The ruling Sadducean priesthood insisted on the rigid enforcement of the law. The party of the pious, the _Hasidim_, however,—according to the liturgy, the apocryphal and the rabbinical literature,—appealed to the mercy of God in song and prayer, acknowledging their failings in humility, and made kindness and love their special objects in life. Therefore with their ascendancy the divine attributes of mercy and compassion were accentuated. God himself, we are told, was heard praying: “Oh that My attribute of mercy may prevail over My attribute of justice, so that grace alone may be bestowed upon My children on earth.”(336) And the second word of the Decalogue was so interpreted that God’s mercy—which is said to extend “to the thousandth generation”—is five hundred times as powerful as His punitive justice,—which is applied “to the third and fourth generation.”(337) 3. Divine mercy shows itself in the law, where compassion is enjoined on all suffering creatures. Profound sympathy with the oppressed is echoed in the ancient law of the poor who had to give up his garment as a pledge: “When he crieth unto Me, I shall hear, for I am gracious.”(338) In the old Babylonian code, might was the arbiter of right,(339) but the unique genius of the Jew is shown in adapting this same legal material to its impulse of compassion. The cry of the innocent sufferer, of the forsaken and fatherless, rises up to God’s throne and secures there his right against the oppressor. Thus in the Mosaic law and throughout Jewish literature God calls himself “the Judge of the widow,” “the Father of the fatherless,”(340) “a Stronghold to the needy.”(341) He calls the poor, “My people,”(342) and, as the rabbis say, He loves the persecuted, not the persecutors.(343)