Job and Solomon: Or, The Wisdom of the Old Testament

by T. K. Cheyne

THE BOOK OF KOHELETH; OR, ECCLESIASTES.

CHAPTER I.
THE WISE MAN TURNED AUTHOR AND PHILOSOPHER.

... Il mondo invecchia,

E invecchiando intristisce.—Tasso, Aminta.

In passing from the book of Ecclesiasticus to that of Ecclesiastes, we are conscious of breathing an entirely different intellectual atmosphere. ‘Seek not out the things that are too hard for thee,’ said Sirach, ‘for thou hast no need of the secret things’ (iii. 21, 22), but the book now before us is the record of a thinker, disappointed it is true, but too much in earnest to give up thinking. Of meditative minds there was no lack in this period of Israel’s history. The writers of the 119th and several other Psalms, as well as Jesus the son of Sirach, had pondered over the ideal life, but our author (the only remaining representative of a school of writers[^[286]]) was meditative in a different sense from any of these. He could not have said with the latter, ‘I prayed for wisdom before the temple’ (Ecclus. li. 14), nor with the former, ‘Thy commandment is exceeding broad’ (Ps. cxix. 96). The idea of the religious primacy of Israel awakened in his mind no responsive enthusiasm. We cannot exactly say that he conceals the place of his residence,[^[287]] but he has certainly no overpowering interest in the scene of his life’s troublesome drama. In this feature he resembles to a considerable extent the humanists of an earlier date (see p. [119]), but in others, and those the most characteristic, he differs as widely from them as the old man from the child. They believed that virtue was crowned by prosperity; even the writer of Job, as some think, had not wholly cast off the consecrated dogma; but the austere and lonely thinker who has left us Ecclesiastes finds himself utterly unable to harmonise such a theory with facts (viii. 14). To him, living during one of the dreariest parts of the post-Exile period, it seemed as if the past aspirations of Israel had turned out a gigantic mistake. That home-sickness which impelled, if not the Second Isaiah himself, yet many who were stirred by his eloquence, to exchange a life of ease and luxury for one of struggle and privation—in what had it issued? In ‘vanity and pursuit of wind’ (comp. Isa. xxvi. 18). To quote a great Persian poet, who in some of his moods resembles Koheleth (see end of [Chap. IX].),

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d,

Who rose before us and as Prophets burn’d,

Are all but Stories, which, arose from Sleep,

They told their fellows, and to Sleep return’d.

Such thoughts as these made the history of Israel an aid to scepticism rather than to faith; added to which it is probable that society in Koheleth’s[^[288]] time seemed to him too corrupt to admit of an idealistic theory of life. For an individual to seek to put in practice such a theory would expose him to hopeless failure and misery. Therefore, ‘be not righteous overmuch,[^[289]] neither pretend to be exceedingly wise; why wilt thou ruin (lit. desolate) thyself?’ (vii. 16). Some, no doubt, as the Soferim or Scripturists, had tried it, but they had only succeeded in making their lives ‘desolate,’ without any compensating advantage. Nor can we say that Ecclesiastes had given up theistic religion. He does not indeed believe in immortality and a future judgment, and is thus partly an exception to the rule of Lucretius,

... nam si certam finem esse viderent

Aerumnarum homines, aliqua ratione valerent

Religionibus atque mineis obsistere vatum.

(De rerum naturâ, i. 108-110.)

He mentions God twenty-seven times, but under the name Elohim, which belonged to Him as the Creator, not under that of Yahveh, which an Israelite was privileged to use; and his one-sided supernaturalism obscured the sense of personal communion with God. He accepts only the first part of the great proclamation concerning the dwelling place of God in Isa. lxvii. 15 (see Eccles. v. 2). It is no doubt God who ‘worketh all’ (xi. 5), but there are nearer and almost more formidable potentates, an oppressive hierarchy of officials ranging from the taxgatherer to the king, ‘a high one watching above the high, and high ones over both’ (v. 8). True, our author seems to admit—at least if the text be sound (iii. 17; comp. viii. 12, 13)—that ‘God will judge the righteous and the wicked’ (i.e. in this life, for he does not believe in another), but the comfort of this thought is dashed with bitterness by an unspoken but distinctly implied complaint, which may perhaps be well expressed in the language of Job (xxiv. 1), ‘Why are judgments laid up (so long) by the Almighty,[^[290]] and (why) do they that know him not see his days?’ or in other words, Why is divine retribution so tardy? It is, in fact, this extreme tardiness of God’s judicial interpositions which our author considers one of the chief causes of the prevalence of wickedness;—

‘Because sentence against the work of wickedness is not speedily executed, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil’ (viii. 11).

On the whole, we may say that the older humanists were sincere optimists, while Koheleth, though theoretically perhaps an optimist (iii. 11), constantly relapses into a more congenial ‘malism.’ I use this word designedly. Koheleth can only be called a pessimist loosely. Bad as things are, he does not believe that the world is getting worse and worse and hasting to its ruin. He believes in revolutions, some for evil, some for good, some for ‘rending’ or ‘breaking down,’ others for ‘sewing’ or ‘building up.’ He believes, in other words, that God brings about recurrent changes in human circumstances. But (like another wise man, Prov. xxv. 21) he does not trust revolutions of human origin (‘evil matters’ he calls them, viii. 3); he is no carbonaro (x. 20). And so for the present he is a ‘malist,’ and having no imaginative faculty he cannot sympathise with the ‘Utopian’ prospects for the future contained in the prophetic visions.

Yet, in spite of appearances, Koheleth builds upon a true Israelitish foundation. It is already something that he cannot bear to plunge into open infidelity, that he is still (as we have seen) a theist, though his theism gives him but little light and no comforting warmth. Now and then he alludes to the religious system of his people (see v. 1-5, 17, viii. 10). A stronger proof of his Israelitish sympathies is his choice of Solomon as the representative of humanity; I say, of humanity, because the author evidently declines to place himself upon the pedestal of Israelitish privilege. (Perhaps, too, as Herzfeld thinks,[^[291]] he would console his people by showing them that they have companions in misfortune everywhere ‘under the sun;’ and we have already seen Job snatch a brief alleviation of pain from the thought of suffering humanity.) Koheleth is not only a Jew, but a man of culture. He cannot perhaps entirely defend himself from the subtle influence of the Greek view of life, and is even willing to associate from time to time with the ministers of alien sovereigns. True, he has noted with bitter irony the absurd and capricious changes in the government of Palestine (x. 5-7), but he has no spark of the spirit of the Maccabees, unless indeed in viii. 2-5, x. 4, 20, beneath the garb of servile prudence we may (with Dr. Plumptre) detect the irony of indignation. To the simple-minded reader at any rate he appears to counsel passive obedience, and a cautious crouching attitude towards those in power. I suspect myself that either the advice is but provisional, or else Koheleth still feels the power of the prophetic Utopia: ce peuple rêve toujours quelque chose d’international.[^[292]] Nay; shall we not carry our generosity even farther? That ‘last word,’ which he would have spoken had he lived longer, may possibly not have been that which the Soferim have forced upon him. Not a future judgment, but a return of prosperity to a wiser though sadder Israel, may have been his silent hope, and in this prosperity we may be sure that a wider and more philosophic culture would form a principal ingredient. This is by no means an absurd fancy. Koheleth firmly believed in recurrent historical cycles, and if there was ‘a time to break down,’ there was also ‘a time to build up’ (iii. 3). Sirach knows no future life and no Messiah; but he believes in the eternity of Israel; why, on the ground of his fragmentary remains, deny the same consolation to Koheleth? Much as I should prefer to imagine a far more satisfactory close for his troubled life (see [Chap. IX.]), I think we ought to admit the possibility of this hypothesis.

As an author, the characteristics of Koheleth are in the main Hebraic, though not without vague affinities to the Greek philosophic spirit. His work is without a model, but the dramatic element in it reminds us somewhat of the Book of Job. Just as the writer of that great poem delineates his own spiritual struggles—not of course without poetic amplification—under the assumed name of Job, so our author, with a similar poetical license, ascribes his difficulties to the imaginary personage Koheleth (or Ecclesiastes). There are also passages in which, like Job, he adopts the tone, style and rhythm[^[293]] of gnomic poetry, though far from reaching the literary perfection of Job or of the proverbial collections. The attempt of Köster and Vaihinger to make him out an artist in the management of strophes is a sport of fancy. Unity and consistency in literary form were beyond the reach, if not of his powers, yet certainly of his opportunities; even his phraseology, as a rule, is in the highest degree rough and unpolished. This is the more striking by contrast with the elegant workmanship of Sirach. But the unknown author has very strong excuses. Thus, first, the negative tone of his mind must have destroyed the cheerful composure necessary to the artist. ‘The burden of the mystery’ pressed too heavily for him to think much of form and beauty. His harp, if he ever had one, he had long since hung up upon the willows. Next, it is highly probable that he was interrupted in the midst of his literary preparations. Nöldeke has remarked[^[294]] that his object was not to produce ‘ein literarisches Schaustück.’ That is perfectly true; his primary object was ‘to scatter the doubts of his own mind.’ But he did not despise the literary craft; he was well aware that even ‘the literature of power’ may increase its influence by some attention to form. It seems to me that the ‘labour of the file’ has brought the first two chapters to a considerable degree of perfection; but the rest of the book, upon the whole, is so rough and so disjointed, that I can only suppose it to be based on certain loose notes or adversaria, written solely with the object of dispersing his doubts and mitigating his pains by giving them expression. The thread of thought seems to break every few verses, and attempts to restore it fail to carry conviction to the unbiassed mind. The feelings and opinions embodied in the book are often mutually inconsistent; in Ibn Ezra’s time, and long before that, the Jewish students of the book were puzzled by this phenomenon, so strange in a canonical Scripture. Not a few scattered remarks have absolutely no connection with the subject. The style, too, is rarely easy and natural, and sometimes (especially in viii. 16, 17) we meet with a sentence which would certainly not have passed an author’s final revision. The most obvious hypothesis surely is that from chap. iii. onwards we have before us the imperfectly worked-up meditations of an otherwise unknown writer, found after his death in proximity to a highly finished fragment which apparently professed to be the work of king Solomon. The meditations and the fragment were circulated in combination (for which there was much excuse, especially as some parts of the notes seemed to be in the narrative and even autobiographic style), and were received with much favour by the students of ‘wisdom,’ more, I should think, owing to the intrinsic interest of the book than to the literary fiction of Solomonic authorship. If this hypothesis be correct, we need not be surprised either at the author’s inconsistencies in opinion, or at the general roughness of his style. The book may not even be all one man’s work. Luther has already brought Ecclesiastes into connection with the Talmud.[^[295]] Now the proverbial sayings which interrupt our thinker’s self-questionings on ‘vanity of vanities’ are like the Haggadic passages which gush forth like fountains in the weary waste of hair-splitting Talmudic dialectics. No one has ever maintained the unity of the Talmud, and no one should be thought unreasonable for doubting the absolute freedom of Ecclesiastes from interpolations.[^[296]]

The third and last excuse which I have to offer is that the meditations of Koheleth partake of the nature of an experiment. He may indeed (as I have remarked) be a member of a school of writers, but his strikingly original manner compels us to regard him as a master rather than a disciple. No such purely reflective work had, so far as we know, as yet been produced in Hebrew literature. Similar moral difficulties to those which preoccupied our author had no doubt occurred to some of the prophets and poets, but they had not been sounded to their depths. Even in the Book of Job the reflective spirit has very imperfect scope. The speeches soon pass into a lyric strain, and Jehovah Himself closes the discussion by imposing silence. But the author of Ecclesiastes was a thinker, not a lyrist, and was compelled to form his own vehicle of thought. He ‘sought,’ indeed, ‘to find out pleasant words’ (xii. 10), but had to strain the powers of an unpliant language to the uttermost, to coin (presumably) new words, and apply old ones in fresh senses, till he might well have complained (to apply Lucretius) ‘propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem.’[^[297]] He deserves great praise for his measure of success; Luzzatto in his early work failed to do him justice. He is not ambitious; as a rule, he abstains from fine writing. Once indeed he attempts it, but, as I venture to think, with but ill success—I refer to the closing description of old age (xii. 4-9), which has a touch of the extravagant euphuism of late Arabic literature.[^[298]] From a poetical point of view, the prelude (i. 4-8) is alone worthy to be mentioned, though not included either by Renan or by Bickell among the passages poetical in form (for a list of which see below[^[299]]). Let us mark this fine passage, that we may return to it again in another connection.

CHAPTER II.
‘TRUTH AND FICTION’ IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

Let us now take a general survey of this strange book, regarding it as a record of the conflicting moods and experiences of a thoughtful man of the world. The author is too modest to appear in his own person (at least in i. 1-ii. 12), but, like Cicero in his dialogues, selects a mouthpiece from the heroic past. His choice could not be doubtful. Who so fit as the wisest of his age, the founder and patron of gnomic poetry, king Solomon (1 Kings iv. 30-32)? After the preluding verses, from which a quotation has been given above, Ecclesiastes continues thus:—

I Koheleth have been[^[300]] king over Israel in Jerusalem; and I gave my mind to making search and exploration, by wisdom, concerning all that is done under heaven; that is a sore trouble which God hath given to the sons of men to trouble themselves therewith! I saw all the works which are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and pursuit of wind.

That which is crooked cannot be straightened,

and a deficiency cannot be reckoned (i. 12-15).

The name or title ‘Koheleth’ is obscure. According to the Epilogue ‘Koheleth was a wise man’ (xii. 9)—a statement which confirms the explanation of the name as meaning ‘one who calls an assembly.’[^[301]] The ‘wise men’ of Israel gathered their disciples together, and such an able teacher as Koheleth would fain gather all who have ears to hear around his seat. But Koheleth is also Solomon (though only for a short time—the author did not, I suppose, live long enough thoroughly to fuse the conceptions of king and philosopher[^[302]]). The wise king is to be imagined standing on the brink of the grave, and casting the clear-sighted glance of a dying man on past life, somewhat as Moses in parts of Deuteronomy or David in 2 Sam. xxii., xxiii. 1-7. A subtle and poetic view of Solomon’s career is thus opened before us. He is not here represented in his political relation, but as a specimen of the highest type of human being, with a boundless appetite for pleasure and every means of gratifying it. But even such a man’s deliberate verdict on all forms of pleasure is that they are utterly unsubstantial, mere vanity (lit. a vapour—Aquila, ἀτμίς; comp. James iv. 14). Neither pure speculation (i. 13-18), nor riotous mirth (ii. 1, 2), nor even the refined voluptuousness consistent with the free play of the intellect[^[303]] (ii. 3), could satisfy his longing, or enable him, with Goethe’s Faust, to say to the flying moment, ‘Ah! linger yet, thou art so fair.’ It is true that wisdom is after all better than folly; Solomon from his ‘specular mount’ could ‘see’ this to be a truth (ii. 13); but in the end he found it as resultless as ‘the walking in darkness’ of the fool.

‘And I myself perceived that one fate befalleth them all. And I said in my heart, As the fate of the fool will be the fate which shall befall me, even me; and why have I then been exceeding wise? and I said in my heart that this also is vanity’ (ii. 14b, 15), i.e. that this undiscriminating fate is a fresh proof of the delusiveness of all things.

And in this strain Koheleth runs on to nearly the end of the chapter, with an added touch of bitterness at the thought of the doubtful character of his successor (ii. 18, 19). Then occurs one of those abrupt transitions which so often puzzle the student of Ecclesiastes. In ii. 1-11 Koheleth has rejected the life of sensuous pleasure, even when wisely regulated, as ‘vanity.’ He now returns to the subject, and declares this to be, not of course the ideally highest good, but the highest good open to man, if it were only in his power to secure it. But he has seen that both sensuous enjoyment and the wisdom which regulates it come from God, who grants these blessings to the man who is good in his sight, while profitless trouble is the portion of the sinner. He repeats therefore that even wisdom and knowledge and joy, the highest attainable goods, are, by reason of their uncertainty, ‘vanity and pursuit of wind’ (ii. 26).

