4. The Orif/in of this Institution.— The. origin of this custom may easily be traced. The Bible emphatically and repeatedly enjoins upon every Israehte to study its contents (Deut. iv,9; xxxii,46), Moses himself ordered that the whole law should be read publicly at the end of every Sabbatic year (xxxi, 10-12), whilst Joshua urg- es that it should be studied day and night (i, 8 ; comp, also Psa. i, 2 sq.). Now the desire to carry out this in- junction literally, and yet the utter impossibility of doing it on the part of those who had to work for daily bread all the week, and who could not afford to buy the neces- sarily expensive scrolls, gave rise to this institutioru On the Sabbath and festivals all were relieved from their labor, and could attend places of worship where the inspired -writings were deposited, and where care could be taken that no private interpretation should be palmed upon the Word of God. Hence both James (Acts XV, 21) and Josephus {Contra Apion, ii, 17) speak of it as a very ancient custom, and the Talmud tells as that the division of each Sabbatic lesson into seven sec- tions was introduced in honor of the Persian king {Me- gilla, 23), -which shows that this custom obtained ante- rior to the Persian rule. Indeed JMaimonides positive- ly asserts that Moses himself ordained the hebdomal reading of the law {Hilchoth Tephillu, xii, 1). Equally natural is the division of the law into Sabbatic sections, as the -svhole of it coidd not be read at once. The only difficulty is to ascertain positively whether the annual, or the triennial division was the more ancient one. A triennial division is mentioned in Megilla 29, b. as cur- rent in Palestine; with this agree the reference to 155 sections of the law in the Midrash, Esther IIG, b, and the IMasoretic division of the Pentateuch into 154 Se- darim. But, on the other hand, R. Simeon b. Eleazar, a Palestinian, declared that Jloses instituted the reading of Lev. xxvi before the Feast of Pentecost, and Deut. xxviii before New Year, which most unquestionably pre- suppose the annual division of the Pentateuch into 54 Parshioth. This is, moreover, confirmed by the state- ment (/te7.31,a) that the section n^^nn PXTI (Deut. xxxiii, 1-xxxiv, 12) was read on the ninth day of the Feast of Tabernacles, thus terminating the annual cycle, as weU as by the fact that the annual festival of the re- joicing of the law (ITTin m^'i^) which commemorates the annual finishing of the perusal of the Pentateuch [see Tabi£rxacles, Fkast of] was an ancient institu- tion. We must therefore conclude that the annual cy- cle which is now prevalent among the Jews was the generally adopted one, at least since the Maccabiean times, whilst the triennial, though the older, was the ex- ception. Usage, ho-wever, probaWy varied, for we find that our Saviour (Luke iv, 16-21), in accordance with this custom, on invitation read and expounded, appar- ently on a Sabbath in January, a passage (Isa. Ixi, 1 , 2), not contained at all in the present scheme of Ilaphtaroth. It is far more difficult to trace the origin of the Ilaphtarah, or the lesson from the prophets, and its sig- nification. A very ancient tradition tells us that the Sjnrians had interdicted the reading of the law, and car- ried away the scrolls containing it, and that appropriate sections from the ]irophets were therefore chosen to re- place the Pentateuch (Zunz, GottesdienstlicheVor. p. 5), whilst Elias Levita traces the origin of the Haphtarah to i)ersecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. In his Lex. (s. V. 1::S) he says, " The wicked Antiochus, king of Greece, prohibited the Jews to read the law publicly. They therefore selected sections from the prophets of the same import as the Sabbatic lessons , . , and though this prohibition has now ceased, this custom has not been left off, and to this day we read a section from the prophets after the reading of the law ;" and we see no reason to reject this account. The objection of Vitrin- , ga, Frankel, Herzfeld, etc., that Antiochus, who wanted I to exterminate Judaism, would not wage war against
HARA
TIARAN
I
the Pentateuch exdusirel;/, but would equal!}'- destroy the jjrophetic books, and that this implies a knowledge on the part of the soldiers of the distinction between the Pentateuch and the other inspired writings, is obvi- ated by the fact that there was an external ditference between the rolls of the Pentateuch and the other sa- cred books, that the Jews claimed the Pentateuch as their law and rule of faith, and that this was the reason wliy It especially was destroyed. (The law has two rollers, i, e. has a roller attached to each ot the two ends of the vellum on wliich it is written, and every weekly portion when read on the Sabbath is unrolled from the right roller and rolled on the left; so that when the law is opened on tlie next Sabbath the portion appointed for that day is at once found. Whereas the prophetic books have only one roller, and the lesson from the prophets has to be sought out on everj' occasion [compare Baha Hatlini, 14: a].) This is corroborated by 1 Mace, i, 56, where the law only is said to have been burned. Ac- cordingly illliSn, from "iUS, lo liberate, to free, signi- fies the liberating lesson, the portion from the prophets which is read instead of the portion from the Liw that could not be read, and which liberates from the injunc- tion of reading the Pentateuch. For the other oiDinions about the signitication oUIaphtaruh,^^ refer to the lit- erature quoted below.