ference to such a body. The command of God is, "Thou shalt
come unto the priests, the Levites, and unto the judge that shall
be in those days, and inquire." It is not said to the judges,
but to the judge (
Hebrew characters). To these, and not to the Sanhedrin,
Moses requires absolute obedience, and that for a just and sufficient
reason, because, as we have shown in Number 2, they had
the means of obtaining an infallible answer by means of the
(Hebrew characters) Urim and Thummim. It was the privilege of
Israel to be able to ask counsel immediately of God; and it was
therefore only rational to expect unconditional obedience to
the command of the Almighty. Such decisions were absolutely
unchangeable as God himself, for "He is not a man that he
should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent;" and no
man in his senses would have thought of getting a sentence of
this kind reversed. These words can therefore by no means
apply to a tribunal fallible in judgment, and as changeable in
its opinions as in the persons of which it was composed: but if
this passage does not apply, there is no other in the Bible which
requires us to receive the decision of the Sanhedrin as of divine
authority, nor in the oral law either, for it supposes that this
council was capable of mistake. Consequently, the Sanhedrin's
approval of the new order and new religion of the rabbies is of
no weight whatever. The Bible does not command us to believe
that they were always in the right; and they themselves
tell us that they might be in the wrong, and therefore might
be in the wrong in their approval of the rabbies.
But the truth is, that neither the Bible nor history gives us
any warrant whatever for regarding the Sanhedrin as a Mosaic
institution. In the first place, it is never once mentioned either
in the Law or in the Prophets. The word Sanhedrin is Greek,
and so far as it goes would lead us to suppose that this tribunal
was not instituted until some time after the building of the
second temple, and after the Greek occupation of the land,
when the Jews had become acquainted with the Greek language.
This Greek word would lead us even to suppose that the Sanhedrin
was instituted by the Greek rulers, and that they gave
the tribunal its name. If it had been an old Mosaic institution,
the Jews themselves, who hated the Greeks, and that with good
reason, would never have given it a Greek name: and even if
the Greeks had assigned this name to a Jewish tribunal, which
had previously existed, the Jews would not have adopted it.
It is true that there is also a Hebrew name for this tribunal,
(Hebrew characters), "The great house of judgment," but if this
had been the original name, it is not at all likely that the Greek
name would have supplanted it; whereas if it was a Greek institution,
and therefore had a Greek name, it is not to be wondered
at that that name should have obtained general currency, or
that it should also be translated into Hebrew. The Hebrew
