of the race going back to a hoary past, and stretching down “the echoing grooves of time” to the tradition of Judaism in our own day.  The Hebrew Word means, and the thing is, “what is said”:  the utterances of the inspired teacher, some tale, some happy play of fancy, some moral aphorism, some charming allegory which captivated the hearers, and was handed down the generations as a precious thought.  It is significant in this regard that the Haggadah is remarkable for the number of foreign words which it contains, Greek, Persian, and Roman terms jostling with Hebrew and Aramaic.  For while the Halakah was the production of the Palestinian and Babylonian schools alone, the Haggadah brought together the harvest of all lands; and scraps of Greek philosophy found their way to Palestine before the Alexandrian school developed its systematic allegory.  In the Mishnah, the earliest body of Jewish lore which was definitely formulated and written down, one section is Haggadic, the passages we know as the “Ethics of the Fathers.”  Now, we cannot place the date of this compilation before the first century,[305] and thus it would seem to be contemporary with Philo’s work, to which it affords numerous parallels.  But the great mass of the Haggadah, the Pesikta, the Mekilta, and the other Midrashim, were all later compilations, some of them as late as the fifth and the sixth century.  Are we to say, then, that where they correspond to Philo they show his influence?  At first this would appear the natural conclusion.

There is a better test of priority, however, than the date of compilation, the test of the thought itself and its expression.  And judged by this test we see that the Haggadah is the more ancient, the primal development of the Hebrew mind.  The “Sayings of the Fathers” are typical of the finest and most concentrated wisdom of the Haggadah, and exhibit thought in its impulsive, unsystematic, gnomic expression, neither logical nor illogical, because it knows not logic.  Beautiful ethical intuitions and profound guesses at theological truth abound; anything like a definite system of ethics and theology is not to be found, whence it is said, “Do not argue with the Haggadah.”  Even more so is this the case with the bulk of the Midrash.  There, pious fancy will weave itself around the history and ideals of the people, and suddenly one comes across a sage reflection or a philosophical utterance.  With Philo it is otherwise.  Compared with the Greeks he is unsystematic, inaccurate, wanting in logic, exuberant in imagination.  Compared with the rabbis he is a formal and accurate philosopher, an exact and scholarly theologian.  The floating poetical ideas of the Haggadah are woven by him into the fabric of a Jewish philosophy and a Jewish theology, and knit together with the rational conceptions of Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” and Plato’s “Timaeus.”  We may say, then, almost with certainty, that Philo derives from the early Jewish tradition, though at the same time he introduced into that tradition many an idea taken from the Greek thinkers, which found its way to the later Palestinian schools of Jamnia and Tiberias, and was recast by the Hebraic imagination.