These, like many more of the Rabbinical proverbs, are essentially poetical.  Some, indeed, are either expanded metaphors or metaphors touched by genius into poetry.  The alliterative proverbs and maxims of the Talmud and Midrash are less easily illustrated.  Sometimes they enshrine a pun or a conceit, or depend for their aptness upon an assonance.  In some of the Talmudic proverbs there is a spice of cynicism.  But most of them show a genial attitude towards life.

The poetical proverb easily passes into the parable.  Loved in Bible times, the parable became in after centuries the most popular form of didactic poetry among the Jews.  The Bible has its parables, but the Midrash overflows with them.  They are occasionally re-workings of older thoughts, but mostly they are original creations, invented for a special purpose, stories devised to drive home a moral, allegories administering in pleasant wrappings unpalatable satires or admonitions.  In all ages up to the present, Jewish moralists have relied on the parable as their most effective instrument.  The poetry of the Jewish parables is characteristic also of the parables imitated from the Jewish, but the latter have a distinguishing feature peculiar to them.  This is their humor, the witty or humorous parable being exclusively Jewish.  The parable is less spontaneous than the proverb.  It is a product of moral poetry rather than of folk wisdom.  Yet the parable was so like the proverb that the moral of a parable often became a new proverb.  The diction of the parable is naturally more ornate.  By the beauty of its expression, its frequent application of rural incidents to the life familiar in the cities, the rhythm and flow of its periods, its fertile imagination, the parable should certainly be placed high in the world’s poetry.  But it was poetry with a tendency, the mashal, or proverb-parable, being what the Rabbis themselves termed it, “the clear small light by which lost jewels can be found.”

The following is a parable of Hillel, which is here cited more to mention that noble, gentle Sage than as a specimen of this class of literature.  Hillel belongs to a period earlier than that dealt with in this book, but his loving and pure spirit breathes through the pages of the Talmud and Midrash: 

    Hillel, the gentle, the beloved sage,
    Expounded day by day the sacred page
    To his disciples in the house of learning;
    And day by day, when home at eve returning,
    They lingered, clustering round him, loth to part
    From him whose gentle rule won every heart. 
    But evermore, when they were wont to plead
    For longer converse, forth he went with speed,
    Saying each day:  “I go—­the hour is late—­
    To tend the guest who doth my coming wait,”
    Until at last they said:  “The Rabbi jests,
    When telling us thus daily