The extravagance, wantonness, and luxurious habits of the fair daughters of Zion, Isaiah denounces in the following drastic lines:—“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton (or, deceiving[[3-1]]) eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet . . . it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell there shall be bad odour, and instead of a girdle a rent, and burning instead of beauty” (ibid. iii. 16–24). And just as Isaiah reproves the Hebrew women for their pride and arrogance, so he censures the cowardice and effeminate habits of the men of Zion, whose motto, he says, was “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die” (ibid. xxii. 13).
The burlesquing of idols and idolatry always afforded a ready mark for the sarcasm of the prophets. As Aristophanes in The Birds ridicules the Greek gods and goddesses, so Isaiah satirizes the sham gods of his country, which were held in great estimation by not a few of his own people. His description of the origin and manufacture of an idol is certainly full of humour. “He” (the pious idolater) “heweth down a tree (he says) and burneth part thereof in a fire; one part serves him as firewood, by means of which he roasteth meat and is satisfied; yea, he warmeth himself therewith, and saith: Aha, I am warm; I have seen the fire. And out of the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down before it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith: Deliver me, for thou art my god” (ibid. xliv. 14–17).
With equal humour Isaiah makes merry over the false prophets of Israel, whom he compares to blind watchmen and to dumb dogs. “His (Israel's) watchmen,” he says, “are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot even bark; they lie down as if dreaming, and are fond of slumber” (ibid. lvi. 10).
Sometimes the butt of Isaiah's sarcasm were persons of high standing, who belonged to nationalities other than his own, such as the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Moabites, and others. Highly diverting is the sarcastic address which he directed to one of the Babylonian kings who, after making an unsuccessful attempt to conquer Palestine, had been ignominiously defeated in his own country. It is to be found in the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah, a short extract from which runs as follows:—“The whole earth is now (after thy fall) at rest and quiet; people break forth into singing. Yea, even the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us. Hell from beneath is astir at thy coming; it rouseth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it has raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? . . . how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”
In an equally amusing and drastic manner is Babylon's fall described by Isaiah. “And Babylon,” he says, “the glory of the kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah . . . neither shall the Arabian pitch his tent there, nor shall the shepherds make their fold in that place. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant places” (ibid. xiii. 19–23).
Next to Isaiah, no other author of any part of the Bible is so prolific of satirical remarks as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes. For the present purpose it matters very little whether the writer of the book in question was King Solomon, to whom the authorship of the Book of Proverbs is commonly ascribed, or some one unknown, who had assumed the pseudonym of “Koheleth.” But this is certain that he does not belong to that class of writers whose humour is but a mixture of bitterness and melancholy, and who, like the authors of Faust and Manfred, speak bitingly of humanity at large. His humour is mostly of the cheerful order; and far from weeping over the foibles and follies of the human race, he makes merry over them. The gist of his philosophy may be said to be embodied in that frequently quoted line from Amphis (Gynaecocratia, p. 481), which runs thus:—
Πῖνε, παῖζε· θνητὸς ὁ βίος.
ὀλίγος οὑπὶ γῇ χρόνος
(Drink and chaff, for life is fleeting; short is our time on earth). Or, to quote Koheleth's own words: “Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all the labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for this alone is his portion” (Eccles. v. 17).
The objects of Koheleth's satire are of a varied description. High functionaries of state, foolish kings, scribblers, tedious preachers, bookworms, idlers, sceptics, fools, drunkards, women—they all come under his scrutiny. His sympathies are always with the poor, helpless, and oppressed, rather than for the rich and affluent, whose “abundance of wealth does not suffer them to sleep[[6-1]].” Koheleth once met a poor man, who had long and vainly tried to obtain, in the High Court of Justice, redress for wrongs done to him, and he put down in writing: “If thou seest oppression of the poor, and violence done to justice and righteousness in the provinces, do not feel astonished at that: for one that is high watches over the high, and over them are yet higher ones” (Eccles. v. 7). Elsewhere he condemns a land, “whose king is childish, and whose princes feast already in the morning,” but he praises such a one “whose princes eat at a proper time for strengthening sake, and not for the sake of gluttony” (ibid. x. 16, 17). In the same chapter (5, 7) he makes the following ironical remark: “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun: folly is set in high places, and the rich (in intellect) sit in lowness. I have seen servants on horses, and princes walking like servants on the ground.”