Halakha - Rules By Which Early Jewish Law Was Derived

Rules By Which Early Jewish Law Was Derived

Hermeneutics is the study of rules for the exact determination of the meaning of a text; it played a notable role in early rabbinic Jewish discussion. The sages investigated the rules by which the requirements of the oral law were derived from and established by the written law, i.e. the Torah. These rules relate to:

• grammar and exegesis
• the interpretation of certain words and letters and superfluous words, prefixes, and suffixes in general
• the interpretation of those letters, which, in certain words, are provided with points
• the interpretation of the letters in a word according to their numerical value
• the interpretation of a word by dividing it into two or more words
• the interpretation of a word according to its consonantal form or according to its vocalization
• the interpretation of a word by transposing its letters or by changing its vowels
• the logical deduction of a halakah from a Scriptural text or from another law

Compilations of such hermeneutic rules were made in the earliest times. The tannaitic tradition recognizes three such collections, namely:

• the Seven Rules of Hillel (baraita at the beginning of Sifra; Ab. R. N. xxxvii.)
• the Thirteen Rules of R. Ishmael (baraita at the beginning of Sifra; this collection is merely an amplification of that of Hillel)
• the thirty-two Rules of R. Eliezer b. Jose ha-Gelili.

The last-mentioned rules are contained in an independent baraita, which has been incorporated and preserved only in later works. They are intended for haggadic interpretation; but many of them are valid for the Halakah as well, coinciding with the rules of Hillel and Ishmael.

Neither Hillel, Ishmael, nor Eliezer ben Jose ha-Gelili sought to give a complete enumeration of the rules of interpretation current in his day, but they omitted from their collections many rules that were then followed. They restricted themselves to a compilation of the principal methods of logical deduction, which they called "middot" (measures), although the other rules also were known by that term (comp. Midrash Sifre, Numbers 2 ).