irectly from India. We are
told in the Talmud that Rabbi Meir knew three hundred Fox Fables, and
that with his death (about 290 C.E.) "fabulists ceased to be," Very few
of Meir's fables are extant, so that it is impossible to gather whether
or not they were original. There are only thirty fables in the Talmud
and the Midrash, and of these several cannot be parallelled in other
literatures. Some of the Talmudic fables are found also in the
classical and the earliest Indian collections; some in the later
collections; some in the classics, but not in the Indian lists; some in
India, but not in the Latin and Greek authors. Among the latter is the
well-known fable of the _Fox and the Fishes_, used so dramatically by
Rabbi Akiba. The original Talmudic fables are, according to Mr. J.
Jacobs, the following: _Chaff, Straw, and Wheat_, who dispute for which
of them the seed has been sown: the winnowing fan soon decides; _The
Caged Bird_, who is envied by his free fellow; _The Wolf and the two
Hounds_, who have quarrelled; the wolf seizes one, the other goes to his
rival's aid, fearing the same fate himself on the morrow, unless he
helps the other dog to-day; _The Wolf at the Well_, the mouth of the
well is covered with a net: "If I go down into the well," says the wolf,
"I shall be caught. If I do not descend, I shall die of thirst"; _The
Cock and the Bat_, who sit together waiting for the sunrise: "I wait
for the dawn," said the cock, "for the light is my signal; but as for
thee--the light is thy ruin"; and, finally, what Mr. Jacobs calls the
grim beast-tale of the _Fox as Singer_, in which the beasts--invited by
the lion to a feast, and covered by him with the skins of wild
beasts--are led by the fox in a chorus: "What has happened to those
above us, will happen to him above," implying that their host, too, will
come to a violent death. In the context the fable is applied to Haman,
whose fate, it is augured, will resemble that of the two officers whose
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 hardl