Justified True Belief

(●) The immigrant teacher who arrived in Jerusalem with nothing and left behind the way Judaism reads its own Scriptures. + A generation before Jesus was born, a poor man from Babylonia walked into Jerusalem to study, and by the end of his life he was the most respected teacher in the country. He wrote nothing. Everything anyone knows about him is a quotation, preserved by people who came later. Those people are worth naming, because they are the whole of the evidence. The Mishnah is the earliest collection of Jewish legal teaching, the rulings of the rabbis gathered up and written down in Palestine around AD 200. The Talmud is the far larger commentary that grew up around the Mishnah afterwards, generations of later rabbis arguing in its margins, one version finished in Palestine about AD 400 and the great one finished in Babylonia about AD 500. Hillel sits in both of them, quoted by name and at length. But even the earliest of those books was compiled two centuries after he died, which is about the distance between a reader today and the men who fought at Waterloo. That gap is a real limit, and nothing said about him gets to ignore it. He is on a Christian site for a plain reason. The New Testament argues inside the world his questions made. When a lawyer asks Jesus which is the great commandment in the Law, when Pharisees ask whether a man may divorce his wife for any cause, when Jesus tells a room full of experts to go and learn what a verse means, the vocabulary and the arguments are the ones the schools of Hillel and Shammai had been trading for a generation. The book of Acts puts a man named Gamaliel in the Sanhedrin telling his colleagues to leave the Christians alone, and the Talmud remembers that Gamaliel as Hillel’s grandson. The dates need care, because they are thinner than the confident numbers make them look. The firmest thing on offer is a single line in the Talmud, that Hillel and the three men who followed him held the leadership for a hundred years while the temple still stood (Shabbath 15a), which puts the start of his own term around 30 BC. Everything else is reckoned outward from there. The often-repeated claim that he lived a hundred and twenty years, for instance, comes from a midrash, one of the rabbis’ running commentaries on Scripture, and what it is really doing is laying his life out beside the life of Moses, who died at a hundred and twenty (Deuteronomy 34:7): forty years before he came up from Babylonia, forty in study, forty at the head of Israel (Sifre Deuteronomy 357). So a birth date of about 110 BC is worked out from that comparison rather than recorded anywhere, and so is a death around 10 AD, which is simply 30 BC plus the last of the three forties.

(●) c. 110 BC: Born in Babylonia, in the Jewish community that never came home from the exile. + When Nebuchadnezzar carried Judah off to Babylon in 586 BC, most of the exiles stayed. Cyrus let them go home half a century later and only a fraction went; the rest built houses, planted gardens and stayed put, and by Hillel’s day the Jewish population of Mesopotamia was large, settled, prosperous, and about a thousand miles from the temple by road. It was a community that had learned to live on the text. There were no sacrifices to attend and no priesthood to consult, so what a Babylonian Jew had was the scroll, the argument about the scroll, and the men who knew both. Hillel came out of that world, and the Talmud never lets anyone forget it. He is Hillel the Babylonian there as well as Hillel the Elder. His brother Shebna was a merchant (Sotah 21a), which suggests a family that traded rather than farmed. His father’s name is not recorded anywhere, which for a famous rabbi is unusual and probably means nobody knew it. Two claims about his origins are traditions rather than records, and the sources that carry them are late. One has Rabbi Levi reporting a genealogical scroll found in Jerusalem in which it stood written that Hillel came from David (Genesis Rabbah 98:8). The other is the hundred and twenty years. Both did useful work for the people who repeated them: Hillel’s descendants led Palestinian Judaism for four hundred years, and a family in that position has every reason to want a royal pedigree behind it and a founder whose life falls into the same shape as Moses’. None of that makes either claim false. It does mean both should be held loosely.

