guilt Mordecai detected.

Such fables are used in the Talmud to point religious or even political
morals, very much as the parables were. The fable, however, took a lower
flight than the parable, and its moral was based on expediency, rather
than on the highest ethical ideals. The importance of the Talmudic
fables is historical more than literary or religious. Hebrew fables
supply one of the links connecting the popular literature of the East
with that of the West. But they hardly belong in the true sense to
Jewish literature. Parables, on the other hand, were an essential and
characteristic branch of that literature.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

MIDRASH.

Schiller-Szinessy.--_Encycl. Brit._, Vol. XVI, p. 285.

Graetz.--II, p. 328 [331] _seq._

Steinschneider.--_Jewish Literature_, pp. 5 _seq._,
36 _seq._

L.N. Dembitz.--_Jewish Services in Synagogue and Home_
(Jewish Publication Society of America, 1898), p. 44.


FABLES.