to ourselves the scene. The week-day family-meal was simple enough, whether
breakfast or dinner - the latter towards evening, although sometimes also in the middle
of the day, but always before actual darkness, in order, as it was expressed, that the
sight of the dishes by daylight might excite the appetite.11 The Babylonian Jews were
content to make a meal without meat; not so the Palestinians.12 With the latter the
favorite food was young meat: goats, lambs, calves. Beef was not so often used, and
still more rarely fowls. Bread was regarded as the mainstay of life,13 without which no
entertainment was considered as a meal. Indeed, in a sense it constituted the meal. For
the blessing was spoken over the bread, and this was supposed to cover all the rest of
the food that followed, s uch as the meat, fish or vegetables - in short, all that made up
the dinner, but not the dessert. Similarly, the blessing spoken over the wine included all
other kinds of drink.14 Otherwise it would have been necessary to pronounce a separate
benediction o ver each different article eaten or drunk. He who neglected the prescribed
benedictions was regarded as if he had eaten of things dedicated to God,15 since it was
written: 'The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.'16 17 Beautiful as this principle
is, it degenerated into tedious questions of casuistry. Thus, if one kind of food was
eaten as an addition to another, it was settled that the blessing should be spoken only
over the principal kind. Again, there are elaborate disputations as to what should be
regarded as fruit, and have the corresponding blessing, and how, for example, one
blessing should be spoken over the leaves and blossom, and another over the berries
of the caper.18 Indeed, that bush gave rise to a serious controversy between the
Schools of Hillel and Shammai. Another series of elaborate discussions arose, as to
what blessing should be used when a dish consisted of various ingredients, some the
product of the earth, others, like honey, derived from the animal world. Such and similar
disquisitions, giving rise to endless argument and controversy, busied the minds of the
Pharisees and Scribes.
8. Not 'to dine' as in the A.V. Although in later Greek the word αριστον was used for
prandium, yet its original meaning as 'breakfast' seems fixed by St. Luke xiv. 12,
αριστον η δειπνον.
9. tyrx) tp, of which the German Morgenbrot is a literal rendering. To take the first meal
later in the day was deemed very unwholesome: 'like throwing a stone into a skin.'
10. On the sacredness of the duty of hospitality, see 'Sketches of Jewish Social Life,' pp.
47-49.
11. Yoma 74 b.
12. Bezeh 16 a.
13. As always in the East, there were many kinds of bakemeat, from the coarse barley -
bread or rice-cake to the finest pastry. We read even of a kind of biscuit, imported from
India (the Teritha, Ber. 37 b).
14. Ber. 41 b.
15. Ber. 35 a.
16. Ps. xxiv. 1.
17. So rigid was this, that it was deemed duty to speak a blessing over a drink of water, if
one was thirsty, Ber. vi. 8.
18. Ber. 36 a.