(●) Before 30 BC: He came up to Jerusalem to study, and one winter Friday he nearly died on a roof to hear a lesson. + The two men he came to hear were Shemaiah and Abtalion, the leading pair of their generation and, in the Talmud’s own words, great sages and great expositors of Scripture (Pesahim 70b). One thing about them shapes everything that follows: both were descended from converts to Judaism, and everybody in Jerusalem knew it. The Talmud tells of a high priest coming out of the temple on the Day of Atonement, the one day in the year he went into the holiest room in the building, with the whole city walking behind him in procession. Then the crowd caught sight of Shemaiah and Abtalion, and the procession went after the two scholars instead, and the high priest was left standing in the street by himself. When the pair came afterwards to pay their respects and take their leave of him, he could not let it go. Let the children of the Gentiles go in peace, he said. They took his own words and handed them back: the children of the Gentiles may indeed go in peace, because they do what Aaron did, and the children of Aaron may not, because they do not (Yoma 71b). Hillel learned his trade from those two, and it shows in everything he did afterwards with outsiders. Getting in was the problem. The school charged at the door, and the best-known story about Hillel’s poverty is told in the Talmud to shut down an excuse. At the last judgment, it says, a poor man who pleads that he had no time to study the Law will be asked whether he was poorer than Hillel the Elder. Hillel earned a small coin a day as a labourer, gave half of it to the doorkeeper of the school, and lived with his family on the other half. One day he earned nothing, and the doorkeeper turned him away. So he climbed onto the roof and lay down over the skylight to listen. It was a Friday in midwinter. At dawn Shemaiah said to Abtalion that the light was late and asked whether the day was cloudy, and they looked up and saw the shape of a man in the opening, buried in snow. They carried him down, washed him, oiled him and set him in front of a fire, and said that such a man deserved that the Sabbath should be broken for his sake (Yoma 35b). Lighting a fire is exactly what the Sabbath forbids, which is the point of the last line. That story is a teaching story, told to make an argument, and how much of it happened is not the sort of thing the sources allow anyone to settle. What it does record reliably is the reputation: this was a man his own tradition remembered as having wanted the Law badly enough to freeze for it.

(●) c. 30 BC: A question about Passover falling on a Sabbath put him at the head of the court, and the same day cost him his composure. + The fourteenth of Nisan, the day the Passover lambs were killed at the temple, fell that year on a Sabbath, and nobody could say what to do. Slaughtering is work, and work is forbidden on the Sabbath; but Passover is commanded, and its date is fixed. The family called the sons of Bathyra, who were leading the court, did not know the answer. Somebody remembered that a man had recently come from Babylon who had studied under Shemaiah and Abtalion, and they sent for him. Hillel gave them two arguments, and both are worth watching slowly, because his whole method is in them. The first turned on the stakes. Grant that the Sabbath already gives way to the daily offering. A man who misses that offering suffers no penalty for it at all. The Passover is not like that: whoever fails to keep it is cut off from his people, which is the Law’s own phrase for being severed from Israel altogether. If the Sabbath yields in the case where nothing much is riding on it, it can hardly refuse to yield in the case where everything is. They would not have it. The daily offering, they answered, is brought every day of the year and burned whole on the altar, and a sacrifice with those advantages settles nothing about any other. So he tried again, and the second argument turned on a phrase. The daily burnt offering, the sacrifice made at the temple every morning and evening whatever else was going on that week, is commanded to be brought "at its appointed time" (Numbers 28:2). The Passover is commanded to be kept "at its appointed time" (Numbers 9:2). The same phrase governs both, so whatever is true of the one ought to be true of the other, and nobody in the room doubted for a moment that the daily offering went on being made on Sabbaths. If that phrase carries the one sacrifice through the Sabbath, it carries the other through as well. They made him head of the court on the spot, and he sat and taught the laws of Passover all day. Then he spoiled it. He turned on the men who had just raised him up and asked what had brought them to it, answering his own question: their own idleness, in never having troubled to learn from the two great men of their generation. Almost at once they asked him a follow-up. What if a man forgets to bring his slaughtering knife on the eve of the Sabbath? He had to say that he had once heard the ruling and had forgotten it, and he fell back on something better than a ruling: leave it to the people, for though they are not prophets they are the children of prophets, and they will know what to do. The next morning he watched them come up to the temple with the knives stuck in the wool of the sheep and wedged between the horns of the goats, and he remembered (Pesahim 66a). The Talmud draws the moral a page later: a sage who grows arrogant loses his wisdom, and Hillel is the proof of it (Pesahim 66b). One caution about titles. The tradition calls him nasi, prince or patriarch, meaning the head of the court itself rather than one respected teacher among several. The Mishnah keeps a list of the pairs, the two-man teams that led the sages generation by generation down to Hillel and Shammai themselves, and that list ends by noting that the first man named in each pair served as nasi (Hagigah 2:2). The Talmud has the sons of Bathyra seating him in the office, and a later telling has them resigning in his favour. Set against all of that, the only title fixed to his own name in the earliest sources is ha-Zaken, the Elder (Shebi'ith 10:3), and modern scholars generally treat the formal patriarchate as read back into his life from the days of his descendants.

