Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied,
And the eyes of man are never satisfied.
Dr. Inman (Ancient Faiths, i., p. 180) connects Abaddon with “Abadan (cuneiform), the lost one, the sun in winter, or darkness,” which conforms with the Avestan Ahriman, who is emphatically a winter-demon, his hell being in the north (cf. Jeremiah i. 14 and elsewhere), and is the natural adversary of the Fire-worshipper.
Among the Zoroastrians there were not only Towers of Silence (Dakhma) for the literally dead, but also for the confinement of those tainted by carrying corpses, or by any contact with the death-fiend’s empire, such as being struck with temporary death. “The unclean,” says Darmesteter, “are confined in a particular place, apart from all clean persons and objects, the Armêst-gâh, which may be described, therefore, as the Dakhma for the living.” Here then are the dead-alive guests of Dame Folly (Proverbs ix. 15), who opposes Wisdom, as Ahriman created Akem-Mano (evil thought) to oppose Vohu-Mano (good thought), and here is the assembly that might give the Solomonic proverb its metaphor:
The man who wandereth from the way of instruction
Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms (or shades, Rephaim).
The Zoroastrian books from which I have been quoting contain passages of very unequal date, but it is the opinion of Avestan scholars that most of them are from very ancient sources, pre-Solomonic, and there is no chronological difficulty in supposing that such institutions as the Armêst-gâh, for the separation of the unclean, should not have been well known in ancient Jerusalem before the corresponding levitical laws concerning the unclean and the leprous existed.
The Book of Proverbs was also a growth, and although, as has been stated, there is reason to regard as later additions most of the proverbs containing the word Jahveh, as they are inconsistent with the general ethical tenor of the book, there are several in which that name is evidently out of place. Even in the editorial Prologue we can hardly recognize orthodox Jahvism in the conception of a being, Wisdom, not created by Jahveh yet giving him delight and some kind of assistance at the creation; and nowhere else in the Old Testament do we find such an idea as that of xx. 27, “The spirit of a man is Jahveh’s lamp,” or in xix. 17:
He who is kind to the poor lendeth to Jahveh,