Already, in the time when Jesus was a boy, Hillel the Babylonian had applied his genius to the interpretation of Torah in ways which gave it a fresh power of ministry to spiritual wants. And when, seventy years later, the catastrophe came, the man was ready who should go forth from Jerusalem, and establish for the ancient religion a "temple not made with hands." Joḥanan ben Zaccai was that man. When he saw that the city was doomed, he went to the Emperor Vespasian, and made his submission to the force that could no longer be resisted (b. Gitt. 56^b). The Emperor asked what he should give him, though he sought no reward. "Give me Jabneh and its wise men"--Jabneh being a town on the coast, where already there were some of the leading Pharisaic teachers. The request was granted, and Joḥanan b. Zaccai gathered in Jabneh the remnants of the learning and wisdom of Judaism. There he and his colleagues repaired the shattered fabric of the religious life of their people, and adjusted it to the new conditions. The Temple with all that belonged to it was gone for ever. But the Synagogue and the College remained, as the home both of worship and study; and the religion of Torah probably gained rather than lost by being finally cut loose from association with the Temple cultus. The assembly at Jabneh took up the task of developing the religion of Torah, and carrying forward the Tradition of the Elders, where it had been interrupted by the war. The teachers to whose hands that task was now committed were henceforth known as the Wise; the names Sopherim and Pharisee were seldom used, but the essential features of their work remained unchanged, and it was carried on in the ancient spirit. In the interval between the capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the almost greater disaster in A.D. 135, when the revolt of Bar Coch'ba was stamped out, the assembly of the Rabbis met from time to time in Jabneh, or Lydda; and even during the persecution which followed on the failure of the last rebellion, when the Jewish teachers were hunted up and down, and Akiba, the greatest of them, was tortured to death, there were still left those who would carry on the tradition of their religion. These were young men who received ordination as Rabbis, when it meant death to be a Rabbi at all, if he should fall into the hands of the Romans. It is told (b. Sanh. 14ª) of R. Jehudah b. Baba, that he took six of his disciples into a secluded spot and there ordained them, and that he had hardly finished before he was discovered by the soldiers, and fell, stabbed with Roman spears. The six young men all survived to become the teachers of the next generation. They handed on what had been committed to them as a sacred trust, the religion of Torah, and the tradition in which its meaning and contents were set forth in growing fulness and clearness.