At the end of this long speech of Koheleth, we naturally ask how far it can be regarded as autobiographical. Only, I think, in a qualified sense. Its psychological depth points to similar experiences on the part of the author, but to experiences which have been deepened in their imaginative reproduction. It is truth mingled with fiction—Wahrheit und Dichtung—which we meet with in the first two chapters. A more strictly biographical narrative appears to begin in chap. iii., from which point the allusions to Solomon cease, and are replaced by scattered references to contemporary history. The confidences of the author are introduced by a passage (iii. 1-8) in the gnomic style, containing a catalogue of the various actions, emotions, and states of feeling which make up human life. Each of these, we are told, has its own allotted season in the fixed order of nature, but as this is beyond the ken and influence of man, the question arises, ‘What profit hath he that worketh in that wherewith he wearieth himself?’ (iii. 9.) Thus, the ‘wearisome trouble’ of the ‘sons of men’ has no permanent result. All that you can do is to accustom yourself to acquiesce in destiny: you will then see that every act and every state in your ever-shifting life is truly beautiful or seemly (iii. 11), even if not profitable to the individual (iii. 9). More than this, man has been endowed with the faculty of understanding this kaleidoscopic world, with the drawback that he cannot possibly embrace it all in one view:—[^[304]]

Also he hath put the world into their heart (i.e. mind), except that man cannot find out from beginning to end the work which God hath made (iii. 11).

In fact, to quote Lord Bacon’s words in the Advancement of Learning, ‘God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe, and desirous to receive it, as the eye to receive the light.’ But here a dark mood interrupts the course of our author’s meditations; or perhaps it is the record of a later period which is but awkwardly attached to the previous passages. ‘To rejoice and to fare well’—sensual (or, let us say, sensuous) pleasure, in short—is now represented as the only good for man, and even that is not to be too absolutely reckoned upon, for ‘it is the gift of God’ (iii. 12, 13, 22; comp. ii. 24). Certainly our author at any rate did not succeed in drowning care in the wine-cup: he is no vulgar sensualist. His merriment is spoiled by the thought of the misery of others, and he can find nothing ‘under the sun’ (a passionate generalisation from life in Palestine) but violence and oppression. In utter despair he pronounces the dead happier than the living (iv. 1, 2). In fact, he says, neither in life nor in death has man any superiority over the other animals, which are under no providential order, and have no principle of continuance. Such is the cynical theory which tempts Koheleth; and yet he seems to have hesitated before accepting it, unless we may venture with Bickell to strike out iii. 17, as the work of a later editor who believed in retributions hereafter (like xi. 9b xii. 7, 13, 14). I confess that consistency seems to me to require this step; the verse is in fact well fitted to be an antidote to the following verse, which seems to have suggested the opening phrase. This is how the text runs at present:—

I said in my heart, The righteous and the wicked shall God judge; for there is a time for every purpose and for every work there (emphatically for ‘in the other world;’ or read, hath he appointed). I said in my heart, (It happens) on account of the sons of men, that God may test them, and that they may see that they are but beasts. For the sons of men are a chance (comp. Herod. i. 32), and beasts are a chance; yea, all have one chance: as the one dies, so dies the other; yea, they all have one spirit; and advantage of the one over the other there is none, for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward, and whether the spirit of the beast goes downward to the earth?[^[305]] (iii. 17-21.)

Our author’s abiding conviction is that ‘the spirit does but mean the breath’ (In Memoriam, lvi.), so that man and the lower animals have ‘one spirit’ and alike end in dust. ‘Pulvis et umbra sumus.’ It is true, some of his contemporaries hold the new doctrine of Immortality, but Koheleth, in his cool scepticism, hesitates to accept it. Which indeed of its enthusiastic advocates can claim to ‘know’ that which he asserts; or can prove to Koheleth’s satisfaction that God (as a psalmist in Ps. xlix. 15 puts it) will ‘receive’ the spirit of man, in spite of the fact that the vital principle of beasts loses itself in the dust of death? It is no doubt an awkward construction which Koheleth adopts: he seems to express an uncertainty as to the fate of the lower animals. To convey the meaning which I have given, the construction ought to have been disjunctive, as in this line from a noble modern poem,

Friend, who knows if death indeed have life, or life have death for goal?[^[306]]

But there is, or rather there ought to be, no doubt as to Koheleth’s meaning. Dean Plumptre frankly admits that ‘it is not till nearly the close of the book, with all its many wanderings of thought, that the seeker rests in that measure of the hope of immortality which we find’ [but this is open to considerable doubt] ‘in xii. 7.’

CHAPTER III.
MORE MORALISING, INTERRUPTED BY PROVERBIAL MAXIMS.

Let us now resume the thread of Koheleth’s moralising. Violence and oppression were two of the chief evils which struck an attentive observer of Palestinian life. But there were two others equally worthy of a place in the sad picture—the evils of rivalry and isolation. First, with regard to rivalry (iv. 4-6). What is ‘skilful work,’ or art, but an ‘envious surpassing of the one by the other’? This also is ‘pursuit of wind;’ it gives no permanent satisfaction. True, indolence is self-destruction: but on the other hand a little true rest is better than the labour of windy effort, urged on by rivalry yielding no rest (Delitzsch). Such at least is the most probable connection, supposing that vv. 5 and 6 are not rather interpolated or misplaced. If however it be objected (here Koheleth passes to a second great evil—that of isolation) that a man may labour for his child or his brother, yet who, pray, is benefited by the money-getting toils of one who has no near relative, and stands alone in the world? A pitiable sight is such unprofitable toil! The fourth chapter closes with maxims on the blessings of companionship (iv. 9-12), followed by a vivid description of the sudden fall of an old and foolish king (iv. 13-16), who had not cared to appropriate one of the chief of these blessings, viz. good advice. There is much that is enigmatical in the last four verses. We should expect the writer to be alluding to some fact in contemporary history, but no plausible parallel has yet been indicated.[^[307]] Ver. 16 is certainly either corrupt or mutilated. Bickell thinks that it must originally have run somewhat as follows:—

There was no end of all the people, even of all those who [applauded him and cast reproaches on the old king. For because he had despised the counsel of the prudent, to rule foolishly and to oppress the people, therefore they hated him, even as those had hated him] who were before them; they also that came afterwards did not rejoice in him.

At this point the ideal autobiography of Koheleth is interrupted. From v. 1 (= iv. 17 in the Hebrew) to vii. 14 we are presented with a mixture of proverbial sayings (such perhaps as Koheleth was continually framing and depositing in his note-books) and records of the wise man’s personal experience. Notice especially the reappearance of the old Israelitish instinctive sympathy with husbandmen (or, shall I say, with yeomen) in ver. 9. Both proverbs and personal records are the offspring of different moods, and therefore not always consistent. Thus at one time our author repeats his preference of sensuous enjoyment to any other mode of passing one’s life.

For (then) he will not think much on the (few) days of his life, because God responds to the joy of his heart (v. 20).

But the writer is too pessimistic to rest long in this thought. It is a ‘common evil among men’ to have riches without the full enjoyment of them: ‘better an untimely birth,’ he cries, than to be in such a case (vi. 3). Note here in passing the fondness of our author for using a comparison in expressing an emphatic judgment (comp. iv. 9-16, vii. 1-8). Better, he continues, is a momentary experience of real happiness than to let the desire wander after unattainable ends. ‘There are many things that increase vanity;’ with the reserve of good taste, he understates his meaning, for what human object, according to Koheleth, is not futile? That gift which to the Christian is so wondrously fair—the gift of life—to him becomes ‘the numbered days of his life of vanity;’ and ‘who knows what is good for man in life, which he spends as a shadow? For who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?’ (vi. 12.) Koheleth, we see, has no faith in his nation, nor in humanity.

I do not feel sure that we may say with Dean Bradley that ‘out of this very gloom and sadness come forth in the next chapter thoughts that have gone, some of them, the round of the world.’ No doubt there is more than a mere tinge of the same midnight gloom in some of these proverbial sayings. But surely there is a complete break in the thread of thought of vi. 12, and a fresh collection of looser notes has found a place at the head of chap. vii. At any rate, these sayings supply a convincing proof that Koheleth was not a mere hedonist or Epicurean. He recalls in vii. 2 his former commendation of feasting, and declares,

It is better to go into the house of mourning than to go into the house of feasting, inasmuch as that is the end of all men, and the living can lay it to his heart (vii. 2).

I said that Koheleth was too pessimistic to remain long under the influence of hedonism. I might have said that he was too thoughtful; a rational man could not, without the anticipations of faith, close his mind to the suggestions of pessimism in the circumstances of Koheleth’s age. Better thoughtful misery than thoughtless mirth, is the keynote of the triad of maxims (vii. 2-6) on the compensations of misery which follows the dreary sentence praising death, in vii. 1.[^[308]] Resignation is the secret of inward peace; ‘with a sad face the heart may be cheerful.’ Not only in view of the great problem of existence, but in your everyday concerns, restrain your natural impulses whether to towering passion or to brooding vexation at the wrongness or the slowness of the course of human affairs (vii. 8, 9). Above all, do not give way to an ignorant idealism. It is unwise to ask ‘How is it that the former days were better than these?’ (vii. 10.) The former time, so bright and happy, and the present, with its predominant gloom, were alike ordained by God (vii. 13 should follow vii. 10); and as a last consolation for cool and rational thinkers, be sure that there is nought to fear after death; there are no torments of Gehenna. This in fact is the reason why God ordains evil; there being no second life, man must learn whatever he can from calamity in this life.

On a good day be of good cheer, and on an evil day consider (this): God hath also made this (viz. good) equally with that (evil), on the ground that man is to experience nothing at all hereafter[^[309]] (vii. 14; comp. ix. 10).

Thus, not only ‘be not righteous over much’ (vii. 16), but ‘do not believe over much’ is the teaching of our rationalist-thinker. There is neither good nor evil after death. But is there no present judgment? Yes; but this is not a thought of life and hope. It is a true ‘religion’ to him; it binds him in his words as well as his actions. But although Hooker so admired the saying in v. 2 (‘God is in heaven, and thou upon earth, therefore let thy words be few’) as to quote it in one of his finest passages,[^[310]] yet the context of v. 2 sufficiently shows how different was the quality of the reverence of the two writers. Be careful to pay thy vows, says Koheleth, lest when thou invokest God’s name, His angel should appear, and call thee to account.

Suffer not thy mouth to bring punishment upon thy body; and say not before the angel, It was an oversight;[^[311]] wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thy hands?’ (v. 6.)

To Koheleth the mention of the divine name is a possible source of danger; to Hooker God is One ‘whom to know is life, and joy to make mention of his name.’ Koheleth has only fear for God’s holy name—a fear which is not indeed ineffectual but very pale and cheerless; Hooker, a ‘perpetual fear and love,’ and the love gives a new quality and a new efficacy to the fear.

CHAPTER IV.
FACTS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE.

At vii. 15 a new section begins, consisting almost entirely of the author’s personal experiences, very loosely connected; it continues as far as ix. 12. A curious passage at the outset appears to describe virtue as residing in the mean between two extremes (vii. 15-18). The appearance however is deceptive: it is as much out of place to quote Aristotle’s famous definition of virtue (μεσότης δύο κακιῶν), as Buddha’s counsel to him who would attain perfection to ‘exercise himself in the medium course of discipline.’ Koheleth merely offers practical advice how to steer one’s ship between the rocks. Do not, he says, make your life a burden by excessive legalism. But on the other hand, do not earn the reputation of caring nothing for the precepts of the law. That were folly, and would bring you to an early death.[^[312]] Koheleth expresses this sharply and enigmatically; do not be too ‘righteous,’ and do not be too ‘wicked.’ ‘Righteous’ and ‘wicked’ are both to be taken in the common acceptation of those terms in the religious world: the words are used ironically. Our author’s only theory of virtue is that no theory is possible. The ‘wisdom’ which both gives ‘defence’ and ‘preserves life’ (vii. 12) is the practical wisdom of resignation and moderation. Of essential wisdom (or philosophy as we should call it[^[313]]) he says, alluding to Job xxviii. 12-23, that it is ‘far off, and exceeding deep; who can find it out?’ (vii. 24.) The old theory, which claimed to give the secret of history, and which even afterwards satisfied some wise men (e.g. Sirach)—the theory that the good are rewarded and the bad punished in this world—is not borne out by Koheleth’s experience,—

There is (many) a righteous man who perishes in spite of his righteousness, and there is (many) an ungodly man who lives long in spite of his wickedness (vii. 15; contrast the interpolated passage viii. 12, 13).

But though Koheleth, like Job, despairs of essential wisdom, he ‘turns’ with hope to the wide field of wisdom—or, as he calls it, ‘wisdom and reasoning,’ i.e. moral inquiries pursued on the inductive method. And what is the result of his inquiry? He gives it with much deliberateness, stating that he (viz. ‘the Koheleth,’ see on xii. 8) has put one fact to another in order to form a conclusion (ver. 27) and it is that women-tempters are more pernicious than Death (man’s great enemy personified, as so often). Or, putting it in other words, which I am forced to paraphrase to bring out their meaning—words to which the well-known poem of Simonides is chivalry itself—‘A few rare specimens of uncorrupted human nature I have found, so rare that one may reckon them as one among a thousand; but not one of these truly human creatures was a woman.’[^[314]] The latter statement is the stronger, and shows that our author agrees with Ecclus. xxv. 19, that ‘all wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.’ And so much in earnest is he, that he even tries a third mode of expressing his conclusion. Carefully limiting himself he says, ‘Lo! this only have I found; that God made mankind upright, but they have sought out many contrivances’ (ver. 29); that is, men and women are both born good, but are too soon sophisticated by civilisation (and the leaders in this downward process, we may infer from the context, are the women). Koheleth scarcely means to imply that civilisation is bad in itself; if he does, the few good men he has met must apparently have been hermits! But though not essentially immoral, the inventive or contriving faculty (so wonderful to Sophocles) seems to Koheleth the chief source of moral danger.

But are these the only results of Koheleth’s wide induction from the facts of contemporary life? Yes; a time such as this ‘when man rules over man to his hurt’ (viii. 9) suggests, not only prudential maxims, but this sad conclusion, already (vii. 15) mentioned by anticipation, that the fate proper to the wicked falls upon the righteous, and that proper to the righteous on the wicked (viii. 14), or to express this in the concrete,

And in accordance with this I have seen ungodly men honoured, and that too in the holy place (i.e. the temple; comp. Isa. xviii. 7); but those who had acted rightly had to depart and were forgotten in the city. This too is vanity[^[315]] (viii. 10).

No wonder that wickedness is rampant! It requires singular courage to do right when Nemesis delays her visit; or, as Koheleth puts it, in language which sorely displeased a later editor,

Because sentence against a wicked work is not executed speedily, therefore men have abundant courage to do evil. For I know that it even happens that a sinner does evil for a long time, and yet lives long, whilst he who fears before God is short-lived as a shadow (viii. 12, 13).

Koheleth does not, of course, include himself among the reckless evil-doers. He acquiesces in the painful inconsistencies of the world, and seems to comfort himself with the relatively best good—‘to eat and drink and be merry’ (viii. 15). Charity may perhaps suggest that this is not said without bitter irony.

Then follows a clumsy but affecting passage (viii. 16, 17) on the uselessness of brooding (as the author had so long done) over the mysteries of human life, which introduces the concluding part of the section (ix. 1-12). These twelve verses are full of a restrained passion. Such being the unfree condition of man that he cannot even govern his sympathies and antipathies, and so regardless of moral distinctions the course of destiny, and there being no hereafter,[^[316]] what remains but to take such pleasure as life—especially wedded life—can offer, and to carry out one’s plans with energy? Yet, alas! it is only too true that neither success nor freedom of action can be reckoned upon, for ‘the race is not to the swift,’ and men are ‘snared’ like the fishes and the birds.

