The Makers and Teachers of Judaism

The Makers and Teachers of Judaism is by Charles Foster Kent, and its opening lines add the words from the fall of Jerusalem to the death of Herod the Great. The preface calls the period represented by the volume “in many ways the most complex and confusing in Israel's history”. The preface says the record is not that of the life of a nation but of the scattered remnants of a race.

The text calls the lot of those later known as the people of the land pitiable, and says there are many references in Lamentations and Ezekiel to the persecutions to which they were subjected by their malignant foes. The text says references to “wisdom's voice crying aloud in the public places” suggest that the wise men at times taught in public, in the market-places, in the open spaces within the city gates. The text says Ben Sira has given a sketch, in 6:32-37, of the schools of the wise, which are clearly the forerunners of the later rabbinical schools. A quoted passage addresses the Lord, asking that their king, the son of David, reign over Israel.