But particularly interesting is one of his metaphors that occurs in the eighth book of the Aeneid (409–13), inasmuch as it seems to be a poetical imitation of another found in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs, in which the model housewife—the Esheth Chayil—is so beautifully described, who rises early in the morning, wakes her housemaids, and prolongs the day with the help of a lamp. It runs thus:—
Now, when the night her middle race has rode,
And his first slumbers had refreshed the god,
The time when early housewives leave the bed;
When living embers on the hearth they spread,
Supply the lamps, and call the maids to rise;
With yawning mouth, and with half-opened eyes
They ply the distaff by the winking light,
And to their labour add the night[[18-1]].
We pass now to another fruitful subject, from which the writers of the Bible have often taken metaphors, viz. the sea, the torrent, and the waters, generally that mostly serve to typify calamity. So Job (vi. 15) has a long and quite Homeric metaphor, formed from a torrent, which begins with the words: “My brothers have dealt deceitfully as the torrent, nay, as a channel of torrents that pass away.”