(●) c. 30 BC – c. 10 AD: For forty years he taught beside Shammai, and the two of them left behind schools that disagreed about nearly everything. + These were the years of Herod the Great, then of his son Archelaus and the first Roman prefects, and it is striking how little of that gets into the record. Hillel’s world is a study house, not a palace. The one thing that fills the sources is his running disagreement with Shammai, his colleague and opposite number, who was by all accounts the harder man. The size of the disagreement is often overstated, and the Mishnah is honest about it. Between Hillel and Shammai themselves only three disputes are recorded (Eduyoth 1:1–3). It is between the two schools they left behind, Beth Hillel and Beth Shammai, that the arguments run into the hundreds. The shorthand says Hillel’s school was lenient and Shammai’s strict, and as shorthand it is usually right, but the Mishnah devotes a chapter to listing the cases where it runs the other way (Eduyoth 4), which is a good sign that the labels are a rule of thumb and not a law. Hillel had eighty disciples, the Talmud says: thirty worthy that God’s presence should rest on them as it did on Moses, thirty worthy that the sun should stand still for them as it did for Joshua, and twenty in the middle. The greatest was Jonathan ben Uzziel and the least was Yohanan ben Zakkai (Sukkah 28a), which is a remarkable thing to say, since Yohanan ben Zakkai is the man who would carry Judaism through the destruction of the temple. The temperament is what the stories are really about, and the best of them is a practical joke. Two men once wagered four hundred zuz, a sum a labourer would need years to earn, that one of them could make Hillel lose his temper. The challenger picked his moment with some care: Friday afternoon, the busiest hour of a Jewish week, when everything has to be done before the Sabbath begins at sundown, and Hillel was washing his head. The man came to the door shouting for him by name, without his title. Hillel threw on a cloak, came out, and called him "my son." Then the questions started. Why do Babylonians have round heads? Because they have no skilled midwives. An hour later the man was back: why do the people of Tadmor have narrow eyes? Because they live in sand and must keep them half shut. An hour later again: why do Africans have broad feet? Because they live in marshland. The man finally said that he had more questions but feared making him angry, and Hillel sat down, wrapped himself in his cloak, and told him to ask them all. Then it came out. Was he the Hillel they titled a prince in Israel? He was. Then, said the visitor, may there not be many like him in Israel, since he had just cost him four hundred zuz. Hillel told him to mind his temper: a Hillel was worth the loss of four hundred zuz and four hundred more, and a Hillel would still not lose his (Shabbath 30b–31a).

(●) c. 10 AD: He died, and the mourners called him the pious one, the humble one, the disciple of Ezra. + No source records the year, and no source describes the death. What the Talmud preserves is the lament, and the strange scene that goes with it. The sages were meeting in an upper room in Jericho when they heard what the rabbis call a bath kol, a heavenly voice, a lesser sort of revelation that they held had been left to Israel after the last prophets fell silent. The voice said that among the men in that room was one worthy that the Shekhinah, the settled presence of God, should rest upon him, but that his generation was not fit for it. Everyone turned and looked at Hillel. When he died they mourned him with a cry that names three things: "Woe, pious! Woe, modesty! O thou disciple of Ezra" (Sanhedrin 11a, Rodkinson translation). The third of those is the highest compliment the tradition had to give, and it is not loose talk. Ezra was the scribe who came up from Babylon with the Law in the fifth century BC and put a scattered community back together around the reading of it. The Talmud says the Law was forgotten in Israel three times, and three times somebody restored it: Ezra came up from Babylon and re-established it, and when it was forgotten again Hillel the Babylonian came up from Babylon and re-established it (Sukkah 20a). Two immigrants from the same country, more than four centuries apart, doing the same job. That is how his own people filed him.

