Second Temple sage, founder of a school
Hillel
הללHilleleditorial spelling
Active
first century BCE
Said to be Babylonian by birth and to have lived in Herod's time, he is remembered for famous sayings, the earliest list of rules of interpretation and as ancestor of the patriarchs. There is no pre-rabbinic evidence for him.
What the sources say
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5 statements
Tradition or narrative
Pirkei Avot traces the rabbinic line back to Second Temple sages, among them Hillel and Shammai, both probably active in the first century BCE. Hillel holds a special place in rabbinic memory: he was supposedly born in Babylonia, was Herod's contemporary, and is linked to the first list of rules for interpreting the Torah and to famous sayings such as the one asking who will be for me if I am not for myself. The two figure as founders of schools, circles of disciples rather than institutions, and their debates take up much room in rabbinic recollection of the Second Temple. Hillel is also named as forebear of the family of sages that would hold the patriarchate.
Did Hillel, Shammai and the other sages of Pirkei Avot really do and say what rabbinic literature ascribes to them? There is no way of knowing. Some have tried to see in Hillel's teachers, Avtalion and Shemaya, two sages Josephus mentions, the Pharisee Pollion and his disciple Samais, but the idea is shaky, and for Hillel himself no evidence older than the rabbis exists.
Tradition or narrative
Even when it decides, rabbinic literature does not discredit the losing view. After three years of dispute between the schools of Shammai and Hillel, a divine voice declared that both were 'the words of the living God', but that the law followed Hillel (Erubin 13b), because his disciples were gracious and modest and taught the rival school's words as well.
Tradition or narrative
The Oral Torah was paradoxical: it grew with the rabbis' rulings, debates and interpretations and included contradictory views, yet all of it, even students' questions, had supposedly been revealed to Moses at Sinai, though he did not realize it. In the story in Shabbat 31a, Hillel teaches the alphabet to a would-be convert who accepts only the Written Torah, in one order one day and reversed the next, to show that without a teacher and the Oral Torah the Written cannot be understood.
Tradition or narrative
The rabbis themselves disagreed about the rules of reading. Ishmael, a second-century sage, is linked to the maxim that the Torah speaks as human beings speak; hence he refused Akiba's effort, in his own day, to find divine meaning in repeated words and even single letters. Tradition gives Hillel a list of 7 rules (middot) and Ishmael one of 13, though midrash is not limited to them. A well-known technique is gematria, which reckons the numerical value of letters.