The section which begins at ix. 13 is of still more varied contents. It begins with a striking little story about the ‘poor wise man,’ a Themistocles in common life, ‘who by his wisdom delivered the city, and no one remembered that poor man’ (ix. 14, 15). Surely here (as in iv. 13, 14, viii. 10) we catch the echo of contemporary history. It is not a generalisation (comp. Prov. xxi. 22), but a fact which the author gives us, and it may plausibly be conjectured that he was the ‘poor wise man’ himself. The rest of the section (down to x. 15) contains proverbs on wisdom and folly, and some bitterly ironical remarks on the exaltation of servants and burden-bearers[^[317]] above the rich and the princely.

CHAPTER V.
THE WISE MAN’S PARTING COUNSELS.

A new section begins at x. 16—no ingenuity avails to establish a connection with the preceding verses. We are approaching our goal, and breathe a freer air. From the very first the ideas and images presented to us are in a healthier and more objective tone. The condemnation expressed in ver. 16 does credit to the public spirit of the writer, and, I need hardly say, is not really inconsistent (as Hitzig supposed) with the advice in ver. 20. In the words—

Even among thine acquaintance[^[318]] curse not the king, and in thy bedchambers curse not the rich; for the birds of the heaven may carry the voice [comp. the cranes of Ibycus] and that which hath wings may report the word—

Dean Plumptre perhaps rightly sees ‘the irony of indignation’ which ‘veils itself in the garb of a servile prudence.’ There is no necessity to reduce Koheleth to the moral level of Epicurus, who is said to have deliberately preferred despotism and approved courting the monarch.

It is a still freer spirit which breathes in the remainder of the book. Let courtiers waste their time in luxury (x. 18), but throw thou thyself unhesitatingly into the swift stream of life. Be not ever forecasting, for there are some contingencies which can no more be guarded against than the falling of rain or of a tree (xi. 3, 4). Act boldly, then, like the corn-merchants, who speculate on such a grand scale,—

Send forth thy bread upon the wide waters [lit. upon the face of the waters], for thou mayst find it [i.e. obtain a good return for it] after many days (xi. 1).

But since fortune is capricious, do not risk thine all on a single venture. ‘Ships are but boards, sailors but men’ &c., as Shylock says. Divide thy merchandise, and so, if one vessel is wrecked or plundered, much may still be saved; or—another possible interpretation—store thy property in various hiding-places, so that, in case of some political revolution, thine all may not be taken from thee,—

Make seven portions, and also eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth (or, the land) (xi. 2).

This is not, of course, the usual explanation of these two verses, which are enigmas fairly admitting of more than one solution. Most commentators understand them as recommending beneficence, which ver. 2 requires to be of extensive range, and which ver. 1 compares to cakes of bread thrown upon the water, and gathered up no one knows by whom. So perhaps (besides Rashi, Aben Ezra, Ginsburg &c.) Goethe in the Westöstliche Divan—

Was willst du untersuchen

Wohin die Milde fliesst!

Ins Wasser wirf dein Kuchen—

Wer weiss wer sie geniesst![^[319]]

I do not think that this suits the context, which suggests activity and caution as the two good qualities recommended by Koheleth. But it is very possible that the proverb was a popular one which the author took up, giving it a fresh application.

Such is the author’s parting advice to the elder part of his readers,—not very elevated, but not without a breath of courageous faith (xi. 5). Not that he has given up his advocacy of pleasure. Side by side with work, a man should cherish, even to the very last, all those sources of joy which God Himself has provided, remembering the long dark days which await him in Sheól. Then, at ver. 9, he addresses the young, and in measured distichs intreats them to enjoy life while they may.

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,

and let thy heart gladden thee in the flower of thine age;

and walk in the ways of thy heart

and according to the sight of thine eyes;

And banish discontent from thy heart,

and put away evil from thy flesh:—

for youth and the prime of life are vanity.

Between lines 4 and 5 we find the received text burdened with a prosaic insertion, which is probably not due to an after-thought on the part of the writer, but to the anxiety of later students to rescue the orthodoxy of the book. The insertion consists of the words, Rabbinic in expression as well as in thought, ‘But know that for all this God will bring thee into the judgment.’[^[320]] It was the wisdom of true charity to insert them; but it is our wisdom as literary students to ‘banish discontent’ with the discord which they introduce by restoring the passage to its original form.

At this point Koheleth turns away from the young to those (presumably) of his own age. Again there are traces at least of a series of distichs which must once have stood here, but either the author or one of his editors, or both, have so far worked over them that the series is no longer perfect. The first suspected instance of this ‘overworking’ occurs at the very outset. ‘Remember thy Creator in the flower of thine age,’ are the opening words of Koheleth’s second address. They are usually explained as taking up the idea of the last judgment expressed at the close of xi. 9. ‘Since God,’ to quote Dr. Ginsburg’s paraphrase, ‘will one day hold us accountable for all the works done in the body, we are to set the Lord always before our eyes.’ The importance of this passage, when thus interpreted, is manifest. It suggests that Koheleth had struggled through his many difficulties to an assured doctrinal and practical position, and that it is not mere rejoicing, but ‘rejoicing in the Lord,’ that Koheleth recommends in xii. 1—an edifying view of the old man’s final result which every one must desire to be true if only it be consistent with the rest of the book. I fear that this is not the case. Elsewhere in the book sensuous pleasure in moderation is praised without any reference to God, and in the immediate neighbourhood of this verse the motive given for rejoicing is not the thought of God, but that of the many days of darkness (i.e. of Sheól) which are coming. Besides, the exhortation ‘Remember thy Creator’ does not perfectly suit the close of the verse, or indeed of the section. What is the natural inference from the fact that at an advanced age life becomes physically a burden? Surely this—that man should enjoy life while his powers are fresh. Cannot an old man ‘remember’ his Creator? (To ‘remember’ is to think upon; it is not a synonym for conversion.) The text therefore is almost certainly incorrect.

Has an editor, then, tampered with the text of the opening words of the exhortation? May we, for instance, follow Grätz and read, for bōr’éka ‘thy Creator,’ bōr’ka ‘thy fountain’ (lit. thy cistern), taking this as a metaphorical expression for ‘thy wife’ or ‘thy wedlock’ (as in Prov. v. 15-18)? The objection certain to be raised is that the text when thus corrected brings the book to a lame and impotent conclusion. It may be true, as Bishop Temple has said, that chastity and monotheism are the chief legacies which the Jewish Church has bequeathed to mankind.[^[321]] There is nothing in an exhortation to prize a pure married life unworthy of a high-minded Jewish teacher. But in this connection it is certainly to a Western reader strange, and one is sorely tempted to suppose a displacement of the words, and, following Bickell, to make the distich—

And remember thy fountain

in the flower of thine age—

the conclusion of the stanzas beginning at xi. 9. This, it is true, involves (1) the excision of the words ‘for youth and the prime of life are vanity,’ and (2) an alteration of the construction of xii. 1, 2 (reading ‘and evil days shall come’ &c.). This violent change is no doubt justified by Bickell on metrical grounds, but as I cannot unreservedly adopt his metrical theory, I have not sufficient excuse for accepting his rearrangement of the text.

I wish some better remedy than that of Grätz could be devised. I would gladly close these Meditations with admiration as well as sympathy. But at the risk of being called unimaginative, I must venture to criticise the entire conclusion of the original Book of Koheleth (xii. 1-7). Most English critics admire the poem on the evils of old age which follows on the earnest ‘Remember,’ and naturally think that it requires some specially sublime saying to introduce it. I do not join them in their admiration, and consequently find it easier to adopt what seems to some the ‘low view’ of Dr. Grätz. Observe that we have already met with an eulogy of wedded bliss side by side with a gloomy picture of death in an earlier section (ix. 9, 10).

This is the poem (if we may call it so) with which the second exhortation of Koheleth is interwoven—

Ere the evil days come, and the years approach

of which thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them:

Ere the sun be darkened, and the light, and the moon, and the stars,

and the clouds keep returning after heavy rains [the winter rains, i.e. old age]:

In the day when the keepers of the house [the hands and arms] tremble,

and the strong men [the feet and legs] bow themselves,

and the grinding-maids [the teeth] cease because they are few,

and the (ladies) who look out at the lattice [the eyes] are darkened:

And the doors [the lips] are shut towards the street,

while the sound of the grinding is low,

And the voice riseth into a sparrow’s [‘childish treble’]

and all the daughters of song [words] are faint.

They are afraid too of a steep place,

and terror besets every way;

and the almond-tree is in bloom [white hair[^[322]]],

and the locust drags itself along,

and the caper-berry fails [to excite the appetite],

For the man is on the way to his eternal home,

and the mourners go about in the street.

Ere the silver string [the tongue] be tied,

and the golden bowl [the head] break,

and the pitcher [the heart] be shivered at the fountain,

and the windlass [the breathing apparatus] break into the pit.

With a little determination the traces of development in the Biblical literature can be more or less effaced. The pious but unphilological editors of Koheleth were not deficient in this quality. After altering the introduction of the poem on old age they proceeded to furnish it with a finale. Not only the opening words of ver. i., but the comfortless expression ‘his eternal house’[^[323]] in ver. 5 gave them serious offence. One remedy would have been to transpose (with the Syriac translator) two of the letters of the Hebrew, and thus change ‘home of his eternity’ into ‘home of his travail’ (i.e. the place where ‘the weary are at rest’). They preferred, however, to add two lines—

and the dust return to the earth as it was,

and the spirit return unto God who gave it.

This no doubt is a direct contradiction of iii. 21. But the ancients probably got over this, as most moderns still do, by supposing that the earlier passage did but express a sceptical suggestion which skimmed the surface of Koheleth’s mind.

The excision of these words would of course not be justified in a translation intended for popular use; but for the purposes of historical study seems almost inevitable. It hangs together with the view adopted as to the origin of xi. 9b, and implies the assumption that the Targum rightly paraphrases, ‘and thy spirit (lit. thy breath, nishm’thāk) will return to stand in judgment before the Lord who gave it thee.’ It ought to be mentioned, however, that some critics (accepting the clause as genuine) see in that return to God nothing more than the absorption of the human spirit into the divine (whether in a naïve popular or in a developed philosophical sense).[^[324]] This will seem plausible at first to many readers. As a Lutheran writer says, ‘Si spes, quam nos fovemus lætissimam, Ecclesiastæ adfulsisset, non obiter ipse tetigisset et verbis ambiguis notasset rem maximi momenti’ (Winzer, ap. Hengstenberg). But if the Hebrew rūakh means, as I think it does, the personal, conscious, spiritual side of man in iii. 21,[^[325]] I fail to see why it should not bear that meaning here.

CHAPTER VI.
KOHELETH’S ‘PORTRAIT OF OLD AGE;’ THE EPILOGUE, ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN.

We have now arrived at the conclusion of the meditations of our much-tried thinker. It is strongly poetic in colouring; but when we compare it with the grandly simple overture of the book (i. 4-8), can we help confessing to a certain degree of disappointment? It is the allegory which spoils it for modern readers, and so completely spoils it, that attempts have been sometimes made to expel the allegorical element altogether. That the first two verses are free from allegory, is admitted, and it is barely possible that the sixth verse may be so too—may be, that is, figurative rather than allegorical. Poets have delighted in these figures; how fitly does one of them adorn the lament in Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady,—

Broken the golden bowl

Which held her hallowed soul!

The most doubtful part, then, is the description in vv. 3-5. I am not writing a commentary, and will venture to express an opinion in favour of the allegorists (it is not fair to call them satirically the anatomists).[^[326]] It is true that there is much variety of opinion among them; this only shows that the allegory is sometimes far-fetched, not that it is a vain imagination. Can there be anything more obscure than the canzoni in Dante’s Convito, which we have the poet’s own authority for regarding as allegorical? And if we compare the rival theories with that which they attempt to displace, can it be said that Taylor’s dirge-theory,[^[327]] or Umbreit’s storm-theory,[^[328]] or that adopted by Wright from Wetzstein[^[329]] is more suitable to the poem than the allegorical theory? Certainly the latter is a very old, if not the oldest theory, and on a point of this sort the ancients have some claim to be deferred to. They seem to have felt instinctively that the intellectual atmosphere of Koheleth (as well as of the Chronicler) was that of the later Judaism. The following story is related in a Talmudic treatise.[^[330]] ‘The Emperor asked R. Joshua ben Hananyah, “How is it that you do not go to the house of Abidan (a place of learned discussions)?” He said to him, “The mountain is snow (my head is white); the hoar frosts surround me (my whiskers and my beard are also hoary); its dogs do not bark (I have lost my wonted power of voice); its millers do not grind (I have no teeth); the scholars ask me whether I am looking for something I have not lost (referring probably to the old man feeling here and there).”’

Once more (see i. 2) the mournful motto, ‘Vanity of vanities! saith the Koheleth; all is vanity’ (xii. 8), and the book in its original form closes.[^[331]] Did the author himself attach this motto? Surely not, if the preceding words on the return of the spirit to its God (see above, on iii. 21) are genuine, for then ‘Vanity of vanities’ would be a patent misrepresentation. All is not ‘vanity,’ if there is in human nature a point connecting a man with that world, most distant and yet most near, where in the highest sense God is. If Koheleth wrote xii. 7b, he cannot have written xii. 8, any more than the author of the Imitation could have written Vanitas vanitatum both on his first page and on his last. Yet who but Koheleth can be responsible for it? For the later editors of whom I have spoken, would be far from approving such a reversal of the great charter of man’s dignity in the eighth Psalm. To me, the motto simply says that all Koheleth’s wanderings had but brought him back to the point from which he started. ‘Grandissima vanità,’ as Castelli, in his dignified Italian, puts it, ‘tutto è vanità.’ All that I can assign to the editors in this verse are the parenthetic words ‘saith the Koheleth.’ Everywhere else we find ‘Koheleth;’ here alone, and perhaps vii. 17 (corrected text), ‘the Koheleth.’[^[332]]

Let us now consider the Epilogue itself.

And moreover (it should be said) that Koheleth was a wise man; further, he taught the people wisdom, and weighed and made search, (yea) composed many proverbs. Koheleth sought to find out pleasant words, and he wrote down[^[333]] plainly words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails well driven in; the members of the assemblies[^[334]] have [in the case of Ecclesiastes] given them forth from another shepherd.[^[335]] And as for all beyond them, my son, be warned; of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.—That which the word ‘all is vanity’ comes to:[^[336]] it is understood (thus), Fear God, and keep His commandments. For this (concerns) every man. For every work shall God bring into the judgment (which shall be) upon all that is concealed and all that is manifest, whether it be good or whether it be evil.

This translation has not been reached without some emendations of the text. It seems to me that everything in this Epilogue ought to be clear. There is but one verse which contains figurative expressions; the rest is simple prose. It is only fair, however, to give one of the current renderings of those verses in which an emendation has been attempted above.

Koheleth sought to find out pleasant words and that which was written down frankly, words of truth. Words of wise men are like goads, and like nails driven in are those which form collections [or, the well-compacted sayings, Ewald; or, the well-stored ones, Kamphausen]—they have been given by one shepherd.... Final result, all having been heard:—Fear God and keep His commandments, for this (concerns) every man.[^[337]]

The first scholar to declare against the genuineness of the Epilogue was Döderlein (Scholia in libros V. T. poeticos, 1779), who was followed by Bertholdt (Einleitung, p. 2250 &c.), Umbreit, Knobel, and De Jong.[^[338]] It was however a Jewish scholar, Nachman Krochmal,[^[339]] who first developed an elaborate theory to account for the Epilogue. According to him, it was added at the final settlement of the Canon at the Synod of Jamnia, A.D. 90, and was intended as a conclusion not merely for Ecclesiastes, but for the entire body of Hagiographa. He thinks (but without any historical ground) that Ecclesiastes was added at that time to close the Canon. The correctness of this view depends partly on its author’s interpretation of vv. 11, 12, partly on his definition of the object of the Synod of Jamnia (see [Appendix].) The two former verses are condensed thus,

The words of the wise are like ox-goads, and the members of the Sanhedrin are like firm nails, not to be moved. As for more than these, beware, my son; of making many books there is no end.

The ‘wise’ spoken of, thinks Krochmal, are the authors of the several books of the Hagiographa, and the warning in ver. 12 is directed against the reception of any other books into the Canon. Whether the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes were to be admitted, was, according to him, a subject of debate at the Synod referred to.