(●) AD 70 and after: His school’s rulings became the law, and his family led Judaism for four centuries. + Sixty years after Hillel died, Rome burned the temple, and Judaism lost the sacrifices, the priesthood and the centre of its worship in a single summer. What survived was the study house, and the man who rebuilt it at Yavneh on the coast was Yohanan ben Zakkai, the least of Hillel’s eighty. The long argument between the two schools was settled in that period, and the way the Talmud tells the settlement says a great deal. Beth Shammai and Beth Hillel disputed for three years, each claiming the law followed them, until a heavenly voice declared that both were disputing the words of the living God, but that the law follows Beth Hillel. The Talmud then asks the obvious question: if both are the words of the living God, why does one win? The answer given is not that Hillel’s school argued better. It is that they were modest and patient, that they would always repeat their opponents’ opinion, and that they would state Beth Shammai’s view before their own (Erubin 13b). A tradition that awards the decision to the side that quoted the other side first has told you what it values. The family kept the leadership, and kept it for a very long time. The Talmud lists the succession as Hillel, then his son Simeon, then Gamaliel, then Simeon again, a hundred years of it while the temple still stood (Shabbath 15a), and the line runs on to Judah ha-Nasi, who compiled the Mishnah about AD 200. So the book in which almost everything Hillel said is preserved was edited by his own descendant in the seventh generation.

What He Taught

(T1) What you hate, do not do to your neighbour: that is the whole Law, and everything else is the commentary on it. + A Gentile came to Shammai and said he would become a Jew on condition of being taught the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Torah is the Law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible and the entire body of commandment carried in them, which is what a Jewish teacher meant when he said the Law. And becoming a Jew meant becoming a proselyte, a Gentile who joins Israel: circumcision, immersion, and the whole obligation of that Law from that day forward. It is not a small request, and the man balanced there on one leg was plainly having fun. Shammai had a builder’s measuring rod in his hand, and he used it on him. The man went to Hillel, who accepted him, and answered the question as asked: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour; that is the whole Law; the rest is commentary; go and learn it. Notice what the last four words do. They are usually dropped when the saying is quoted, and dropping them turns it into something Hillel did not say. He is not telling the man that the six hundred and thirteen commandments the rabbis counted in the Torah are optional decoration around a single decent sentiment. He is telling him what the commandments are for. The Law is the commentary, and a commentary is what you read when you want to know what a text means in a particular case. What does not doing what you would hate look like when your neighbour’s ox is in your field, when you are holding his cloak in pledge overnight, when you are hiring a day labourer who needs his wages before dark? Go and learn it. The summary sends you into the details rather than releasing you from them. The rule itself was not new with him. Tobit, a Jewish book from perhaps two centuries earlier, already has "Do that to no man which thou hatest" (Tobit 4:15, King James Apocrypha), and behind both stands the commandment Hillel is compressing: "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). What was new was the use he put it to. He put it in the hands of an outsider on his first day, as the thing to start from. Two more Gentiles came to him in the same run of stories. One would accept the written Law but not the oral tradition, which is the body of ruling and interpretation the rabbis carried in memory alongside the written text and held to be binding with it. The other wanted to be made high priest. Shammai drove both away. Hillel took both, taught them, and let the second discover for himself, from Numbers 3:10, why a convert cannot be high priest. The three of them said afterwards that Shammai’s temper had nearly driven them out of the world, and Hillel’s patience had brought them in (Shabbath 31a).

(Q) "What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow; this is the whole law. All the rest is a commentary to this law; go and learn it." + Source: Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 31a (Rodkinson translation). Hillel is answering the man on one foot, and the answer is given in Aramaic, the everyday language, rather than in the Hebrew of the schools. He is speaking to a beginner in the beginner’s own tongue.

