Suffer not thy mouth to bring punishment upon thy body; and say not before the angel, It was an oversight;[[311]] wherefore should God be angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thy hands?’ (v. 6.)
To Koheleth the mention of the divine name is a possible source of danger; to Hooker God is One ‘whom to know is life, and joy to make mention of his name.’ Koheleth has only fear for God’s holy name—a fear which is not indeed ineffectual but very pale and cheerless; Hooker, a ‘perpetual fear and love,’ and the love gives a new quality and a new efficacy to the fear.
CHAPTER IV.
FACTS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE.
At vii. 15 a new section begins, consisting almost entirely of the author’s personal experiences, very loosely connected; it continues as far as ix. 12. A curious passage at the outset appears to describe virtue as residing in the mean between two extremes (vii. 15-18). The appearance however is deceptive: it is as much out of place to quote Aristotle’s famous definition of virtue (μεσότης δύο κακιῶν), as Buddha’s counsel to him who would attain perfection to ‘exercise himself in the medium course of discipline.’ Koheleth merely offers practical advice how to steer one’s ship between the rocks. Do not, he says, make your life a burden by excessive legalism. But on the other hand, do not earn the reputation of caring nothing for the precepts of the law. That were folly, and would bring you to an early death.[[312]] Koheleth expresses this sharply and enigmatically; do not be too ‘righteous,’ and do not be too ‘wicked.’ ‘Righteous’ and ‘wicked’ are both to be taken in the common acceptation of those terms in the religious world: the words are used ironically. Our author’s only theory of virtue is that no theory is possible. The ‘wisdom’ which both gives ‘defence’ and ‘preserves life’ (vii. 12) is the practical wisdom of resignation and moderation. Of essential wisdom (or philosophy as we should call it[[313]]) he says, alluding to Job xxviii. 12-23, that it is ‘far off, and exceeding deep; who can find it out?’ (vii. 24.) The old theory, which claimed to give the secret of history, and which even afterwards satisfied some wise men (e.g. Sirach)—the theory that the good are rewarded and the bad punished in this world—is not borne out by Koheleth’s experience,—
There is (many) a righteous man who perishes in spite of his righteousness, and there is (many) an ungodly man who lives long in spite of his wickedness (vii. 15; contrast the interpolated passage viii. 12, 13).
But though Koheleth, like Job, despairs of essential wisdom, he ‘turns’ with hope to the wide field of wisdom—or, as he calls it, ‘wisdom and reasoning,’ i.e. moral inquiries pursued on the inductive method. And what is the result of his inquiry? He gives it with much deliberateness, stating that he (viz. ‘the Koheleth,’ see on xii. 8) has put one fact to another in order to form a conclusion (ver. 27) and it is that women-tempters are more pernicious than Death (man’s great enemy personified, as so often). Or, putting it in other words, which I am forced to paraphrase to bring out their meaning—words to which the well-known poem of Simonides is chivalry itself—‘A few rare specimens of uncorrupted human nature I have found, so rare that one may reckon them as one among a thousand; but not one of these truly human creatures was a woman.’[[314]] The latter statement is the stronger, and shows that our author agrees with Ecclus. xxv. 19, that ‘all wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.’ And so much in earnest is he, that he even tries a third mode of expressing his conclusion. Carefully limiting himself he says, ‘Lo! this only have I found; that God made mankind upright, but they have sought out many contrivances’ (ver. 29); that is, men and women are both born good, but are too soon sophisticated by civilisation (and the leaders in this downward process, we may infer from the context, are the women). Koheleth scarcely means to imply that civilisation is bad in itself; if he does, the few good men he has met must apparently have been hermits! But though not essentially immoral, the inventive or contriving faculty (so wonderful to Sophocles) seems to Koheleth the chief source of moral danger.
But are these the only results of Koheleth’s wide induction from the facts of contemporary life? Yes; a time such as this ‘when man rules over man to his hurt’ (viii. 9) suggests, not only prudential maxims, but this sad conclusion, already (vii. 15) mentioned by anticipation, that the fate proper to the wicked falls upon the righteous, and that proper to the righteous on the wicked (viii. 14), or to express this in the concrete,
And in accordance with this I have seen ungodly men honoured, and that too in the holy place (i.e. the temple; comp. Isa. xviii. 7); but those who had acted rightly had to depart and were forgotten in the city. This too is vanity[[315]] (viii. 10).
No wonder that wickedness is rampant! It requires singular courage to do right when Nemesis delays her visit; or, as Koheleth puts it, in language which sorely displeased a later editor,
Because sentence against a wicked work is not executed speedily, therefore men have abundant courage to do evil. For I know that it even happens that a sinner does evil for a long time, and yet lives long, whilst he who fears before God is short-lived as a shadow (viii. 12, 13).