent of Christ's learning and wisdom. He asked a question which instantly betrayed a false and unspiritual point of view, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?"

The Rabbinical schools, in their meddling, carnal,

1 Matt. xxii. 34-40; Mark xii. 28-34. St. Matthew says, voμikòs, a word more frequently used by St. Luke than ypaμμaтeús, as less likely to be misunderstood by his Gentile readers; similarly Josephus calls the scribes ¿nyntàι vóμov (comp. Juv. Sat. vi. 544).

THE GREATEST COMMANDMENT.

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superficial spirit of word-weaving and letter-worship, had spun large accumulations of worthless subtlety all over the Mosaic law. Among other things they had wasted their idleness in fantastic attempts to count, and classify, and weigh, and measure all the separate commandments of the ceremonial and moral law. They had come to the sapient conclusion that there were 248 affirmative precepts, being as many as the members in the human body, and 365 negative precepts, being as many as the arteries and veins, or the days of the year: the total being 613, which was also the number of letters in the Decalogue. They arrived at the same result from the fact that the Jews were commanded (Numb. xv. 38) to wear fringes (tsitsith) on the corners of their tallith, bound with a thread of blue; and as each fringe had eight threads and five knots, and the letters of the word tsitsith make 600, the total number of commandments was, as before, 613.1 Now surely, out of such a large number of precepts and prohibitions, all could not be of quite the same value; some were "light" (kal), and some were "heavy" (kobhed). But which? and what was the greatest commandment of all? According to some Rabbis, the most important of all is that about the tephillin and the tsîtsith, the fringes and phylacteries; and "he who diligently observes it is regarded in the same light as if he had kept the whole Law."2

1 Other Rabbis reckoned 620, the numerical value of the word (kether), “a crown.' This style of exegesis was called Gematria (Buxtorf, Syn. Jud. c. ix.; Bartolocci, Lex. Rabb. s. v.). The sages of the Great Synagogue had, however, reduced these to eleven, taken from Ps. xv., and observed that Isaiah reduced them to six (Isa. lv. 6, 7), Micah to three (vi. 8), and Habbakuk to one (ii. 4) (see Maccoth, f. 24). Hillel is said to have pointed a heathen proselyte to Lev. xix. 18, with the remark that "this is the essence of the Law, the rest is only commentary."

2 Rashi on Numb. xv. 38-40. When R. Joseph asked R. Joseph Ben

Some thought the omission of ablutions as bad as homicide; some that the precepts of the Mishna were all "heavy;" those of the Law were some heavy and some light. Others considered the third to be the greatest commandment. None of them had realised the great principle, that the wilful violation of one commandment is the transgression of all (James ii. 10), because the object of the entire Law is the spirit of obedience to God. On the question proposed by the lawyer the Shammaites and Hillelites were in disaccord, and, as usual, both schools were wrong: the Shammaites, in thinking that mere trivial external observances were valuable, apart from the spirit in which they were performed, and the principle which they exemplified; the Hillelites, in thinking that any positive command could in itself be unimportant, and in not seeing that great principles are essential to the due performance of even the slightest duties.

Still the best and most enlightened of the Rabbis had already rightly seen that the greatest of all commands, because it was the source of all the others, was that which enjoined the love of the One True God. Jesus had already had occasion to express His approval of this judgment,' and He now repeats it. Pointing to

Rabba which commandment his father had told him to observe more than any other, he replied, "The law about tassels. Once when, in descending a ladder, my father trod on one of the threads, and tore it, he would not move from the place till it was repaired" (Shabbath, 118 b). These fringes must be of four threads, one being blue, which are to be passed through an eyelet-hole, doubled to make eight; seven are to be of equal length, the eighth to have enough over to twist into five knots, which represent the five books of the Law! &c. (Buxtorf, ubi supra, and Leo Modena, Rites and Customs of the Jews, I. ch. xi.). about them were amazingly minute. 73, 2; Jer. Berach., f. 3, 2.

1 Luke x. 27. V. supr., p. 131.

As for the tephillin, the precepts For the other points see Tanch., f.

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the Scribes' tephillin,1 in which one of the four divisions contained the Shema" (Deut. vi. 4)—recited twice a day by every pious Israelite-He told them that that was the greatest of all commandments, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord;" and that the second was like to it, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Love to God issuing in love to man-love to man, our brother, resulting from love to our Father, God-on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.2

The question, in the sense in which the Scribe had put it, was one of the mere μáxai voμikai, one of those "strivings about the Law, which, as they were handled by the schools, were " unprofitable and vain."

But he could not fail to see that Jesus had not treated it in the idle disputatious spirit of jangling logomachy to which he was accustomed, and had not in His answer sanctioned any of the common errors and heresies of exalting the ceremonial above the moral, or the Tradition over the Torah, or the decisions of Sopherîm above the utterances of Prophets. Still less had He fallen into the fatal error of the Rabbis, by making obedience in one particular atone for transgression in another. The commandments which He had mentioned as the greatest were not special but general-not selected out of many, but inclusive of all. The Scribe had the sense to observe, and the candour to acknowledge, that

1 The passages inscribed on the parchment slips which were put into the cells of the little leather boxes called tephillin were Exod. xiii. 1—10, 11-16; Deut. vi. 4-9; xi. 13-21. The sect of Perushim, or modern Pharisees, to this day Tλaτúvovσi тà quλaktńpia (Matt. xxiii. 5).

2 The expression "hangs" is probably proverbial, but some have seen in it a special allusion to the hanging tsîtsith, which were meant to remind them of the Law (Numb. xv. 39). (Stier, iii. 184.)

3 Titus iii. 9.