(T2) Be a disciple of Aaron: love peace, chase after it, love people, and bring them near to the Law. + Aaron is an odd hero to pick. He is the brother who made the golden calf while Moses was up the mountain, and Scripture does not hide it. But the rabbis remembered him for something else: he was the one who went between people who had quarrelled, and the picture of Aaron as the peacemaker who walks back and forth until two neighbours are speaking again is standard in their literature. The saying has four clauses and the last one is the sharp one. Loving peace is a disposition; pursuing it is work; loving your fellow creatures widens the circle past your own people; and bringing them near to the Law says what you do once they are inside the circle. Hillel was talking, at least in part, about Gentiles. Judaism in his century was actively drawing outsiders in, and the three converts he took in when Shammai turned them away (T1) are the saying in action. The best commentary on it is a scene from the generation before him. Shemaiah and Abtalion, his own teachers, were descendants of converts, and a high priest once sneered at them for it: let the children of the Gentiles go in peace. Their answer was that the children of the Gentiles may go in peace, because they do what Aaron did, and the children of Aaron may not, because they do not (Yoma 71b). Hillel had watched his teachers answer contempt that way, and then made it his one-sentence rule for how to be a teacher. Christian readers will hear a familiar note in all of that, and it needs handling carefully. Gentleness toward outsiders, patience with the slow, an open door: those are commended in the Gospels too, and Jesus tells the crowds to learn from him because he is "gentle and lowly in heart" (Matthew 11:29). That is a genuine overlap in temperament between a Jewish teacher and the Jewish teacher who came a generation later. It is not evidence that either was borrowing from the other, and it settles nothing about the much larger questions between them.

(Q) "Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and following after peace, loving men and bringing them nigh unto the Law." + Source: Mishnah, Pirke Aboth 1:12 (Oesterley translation). Pirke Aboth, the Sayings of the Fathers, is the one tractate of the Mishnah that contains no law at all, only the maxims of the teachers in the order they received the tradition from one another. Hillel’s entry is the twelfth link in that chain.

(T3) Scripture is read by rules a stranger can check, not by whoever in the room remembers the most. + Here is the problem Hillel walked into, and it is easier to see from the outside. A body of law carried by memory is only as good as the memories in the room. It works beautifully until the day nobody present happens to have heard the ruling, and then there is nothing left to do but guess or vote. That is exactly the day the sons of Bathyra had when Passover fell on a Sabbath and no one could say whether the lambs could be killed. Hillel’s answer was not a better memory. It was a method. Seven rules of interpretation are credited to him, the seven middot, which is the Hebrew word for measures, and the list is the earliest of its kind in Jewish literature (Tosefta Sanhedrin 7:11; Aboth de-Rabbi Nathan 37; the introduction to the Sifra). Two of them do most of the work, and both are in the Passover argument. - Kal va-homer, light and heavy: if a rule holds in the easier case, it certainly holds in the harder one. If your town will not let you park in front of the fire station on a quiet Tuesday, it will certainly not let you park there while the station is answering a fire. Hillel used it on the sacrifices: if the Sabbath gives way to the daily offering, which carries no penalty for being missed, it must give way to the Passover, which does. - Gezerah shavah, equal ordinance: where the same distinctive phrase governs two passages, what is true of the one carries over to the other. The daily offering is commanded "at its appointed time" (Numbers 28:2), and so is the Passover (Numbers 9:2). Two contracts signed with the same clause are read the same way. The other five extend the same idea: building a general rule from one verse, or from two verses together, working out how a general statement and a particular case limit each other, reading a passage by another that resembles it, and taking a word’s meaning from its context. A century later Rabbi Ishmael expanded the list to thirteen, and it is Hillel’s seven that everything after is built on. The gain is public argument. A rule you can name is a rule your opponent can check, and a ruling can now be defended by anyone who can read, rather than only asserted by whoever holds the chair. The cost is real too, and later teachers felt it: a tool like gezerah shavah, which needs only a shared phrase, will prove almost anything in the hands of someone determined, and the rabbis eventually hedged it about with restrictions for that very reason. These are not exotic moves, and the New Testament makes them constantly. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (Matthew 7:11) is light and heavy, exactly. So is Paul: "if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life" (Romans 5:10). The apostles argue like men trained in the same room.