But there is no necessity whatever for this interpretation of vv. 11, 12. The phrase, ‘the words of the wise,’ is not a fit description of all the books of the Hagiographa (of Psalms, Daniel, and Chronicles for instance), and the warning in ver. 12 more probably has relation to the proverbial literature in general, such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Wisdom of Sirach, or at least to the Book of Proverbs, to which Kleinert conjectures that Ecclesiastes once formed an appendix. There is nothing in the Epilogue to suggest a reference to the Canon. The ‘many books’ spoken of are probably such as did not proceed from thoroughly orthodox sources. We have absolutely no information as to Jewish literature outside the Canon. That there was a heterodox literature, has been inferred by Ewald from Jer. viii. 8, Prov. xxx. 1-4; it is also clear from several passages in the Book of Enoch. Tyler and Plumptre may possibly be right in seeing here an allusion to the incipient influence of Greek literature upon the Jews. This is at any rate more justifiable than to assume an arrangement of the Hagiographa with Ecclesiastes for the closing book for which there is no ancient testimony.

Krochmal’s ingenious theory has, however, been adopted by Jost, Grätz and Renan,[^[340]] though Renan is willing to admit that vv. 9, 10 may be from the pen of the author himself. ‘Cet épilogue complète bien la fiction qui fait la base du livre. Quel motif d’ailleurs eût amené à faire postérieurement une telle addition?’[^[341]] I do not myself hold with Krochmal, but vv. 9-12 seem to me to hang together, and I do not think that the author himself would be at the pains to destroy his own fiction, whereas a later editor would naturally append the corrective statement that the real Koheleth was not a king, but a wise man. (Observe too that ‘Koheleth’ in ver. 8 has the article, but in vv. 9, 10 is without it, suggesting a change of writer.) I agree however with Renan that vv. 13, 14, which differ in tone and in form from the preceding verses, appear to be a later addition than the rest of the Epilogue. Renan, it is true, distrusts this appearance; he fears a too complicated hypothesis. But we must at least hold that vv. 13, 14 were added (whether by the Epilogist or by another) by an after-thought. The Epilogue should therefore be divided into two parts, vv. 9-12, and vv. 13, 14. In the first part, the real is distinguished from the fictitious author; his qualifications are described; the editors of his posthumous work are indicated; and a warning is given to the disciple of the Epilogist (to apply the words of M. Aurelius) ‘to cast away the thirst for books.’[^[342]] In the second part, a contradiction is given to what seemed an unworthy interpretation of a characteristic expression of Koheleth’s, and the higher view of its meaning is justified—justified, that is, to those who approach the work from the practical point of view of those who have as yet no better moral ‘Enchiridion.’[^[343]]

At what period was the Epilogue added? The consideration of its style may help us at least to a negative result. The Hebrew approaches that of the Mishna, but is yet sufficiently distinct from it to be the subject of expository paraphrase in the Talmuds.[^[344]] It is therefore improbable that it was added long after the period of the author himself. Books like Sirach and Koheleth soon became popular, and attracted the attention of the religious authorities. Interpolation or insertion seemed the only way to counteract the spiritual danger to unsuspicious readers.

CHAPTER VII.
ECCLESIASTES AND ITS CRITICS (FROM A PHILOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW).

By comparison with Ecclesiastes, the books which we have hitherto been studying may be called easy; at any rate, they have not given rise to equally strange diversities of critical opinion. A chapter with the above heading seems therefore at this point specially necessary. Dr. Ginsburg’s masterly sketch of the principal theories of the critics down to 1860 dispenses me, it is true, from attempting an exhaustive survey.[^[345]] It is not the duty of every teacher of Old Testament criticism to traverse the history of his subject afresh, any more than it is that of the commentator as such to begin with a catena of the opinions of previous writers. Suffice it to call attention to two of the Jewish and two of the Christian expositors mentioned by Dr. Ginsburg, viz. Mendelssohn and Luzzatto, and Ewald and Vaihinger. Mendelssohn seems important not so much by his results as by his historical position. His life marks an era in Biblical study, most of all of course among the Jews, but to some extent among Christians also. His Hebrew commentary on Koheleth deserves specially to be remembered, because with it in 1770 he broke ground anew in grammatical exegesis. To him, as also to Vaihinger, the object of Koheleth is to propound the great consolatory truth of the immortality of the soul, while Ewald, more in accordance with facts, describes it as being rather to combine all that is true, however sad, and profitable, and agreeable to the will of God in a practical handbook adapted to those troublesome times. Ewald and Vaihinger both divide the book into four sections,—(1) i. 2-ii. 26, (2) iii. 1-vi. 9, (3) vi. 10-viii. 15, (4) viii. 16-xii. 8, with the Epilogue xii. 9-14. The latter, whose view is more developed than Ewald’s, and whom I refer to as closing and summing up a period, maintains that each section consists of three parts which are again subdivided—for Koheleth, though you would not think it, is a literary artist—into strophes and half-strophes, and that the theme of each section is thrown out, seemingly by chance, but really with consummate art, in the preceding one. Thus the four sections interlace, and the unity of the book is established. The Epilogue, too, according to Vaihinger, can thus be proved to be the work of the author of Koheleth; for it does but ratify and develope what has already been indicated in xi. 9, and without it the connection of ideas would be incomplete.[^[346]] I think that our experience of some interpreters of the Book of Job may predispose us to be sceptical of such ingenious subtleties, and I notice that more recent critics show a tendency to insist less on the logical distribution of the contents and to regard the book, not indeed as a mere collection of rules of conduct, but at any rate as a record of a practical and not a scholastic philosopher. This tendency is not indeed of recent origin, though it has increased in favour of late years. Prior the poet had already said that Ecclesiastes ‘is not a regular and perfect treatise, but that in it great treasures are “heaped up together in a confused magnificence;”’[^[347]] Bishop Lowth, that ‘the connection of the arguments is involved in much obscurity;’[^[348]] while Herder, in his letters to a theological student, had penned this wise though too enthusiastic sentence, which cuts at the root of all attempts at logical analysis,

Kein Buch ist mir aus dem Alterthum bekannt, welches die Summe des menschlichen Lebens, seine Abwechselungen und Nichtigkeiten in Geschäften, Entwürfen, Speculationen und Vergnügen, zugleich mit dem was einzig in ihm wahr, daurend, fortgehend, wechselnd, lohnend ist, reicher, eindringlicher, kürzer beschriebe, als dieses.[^[349]]

But I must retrace my steps. One of my four critics has yet to be briefly characterised—S. D. Luzzatto of Padua, best known as the author of a Hebrew commentary on Isaiah, but also a master in later Hebrew and Aramaic scholarship. As a youth of twenty-four he wrote a deeply felt and somewhat eccentrically ingenious treatise on Koheleth, which he kept by him till 1860, when it appeared in one of the annual volumes of essays and reviews called Ozar Nechmad. In it he maintains, with profound indignation at the unworthy post-Exile writer, that the Book of Ecclesiastes denies the immortality of the soul, and recommends a life of sensuous pleasure. The writer’s name, however, was, he thinks, Koheleth, and his fraud in assuming the name of Solomon was detected by the wise men of his time, who struck out the assumed name and substituted Koheleth (leaving however the words ‘son of David, king in Jerusalem,’ as a record of the imposture). Later students, however, were unsuspicious enough to accept the work as Solomon’s, and being unable to exclude a Solomonic writing from the Canon, they inserted three qualifying half-verses of an orthodox character, viz. ‘and know that for all this God will bring thee into judgment’ (xi. 6b); ‘and remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth’ (xii. 1a); ‘and the spirit shall return to God who gave it’ (xii. 8b). This latter view, which has the doubtful support of a Talmudic passage,[^[350]] appears to me, though from the nature of the case uncertain, and susceptible, as I think, of modification, yet in itself probable as restoring harmony to the book, and in accordance with the treatment of other Biblical texts by the Soferim (or students and editors of Scripture). Geiger may have fallen into infinite extravagances, but he has at any rate shown that the early Soferim modified many passages in the interests of orthodoxy and edification.[^[351]] If so, they did but carry on the process already begun by the authors of the sacred books themselves; it may be enough to remind my readers of the gradual supplementing of the original Book of Job by later writers. To the three passages of Koheleth mentioned above, must be added, as Geiger saw,[^[352]] the two postscripts which form the Epilogue. From the close of the last century a series of writers have felt the difficulties of this section so strongly that they have assigned it to one or more later writers, and in truth, although these difficulties may be partly removed, enough remains to justify the obelising of the passage.

There is no evidence that Luzzatto ever retracted the critical view mentioned above. To the character of the author, it is true, he became more charitable in his later years. I do not think the worse of him for his original antipathy. An earnest believer himself and of fiery temperament, he could not understand the cool and cautious reflective spirit of the much-tried philosopher;[^[353]] and as a lover of the rich, and, as the result of development, comparatively flexible Hebrew tongue, he took a dislike to a writer so wanting in facility and grace as Koheleth.[^[354]] It was an error, but a noble one, and it shows that Luzzatto found in the study of criticism a school of moral culture as well as of literary insight.

The adoption of Luzzatto’s view,[^[355]] combined with Döderlein’s as to the epilogue, removes the temptation to interpret Koheleth as the apology of any particular philosophical or theological doctrine. The author now appears, not indeed thoroughly consistent, but at least in his true light as a thinker tossed about on the sea of speculation, and without any fixed theoretic conclusions. Without agreeing to more than the relative lateness of the epilogue, De Jong,[^[356]] a Dutch scholar, recognises the true position of Koheleth, and in the psychological interest of the book sees a full compensation for the want of logical arrangement. De Jong indeed was not acquainted with the theory of Nachman Krochmal, which if sound throws such great light on the reason of the addition of the epilogue (see end of [Chap. VI.]) This has been accepted by Grätz and Renan, but, as I have ventured to think, upon insufficient grounds. The brevity of my reference to these two eminent exegetes must be excused by my inability to follow either of them in his main conclusions. The glossary of peculiar words and the excursus on the Greek translation given by the former (1871) possess a permanent value, and there is much of historical interest in his introduction. But I agree with Kuenen that the student who selects Grätz as his guide will have much to unlearn afterwards.[^[357]] In order to show that Ecclesiastes is a politico-religious satire levelled against king Herod, with the special object of correcting certain evil tendencies among the Jews of that age, Grätz is compelled to have recourse to much perverse exegesis which I have no inclination to criticise.[^[358]] Renan’s present view differs widely from that given in his great unfinished history of the Semitic languages. But I shall have occasion to refer to his determination of the date of our book later.

Among recent English students, no one will refuse the palm of acuteness and originality to Tyler (1874). His strength lies not in translation and exegesis, but in the consistency with which he has applied his single key, viz. the comparison of the book with Stoic and Epicurean teaching. He is fully aware that the book has no logical divisions. Antithesis and contradiction is the fundamental characteristic of the book. Not that the author contradicts himself (comp. the quotation from Ibn Ezra in Ginsburg’s Coheleth, p. 57), but that a faithful index of the contradictions of the two great philosophical schools gives a greater point to his concluding warning against philosophy. It is the ‘sacrificio dell’ intelletto’ which the author counsels. But Mr. Tyler’s theory or at least his point of view demands a separate consideration. It may however be fairly said here that by general consent Mr. Tyler has done something to make the influence of Greek philosophical ideas upon Ecclesiastes a more plausible opinion.

To a subsequent chapter I must also beg to refer the reader for a notice of Gustav Bickell’s hypothesis (1884) relative to the fortunes (or misfortunes) of the text of Koheleth. This critic is not one of those who grant that the book had from the first no logical division, and his hypothesis is one of the boldest and most plausible in the history of criticism. Its boldness is in itself no defect, but I confess I desiderate that caution which is the second indispensable requisite in a great critic. The due admixture of these two qualities nature has not yet granted. Meantime the greatest successes are perhaps attained by those who are least self-confident, least ambitious of personal distinction. Upon the whole, from the point of view of the student proper, are there more thankworthy contributions to criticism not less than to exegesis than the books of Plumptre (1881), Nowack (1883), and above all the accomplished altmeister Franz Delitzsch (1875)? Whatever has been said before profitably and well, may be known by him who will consult these three accomplished though not faultless expositors. I would not be supposed to detract from other writers,[^[359]] but I believe that the young student will not repent limiting himself, not indeed to one, but to three commentaries.

CHAPTER VIII.
ECCLESIASTES AND ITS CRITICS (FROM A LITERARY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW).

It is not every critic of Ecclesiastes who helps the reader to enjoy the book which is criticised. Too much criticism and too little taste have before now spoiled many excellent books on the Old Testament. Ecclesiastes needs a certain preparation of the mind and character, a certain ‘elective affinity,’ in order to be appreciated as it deserves. To enjoy it, we must find our own difficulties and our own moods anticipated in it. We must be able to sympathise with its author either in his world-weariness and scepticism or in his victorious struggle (if so be it was victorious) through darkness into light. We must at any rate have a taste for the development of character, and an ear for the fragments of truth which a much-tried pilgrim gathered up in his twilight wanderings. Never so much as in our own time have this taste and this ear been so largely possessed, as a recent commentary has shown in delightful detail, and I can only add to the names furnished by the writer that of one who perhaps least of all should be omitted, Miss Christina Rossetti.[^[360]] But to prove the point in my own way, let me again select four leading critics, as representatives not so much of philology as of that subtle and variable thing—the modern spirit, viz. Renan, Grätz, Stanley, and Plumptre. The first truly is a modern of the moderns, though it is not every modern who will subscribe to his description of Ecclesiastes as ‘livre charmant, le seul livre aimable qui ait été composé par un Juif’[^[361]] One might excuse it perhaps if in some degree dictated by a bitter grief at the misfortunes of his country; pessimism might be natural in 1872. But alas! ten years later the same view is repeated and deliberately justified, nor can the author of Koheleth be congratulated. He is now described[^[362]] as ‘le charmant écrivain qui nous a laissé cette délicieuse fantaisie philosophique, aimant la vie, tout en en voyant la vanité,’ or, as a French reviewer condenses the delicate phrases of his author, ‘homme du monde et de la bonne société, qui n’est, à proprement parler, ni blasé ni fatigué, mais qui sait en toutes choses garder la mesure, sans enthousiasme, sans indignation, et sans exaltation d’aucune espèce.’ A speaking portrait of a Parisian philosophe, but does it fit the author of Ecclesiastes? No; Koheleth has had too hard a battle with his own tongue to be a ‘charming writer,’ and even if not exactly blasé (see however ii. 1-11), he is ‘fatigued’ enough with the oppressive burdens of Jewish life in the second century B.C. That he has no enthusiasm, and none of those visions which are the ‘creators and feeders of the soul,’[^[363]] is cause for pity, not for admiration; but that he has had no visitings of sæva indignatio, is an unjust inference from his acquired calmness of demeanour. He is an amiable egoïst, says M. Renan; but would Koheleth have troubled himself to write as he does, if egoïsm were the ripened fruit of his life’s experience? Why does this critic give such generous sympathy to the Ecclesiastes of the Slav race,[^[364]] and such doubtful praise to his great original? It is true, Koheleth seems to despair of the future, but only perhaps of the immediate future (iii. 21), and Turgenieff does this too. ‘Will the right men come?’ asks one of the personages of Turgenieff’s Helen, and his friend, as the only reply, directs a questioning look into the distance. That is the Russian philosopher’s last word; Koheleth has not told us his. His literary executors, no doubt, have forced a last word upon him; but we have an equal right to imagine one for ourselves. M. Renan ‘likes to dream of a Paul become sceptical and disenchanted;’[^[365]] his Koheleth is an only less unworthy dream. M. Renan praises Koheleth for the moderation of his philosophising; he repeatedly admits that there was an element of truth in the Utopianism of the prophets; why not ‘dream’ that Koheleth felt, though he either ventured not or had no time left to express it, some degree of belief in the destiny of his country?

