HILLÉL. - Tannait (v.), called “the Babylonian” because he was descended from a family of exiles, renowned for his doctrine and his highly humane outlook, who lived at the time of Herod the Great. Erroneous is the report that HILLÉL was the teacher of Jesus.
HILLÉL introduced the legal formula of the “prosbol,” προσβολή, which was intended to overcome the difficulty that had arisen in life because of the Mosaic law regarding the remission of debts in the sabbatical year. The formula introduced by HILLÉL runs: “I, N. N., transmit to you, judges at N. N., (the declaration) that I may demand every credit I have granted at any time.” By this formula the debtor was deprived of any desire to refrain from repaying the debts he had contracted. Without the “prosbol” an insurmountable stagnation would have occurred in economic life.
hálakhah (v.) made necessary a restraint which at that time and under the influence of HILLÉL found expression in seven of the most ancient hermeneutic rules for deducing from the text of the law, rules that had become necessary because of current practice. These hermeneutic norms do not correspond to Western logic. Thus, for example, the chance repetition of the same word in two different legal texts implies the duty of subjecting both texts to the same norms; what holds good for the law in one text must also hold good for the law contained in the other. In consonance with modern logic is instead the hermeneutic rule based on the principle “a minori ad maius.”
A different direction from that of HILLÉL was followed by another master contemporary with him, Sammaj.