(Q) "As it is written concerning the continual daily sacrifice, 'My offering, etc., shall ye observe to offer unto me in its due season,' and the same term, 'at its appointed season,' is mentioned in connection with the Passover-sacrifice, therefore both may supersede the Sabbath." + Source: Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 66a (Rodkinson translation). The sons of Bathyra had refused to take his first answer, which was simply that more than two hundred sacrifices already override the Sabbath, and had insisted that he ground the ruling in an actual text. This is what he gave them, and it is the earliest use of the rules that the tradition records.

(T4) A commandment that leaves the poor unable to borrow is not being kept, and the law can be arranged so that it is. + Every seventh year, Israel was to cancel its debts. "At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release," says Deuteronomy 15:1, and every creditor was to let go what he had lent. It is one of the most generous provisions in any ancient law code, and it had a predictable failure mode, which Moses names in the same paragraph before anybody has a chance to discover it: as the seventh year approaches, a lender does the arithmetic, sees that he will never be repaid, and finds a reason to say no. "Take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart and you say, The seventh year, the year of release is near, and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, and you give him nothing" (Deuteronomy 15:9). Picture the widow in the sixth year who needs the price of seed. The commandment written to protect her is the reason she is turned away at every door, and the men turning her away are the ones keeping it most carefully. Hillel’s answer was a legal instrument called the prosbul, from a Greek phrase meaning before the assembly of counsellors. The lender declares in front of a court that the debts owed to him are handed over to the court, and a debt the court is holding is not released in the seventh year. The lender can lend without losing his money, and the borrower can borrow. The Mishnah records the reason in a phrase that became a standing category in Jewish law: it was done mipnei tikkun ha-olam, for the right ordering of the world (Gittin 4:3), and it says plainly that Hillel acted because he saw people refusing to lend to one another and so transgressing what is written in the Law (Shebi'ith 10:3). Whether that keeps the commandment or quietly cancels it is a question people have argued about ever since, and both sides have something. On one reading, the release was given for the poor, the poor were being hurt by it, and Hillel restored the purpose of the text at the cost of its letter. On the other, the release was a command about property that God gave knowing exactly what lenders are like, and a form recited before three judges is a way of not obeying it. Nothing in the sources suggests Hillel was troubled by the second reading, and nothing in them suggests he was unaware of it either.

(Q) "I deliver unto you . . . judges of . . . [place], that I may at any time I choose collect my debts." + Source: Mishnah, Shebi'ith 10:4, the wording of the prosbul (Jewish Encyclopedia translation, 1901–1906). The whole instrument is one sentence, said aloud in front of a court and written down. The blanks are for the names of the judges and the town, which is what turns a private debt into a matter the court is holding.

(T5) Judge no one until you have stood where he is standing, and do not wait for a convenient hour. + Five short rules sit together in the Mishnah, and they read like a man talking to a student he likes. - Do not separate yourself from the congregation. Whatever else the religious life is, it is not private. A man who withdraws because the people around him are disappointing has removed the only material he had to work with. - Do not trust yourself until the day of your death. Not despair, and not a low view of human beings: simply the observation that nobody is safely past the point where he can fail, and that the man most certain he is finished with a sin is the one to watch. - Do not judge your neighbour until you come into his place. Not a ban on judging, which the same tradition requires of courts every week. It is a rule about the distance between a verdict and a life. You do not know what the man’s week was, what he was afraid of, or what he had already tried, and the words come cheaply until you are standing where he is. - Do not say of a thing that cannot be understood that it will be understood in the end. The old commentators take this one as a rule for teachers. Do not say the thing your hearer cannot follow and leave him to catch up later; say the part he can take now, and say it so that he can take it. - Do not say, when I have leisure I will study, for you may not have leisure. The leisure never comes. Everyone believes there is a quieter version of next year waiting, and there is not. Christian readers will hear the third of these in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says "Judge not, that you be not judged" and adds that the measure you use will be measured back to you (Matthew 7:1–2), and the second in Paul’s warning that "anyone who thinks that he stands" should "take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12). These are not borrowings in either direction. They are what a shared Scripture and a shared world produce.

