Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms. (xxi. 16.)
The two proverbs last quoted may be usefully compared with the ancient Prologue (viii. ix.) already referred to in this chapter, as they are there reproduced pictorially in Wisdom and Dame Folly sitting at their respective doors. Wisdom offers long life and happiness:
But he who wandereth from me doeth violence to his own life,
All who hate me love death. (viii. 36.)
Dame Folly tries to turn into her by-path those who are “proceeding straight in their course” (ix. 15), but her victim—
He knoweth not her phantoms are there,
That her guests are in the underworld. (ix. 18.)
The same Hebrew word Rephaim (phantoms or shades) is used here and in xxi. 16.
All of these references to death and the underworld (sheol), except perhaps xiv. 32, refer to the living death, moral and spiritual, which is of such vast and fundamental significance in Zoroastrian religion. In this religion the evil power is “all death.” The universe is divided by and into “the living and the not living.”[8] “When these two Spirits came together they made first Life and Death,”—words sometimes used as synonymous with the “Good and the Evil Mind.” Ahura Mazda representing all the forces that work for health and life, Angromainyu (Ahriman) all that work for disease and destruction, have ranged with them all animals and plants, on one side or the other, in this great conflict. The life of an Ahrimanian creature is “incarnate death.” (Darmesteter’s Introduction to the Vendîdâd, v. 11.) His destructiveness is equally against virtue, wisdom, peace, health, happiness, life, and all of these, not merely physical dissolution, are included in his Avestan title, “The Fiend who is all death.” He is the Abaddon of Revelation ix. 11, also he “that had the power of death” in Hebrews ii. 14, and probably came into both of these from Proverbs xxvii. 20: