HILLEL. - Tannaite (v.), called "the Babylonian" because he was descended from a family of exiles, famous for his doctrine and his highly humane feeling, who lived in the time of Herod the Great. The report according to which H. was a teacher of Jesus is erroneous.
H. introduced the legal formula of the "prosbòl," προφυλῆ, which was intended to overcome the difficulty that arose in life because of the Mosaic law of the remission of debts in the sabbatical year. The formula introduced by H. reads: "I, N. N., transmit to you, judges at N. N., (the declaration) according to which I may claim every credit granted by me at any time." With this formula the debtor was deprived of the desire to refrain from repaying the debts he had contracted. Without the "prosbòl" an incurable stagnation would have occurred in economic life.
The predominance of the abstract hâlakhâh (v.) made necessary a check which in his time and under the influence of H. found its expression in seven of the most ancient hermeneutical rules of deduction from the text of the law, which had become necessary because of current practice. These hermeneutical 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 to subject both texts to the same norms; whatever holds for the law in one text must also hold for 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 direction different from that of H. was followed by another head of a school contemporary with him, Shammai.