It is evident that for the religion of Torah the prime necessity was to know the meaning of the Scriptures in general and of the Pentateuch in particular. The oral Tradition started with the interpretation of Scripture; and never in its furthest flights of allegorical extravagance or daring imagination did it wholly forget or entirely disown its connection with the written word. The connection is not always easy to trace; but it is there, none the less. The Tradition of the Elders, wherever it be examined, and whatever be the subject of its pronouncements, is, from first to last, and from its highest to its lowest, the declaration that, when God gave the Torah to Israel, "this" and "this" and "this" is what he meant by it.
When Ezra and his successors made it their chief task to study and interpret the written Torah, what they looked for before everything else was direction for _doing_ the divine will. The reasons why they took this line have already been explained, and need not be repeated (see above, Chapter II.). The effect was that in the body of tradition gradually formed, the element of precept was the most conspicuous and the most systematically developed. It was essential that the Jew, desiring to serve God, should know exactly what he was commanded to do, and what he was forbidden to do, and what was the right course to take in cases where no divine command or prohibition had been explicitly given. The Halachah was the answer to these questions; being of the nature of a comprehensive rule of right conduct, and intended to cover every possible occasion on which a decision was called for. The results, obtained by proper methods of interpretation, and recognised as valid by competent authority, were clear and definite, and could only be disputed by showing that in fact the real intention of Scripture was otherwise. Hence it was possible to elaborate a consistent system of Halachah, and eventually to codify it all.[15]
[15] The process of building up the system is seen in the Talmud. The Code, or the chief Code, is the Shulḥan Aruch, compiled in the sixteenth century by Joseph Caro.
But the interpreters of Scripture found more in its pages than precept; the Torah taught other things besides directions for doing the divine will. It contained instruction about God Himself, about Israel's relation to Him, about the creation and divine providence as shown in past history, about human virtues and vices, and the divine approval or disapproval of them, and so on. It was the task of the interpreters to set forth this teaching, as well as the positive or negative precepts. It is probable that the early Sopherim described their work of interpretation as a whole by the word Haggadah; or, rather, that they used the cognate verb "higgid" to indicate that the Scripture "declared" so and so. But when they began to develop the special line of Halachah, the meaning of what had been the more general term was restricted so as to denote all the remainder that was not Halachah. This is, in practice, what Haggadah does mean, namely, interpretation of Scripture in all other directions except that of precept.[16] As a technical term, indeed, the actual word Haggadah may be no earlier than the first, or even the second, century of our era; but that method or process of interpretation which it was used to describe was in practice long before.