Nehemiah was a statesman, not a priest or scribe; a politician, not a literary man. It is true that he may have had assistants, or committed the work to competent hands; but this is conjectural. The account of his supposed canon hardly commends itself by inherent truthfulness or probability, though it is accepted by Ewald and Bleek. When the great synagogue ceased, there was an interval during which it is not clear whether the sacred books were neglected, except by private individuals; or whether they were studied, copied, and collected by a body of scribes. Perhaps the scribes and elders of the Hasmonæan time were active at intervals in this department. The institution of a senate by Judas Maccabaeus is supposed to be favored by 2 Maccabees (chapter i. 10-ii. 18); but the passage furnishes poor evidence of the thing. Judas is there made to write to Egypt in the year of the Seleucidae 188, though he died thirty-six years before, _i.e._, 152. Other places have been added as corroborative, viz., 2 Maccab. iv. 44, xi. 27; 1 Maccab. vii. 33. Some go so far as to state that Jose ben Joeser was appointed its first president at that time. The Midrash in Bereshith Rabba (§ 65) makes him one of the sixty Hassidim who were treacherously murdered by Alcimus; but this is neither in the first book of the Maccabees (chapter vii.) nor in Josephus,(46) and must be pronounced conjectural. It is impossible to fix the exact date of Jose ben Joeser in the Hasmonean period. Pirke Aboth leaves it indefinite. Jonathan, Judas Maccabaeus’s successor, when writing to the Lacedaemonians, speaks of the _gerusia_ or senate as well as _the people_ of the Jews; whence we learn that the body existed as early as the time of Judas.(47) Again, Demetrius writes to Simon, as also to _the elders_ and _nation_ of the Jews.(48) After Jonathan and Simon, it may have been suspended for a while, in consequence of the persecution and anarchy prevailing in Judea; till the great Sanhedrim at Jerusalem succeeded it, under Hyrcanus I. Though the traces of a senate in the Maccabaean epoch are slight, the Talmud countenances its existence.(49) We believe that it was earlier than Judas Maccabaeus. Of its constitution nothing is known; but it was probably aristocratic. The Hasmonean prince would naturally exert a commanding influence over it. The great synagogue had been a kind of democratic council, consisting of scribes, doctors or teachers, and priests.(50) Like their predecessors of the great synagogue, the Hasmonæan elders revised the text freely, putting into it explanatory or corrective additions, which were not always improvements. The way in which they used the book of Esther, employing it as a medium of Halachite prescription, shows a treatment involving little idea of sacredness attaching to the Hagiographa.