HILLEL. — ANNATA (v.), called the “Babylonian” because he was descended from a family of exiles, renowned for his learning and his profoundly humane outlook, who lived in the time of Herod the Great. The report that H. was a teacher of Jesus is erroneous.
H. introduced the legal formula of the “prosbòl,” προφυλῆ, whose purpose was to overcome the difficulty that had arisen in practical life because of the Mosaic law concerning the remission of debts in the sabbatical year. The formula introduced by H. reads: “I N. N. transfer to you, judges at N. N. (the declaration) according to which I may claim every debt granted by me at any time.” By means of this formula, the debtor was deprived of any inclination to abstain from repaying the debts he had contracted. Without the “prosbòl,” an irremediable stagnation would have occurred in economic life.
The predominance of the abstract hâldkhâh (v.) made necessary a restraint which, in due course and under the influence of H., found expression in seven of the most ancient hermeneutical rules for deriving conclusions from the text of the law, rules that had become necessary because of current practice. These hermeneutical norms do not correspond to Western logic. Thus, for example, the accidental repetition of the same word in two different legal texts implies the obligation to submit both texts to the same rules; whatever applies to the law in one text must also apply to the law contained in the other. In harmony with modern logic, on the other hand, is the hermeneutical rule based on the principle “a minori ad maius.”
A different approach from that of H. was followed by another contemporary leader of a school, Sammaj.