HILLEL, a famous Jewish rabbi, sometimes called for distinction’s sake 1P,∣Π, “the elder” or “the old,” flourished about the time of Herod the Great. According to the Talmudists he was born of a poor Davidic family, at Babylon, apparently about the year 75 b.c. In his zeal for the study of the law he went, when already of mature age, to Jerusalem, where Shemaiah and Abtalion were at that time the leading teachers. While supporting himself and his family there by working as a day labourer, he was not always able to earn the fee which the porter of the Beth-Midrash or house of instruction is said to have required; but such was his ardour for learning that on one occasion on a cold December morning, having failed to obtain admission, he climbed up to the window of the class-room, where some time afterwards he was found quite buried and half frozen to death under a heavy fall of snow. He was now made free of the schools, and so great were the attainments with which his diligence was ultimately rewarded that, according to the tradition, he understood all languages, including those of the hills and the valleys, the trees and the flowers, the beasts and the demons. In his later years he succeeded the “sons of Bethyras” in the presidency of the sanhedrin, and in this high position he became the author of several important rules of interpretation (the so-called seven “middoth”; see Hermeneutics), and also of some authoritative legal decisions. A contemporary, and perhaps a pupil of his, was Shammai, who became the head of a rival and at times bitterly hostile school. Dying about the year 10 A.D., Hillel was succeeded in his official position by his son Simeon, and afterwards by his grandson Gamaliel I....
There is evidently a good deal of what is incredible in the above Talmudic account; for example, it is now recognized on all hands that the Talmudic statement as to Hillel’s presidency over the sanhedrin is absolutely irreconcilable with what we learn from the New Testament writers and from Josephus, and must be regarded as wholly unhistorical. But after every reasonable deduction has been duly made, we still have ample traces of a strong personality, characterized by unusual sweetness and light, bent on supporting the claims of a right-minded and ethical religion against those of mere sacerdotal traditionalism. His “middoth,” so far as they go (but they do not go far), are based on sound principles of logic and hermeneutic; the so-called “prosbol,” by which he evaded the restrictions laid upon commerce through the law relating to the sabbatic year, showed that he possessed at least some power of adapting old institutions to the changing circumstances and wants of a progressive society; and if most of the questions which are alleged to have divided his school from that of Shammai cannot but strike the modern reader as having been infinitely small, the “golden rule” and some other sayings attributed to him show that he was not incapable of large and true views on the deepest problems of human life.
A remote descendant of the same name, who flourished about 350 A. D., is said to have sought to quiet his co-religionists, restive under foreign domination, with the novel doctrine that all the “Messianic” prophecies of the Old Testament had related to Hezekiah, and had been fulfilled in him.
Our only source of information with regard to Hillel “the old” is the Talmud, unless indeed the Pollion referred to once and again by Josephus be also Hillei under a Greek name. For the grounds on which this probable identification rests, and for a masterly sketch of Hillel and his place in the history of Israel, the great work of Ewald may be consulted (Gesch. d. V. Israel, vol. v.). See also Delitzsch, Jesus u. Hillel (3d ed^ 1879); Derenbourg, Histoire de la Palestine, pp. 176-92; and Schürer, Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, sec. 25. All the recent works dealing with the life of Christ also touch upon this subject, especially with reference to the question regarding the “originality” of the two teachers. Renan, Keim, and Farrar (vol. ii. appendix) may be specially named.
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