M. Renan, in fact, seems to me at once to admire Koheleth too much, and to justify his admiration on questionable grounds. It might have been hoped that the unlikeness of this book to the other books of the Canon would have been the occasion of a worthy and a satisfying estimate from this accomplished master. A critic of narrower experience represents Koheleth partly as a cynical Hebrew Pasquin, who satirises the hated foreigner, Herod the Great, and the minions of his court, partly as an earnest opponent of a dangerous and growing school of ascetics. I refer to this theory here, not to criticise it, but to call attention to its worthier conception of Koheleth’s character. The tendency of Ecclesiastes Dr. Grätz considers to be opposed to the moral and religious principles of Judaism and Christianity, but to the man as distinguished from his book he does full justice. It is a mistake when this writer’s theory is represented by Dean Plumptre as making Koheleth teach ‘a license like that of a St. Simonian rehabilitation of the flesh.’[^[366]] Koheleth’s choice of language is not indeed in good taste, but it was only a crude way of emphasising his opposition to a dangerous spirit of asceticism. Such at least is Dr. Grätz’s view. ‘Koheleth is not the slave of an egoïstic eudemonism, but merely seeks to counteract pietistic self-mortification.’[^[367]] Dr. Grätz thinks, too, and rightly, that he can detect an old-fashioned Judaism in the supposed sceptical philosopher: Koheleth controverts the new tenet of immortality, but not that of the resurrection. I am anticipating again, but do so in order to contrast the sympathetic treatment of the Breslau professor with the unsympathetic or at least unsuitable portraiture of Koheleth given by the Parisian critic.

Of all writers known to me, however, none is so sympathetic to Koheleth as Dr. Plumptre, in whose pleasing article in Smith’s Dictionary we have the germ of the most interesting commentary in the language. A still wider popularity was given to the Herder-Plumptre theory by Dr. Stanley, who eloquently describes Ecclesiastes as ‘an interchange of voices, higher and lower, within a single human soul.’ ‘It is like,’ he continues, ‘the perpetual strophe and antistrophe of Pascal’s Pensées. But it is more complicated, more entangled, than any of these, in proportion as the circumstances from which it grows are more perplexing, as the character which it represents is vaster, and grander, and more distracted.’[^[368]] In his later work, Dr. Plumptre aptly compares the ‘Two Voices’ of our own poet (strictly, he remarks, there are three voices in Ecclesiastes), in which, as in Koheleth, though more decidedly, the voice of faith at last prevails over that of pessimism.[^[369]] I fear, however, that Dr. Plumptre’s generous impulse carries him farther than sober criticism can justify. The aim of writing an ‘ideal biography’ closing with the ‘victory of faith’ seems to me to have robbed his pen of that point which, though sometimes dangerous, is yet indispensable to the critic. The theory of the ‘alternate voices,’ of which Dr. Plumptre is, not the first,[^[370]] but the most eloquent advocate, seems to me to be an offspring of the modern spirit. It is so very like their own case—the dual nature[^[371]] which a series of refined critics has attributed to Koheleth, that they involuntarily invest Koheleth with the peculiar qualities of modern seekers after truth. To them, in a different sense from M. Renan’s, Ecclesiastes is ‘un livre aimable,’ just as Marcus Aurelius and Omar Khayyâm are the favourite companions of those who prefer more consistent thinking.

Certainly the author of Ecclesiastes might well be satisfied with the interest so widely felt in his very touching confidences. It is the contents, of course, which attract so many of our contemporaries—not the form: only a student of Hebrew can appreciate the toilsome pleasure of solving philosophical enigmas. And yet M. Renan has made it possible even for an exigeant Parisian to enjoy, not indeed the process, but the results, of philological inquiry, in so far as they reveal the literary characteristics of this unique work; he has, indeed, in his function of artistic translator, done Koheleth even more than justice. In particular, his translations of the rhythmic passages of Koheleth which relieve the surrounding prose are real tours de force. These passages M. Renan, following M. Derenbourg,[^[372]] regards as quotations from lost poetical works, reminding us that such poetical quotations are common in Arabic literature. To represent in his translation the character of the Hebrew rhythm, which is ‘dancing, light, and pretentiously elegant,’ M. Renan adopts the metres of Old French poetry. ‘Il s’agissait de calquer en français des sentences conçues dans le ton dégagé, goguenard et pru-d’homme à la fois de Pibrac, de Marculfe ou de Chatonnet, de produire un saveur analogue à celle de nos quatrains de moralités ou de nos vieux proverbes en bouts-rimés.’ Of the poem on old age he says that it is ‘une sorte de joujou funèbre qu’on dirait ciselé par Banville ou par Théophile Gautier et que je trouve supérieur même aux quatrains de Khayyâm.’[^[373]] I should have thought the comparison very unjust to the Persian poet. To me, I confess, the prelude or overture (i. 4-8), though not in rhythmic Hebrew, is the gem of the book. Questionable though its tendency may seem, if we look at the context, its poetry is of elemental force, and appeals to the modern reader in some of his moods more than almost anything else in the Old Testament outside the Book of Job. I cannot help alluding to Carlyle’s fine application of its imagery in Sartor Resartus, ‘Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind: Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement.’ How differently Koheleth,—

One generation goeth, another cometh;

but the earth abideth for ever:

And the sun ariseth, and the sun goeth down,

and panteth unto his place where he ariseth:

It goeth to the south, and whirleth about unto the north,

the wind whirleth about continually;

and upon his circuits the wind returneth.

All streams run into the sea, and the sea is not full;

unto the place whither the streams go, thither they go again.

All things are full of weariness; no man can utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

Compare with this the words, so Greek in tone, of xi. 7, as well as the constantly recurring formula ‘under the sun’ (e.g. i. 3, iv. 3). We can see that even Koheleth was affected by nature, but without any lightening of his load of trial. The wide-open eye of day seemed to mock him by its unfeeling serenity. He lacked that susceptibility for the whispered lessons of nature which the poet of Job so pre-eminently possessed; he lacked too the great modern conception of progress, embodied in that fine passage from Carlyle. He was prosaic and unimaginative, and it is partly because there is so little poetry in Ecclesiastes that there is so little Christianity. But I am already passing to another order of considerations, without which indeed we cannot estimate this singular autobiography aright. We have next to consider Koheleth from a directly religious and moral point of view.

CHAPTER IX.
ECCLESIASTES FROM A MORAL AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW.

We have seen how large a Christian element penetrates and glorifies the bold questionings of the Book of Job. Whatever be our view on obscure problems of criticism, the character-drama which the book in its present form presents is one which it almost requires a Christian to appreciate adequately. It is different with the Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘He who will allow that book to speak for itself, and does not read other meanings into almost every verse, must feel at every step that he is breathing a different atmosphere from that of the teaching of the Gospels.’[^[374]] Still more is this the case if we claim the right of free criticism, and deny that the hints of a growing tendency to believe are due to the morbidly sceptical author of the book (if it may be called a book). Certainly the religious use of Koheleth is more directly affected by modern criticism and exegesis than that of any other Old Testament writing. The early theologians could dispense with criticism, because they so frequently allegorised or unconsciously gave a gentle twist to the literal meaning. But we, if for a religious purpose we use the book uncritically, must be well aware that we often misrepresent both the author of Koheleth himself and Christian faith. Let me only mention three texts in the use of which this misrepresentation very commonly takes place. The fixity of the spiritual state in which a man is at death may or may not be an essential Christian doctrine, but we have no right to quote either Koheleth’s despairing description of the inert life of the shades (ix. 10), or the proverbial saying on the unalterableness of the laws of nature (xi. 3), in support of this; nor is it well to adopt a phrase (descriptive of Sheól) from xii. 5, which favours the false idea expressed in the too common ‘Here lieth’ of the churchyard. Anticipations of really fundamental Christian doctrines are, I admit, rarely sought for in Ecclesiastes. It is well that this should be so. How completely the evangelical elements in Jewish religion had been obscured later on in this period, we have seen from the Wisdom of Sirach. It seemed in fact as if the only alternatives then for a thoughtful Jew were a more or less strict legal orthodoxy and a resigned acquiescence in things as they were, brightened only by gleams, eagerly hailed, of intellectual or sensuous pleasure. Sirach chose the former of these, Koheleth the latter. Koheleth’s was not in itself the better choice. But the worse alternative needed perhaps to be stated as forcibly as possible, that men might see the rock and avoid shipwreck. Ecclesiastes, like the first part of Goethe’s Faust, may, with the fullest justice, be called an apology for Christianity, not as containing anticipations of Christian truth—the error of Hengstenberg;[^[375]] but inasmuch as it shows that neither wisdom, nor any other human good or human pleasure, brings permanent satisfaction to man’s natural longings. It is at any rate a contribution towards the negative criticism with which such an apology must begin, just as the Book of Job is a contribution, or a series of contributions, towards a more perfect and evangelical theodicy.

There is at least one point, then, which the moral and religious critic of Ecclesiastes can adopt out of all the strangely distorted views of patristic writers, so ably summed up by Dr. Ginsburg in his Introduction, viz. that the gloomy sentence, Vanitas vanitatum, is perfectly accurate when applied to the life of Koheleth, but only to a life like his. Thomas à Kempis could prelude with two verses from Koheleth (i. 2, 8), but he could only prelude. A life of true service—one whose centre is outside self or family or even nation—is not vanity nor vexation of spirit: Koheleth might have added this as the burden of a second part of his book. But did he not actually append it as his epilogue? Did he not ‘faintly trust’ the hope of immortality (xii. 7)? Did he not work his way back to a living faith, like ‘Asaph’ in Ps. lxxiii.? There is no question that the book was admitted into the Canon on the assumption that he did. As a great Jewish preacher says, the book [in its present form] opens with Nothingness, but closes with the fear of God.[^[376]] It is parallel in this respect to many Jewish lives, like that of Heine, which may be described as the prodigal son’s quest of his long-lost father. Accepting this view, we may join with another Jewish writer in his admiration of the influences of Jewish theism, which were then at least so strong that a consistent Jewish sceptic was an impossibility. ‘It is this,’ he remarks, ‘that gives the peculiar charm to this little book.’[^[377]] It is impossible to give a conclusive refutation of this view, which I should like to believe true, but which seems to me to labour under exegetical difficulties. To me, Koheleth is not a theist in any vital sense in his philosophic meditations, and his so-called ‘last word’ seems forced upon him by later scribes, just as Sirach’s orthodoxy was at any rate heightened in colour by subsequent editors. To me, Derenbourg’s view is a dream, though an edifying one. It may be that the author did return to the simple faith of his childhood. He certainly never lost his theism, though pale and cheerless it was indeed, and utterly unable to stand against the assaults of doubt and despondency. It may be that history, neglected history, taught him at last to believe in the divine guidance of the fortunes of Israel. I would fain imagine this retracing of the weary pilgrim’s steps; but other and less pleasing dreams to a Christian are equally possible and I do not venture to accept the return of the prodigal as a well-authenticated fact.

We must remember too that the troubled wanderer had not really so many steps to retrace. Much that both Christians and Jews now regard as essential to faith was not, in the time of Koheleth, commonly so regarded. I am well aware of the great intuitions of some of the psalmists at certain sublime moments, and admit that they seem to us to lead naturally on to our own orthodoxy. But these intuitions could not and did not possess the force of dogmas. The great doctrines of the Resurrection and of Immortality had long to wait for a moderate degree of acceptance (they were not held, for instance, by Sirach), and longer still before they coalesced in a new and greater doctrine of the future life. Koheleth’s dissatisfaction with the doctrine of present retribution (the central point both of his heterodoxy and of Job’s) might have helped him to accept the former of these. His acquaintance with non-Jewish philosophical literature, if we may venture to assume this as a fact, might have led him, as it led the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, to embrace the hope of immortality. But though there probably is an allusion to this hope as well-founded in xii. 7b, we have seen reason to doubt whether the words came from Koheleth himself; at any rate, they are isolated, and many do not admit the allusion. Either of these doctrines would have saved Koheleth from despondency had he accepted it. From our present point of view, we must blame him for not accepting one refuge or the other, or even that simpler belief in the imperishableness of the Jewish race which Sirach had, and which has preserved so many Israelitish hearts in trials as severe as Koheleth’s. There must have been a strange weakness in his moral fibre; how else can we account either for his want of Jewish feeling or, I would now add, using the word in its looser sense, for his pessimism? As Huber has well observed,[^[378]] none of the ancient peoples was naturally less inclined to pessimism than the Jews, so that a work like Ecclesiastes is a portent in the Old Testament, and alien to the spirit of true Judaism. I cannot wonder that both Jews and Christians have now and again been repelled by this strange book[^[379]] and denied its title to canonicity, partly for its pessimism, partly for its supposed Epicureanism, or that the author of the Book of Wisdom before them should have given Koheleth the most scathing of condemnations by putting almost its very language into the mouth of the ungodly.[^[380]] The true student may no doubt be equally severe upon Koheleth for his despair of wisdom and depreciation of its delights (i. 17, 18, ii. 15, 16), which are hardly redeemed by the utilitarian sayings in vii. 11, 12.

I cannot justify Koheleth, but I can plead for a mitigation of these censures, and altogether defend the admission of the Book (not, of course, as Solomonic) into the sacred Canon. Whether Jewish or not, the pessimistic theory of life has a sound kernel. ‘Our sadness,’ as Thoreau says, ‘is not sad, but our cheap joys. Let us be sad about all we see and are, for so we demand and pray for better. It is the constant prayer [of the good] and whole Christian religion.’[^[381]] This too is the burden of E. von Hartmann’s criticism of a crudely optimistic Christianity; and need we reject the truth for the extravagances of the teacher? Next, as to the preference of sensuous enjoyment to philosophic pursuits in Koheleth. I would not seek to weaken passages like ii. 24, viii. 15, by putting them down to the irony of a sæva indignatio. But as for the depreciation of intellectual pleasure, may it not be excused by the author’s want of a sure prospect of the ‘age to come’ such as we find in those lines of Davenant,[^[382]]

Before by death you nearer knowledge gain

(For to increase your knowledge you must die),

Tell me if all that knowledge be not vain,

On which we proudly in this life rely.

And as to the commendations of sensuous pleasure, have they not a relative justification?[^[383]] The legalism of the ‘righteous overmuch’ threatened already perhaps to make life an intolerable burden. And though Koheleth erred in the form of his teaching, yet he did well to teach the ‘duty of delight’ (Ruskin) and to oppose an orthodoxy which sought, not merely to transform, but to kill nature. It is to his credit that he touches on the relations of the sexes with such studious reserve.[^[384]] As a rule, the enjoyments which he recommends are those of the table, which in Sirach’s time (Ecclus. xxxii. 3-5) and perhaps also in Koheleth’s included music and singing,—in short, festive but refined society. His praise of festive mirth is at any rate more excusable morally than Omar Khayyâm’s impassioned commendations of the wine-cup.[^[385]] As Jeremy Taylor says, ‘It was the best thing that was then commonly known that they should seize upon the present with a temperate use of permitted pleasures.’[^[386]] Lastly, the admission of the book into the Canon is (perhaps we may say) not less providential than that of the Song of Songs. The latter shows us human nature in simple and healthy relations of life; the former, a human nature in a morbid state and in depressed and artificial circumstances. How to return at least to inward simplicity and health, the latter part (not the Epilogue) of the Book of Job beautifully shows us.

Our great idealist poet Shelley, who so admired Job, disliked Ecclesiastes for the same reason as the ancient heretics already mentioned. One greater than he, our ‘sage and serious’ Milton, justifies the sacred Scripture for the variety of its contents on the same ground that he advocates ‘unlicensed printing.’ Both are ‘for the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth.’ We need not, then, he says, be surprised if the Bible ‘brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.’[^[387]] The Bible, according to Milton, is perfect not in spite but because of its variety; it is like the rugged ‘mountains of God,’ not like the symmetrical works of human art. But Milton has also reminded us that a fool may misuse even sacred Scripture.

CHAPTER X.
DATE AND PLACE OF COMPOSITION.

