“The ants are a people not strong,
Yet they provide their meat in the summer,”
no doubt led to the famous parable of Proverbs vi. 6–11, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard.” Being there imbedded in an otherwise commonplace editorial chapter, they may have been derived from some commentator on Agur.
Agur apparently represents the Solomonic thinkers brought with the rest of the people under the trials that made Israel the Job of nations. They are such as those who led astonished Jeremiah to ask “what kind of wisdom is in them?” (Jeremiah viii.) They “do not recognise Jahveh’s judgments”; in “shame, dismay, captivity, they have rejected Jahveh’s word.” The exquisite humor of Agur shows that these philosophers did not lose their serenity. Agur sees man passing his life between two insatiable daughters of the ghoul, “the Grave and the Womb,”—Birth and Death,—and amid the inevitable evils of life he will be wise to refrain from rage and lay his hand upon his lips.
But silence was just what the Jahvist omniscients could not attain to. Notwithstanding Jahveh’s confession that Job was right in his position, and the orthodox wrong in their theory that all evil is providential, the “comforters” rise again in the commentator who begins (Proverbs xxx. 5):
“Every word of God is perfected.
He is a shield to them that trust in Him,”
and proceeds in verse 14 with his inanities. And these have prevailed ever since. Even Jesus, when he took up the burden of Wisdom, and rebuked the Jahvist superstition that those on whom a tower fell were subjects of a judgment, must have his stupid corrector to add, “Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish.” This simpleton’s superstition has taken the place of the great successor of Solomon, and to-day, amid all the learning of Christendom, is proclaiming that the Father is “permitting” all the Satans,—war, disease, earthquake, famine,—to harry his children just to test them or to chasten them. Why should omnipotence create a race requiring worse than inquisitorial tortures for its discipline? In all the literature of Christendom there is not one honest attempt to deal with the evils and agonies of nature; and at this moment we find theists apotheosizing the “Unknowable from which all things proceed,” without any appreciation of the fact that in the remote past Jahvism sought the same refuge, and that it was proved by Job a refuge of fallacies. In an awakening moral and humane sentiment Job stands in this latter day upon the earth, and again steadily repeats his demand why one should respect an Unknowable from whom all things,—all horrors and agonies,—proceed.
Ethically we are required to do no evil that good may come; theologically, to worship a deity who is doing just that all the time. This is no doubt a convenient doctrine for the Christian nations that wish to preserve their own property and peace at home, while acting as banditti in remote continents and islands. All such atrocities are enacted and adopted as part of the providential plan of spreading the Gospel, latterly “civilisation”; but it is very certain that there can be no such thing as national civilisation until evil is recognised as evil, good as good,—the one to be abhorred, the other loved,—and no deity respected whose government would wrong a worm.