Topic summary
House of Shammai
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Houses of Hillel and Shammai.
The House of Hillel (Beit Hillel) and House of Shammai (Beit Shammai) were two schools of thought in Jewish scholarship during the period of the Zugot (transl. pairs). The houses were named after the sages, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai (of the last century BCE and the early 1st century CE), who founded them. These two schools had vigorous debates on matters of ritual practice, ethics, and theology, which were critical for shaping the Oral Torah and, later, Rabbinic Judaism as it is today.