Jewish tradition, while admitting a Hezekian or post-Hezekian redaction of the book, assigns the original authorship of Ecclesiastes to Solomon. The Song of Songs it regards as the monument of this king’s early manhood, the Book of Proverbs of his middle age, and the semi-philosophical meditations before us as the work of his old age. The tradition was connected by the Aggada with the favourite legend[^[388]] of the discrowned Solomon, but is based upon the book itself, the passages due to the literary fiction of Solomon’s authorship (which Bickell indeed attributes to an interpolator) having been misunderstood. Would that the author of the Lectures on the Jewish Church had given the weight of his name to the true explanation of these passages! The reticence of the lines devoted in the second volume of the Lectures to Ecclesiastes has led some critics to imagine that according to Dean Stanley, this book, like much of Proverbs, might possibly be the work of the ‘wisest’ of Israel’s kings. Little had the author profited by Ewald if he really allowed such an absolute legend the smallest standing-ground among reasonable hypotheses! Whichever way we look, whether to the social picture, or to the language, or to the ideas of the book, its recent origin forces itself upon us. The social picture and the ideas need not detain us here. Either Solomon was transported in prophetic ecstasy to far distant times (the Targum on Koheleth frequently describes him as a prophet), or the writer is a child of the dawning modern age of Judaism. The former alternative is plainly impossible. Political servitude, and a generally depressed state of society (exceptional cases of prosperity notwithstanding), mark the book as the work of a dark post-Exile period. The absence of any national feeling equally distinguishes it from the monuments of the earlier humanistic movement (even from Job). The germs of philosophic thought, which cannot be explained away, supply, if this be possible, a still more convincing argument. We shall return to these later on: at present, let us confine ourselves to the linguistic evidence, which has been set forth with such accuracy and completeness by Delitzsch[^[389]] and after him by Dr. Wright of Dublin.

The Hebrew language has no history if Ecclesiastes belongs to the classical period; indeed, the Hebrew name of the book may seem of itself to stamp it as of post-Exile origin (see note on Koheleth in Appendix). The student would do well, however, to examine all the peculiar words or forms in Delitzsch’s glossary, and to classify them for himself, under two principal heads, (1) those which occur elsewhere but in distinctively late-Hebrew books, (2) those only found in Koheleth, with four subdivisions, viz., (a) words which can be explained from Biblical Hebrew usage, (b) those which belong to the vocabulary of the Mishna, (c) those of Aramaic origin and affinities, (d) those borrowed from non-Semitic languages. The student should also notice the striking grammatical peculiarities of Koheleth, especially the fact that the ordinary historic tense (the imperfect with Waw consecutive) is hardly ever used. The scholar’s instinct but three times reveals itself in the adoption of this old literary idiom (i. 17, iv. 1, 7), but elsewhere the usage of the Mishna is already law. Almost equally important is the fact that the Hebrew mood-distinctions are so little used in Koheleth (on which point see Delitzsch’s introduction); indeed, we may say upon the whole that that which gives a characteristic flavour to the old Hebrew style is ‘ready to vanish away.’ The Mishnic peculiarities of the book are especially interesting, as confirming our view of its origin. The author is very different in his opinions from the doctors of the Mishna, but he resembles them in his questioning and reflective spirit, and helped to form the linguistic instrument which they required. Less important, but not to be ignored, are the Aramaic elements. Even Dr. Adam Clarke, untrained scholar as he was, pronounced that the attempts which had as yet been made to overthrow the evidence, were ‘often trifling and generally ineffectual.’[^[390]] The Aramaisms of Koheleth are irreconcileable with a pre-Exile date; they can only be paralleled and explained from the Aramaic portions of the books of Ezra and Daniel. That they are comparatively few, only proves that the force of the Aramaising movement has abated, and that the Hebrew language, at any rate in the hands of some of its chief cultivators, is passing into a new phase (the Mishnic). The judgment of Ewald, as already expressed in 1837, appears to me on the whole satisfactory: ‘One might easily imagine Koheleth to be the very latest book in the Old Testament. A premature conclusion, since Aramaic influence extended very gradually and secretly, so that one writer might easily be more Aramaic in the colouring of his style than another. But though not [even if not] the latest, it cannot have been written till long after Aramaic had begun powerfully to influence Hebrew, and therefore not before the last century of the Persian rule.’[^[391]]

For the sake of my argument, it is hardly necessary to refer to the words of non-Semitic origin, which are (as most critics rightly hold) but two in number; 1 פַּרְדֵּם (ii. 5, plur.) undoubtedly a Hebraised Persian word, on which I lay no stress here, because it occurs, not only in Neh. ii. 8, but also in Cant. iv. 13, where many critics deny that it militates against a pre-Exile date, and 2 פִתְגָם (viii. 11), which occurs in the Aramaic parts of Ezra and Daniel, and also in Esth. i. 20, and while used in the Targums and in Syriac, did not become naturalised in Talmudic. This word, too, is commonly regarded as Hebraised Persian, but, following Zirkel, the eminent Jewish scholar Heinrich Grätz declares it to be the Hebraised form of a Greek word. Is this possible or probable? Are there any genuine Græcisms of language, and consequently also of thought, in the Book of Koheleth? An important question, to which we will return.

The date suggested by Ewald, and accepted by Knobel, Herzfeld, Vaihinger, Delitzsch, and Ginsburg, suits the political circumstances implied in Koheleth. The Jews had long since lost the feelings of trust and gratitude with which in ‘better days’ (vii. 10) they regarded the court of Persia; the desecration of the temple by Bagoses or Bagoes (Jos. Ant. xi. 7) is but one of the calamities which betel Judæa in the last century of the Persian rule. It is a conjecture of Delitzsch that iv. 3 contains a reminiscence of Artaxerxes II. Mnemon (died about 360), who was ninety-four years old, and according to Justin (x. 1), had 115 sons, and of his murdered successor Artaxerxes III. Ochus. Probably, if we knew more of this period, we should be able to produce other plausible illustrations. Certainly the state of society suits the date proposed. As Delitzsch remarks, ‘The unrighteous judgment, iii. 16; the despotic depression, iv. 1, viii. 9, v. 8; the riotous court-life, x. 16-19; the raising of mean men to the highest dignities, x. 5-7; the inexorable severity of the law of military service, viii. 8; the prudence required by the organised system of espionage,—all these things were characteristic of this period.’ Probably an advocate of a different theory would interpret these passages otherwise; but as yet no conclusive argument has been offered for supposing allusions to circumstances of the Greek period.

Let me frankly admit, in conclusion, that the evidence of the Hebrew favours a later date than that proposed by Ewald—favours, but does not actually require it. It seems, however, that if the book be of the Greek period, we have a right to expect some definite traces of Greek influence. This will supply the subject of the next chapter.

At any rate, the author addresses himself to Palestinian readers. He lives, not (I should suppose) in the country, as Ewald thought, but near the temple, or at least has opportunities of frequenting it (v. 1,[^[392]] viii. 10). Some recent scholars place him in Alexandria; but the reference to the corn trade in xi. 1 does not prove this to be correct; indeed, the very same section contains a reference to rain (so xii. 2). Sharpe[^[393]] is alone in preferring Antioch, the capital of the Greek kingdom of Syria. Kleinert’s remark that ‘king in Jerusalem’ (i. 12) implies a foreign abode is met by the remark that Jerusalem was in the writer’s time no longer a royal city. The author may have travelled, and like Sirach have had personal acquaintance with the dangers of court-life (either at Susa or at Alexandria). The references to the king do not perhaps compel this supposition; ‘are not my princes altogether kings?’ (Isa. x. 8) could be said of Persian satraps.

CHAPTER XI.
DOES KOHELETH CONTAIN GREEK WORDS OR IDEAS?

We now begin the consideration of the question, Are there any well-ascertained Græcisms in the language and in the thought of this obviously exceptional book? That there are many Greek loan-words in Targumic and Talmudic, is undeniable, though Levy in his lexicon has no doubt exaggerated their number. G. Zirkel, a Roman Catholic scholar, was the first who answered in the affirmative, confining himself to the linguistic side of the argument. His principal work,[^[394]] Untersuchungen über den Prediger (Würzburg, 1792), is not in the Bodleian Library, but Eichhorn’s review in his Allgemeine Bibliothek, vol. iv. (1792), contains a summary of Zirkel’s evidence from which I select the following.

(a) יָפֶה, in sense of καλός ‘becoming’ (iii. 11, v. 17). This is one of the Græcisms which commend themselves the most to Grätz and Kleinert. The former points especially to v. 17, where he takes טוב אשר יפה together as representing καλὸν κἀγαθόν (comp. Plumptre on v. 18). The construction, however, is mistaken (see Delitzsch). The second אשר indicates that יפה is a synonym of וטב ‘excellent.’ The notion of the beautiful can be developed in various ways. The sense ‘becoming,’ characteristic of later Hebrew, is more distinctly required in iii. 11.

(b) ‘In the clause לָמָּה חָכַמְתִּי אֲנִי אָז יֹתֵר (ii. 15) the words אָז יֹתֵר must signify ἔτι μᾶλλον: quid mihi prodest majorem adhuc sapientiæ operam dare?’ But the demonstrative particle אז means, not ἔτι, but ‘in these circumstances’ (Jer. xxii. 15). Its position and connection with יתר are for emphasis. The fact of experience mentioned makes any special care for wisdom unreasonable.

(c) ‘עֳשׂׂות טוֹב (iii. 12) is a literal translation of εὖ πράττειν.’ This is accepted by Kleinert and also by Tyler. The very next verse seems to explain this phrase by ראה טוב (comp. v. 17); certainly the ethical meaning is against the analogy of ii. 24, iii. 22, and similar passages. But should we not, with Grätz and Nowack, correct רְאוֹת טוב in iii. 12?

(d) ‘כִּי הָאֱלֹהִים וגו (v. 19) must mean, God gives him joy of heart. ענה “respondere” seems to have borrowed the meaning “remunerari” from ἀμείβεσθαι, which has both senses. The ancient writer of the book thought thus in Greek, ὅτι θεὸς ἀμείβεται (αὐτὸν) εὐφροσύνῃ τῆς καρδίας.’ Zirkel forgets Ps. lxv. 6. See however Delitzsch.

(e) הֲלָךּ־נֶפֶשׁ (vi. 9) = ὁρμὴ τῆς ψυχῆς [M. Aurelius iii. 15]. But the phrase is idiomatic Hebrew for ‘roving of the desire.’

(f) יֵצֵא אֶת־כֻּלָּם (vii. 18). ‘The Hebrew writer found no other equivalent for μέσην βαδίζειν.’ But unless he borrowed the idea (that of cultivating the mean in moral practice), why should he have tried to express the technical term?

(g) כִּי־זֶה כָּל־הָאָדָם (xii. 13). ‘A pure Græcism, τοῦτο παντὸς ἀνθρὼπου.’ But how otherwise could the idea of the universal obligation to fear God have been expressed? Comp. the opening words of iii. 19.

To these may be added (h) ביום טובה (vii. 14) = εὐημερία (see however xii. 1); (i) the ‘technical term’ טור (i. 13, ii. 3, vii. 25) = σκέπτεσθαι [but good Hebrew for ‘to explore’]; (k) פתגם (viii. 11) = φθέγμα; (l) פרדם (ii. 15) = παράδεισος (see above).

No one in our day would dream of accepting these ‘Græcisms’ in a mass.

Zirkel tried to prove too much, as Grätz himself truly observes. Any peculiar word or construction he set down as un-Hebraic and hurried to explain it by some Greek parallel, ignoring the capacity of development inherent in the Hebrew language. His attempt failed in his own generation. Three recent scholars however (Grätz, Kleinert, and Tyler), have been more or less captivated by his idea, and have proposed some new and some old ‘Græcisms’ for the acceptance of scholars. To me it seems that, their three or four very disputable words and phrases are not enough. If the author of Koheleth really thought half in Greek, the Greek colouring of the language would surely not have been confined to such a few expressions. If מה־שהיה (vii. 24) were really derived from τὸ τί ἐστιν, as Kleinert supposes, should we not meet with it oftener? But the phrase most naturally means, not ‘the essence of things,’ but ‘that which hath come into existence;’ phenomena are not easily understood in their ultimate causes, is the simple meaning of the sentence. I have said nothing as yet of the supposed Græcism in the epilogue—the last place where we should have expected one (considering ver. 12). But Mr. Tyler’s proposal to explain הַכֹּל (xii, 13) by τὸ καθόλου or τὸ ὅλον (a formula introducing a general conclusion), falls to the ground, when the true explanation of the passage has been stated (see p. [232]).

There are therefore no Græcisms in the language of the book. Of course ideas may have been derived from a Greek source notwithstanding. The book, as we have seen already, is conspicuous by its want of a native Jewish background, nor does it show any affinity to Babylonian or Persian theology. It obviously stands at the close of the great Jewish humanistic movement, and gives an entirely new colour to the traditional humanism by its sceptical tone and its commendations of sensuous pleasure. It is not surprising that St. Jerome should remark on ix. 7-9, that the author appears to be reproducing the low ideas of some Greek philosophers, though, as this Father supposes, only to refute them.

‘Et hæc inquit, aliquis loquatur Epicurus, et Aristippus et Cyrenaici et cæteræ pecudes Philosophorum. Ego autem, mecum diligenter retractans, invenio’[^[395]] &c.

Few besides Prof. Salmon would accept the view that Eccles. ix. 7-9 and similar passages are the utterances of an infidel objector (see Bishop Ellicott’s Commentary); but it is perfectly possible to hold that there are distinctively Epicurean doctrines in the Koheleth. The later history of Jewish thought may well seem to render this opinion probable. How dangerously fascinating Epicureanism must have been when the word ‘Epicuros’ became a synonym in Rabbinic Hebrew for infidel or even atheist.[^[396]] It is indeed no mere fancy that just as Pharisaism had affinities with Stoicism, so Sadducæism had with Epicureanism. As Harnack well says, ‘No intellectual movement could withdraw itself from the influences which proceeded from the victory of the Greeks over the Eastern world.’[^[397]] Mr. Tyler,[^[398]] however, and his ally Dean Plumptre, have scarcely made the best of their case, the Epicurean affinities which they discover in Koheleth being by no means striking. Much use is made of the De Rerum Naturâ of Lucretius—a somewhat late authority! But if points of contact with Lucretius are to be hunted for, ought we not also to mention the discrepancies between the ‘wise man’ and the poet? If Lucr. i. 113-116 may be used to illustrate Eccles. iii. 21, must we not equally emphasise the difference between the festive mirth recommended by Koheleth (ix. 7, 8 &c.) and the simple pleasures so beautifully sung by Lucretius (ii. 20-33), and which remind us rather of the charming naturalness of the Hebrew Song of Songs?[^[399]] The number of vague analogies between Koheleth and Epicureanism might perhaps have been even increased, but I can find no passage in the former which distinctly expresses any scholastic doctrine of Epicureanism. For instance the doctrine of Atomism assumed for illustration by Dean Plumptre,[^[400]] cannot be found there by even the keenest exegesis; the plurality of worlds is not even distantly alluded to, and the denial of the spirit, if implied in iii, 21 (see p. [212]), is only implied in the primitive Hebrew sense, familiar to us from Job and the Psalter. The recommendation of ἀταραξία (to use the Epicurean term), coupled with sensuous pleasure (v. 18-20), requires no philosophic basis, and is simply the expression of a pococurante mood, only too natural in one debarred from a career of fruitful activity. Lastly, there is nothing in the phraseology either of the Hebrew or of the Septuagint to suggest an acquaintance with Epicureanism.

A stronger case can be made for the influence of Stoicism. The undoubted Oriental affinities of this system and its moral and theological spirit would, as Mr. Tyler observes, naturally commend it to a Jewish writer. We know that, at a somewhat later day, Stoicism exercised a strong fascination on some of the noblest Jewish minds. Philo,[^[401]] the Book of Wisdom, and the so-called Fourth Book of Maccabees, have undeniable allusions to it; and more or less probable vestiges of Stoicism have been found in the oldest Jewish Sibyl[^[402]] (about B.C. 140) and in the Targum of Onkelos.[^[403]] But how does the case stand with Koheleth? First of all, are there any traces of Stoic terminology? That terminology varied no doubt within certain limits, and could not be accurately reproduced in Hebrew. Still even under the contorted forms of expression to which a Hebrew-writing Stoic or semi-Stoic might be driven we could hardly fail to recognise the familiar Stoic expressions, εἱμαρμένη, πρόνοια, φαντασία, φύσις, φρόνησις, ἀρετή. The Septuagint version ought to help us here. But among the twenty words almost or entirely peculiar to the Greek of Ecclesiastes, the only two technical philosophic terms are σοφία and γνῶσις.

