=10. The various traditions= which in all variety of expression, as unwritten laws, as commentaries and opinions, went to make up the Talmud, with its Mishna and Gamara, had remained unwritten for generations because there was a rule given out by some of their learned men and teachers that “things delivered by word of mouth must not be recorded.” But about A. D. 180 one of the most influential and wisest of their number, Rabbi Jehudah, decided that the time had come when the Mishna must be committed to writing. Rabbi Jehudah, for whom the greatest veneration existed, began with his fellow-laborers the heavy task of reducing all these traditions and decisions of many generations to a written form, and this work was performed at Tiberias (on the lake of the same name, 70 miles north of Jerusalem), where a celebrated school existed after Titus had destroyed Jerusalem.[146] It is a memorable fact that for nearly four centuries the vast amount of literature which composed the Talmud had been stored only in the memory of the learned members of the Jewish nation. =11. The vastness of this labor= of memorial possession may be comprehended in some degree when we learn that of only one rabbi[147] 300 magisterial sentences are recorded in the Talmud, and years before his time Rabbi Hillel[148] reduced 600 or 700 sections, which had been known before only in a complicated mass, into orders, divisions, chapters, and verses, whereby they could be better memorized. =12. Although this cultivation of the memory= was carried on to a very great extent among the Jews during one or two centuries before the Christian era, and to a degree unexcelled by any other nation, there are evidences that long before the Captivity the cultivation of the memory was largely encouraged.