Talmud supplied the deficiency and completed a perfect whole. While yet
in the Wilderness, Moses commanded the Israelites to establish courts
and appoint judges for the administration of justice as soon as they
were settled in Palestine.[58] This clearly indicates that the great
lawgiver did not intend his ordinances and injunctions to be final and
exclusive. Having furnished a foundation for the scheme, he anticipated
that the piety, judgment, and learning of subsequent ages would do the
rest. His expectations were fulfilled in the development of the
traditions afterwards embodied in the Mishna, which is the principal
component part of the Talmud.
As before suggested, with the growth in population and the
ever-increasing complications in social, political, and religious life,
and with the general advance in Hebrew civilization, Mosaic injunction
began to prove entirely inadequate to the national wants. In the time
intervening between the destruction of the first and second Temples, a
number of Mosaic laws had become utter anachronisms; others were
perfectly impracticable, and several were no longer even understood. The
exigencies of an altered mode of life and the changed conditions and
circumstances of the people rendered imperative the enactment of new
laws unknown to the Pentateuch. But the divine origin of the Hebrew
system of law was never for a moment forgotten, whatever the change and
wherever made. The Rabbins never formally repealed or abolished any
Mosaic enactment. They simply declared that it had fallen into
desuetude. And, in devising new laws rendered necessary by changed
conditions of life they invariably invoked some principle or
interpretation of the Written Law.
In the declining years of Jewish nationality, many characteristic laws
of the Pentateuch had become obsolete. The ordinance which determined
the punishment of a stubborn and rebellious son; the enactment which
commanded the destruction of a city given to idolatry; and, above all,
the _lex talionis_ had become purely matters of legend. On the other
hand, many new laws appear in the Talmud of which no trace whatever can
be discovered in the Pentateuch. "The Pharisees," says Josephus, "have
imposed upon the people many laws taken from the tradition of the
Fathers, which are not written in the law of Moses."[59] The most
significant of these is the one providing for Antecedent Warning in
criminal prosecutions, the meaning and purpose of which will be fully
discussed in another chapter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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