(Q) "Separate thyself not from the congregation, and trust not thyself until the day of thy death"; and "Judge not thy neighbour until thou comest into his place." + Source: Mishnah, Pirke Aboth 2:4 (Oesterley translation, which numbers the saying 2:5). The same paragraph closes with the warning about leisure. Aboth quotes Hillel more than any other teacher in its first two chapters, which is a fair measure of how the tradition ranked him.

(Q) "If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am for myself (only), what am I? And if not now, when?" + Source: Mishnah, Pirke Aboth 1:14 (Oesterley translation). Three questions and no answers, which is why the saying has outlived everything else he said. Nobody else can do your repenting or your learning for you; a life spent entirely on yourself is not worth much; and the hour for both is this one. It is the closest thing in the record to Hillel talking to himself.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Gospels argue in his vocabulary and about his questions, which is one of the quieter marks of their honesty. + A forger inventing a Jewish teacher for a later Greek-speaking church would give him timeless material. The Gospels instead show Jesus being handed the specific live controversies of Jerusalem in the first third of the first century, and three of them run back to Hillel and his school. - Summarising the Law. "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" (Matthew 22:36) is not an idle question, and it is not a Greek one. It is close kin to the question the man on one foot put to Hillel. Jesus answers it in the same shape and with different content: love of God first, love of neighbour second, "On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 22:40). - Divorce. The Mishnah records the two schools splitting over Deuteronomy 24:1, which lets a man divorce his wife when "he has found some indecency in her." Beth Shammai read that as unfaithfulness and nothing else. Beth Hillel read it as anything at all that displeased him, down to a ruined dish (Gittin 9:10). When the Pharisees ask Jesus whether it is lawful "to divorce one’s wife for any cause" (Matthew 19:3), they are quoting the debate. He declines both answers and goes behind the permission to Genesis: Moses allowed it "because of your hardness of heart," but "from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). One caution about who held which view, though: that lenient reading belongs to the school after Hillel, and it is not a ruling recorded from the man himself. - Go and learn. When Jesus tells a room of experts "Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice" (Matthew 9:13), he is using the standard rabbinic send-off, the same words that close Hillel’s answer on one foot. Christians took a long time to notice any of this. One church father names him, and only once. Jerome, commenting on the stone of stumbling in Isaiah 8:14, reports that the Nazarenes, Jewish believers in Jesus who went on living as Jews, read the two houses of Israel in that verse as the two schools of Shammai and Hillel, and he passes on Hebrew etymologies that turn the one name into a scatterer and the other into a profane man. That is the whole of the patristic record, which is to say everything the church fathers of the first Christian centuries have to say about him: one passage, taken at second hand, and hostile. Hillel arrives in Christian scholarship proper a long way later, with the Hebraists of the Renaissance and after, above all with John Lightfoot. His Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae, Hebrew and Talmudic Hours, published in parts from 1658 and finished after his death, set Talmudic passages beside the Gospels verse by verse, so that a minister with no Aramaic could see what the argument in the text had sounded like to the men having it. Hillel has been part of New Testament study ever since.

(†) His grandson stood up in the Sanhedrin and told it to leave the Christians alone. + In Acts 5 the apostles are on trial before the Sanhedrin, the supreme council in Jerusalem, seventy-odd men who tried the cases that touched the Law and the temple, and the council is close to killing them when one man stops it: "a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people" (Acts 5:34). He clears the room, reminds the council of two failed movements that collapsed on their own, and gives them a rule that has been quoted ever since: "if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!" (Acts 5:38–39). They take his advice, and the church survives its first legal crisis. The same Gamaliel turns up once more, as the teacher at whose feet Paul was educated (Acts 22:3). The Talmud’s roll of the leadership runs Hillel, then Simeon, then Gamaliel (Shabbath 15a), and the tradition reads that as father, son and grandson. Two things about that should be held together rather than one at a time. On the one hand, Acts itself never mentions the relationship, and the rabbinic line of succession comes from books written centuries after the men in it were dead. On the other, it is the tradition of Gamaliel’s own people about their own leaders, a family line is not the sort of thing they had any motive to invent, and the identification is generally accepted. What is hard to miss is the family resemblance in the argument. The reason the Talmud gives for the law following Beth Hillel is that they stated the other side’s case before their own (Erubin 13b). The reason Gamaliel gives for sparing the apostles is that the council does not yet know which side of this it is on. That is the same instinct: a decision deferred, an opponent given room, a confidence that the truth does not need protecting by force. Luke, who never writes off the Judaism his story grew out of, thought the moment worth recording in full.

