so are a few years in the day of eternity (xviii. 9).
Still the chief value of the book is, historically, to fill out the picture of a little known period, and doctrinally, to show the inadequacy of the old forms of religious belief, and the moral distress from which the Christ was a deliverer.
AIDS TO THE STUDENT.
Besides the commentaries of Bretschneider (1806), Fritzsche (1859), and Bissell (in the American edition of Lange), see Gfrörer, Philo, ii. (1831), pp. 18-52; Dähne, Geschichtliche Darstellung der jüdischalexandrin. Religionsphilosophie, ii. (1834), pp. 126-150; Zunz, Die gottesdienstl. Vorträge der Juden (1832), pp. 100-105; Ewald, Jahrbücher der bibl. Wissenschaft, iii. (1851), pp. 125-140; History of Israel, v. 262 &c.; Jost, Gesch. des Judenthums, i. (1857), p. 310 &c.; Herzfeld, Gesch. des Volkes Jisrael, iii. (1863), see Index; Horowitz, Das Buch Jesus Sirach (1865); Dyserinck, De Spreuken van Jesus den zoon van Sirach vertaald (1870); Grätz, Monatsschrift for 1872, pp. 49 &c., 97 &c.; Seligmann, Das Buch der Weisheit des Jesus Sirach (1883); Fritzsche, art. in Schenkel’s Bibellexikon, iii. 252 &c.; Stanley, Jewish Church, vol. iii. (see Index); Westcott, art. ‘Ecclesiasticus’ in Smith’s Bible Dictionary; Deane, ‘The Book of Ecclesiasticus: its Contents and Character,’ The Expositor, Nov. 1883; Wright, The Book of Koheleth, 1883, chap. ii. (decides, perhaps, too hastily that Sirach in many passages imitates Koheleth).
THE BOOK OF KOHELETH; OR, ECCLESIASTES.
CHAPTER I.
THE WISE MAN TURNED AUTHOR AND PHILOSOPHER.
... Il mondo invecchia,
E invecchiando intristisce.—Tasso, Aminta.
In passing from the book of Ecclesiasticus to that of Ecclesiastes, we are conscious of breathing an entirely different intellectual atmosphere. ‘Seek not out the things that are too hard for thee,’ said Sirach, ‘for thou hast no need of the secret things’ (iii. 21, 22), but the book now before us is the record of a thinker, disappointed it is true, but too much in earnest to give up thinking. Of meditative minds there was no lack in this period of Israel’s history. The writers of the 119th and several other Psalms, as well as Jesus the son of Sirach, had pondered over the ideal life, but our author (the only remaining representative of a school of writers[[286]]) was meditative in a different sense from any of these. He could not have said with the latter, ‘I prayed for wisdom before the temple’ (Ecclus. li. 14), nor with the former, ‘Thy commandment is exceeding broad’ (Ps. cxix. 96). The idea of the religious primacy of Israel awakened in his mind no responsive enthusiasm. We cannot exactly say that he conceals the place of his residence,[[287]] but he has certainly no overpowering interest in the scene of his life’s troublesome drama. In this feature he resembles to a considerable extent the humanists of an earlier date (see p. [119]), but in others, and those the most characteristic, he differs as widely from them as the old man from the child. They believed that virtue was crowned by prosperity; even the writer of Job, as some think, had not wholly cast off the consecrated dogma; but the austere and lonely thinker who has left us Ecclesiastes finds himself utterly unable to harmonise such a theory with facts (viii. 14). To him, living during one of the dreariest parts of the post-Exile period, it seemed as if the past aspirations of Israel had turned out a gigantic mistake. That home-sickness which impelled, if not the Second Isaiah himself, yet many who were stirred by his eloquence, to exchange a life of ease and luxury for one of struggle and privation—in what had it issued? In ‘vanity and pursuit of wind’ (comp. Isa. xxvi. 18). To quote a great Persian poet, who in some of his moods resembles Koheleth (see end of [Chap. IX].),
The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d,