and walk in the ways of thy heart

and according to the sight of thine eyes;

And banish discontent from thy heart,

and put away evil from thy flesh:—

for youth and the prime of life are vanity.

Between lines 4 and 5 we find the received text burdened with a prosaic insertion, which is probably not due to an after-thought on the part of the writer, but to the anxiety of later students to rescue the orthodoxy of the book. The insertion consists of the words, Rabbinic in expression as well as in thought, ‘But know that for all this God will bring thee into the judgment.’[[320]] It was the wisdom of true charity to insert them; but it is our wisdom as literary students to ‘banish discontent’ with the discord which they introduce by restoring the passage to its original form.

At this point Koheleth turns away from the young to those (presumably) of his own age. Again there are traces at least of a series of distichs which must once have stood here, but either the author or one of his editors, or both, have so far worked over them that the series is no longer perfect. The first suspected instance of this ‘overworking’ occurs at the very outset. ‘Remember thy Creator in the flower of thine age,’ are the opening words of Koheleth’s second address. They are usually explained as taking up the idea of the last judgment expressed at the close of xi. 9. ‘Since God,’ to quote Dr. Ginsburg’s paraphrase, ‘will one day hold us accountable for all the works done in the body, we are to set the Lord always before our eyes.’ The importance of this passage, when thus interpreted, is manifest. It suggests that Koheleth had struggled through his many difficulties to an assured doctrinal and practical position, and that it is not mere rejoicing, but ‘rejoicing in the Lord,’ that Koheleth recommends in xii. 1—an edifying view of the old man’s final result which every one must desire to be true if only it be consistent with the rest of the book. I fear that this is not the case. Elsewhere in the book sensuous pleasure in moderation is praised without any reference to God, and in the immediate neighbourhood of this verse the motive given for rejoicing is not the thought of God, but that of the many days of darkness (i.e. of Sheól) which are coming. Besides, the exhortation ‘Remember thy Creator’ does not perfectly suit the close of the verse, or indeed of the section. What is the natural inference from the fact that at an advanced age life becomes physically a burden? Surely this—that man should enjoy life while his powers are fresh. Cannot an old man ‘remember’ his Creator? (To ‘remember’ is to think upon; it is not a synonym for conversion.) The text therefore is almost certainly incorrect.

Has an editor, then, tampered with the text of the opening words of the exhortation? May we, for instance, follow Grätz and read, for bōr’éka ‘thy Creator,’ bōr’ka ‘thy fountain’ (lit. thy cistern), taking this as a metaphorical expression for ‘thy wife’ or ‘thy wedlock’ (as in Prov. v. 15-18)? The objection certain to be raised is that the text when thus corrected brings the book to a lame and impotent conclusion. It may be true, as Bishop Temple has said, that chastity and monotheism are the chief legacies which the Jewish Church has bequeathed to mankind.[[321]] There is nothing in an exhortation to prize a pure married life unworthy of a high-minded Jewish teacher. But in this connection it is certainly to a Western reader strange, and one is sorely tempted to suppose a displacement of the words, and, following Bickell, to make the distich—

And remember thy fountain

in the flower of thine age—