(†) For two centuries his golden rule has been set against the Sermon on the Mount, usually to prove more than it can. + From the nineteenth century onward it became common to say that Jesus taught nothing Hillel had not taught first, with the two versions of the golden rule as the exhibit. The reply from the other direction was just as quick, and just as tidy: Hillel’s rule is merely negative, do no harm, while Jesus’ is positive and therefore higher. Both claims are worse than the evidence. - The negative form is older than either of them. Tobit, written perhaps two hundred years before Hillel, has "Do that to no man which thou hatest" (Tobit 4:15, King James Apocrypha), and both men are compressing the same commandment out of Leviticus 19:18. Nobody invented it; the question of who said it first is the wrong question. - The distance between the negative and positive forms is real but small, and it is not where the weight lies. "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 7:12) does ask for more than restraint. But a man who genuinely does not do to others what he would hate has already gone a long way, and Hillel’s "go and learn it" sends him the rest of it. - The genuine difference is what each rule is fastened to, and two sentences held up side by side is not where it shows. Hillel fastens his rule to the Law: go and learn it, and the commandments will teach you what it comes to in a particular case. Jesus fastens his to the same Scriptures, "for this is the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 7:12), and then to himself, since the sermon the rule sits in ends with the crowds astonished, "for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes" (Matthew 7:29). The disagreement that matters is about who is speaking, not about which of two sentences asks more. The most useful thing the comparison does is to settle a question it was never meant to raise. Jesus of Nazareth argues like a first-century Jewish teacher, about first-century Jewish questions, in first-century Jewish forms. That is what the Gospels say he was, and the rabbinic parallels keep confirming it from outside.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the missing first commandment, the remedy of study, and a form recited over a hard heart. + Hillel is not a Christian ancestor, and treating him as one does him no honour. Three places in his own record, not in what other people later made of it, are where the roads separate. - The summary leaves out God. Asked for the whole Torah in one sentence, Hillel gave a rule about your neighbour. He was answering a man standing on one foot, and it would be unfair to press the omission as a doctrine. But the omission is still the interesting thing, because when the same question is put to Jesus he refuses to answer it with one commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37–39). Two, in that order. The love of God is not the commentary on the love of neighbour, and a summary that starts with the neighbour has already made a decision about what religion is for. - Go and learn it. The instruction assumes that what stands between a man and the good is that he does not yet know enough, and that the cure is instruction. It is a hopeful view of people, and there is a great deal in it: the rabbis were not naive about sin, and their religion had the Day of Atonement, sacrifice, repentance and the mercy of God in it. But the New Testament’s diagnosis is different in kind. "For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:20); what the Law does supremely well is show you what you are, and what is then needed is not a further course of study but rescue given as a gift (Ephesians 2:8–9). - The prosbul. Deuteronomy 15 saw the hard heart coming and named it in advance (Deuteronomy 15:9), and Hillel’s device meets it by rearranging the paperwork so that the commandment can no longer bite. His motive was the commandment’s own motive, and the poor really were better off with credit than with a release they could not get a loan to reach. Still, the prophets had said what the actual remedy would be, and it was not procedural: "I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). The last thing to say is not a criticism. Hillel’s own tradition gave him the highest praise it had, disciple of Ezra, and that is praise for a teacher. He claimed nothing more, and the largest thing his followers ever claimed for him was that he was worthy of a prophet’s place in a generation that did not deserve one. That is exactly what makes the claim the Gospels make about a Galilean of the next generation so difficult to file beside him. Hillel asked the men who came to him to go and learn. The other asked them to leave what they were doing and follow him. They are not two answers to the same question, and the trouble is not that one teacher outranks another. Only one of the two is only a teacher.