The Legends of the Jews, vol 1 | Page 3

provide, or agree to also provide on request at no additional
cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in its original plain ASCII form
(or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Small
Print!" statement.

[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg
Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following
each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual
(or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Carnegie-Mellon
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software

The Legends of the Jews Volume 1, by Louis Ginzberg

Footnote numbers have been indicated but footnotes are not included in
this etext. If you have a copy of this book and would like to add the
footnotes, please contact Project Gutenberg.
THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS
BY LOUIS GINZBERG
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN MANUSCRIPT BY
HENRIETTA SZOLD
VOLUME I
BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS
FROM THE CREATION TO JACOB

TO MY BROTHER ASHER

PREFACE
Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben, das allein veraltet nie.
The term Rabbinic was applied to the Jewish Literature of post-Biblical
times by those who conceived the Judaism of the later epoch to be
something different from the Judaism of the Bible, something actually
opposed to it. Such observers held that the Jewish nation ceased to exist
with the moment when its political independence was destroyed. For
them the Judaism of the later epoch has been a Judaism of the
Synagogue, the spokesmen of which have been the scholars, the Rabbis.
And what this phase of Judaism brought forth has been considered by
them to be the product of the schools rather than the product of
practical, pulsating life. Poetic phantasmagoria, frequently the
vaporings of morbid visionaries, is the material out of which these
scholars construct the theologic system of the Rabbis, and fairy tales,
the spontaneous creations of the people, which take the form of sacred
legend in Jewish literature, are denominated the Scriptural exegesis of
the Rabbis, and condemned incontinently as nugae rabbinorum.
As the name of a man clings to him, so men cling to names. For the
primitive savage the name is part of the essence of a person or thing,
and even in the more advanced stages of culture, judgments are not
always formed in agreement with facts as they are, but rather according
to the names by which they are called. The current estimate of Rabbinic
Literature is a case in point. With the label Rabbinic later ages inherited
from former ages a certain distorted view of the literature so designated.
To this day, and even among scholars that approach its investigation
with unprejudiced minds, the opinion prevails that it is purely a learned
product. And yet the truth is that the most prominent feature of
Rabbinic Literature is its popular character.
The school and the home are not mutually opposed to each other in the
conception of the Jews. They study in their homes, and they live in
their schools. Likewise there is no distinct class of scholars among
them, a class that withdraws itself from participation in the affairs of
practical life. Even in the domain of the Halakah, the Rabbis were not
so much occupied with theoretic principles of law as with the concrete
phenomena of daily existence. These they sought to grasp and shape.
And what is true of the Halakah is true with greater emphasis of the
Haggadah, which is popular in the double sense of appealing to the

people and being produced in the main by the people. To speak of the
Haggadah of the Tannaim and Amoraim is as far from fact as to speak
of the legends of Shakespeare and Scott. The ancient authors and their
modern brethren of the guild alike elaborate legendary material which
they found at hand.
It has been held by some that the Haggadah contains no popular
legends, that it is wholly a factitious, academic product. A cursory
glance at the pseudepigraphic literature of the Jews, which is older than
the Haggadah literature by several centuries, shows how untenable this
view is. That the one literature should have drawn from the other is
precluded by historical facts. At a very early