Next, can we detect references to distinctive Stoic doctrines? Mr. Tyler lays great stress in his reply on the Catalogue of Times and Seasons (iii. 1-8), which he regards as an expansion of the Stoic ὁμολογουμένως ζῆν But the idea that there is an appointed order of things, and that every action has its place in it, is much more a corollary of the doctrine of Destiny than of the doctrine of Duty. The essence of the latter doctrine is that men were meant to conform and ought to conform to the Universal Order, acquiescing in that which is inevitable, shaping in the best way that which is possible to be moulded. Upon this the practical ethics of Stoicism depend. But this is the very point which is absent in Ecclesiastes. The Catalogue of Times and Seasons ends not with the Stoic exhortation ἐκπληροῦ τὴν χώραν, ‘Fulfil thy appointed part,’ but with the despondent reflection of the Fatalist, ‘What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he toileth?’ (iii. 9.) A second argument is that the idea ‘There is no new thing under the sun’ (i. 9) is a phase of the Stoic doctrine of cyclical revolutions. But all that which gave form and colour to the Stoic doctrine is entirely absent—especially, as Mr. Tyler himself admits, the idea of ἐκπύρωσις. The idea, as it is found in Ecclesiastes, has nothing Stoic or even philosophical about it. It is simply an old man’s observation that human actions, like natural phenomena, tend to repeat themselves in successive generations.[^[404]]

That there are analogies between Stoicism and the ideas of Koheleth need not be denied; Dr. Kalisch has collected some of them in his very interesting philosophico-religious dialogue.[^[405]] Prominent among these is the peculiar use of the terms ‘madness’ and ‘folly.’ ‘From the followers of Zeno,’ remarks Dean Plumptre,[^[406]] ‘he learned also to look upon virtue and vice in their intellectual aspects. The common weaknesses and follies of mankind were to him, as to them, only so many different forms and degrees of absolute insanity (i. 17, ii. 12, vii. 25, ix. 3).’ But this division of mankind into wise men and fools is common to the Stoa with the ancient Hebrew sages who ‘sat in the gate.’ When the great populariser of Stoicism says, ‘Sapientia perfectum bonum est mentis humanæ,’[^[407]] he almost translates more than one of the proverbs which we have studied already. Another point of contact with Stoicism is undoubtedly the Determinism of the book, which, as Prof. Kleinert observes, leaves no room for freedom of the will, and fuses the conceptions of εἱμαρμένη and πρόνοια (see especially chap. iii.). But such Determinism need not have been learned in the school of Zeno. It is genuinely Semitic (did not Zeno come from the Semitic Citium?) What is the religion of Islam but a grandiose system of Determinism? Indeed, where is virtual Determinism more forcibly expressed than in the Old Testament itself (e.g., Isa. lxiii. 17)?

Those who adopt the view which I am controverting are apt to appeal to somewhat late philosophic authorities. I cannot here discuss the parallelisms which have been found in the Meditations or Self-communings (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν) of the great Stoic emperor. Some, for instance, consider the ῥύσεις καὶ ἀλλοιώσεις which ‘renew the world continually’ (M. A. vi. 15) and the περιοδικὴ παλιγγενεσία τῶν ὅλων (M. A. xi. 1) to be alluded to in Eccles. i. 5-9. More genuine are some at least of the other parallelisms, e.g. Eccles. i. 9, M. A. vi. 37, vii. 1, x. 27, xii. 26; Eccles. ii. 25, M. A. ii. 3 (ad init.); Eccles. iii. 11, M. A. iv. 23 (ad init.); Eccles. vi. 9, M. A. iv. 26; Eccles, xi. 5, M. A. x. 26. I admit that there is a certain vague affinity between the two thinkers; both are earnest, both despair of reforming society, both have left but a fragmentary record of their meditations. But the ‘humanest of the Roman race’[^[408]] stands out, upon the whole, far above the less cultured and more severely tried Israelite. Alike in intellectual powers and in moral elevation the soul of the Roman is of a truly imperial order. He is not, like Koheleth, a ‘malist’ (see pp. [201]-202); he boldly denies evil, and his strong faith in Providence cannot be disturbed by apparent irregularities in the order of things. It is true that this does but make the sadness of his golden and almost Christian book the more depressing. But the book is ‘golden.’[^[409]] Koheleth and M. Aurelius alike call forth our pity and admiration, but in what different proportions!

If, then, there are points of agreement between Koheleth and M. Aurelius, there must also of necessity be points of disagreement. Every page of their writings would, I think, supply them. Suffice it to put side by side the saying of Koheleth, ‘God is in heaven, and thou upon earth’ (v. 2), and M. Aurelius’ invocation of the world as the ‘city of God’ (iv. 23). The comparison suggests one of the greatest discrepancies between Koheleth and the Stoics—the doctrine of God. Such faith as the former still retains is faith in a transcendent and not an immanent Deity. The germs of a doctrine of Immanence which the older Wisdom-literature contains (Kleinert quotes Ps. civ. 30, Job xxvi. 13), have found no lodgment in the mind of our author, who is more affected by the legal and extreme supernaturalistic[^[410]] point of view than he is perhaps aware.

Mr. Tyler’s introduction to his Ecclesiastes is a work of great acuteness and originality, and seeks to provide against all reasonable objections; I cannot do justice to it here. One part of his theory, however, is too remarkable to be passed over (see above, pp. [240], [241]). He supposes that Stoic and Epicurean doctrines were deliberately set over against each other by the wise man who wrote our book, in order by the clash of opposites to deter the reader from dangerous and unsatisfying investigations. The goal of the author’s philosophising thus becomes the negation of all philosophy, and this ‘sacrificio dell’ intelletto’ he insinuatingly commends by the subtlest use of artifice. Such a theory may have occurred to one or another early writer (see Ginsburg), but seems out of harmony with the character of the author as revealed in his book. He is not such a weak-kneed wrestler for truth. You may fancy him sometimes a Stoic, sometimes an Epicurean; but he always speaks like a man in earnest, however his opinions may change through the fluctuations of his moods. Mr. Tyler’s theory confounds Koheleth’s point of view with that of a far inferior thinker, the author of Ecclesiasticus (see above, p. [199]).

I cannot, therefore, be persuaded to explain this enigmatical book by a supposed contact with Greek philosophy such as we do really find in the Book of Wisdom. I have no prejudice against the supposition in itself. It would help me to understand the Hellenising movement at a later day if Stoic and (still more) Epicurean ideas had already filtered into the minds of the Jewish aristocracy. The denunciations in the Book of Enoch (xciv. 5, xcviii. 15, civ. 10) not impossibly refer to a heretical philosophical literature (see p. [233]); the only question is, To a native or to a half foreign literature? I see no sufficient reason at present for adopting the latter alternative. Koheleth is really a native Hebrew philosopher, the first Jew who, however awkwardly and ineffectually, ‘gave his mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven’ (i. 13). Very touching in this light are the memoranda which he has left us. They are incomplete enough; Koheleth is but the forerunner of more systematic philosophisers. His ideas are nothing less than scholastic; how could we expect anything different, his first object being in all probability to soothe the pain of an inward struggle by giving it literary expression? If, however, I was compelled to suggest a secondary reference to any foreign system, I could most easily suppose one to the pessimistic teaching of Hegesias Peisithanatos, who, after Ptolemy Soter and Philadelphus had made Alexandria the seat of the world’s commerce and the centre of Greek literature and culture, was seized with the thought of the vanity of all things, of the preponderance of evil, and of the impossibility of happiness.[^[411]] Koheleth’s teaching would be a safeguard to any Jew who might be tempted by this too popular philosopher. He admits ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, but insists that, granting all drawbacks, ‘the light is sweet’ (xi. 7), the living are better off than the dead (ix. 4-6), and sensuous pleasure, used in moderation, is at least a relative good (ii. 24); also that it is futile to inquire ‘why the former days (of the earlier Ptolemies?) were better than these’ (vii. 10), and, if a later view of his meaning may be trusted, he sought to displace the many dangerous books which were current by words which were at once pleasantly written and objectively true (xii. 10, 12).

Koheleth is a native Hebrew philosopher. The philosophy of an eastern sage is not to be tied up in the rigid formulæ of the West. Easterns may indeed take kindly to Western doctrines; but where they think independently, they eschew system. Koheleth’s seeming Stoicism is, as we have seen, of primitive Hebrew affinities; his seeming Epicureanism, if it be not sufficiently explained as a mental reaction against the gloom of the times, may perhaps be connected more or less closely, not with the schools of Greek philosophers, but with the banquet-halls of Egypt. The Hebrew writer’s invitations to enjoy life remind us of the call to ‘drink and be happy,’ which accompanied the grim symbolic ‘coffin,’ or mummy, at Egyptian feasts (probably they were funeral-feasts), according to Herodotus (ii. 78), and of the festal dirges translated by Goodwin and Stern.[^[412]] A stanza in one of the latter may be given here. It is from the song supposed to be sung by the harper at an anniversary funeral feast in honour of Neferhotep, a royal scribe, and still to be seen cut in the stone at Abd-el-Gurna, in the Theban necropolis. As Ebers has remarked,[^[413]] the song ‘shows how a certain fresh delight in life mingled with the feelings about death that were prevalent among the ancient Egyptians, who celebrated their festivals more boisterously than most other peoples.’ By a poetic fiction, the dead man is supposed to be present, and to listen to the song.

Make a good day, O holy father!

Let odours and oils stand before thy nostril.

Wreaths of lotus are on the arms and the bosom of thy sister,

Dwelling in thy heart, sitting beside thee.

Let song and music be before thy face,

And leave behind thee all evil cares!

Mind thee of joy, till cometh the day of pilgrimage,

When we draw near the land which loveth silence.

We have seen that the Wisdom of Sirach betrays a taste for Egyptian festivity (p. [191]). May we not suppose that Koheleth too had travelled to Alexandria? This view commends itself to Kleinert, and I have no objection to it with due limitations. Koheleth may have envied and sought to copy the light-hearted gaiety of the valley of the Nile. But we ought not to conceal the fact that the lines quoted above are followed by others which have no parallel in Koheleth.

Good for thee then will have been (an honest life),

Therefore be just and hate transgressions,

For he who loveth justice (will be blest).

(They in the shades) are sitting on the bank of the river,

Thy soul is among them, drinking its sacred water.

... (woe to the bad one!)

He shall sit miserable in the heat of infernal fires.

There is a wide difference between a people who believed in a happy Amenti where Osiris himself dwelt and the Jew who doubted much but believed firmly in Sheól. I admit then the probability that the latter had travelled, and was not unaffected by the brightness of Egyptian society, but I see no reason to suppose that he knew and was influenced by the expressions of Egyptian songs. The resemblances adduced are to me as fortuitous as those between the love-poems of the Nile valley and the Hebrew Song of Songs, or (we may add) as that striking one between Eccles. i. 4 and some of the opening lines of the ‘Song of the Harper,’—

Men pass away since the time of Ra [the sun of day]

And the youths come in their stead.

Like as Ra reappears every morning,

And Tum [the sun of night] sets in the horizon,

Men are begetting,

And women are conceiving.[^[414]]

I make no excuse for the length of this inquiry. If we could trace Greek influences, linguistic or philosophical, in the strange book before us, its date would be decided. Taking into account the circumstances of the writer, we might assign it to the reign of Ptolemy IV. Philopator, when the Egyptian rule began to be calamitous for Judæa. Kleinert would place it rather in one of the early, fortunate reigns (Herzog-Plitt, xii. 173); but he forms perhaps too favourable a view of the social picture in Koheleth. Hitzig, who gives a very restricted range to Greek philosophical influence upon our book, and accepts none of Zirkel’s Græcisms, fixes the date in the first year of Ptolemy V. Epiphanes. Geiger, Nöldeke, Kuenen, Tyler, and Plumptre, on various grounds, think this the most probable period,[^[415]] and the view is endorsed by Zeller, the historian of Greek philosophy.

A Maccabæan and still more a Herodian date seem to me absolutely excluded, though Zirkel and Renan have advocated the one, and Heinrich Grätz (see p. [240]) the other. The book is certainly pre-Maccabæan, not merely because of a Talmudic anecdote,[^[416]] but because of its want of religious fervour (comp. Esther) and its cosmopolitanism. The germs of the Jewish parties may be there, but only the germs. To me Hitzig’s is the latest possible date; but if we must admit a vague and indirect Greek influence, should we not place the book a little earlier as suggested above? But I do not see that we must admit even a vague Greek influence. The inquiring spirit was present in the class of ‘wise men’ even before the Exile, and the circumstances of the later Jews were, from the Exile onwards, well fitted to exercise and develope it. Hellenic teaching was in no way necessary to an ardent but unsystematic thinker like Koheleth. The date proposed by Ewald and Delitzsch is on this and other grounds probable, and on linguistic grounds not impossible.

There are two recent treatises on the philosophical affinities of Koheleth which may be mentioned here, though only the first is known to me. Paul Kleinert, who has long made a special study of Koheleth (see his Prediger Salomo, 1864), contributed to the Theolog. Studien und Kritiken, 1883, p. 761, &c., a striking paper called ‘Sind im Buche Koheleth ausserhebräische Einflüsse anzuerkennen,’ and August Palm in 1885 published a programme entitled ‘Qohelet und die nacharistotelische Philosophie’ (Mannheim).

CHAPTER XII.
TEXTUAL PROBLEMS OF KOHELETH.

I.

According to Delitzsch, the Song of Solomon is the most difficult book in the Old Testament. If so, Ecclesiastes comes next in order. None of the attempts to discover a logical plan having been successful, Gustav Bickell’s new hypothesis (1884) deserves a respectful hearing, since it endeavours to solve the enigma in a most original way, connecting it with the problem of the text. This critic starts from the observation that continuous passages of some extent are suddenly closed by an abrupt transition, and that such passages are pretty equal in length. His explanation of this is a purely mechanical one. The troubles of the commentators have arisen principally from an accident which happened to a standard MS., called by Bickell, ‘die Unfallshandschrift’ (the Accident-manuscript). This MS. seems to have consisted of 21 or 22 leaves, with an average of 518 to 535 letters to a leaf. To speak more precisely, it was composed of fasciculi of four double leaves each; the book began on the sixth leaf of the first fasciculus, and ended on the second, or more probably on the third leaf of the fourth. Through a loosening of the two middle fasciculi, a dislocation took place, and an almost entirely new order arose, though with one exception the leaves which had been placed in pairs remained together. But the story of the fortunes of Ecclesiastes has not yet been told. Three hands, besides the original writer, have worked on this ill-fated book. One of these is considered to have been a downright ‘enemy’ who tampered with the text before the dislocation had taken place. From him proceed ‘the protests against Koheleth’s principles on the obedience due to the king in viii. 1, 5a as well as the offensive expressions in xi. 5, xii. 4, 5, by which he sought to make the book ridiculous and contemptible.’ Subsequently to him, and after the leaves had been thrown into confusion, another writer made ‘well-meaning additions,’ and so brought the book into nearly its present form; among these additions was the Epilogue. His aim was ‘to brighten Koheleth’s gloomy view of the world, partly by emphasising the doctrine of a present retribution, but still more by pointing to a future judgment in which inequalities should be rectified.’ The third hand is that of the so-called pseudo-Solomonic interpolator. He must have gone to work after the Epilogist, for the latter simply knows Koheleth as a wise man skilled in proverbial composition. Bickell also claims to make transpositions on a small scale, and offers many emendations sometimes based on the Septuagint. ‘Habent sua fata libelli.’

