alliteration, assonance, and imagination. The Rabbinical proverbs show
all these poetical qualities.

He who steals from a thief smells of theft.--Charity is the
salt of Wealth.--Silence is a fence about Wisdom.--Many old
camels carry the skins of their young.--Two dry sticks and one
green burn together.--If the priest steals the god, on what
can one take an oath?--All the dyers cannot bleach a raven's
wing.--Into a well from which you have drunk, cast no
stone.--Alas for the bread which the baker calls bad.--Slander
is a Snake that stings in Syria, and slays in Rome.--The Dove
escaped from the Eagle and found a Serpent in her nest.--Tell
no secrets, for the Wall has ears.

These, like many more of the Rabbinical proverbs, are essentially
poetical. Some, indeed, are either expanded metaphors or metaphors
touched by genius into poetry. The alliterative proverbs and maxims of
the Talmud and Midrash are less easily illustrated. Sometimes they
enshrine a pun or a conceit, or depend for their aptness upon an
assonance. In some of the Talmudic proverbs there is a spice of
cynicism. But most of them show a genial attitude towards life.

The poetical proverb easily passes into the parable. Loved in Bible
times, the parable became in after centuries the most popular form of
didactic poetry among the Jews. The Bible has its parables, but the
Midrash overflows with them. They are occasionally re-workings of older
thoughts, but mostly they are original creations, invented for a special
purpose, stories devised to drive home a moral, allegories administering
in pleasant wrappings unpalatable satires or admonitions. In all ages
up to the present, Jewish moralists have relied on the parable as their