Of far greater importance than the priest was the Scribe: but the Scribe was only a layman. He was not consecrated to a sacred office, and to that extent set apart from the rest of his fellow-men: he was indeed chosen and appointed by those who were competent to do so, but, in regard to what he might or might not do, he was in just the same position as any Pharisee who was not a Scribe. What distinguished him from the rest of his brethren was that he made it his special business to study the Torah, both written and unwritten, and to qualify himself to be a teacher of it. His proficiency was recognised and vouched for, by those who were already accepted religious teachers, by some form of ordination. To become a Scribe was not so much to take orders as to take a degree, though that is not an exact parallel. I have explained in the preceding chapter the way in which the Torah was regarded as the embodiment of the full and final revelation which God had made to Israel. It was the source of all knowledge, the supreme authority, the regulator of all action. It included within its range the whole duty of man, his entire relation to God and to his fellow-men. The written Torah was contained in the Pentateuch. The other canonical books of the Old Testament were to be read in the light afforded by the Torah, and to be valued for the help they gave in illustrating its meaning, making clear what had been left obscure in the Pentateuch. That there could be any contradiction between the secondary scriptures and the Pentateuch was in theory impossible. And when in the case of certain books, namely, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, contradictions were alleged, the alternatives were to explain away the contradiction or to reject the books from the canon. The books were retained, by an exercise of dialectic subtlety which is graphically indicated in the statement that a certain Rabbi burnt the "midnight oil" to the extent of three hundred barrels, in his studies to reconcile the book of Ezekiel with the standard of the Torah (b. Shabb. 13^b).