I have said that Bickell’s explanation of the want of order in Ecclesiastes is a purely mechanical one. It is not on that account to be rejected. A German reviewer[^[417]] has mentioned a case within his own experience in which the double leaves of one of the fasciculi of an Oriental MS. had been disarranged in the binding, a circumstance which had led to various additions and alterations. It may indeed be urged as an objection that the Septuagint text differs in no very material respect from the Massoretic. But a work like Ecclesiastes had at first in all probability but a very slight circulation, so that an accident to a single MS. would naturally involve unusually serious consequences. Still from the possibility to the actuality of the ‘accident’ is a long step. Apart from other difficulties in the theory, the number and arbitrariness of the transpositions, additions, and alterations are reason enough to make one hesitate to accept it; and when we pass from the very plausible arrangement of the contents (Bickell, pp. 53, 54) to the translation of the text, it is often only possible to make them tally by a violent and imaginative exegesis.

Among the transpositions (to which I have no theoretic objection[^[418]]) are the following:

v. 9-16 placed after ii. 11,

viii. 9-14 “ ” iii. 8,

vi. 8-12 “ ” x. 1,

iv. 9-16 “ ” vii. 20,

x. 16-xi. 6 “ ” v. 8,

xi. 6 “ ” xi. 3.

Bickell’s theory that the passages which assert or suggest Solomonic authorship in i. 1, 12, 16, ii. 7, 8, 9, [12], are due to an interpolator,[^[419]] is plausible; it throws a new light on the statement of the Epilogue (xii. 9) that ‘Koheleth was a wise man,’ and a motive for the interpolation can be readily imagined—the desire to obtain ecclesiastical sanction for the book. It is, however, incapable of proof.

II.

There are in fact few books on Ecclesiastes so stimulating as Bickell’s, though it needs to be read with discrimination[^[420]] (comp. p. [241]). Putting aside the author’s peculiar theory, it must be owned that he has enabled us to realise the inherent difficulties of the text as it stands, and contributed some very happy corrections. All critics will admit the need of such emendations. The text of Koheleth is even more faulty than that of Job, Psalms, or Proverbs. We cannot wonder at this. Meditations often so fragmentary on such a difficult subject were foredoomed to suffer greatly at the hands of copyists. A minute study of the various readings and of the corrections which have been proposed would lead us too far, interesting as it would be (compare Renan’s remarks, L’Ecclésiaste, p. 53). Cappellus (Louis Cappel) has done most for the text among the earlier critics (see his Critica Sacra, Par. 1650); Grätz has also made useful suggestions based upon the versions. Renan, and (as we have seen) Bickell, have corrected the text on a larger scale; occasional emendations of great value are due to Hitzig, Delitzsch, Klostermann, and Krochmal. The notes in the expected new edition of Eyre and Spottiswoode’s Variorum Bible will indicate the most important various readings and corrections; to these I would refer the reader. The corrections of Bickell are those least known to most students. In considering them, we must distinguish between those which arise out of his peculiar critical theory and those which are simply the outcome of his singular and brilliant insight. Of the latter, I will here only mention two. One occurs in iii. 11, where for אֶת־הָעֹלָם (or אֶת־הָעוֹלָם the Oriental or Babylonian reading), he gives (see below, p. [299]) לְבַקֵּשׁ אֶת־כָּל־הֶעָלֻם, remarking that כָּל־ survived in the text translated in the Septuagint. The fact is, however, that though Cod. Vat. does read σύμπαντα τὸν αἰῶνα, Cod. Alex., Cod. Sin., and the Complutensian ed. all read σὺν τὸν αἰῶνα, and as the verse begins Τὰ σύμπαντα (v. l. Σύμπαντα) it is probable enough that σύμπαντα was written the second time in Cod. Vat. by mistake. At any rate, copyists both of the Greek and of the Hebrew were sometimes inclined to insert or omit ‘all’ at haphazard; thus, in iv. 2, Cod. Vat. inserts ‘all,’ which is omitted in Cod. Alex. and Cod. Sin.

Another, adopted above at p. [220], is in viii. 10. Read וְּבָמקוֹם קָדוֹשׁ ויהַלְּכוּ (or נִקְבָּדִים) כְּבֵדִים. ובאו is a fragment of the correct reading ובמקום which stood side by side with the alternative reading וממקום.

On the question of interpolations, enough has been said already. Probably Cornill’s book on Ezekiel will dispose many critics to look more favourably on attempts to purify Biblical texts from glosses and other interpolations. Grätz’s conclusion certainly cannot be maintained, ‘Sämmtliche Sentenzen gehören streng zu ihrer nachbarlichen Gedankengruppe, führen den Gedanken weiter oder spitzen ihn zu.’

I have still to speak of the Septuagint version. Its importance for textual criticism is great; indeed, we may say with Klostermann that the Massoretic text and this translation are virtually two copies of one and the same archetype. It is distinguished from the Septuagint versions of the Books of Job, Proverbs, and even Psalms by its fidelity. Those versions approximate more or less closely to the elegant manner of Symmachus, but the Greek style of the Septuagint Koheleth is most peculiar, admitting such words as ἀντίῤῥησις, ἔγκοπος, ἐκκλησιαστής, ἐντρύφημα, ἐπικοσμειν, παραφορά, περιουσιασμός, περιφέρεια, περισπασμός, προαίρεσις (in special sense, ii. 17) ἐξουσιάζειν (not less than eleven times), and such abnormal phrases as ὑπὸ τὸν ἥλιον (i. 3 and often), and especially σὺν, as an equivalent of את when distinctive of the accusative (ii. 17, iii. 10, iv. 3, vii. 15, and nine other passages; elsewhere σύμπαντα or the like). The last-named peculiarity reminds us strongly of Aquila[^[421]] (comp. [God created] σὺν τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ σὺν τὴν γην, Aquila’s rendering of Gen. i. 1); but it must be also mentioned that in more than half the passages in which את of the accusative occurs in the original, this characteristic rendering of Aquila is not found. This fact militates against the theory of Grätz,[^[422]] that the Septuagint version of Ecclesiastes is really the second improved edition of Aquila, and against that of Salzberger,[^[423]] who argues that the fragments given as from Aquila in Origen’s Hexapla are not really Aquila’s at all, the one and only true edition of Aquila’s Ecclesiastes being that now extant in the Septuagint (comp. the case of Theodotion’s Daniel). It seems clear that the Septuagint version, as it stands, is a composite one, but it is possible, as Montfaucon long ago pointed out,[^[424]] that an early version once existed, independent of Aquila. The question of the origin of this version is of some critical importance, for if the work of Aquila, the Septuagint Ecclesiastes cannot be earlier than 130 A.D. Supposing this to be the first Greek version of the book, we obtain an argument in favour of the Herodian date of Ecclesiastes advocated by Grätz. Upon the whole, however, there seems no sufficient reason for doubting that there was a Septuagint version of the book distinct from Aquila’s, as indeed Origen’s Hexapla and St. Jerome in the preface to his commentary attest, and that this version in its original form goes back, like the versions of Job and Proverbs, to one of the last centuries before Christ.

On the Peshitto version of Koheleth and Ruth there is a monograph by G. Janichs, Animadversiones criticæ &c. (Breslau, 1871), with which compare Nöldeke’s review, Lit. Centralblatt, 1871, No. 49. For the text of the Græcus Venetus, see Gebhardt’s edition (Leipz. 1874). Ginsburg’s well-known work (1861) contains sections on the versions.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE CANONICITY OF ECCLESIASTES AND ECCLESIASTICUS.

I.

It is not surprising that these strange Meditations should have had great difficulty in penetrating into the Canon. There is sufficient evidence (see the works of Plumptre and Wright)[^[425]] that the so-called Wisdom of Solomon is in part a deliberate contradiction of sentiments expressed in our book. The most striking instance of this antagonism is in Wisd. ii. 6-10 (cf. Eccles. ix. 7-9), where the words of Koheleth are actually put into the mouth of the ungodly libertines of Alexandria. The date of Wisdom is disputed, but cannot be earlier than the reign of Ptolemy VII. Physcon (B.C. 145-117). The attitude of the writer towards Koheleth may perhaps be compared with that of the Palestinian teachers who relegated the book among the apocrypha on this among other grounds, that it contained heretical statements, e.g. ‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth’ &c. (xi. 9). Nothing is more certain than that the Book of Koheleth was an Antilegomenon in Palestine in the first century before Christ. And yet it certainly had its friends and supporters both then and later. Simeon ben Shetach and his brother-in-law, King Alexander Jannæus (B.C. 105-79), were as familiar with Koheleth as the young men of Alexandria, and Simeon, according to the Talmudic story[^[426]] (Bereshith Rabba, c. 91), quoted Eccles. vii. 12a with a prefix (דכתיב ‘as it is written’) proper to a Biblical quotation. From another Talmudic narrative (Baba bathra, 4a) it would seem that Koheleth was cited in the time of Herod the Great as of equal authority with the Pentateuch, and from a third (Shabbath, 30b) that St. Paul’s teacher, Gamaliel, permitted quotations from our book equally with those from canonical Scriptures. Like the Song of Songs, however, it called forth a lively opposition from severe judges. The schools of Hillel and Shammai were divided on the merits of these books. At first the Shammaites, who were adverse to them, carried a majority of the votes of the Jewish doctors. But when, after the destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish learning reorganised itself at Jamnia (4-½ leagues south of Jaffa), the opposite view (viz. that the Song and Koheleth ‘defile the hands’—i.e. are holy Scriptures) was again brought forward in a synod held about A.D. 90, and finally sanctioned in a second synod held A.D. 118. The arguments urged on both sides were such as belong to an uncritical age. No attempt was made to penetrate into the spirit and object of Koheleth, but test passages were singled out. The heretically sounding words in xi. 9a were at first held by some to be decisive against the claim of canonicity, but—we are told—when the ‘wise men’ took the close of the verse into consideration (‘but know that for all this God will bring thee into the judgment’), they exclaimed יפה אמר שלמה, ‘Solomon has spoken appropriately.’[^[427]]

This first synod or sanhedrin of Jamnia has played an important part in recent arguments. According to Krochmal, Grätz, and Renan, one object of the Jewish doctors was to decide whether the Song and Koheleth ought to be admitted into the Canon. It seems, however, to have been satisfactorily shown[^[428]] that their uncertainty was not as to whether these books ought to be admitted, but whether they had been rightly admitted. It is true that there was, even as late as A.D. 90, a chance for any struggling book (e.g. Sirach) to find its way into the Canon. But in the case of the Song and Koheleth a preliminary canonisation had taken place; it only remained to set at rest all lingering doubts in the minds of those who disputed the earlier decision. Another matter was also considered, according to Krochmal, at the synod of A.D. 90, viz. how to indicate that with the admission of Ecclesiastes the Canon of the Hagiographa was closed. I have already referred to this scholar’s view of the Epilogue (p. [232] &c.), and need only add that, if we may trust the statement of the Talmud, the canonicity of Koheleth was finally carried in deference to an argument which presupposes that xii. 13, 14 was already an integral part of Koheleth. The Talmudic passage is well known; it runs thus—

‘The wise men’ [i.e. the school of Shammai] ‘sought to “hide” the Book of Koheleth because of its contradictory sayings. And why did they not “hide” it? Because the beginning and the close of it consist of words of Tōra’ [i.e. are in harmony with revealed truth][^[429]]. By the ‘beginning’ the Jewish doctors meant Koheleth’s assertion that ‘all a man’s toil which he toileth under the sun’ (i.e. all earthly, unspiritual toil) is unprofitable (i. 3), and by the ‘close’ the emphatic injunction and dogmatic declaration of the epilogist in xii. 13, 14. The Talmudic statement agrees, as is well known, with the note of St. Jerome on these verses. ‘Aiunt Hebræi quum inter cætera scripta Salomonis quæ antiquata sunt, nec in memoriâ duraverunt, et hic liber obliterandus videretur, eo quòd vanas Dei assereret creaturas, et totum putaret esse pro nihilo, et cibum, et potum, et delitias transeuntes præferret omnibus; ex hoc uno capitulo meruisse auctoritatem, ut in divinorum voluminum numero poneretur, quòd totam disputationem suam, et omnem catalogum hâc quasi ἀνακεφαλαιώσει coarctaverit, et dixerit finem sermonum auditu esse promtissimum, nec aliquid in se habere difficile: ut scilicet Deum timeamus, et ejus præcepta faciamus’ (Opera, ii. 787).

The canonicity of Ecclesiastes was rarely disputed in the ancient Church. The fifth œcumenical council at Constantinople pronounced decisively in its favour. On the Christian heretics in the fourth century who rejected it, see Ginsburg, Coheleth, p. 103.

Let me refer again, in conclusion, to the story in which that remarkable man—‘the restorer of the Law’—Simeon ben Shetach plays a chief part. It not only shows that Koheleth was a religious authority at the end of the second or beginning of the first century B.C., but implies that at this period the book was already comparatively old, and, one may fairly say, pre-Maccabæan. I presume too that the addition of the Epilogue (see pp. [234]-5) with the all-important 13th and 14th verses had been made before Simeon’s time.

II.

It was remarked above that as late as A.D. 90 there was a chance for any struggling book to gain admission into the Canon. Now for at least 180 years the Wisdom of Ben Sira had been struggling for recognition as canonical. In spite of the fact that it did not claim the authorship of any ancient sage, and that, like Koheleth, it contained some questionable passages, it was certainly in high favour both in Alexandria and in Palestine. As Delitzsch points out, ‘the oldest Palestinian authorities (Simeon ben Shetach, the brother of Queen Salome, about B.C. 90, seems to be the earliest) quote it as canonical, and the censures of Babylonian teachers only refer to the Aramaic Targum, not to the original work. The latter was driven out of the field by the Aramaic version, which, though very much interpolated, was more accessible to the people.’[^[430]] Simeon ben Shetach was counted among the Jewish ‘fathers,’ and a saying of his is given in Pirke Aboth, i. 10. It is remarkable that the very same passage of Bereshith Rabba (c. 91) which contains this wise man’s quotations from Koheleth (see above) also contains one from Sirach introduced with the formula בספרא דבן סירא כתיב, ‘in the book of Ben Sira it is written.’ The quotation is, ‘Exalt her, and she shall set thee between princes’—apparently a genuine saying of Ben Sira (Sirach), though not found in our Ecclesiasticus. The first word (‘Exalt her’) comes, it is true, from Prov. iv. 8, but, as Dr. Wright remarks,[^[431]] Ben Sira ‘was fond of tacking on new endings to old proverbs.’ At a much later period, a quotation from Ben Sira (Sir. vii. 10?) is made by Rab (about 165-247 A.D.) introduced with the formula משום שנאמר, ‘because it is said,’ Erubin, c. 65a. Strack indeed supposes that Rab meant to quote from canonical Scripture, but by a slip quoted from Ben Sira instead; but this is too bold a conjecture. Lastly, Rabba (about 270-330 A.D.) quotes a saying of our book (Sir. xiii. 15; xxvii. 9) as ‘repeated a third time in the Kethubhim (the Hagiographa)’—משולש בכתובים, Baba Kamma, c. 92b.

It is quite true that, according to the Talmudic passage referred to on p. [196], the Book of Ben Sira stands on the border-line between the canonical and the non-canonical literature: the words are, ‘The Books of Ben Sira, and all books which were written thenceforward, do not defile the hands.’ But taking this in connection with the vehement declaration of Rabbi Akiba that the man who reads Ben Sira and other ‘extraneous’ books has no portion in the world to come,[^[432]] we may safely assume that the Book of Ben Sira had a position of exceptional authority with not a few Jewish readers. It is equally certain, as the above quotations show, that even down to the beginning of the fourth century A.D. sayings of Sirach were invested with the authority of Scripture. Whatever, then, may have been the theory (and no one pretends that the Synods of Jamnia placed Sirach on a level with Koheleth), the practice of some Jewish teachers was to treat Sirach as virtually canonical, which reminds us of the similar practice of some Christian Fathers. St. Augustine says (but he retracted it afterwards) of the two books of Wisdom, ‘qui quoniam in auctoritatem recipi meruerunt, inter propheticos numerandi sunt’ (De doctr. Christianâ, ii. 8), and both Origen and Cyprian quote Sirach as sacred scripture. Probably, as Fritzsche remarks, Sirach first became known to Christian teachers at Alexandria at the end of the second century.