In the Talmud is contained the main source for the knowledge of what Pharisaism meant; because it was made the storehouse in which all, or nearly all, that was held to be valuable in the Tradition of the Elders, the explicit religion of Torah, was stored up. There is a huge literature contemporary with the Talmud, to which the general name of Midrash is given; all of it is traditional, and all of it bears on the religion of Torah, in one way or another. This is the written deposit of Pharisaism, the mark which it has left upon the literature of the world. It is there, and not in the writings of those who did not understand its ideals or share its hopes, that its real meaning can alone be found. Those ideals and hopes first dawned in Jewish minds under the influence of Ezra. The Talmud is the witness to show how some of his countrymen, some of the bravest, some of the ablest, some of the most pious and saintly, and a host of unnamed faithful, were true to those ideals and clung to those hopes; and how, through good report and ill report, through shocks of disaster and the ruin of their state, ground down by persecution, or torn by faction, steadily facing enemies without and enemies within, they held on to the religion of Torah. They have not sought, and they certainly have not found, the praise of men for their steadfastness. For these are the Pharisees, and the world has for them only a contemptuous gibe. Who was it that said: "For every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment"? CHAPTER II THE THEORY OF TORAH In the preceding chapter I sketched the historical development of Pharisaism from its source in the work of Ezra to the time when it had found its literary expression in the Talmud and the Midrash. I said that from first to last what was developed was the religion of Torah. It is therefore essential to the understanding of Pharisaism that the reader should, first, obtain a clear conception of the meaning of Torah, and, second, that he should bear that conception always in mind in his further study of Pharisaism. It will be my task in the present chapter to show what Torah meant, and what form the religion of Torah actually, and perhaps necessarily, assumed. If I succeed, then the reader will understand how it was that Rabbinical devotion to Torah could express itself quite naturally in terms which to the unenlightened Gentile appear to be extravagant--as, for instance, when it is said that God studies Torah for three hours every day (b. A. Zar. 3^b).