The excision of these words would of course not be justified in a translation intended for popular use; but for the purposes of historical study seems almost inevitable. It hangs together with the view adopted as to the origin of xi. 9b, and implies the assumption that the Targum rightly paraphrases, ‘and thy spirit (lit. thy breath, nishm’thāk) will return to stand in judgment before the Lord who gave it thee.’ It ought to be mentioned, however, that some critics (accepting the clause as genuine) see in that return to God nothing more than the absorption of the human spirit into the divine (whether in a naïve popular or in a developed philosophical sense).[[324]] This will seem plausible at first to many readers. As a Lutheran writer says, ‘Si spes, quam nos fovemus lætissimam, Ecclesiastæ adfulsisset, non obiter ipse tetigisset et verbis ambiguis notasset rem maximi momenti’ (Winzer, ap. Hengstenberg). But if the Hebrew rūakh means, as I think it does, the personal, conscious, spiritual side of man in iii. 21,[[325]] I fail to see why it should not bear that meaning here.
CHAPTER VI.
KOHELETH’S ‘PORTRAIT OF OLD AGE;’ THE EPILOGUE, ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN.
We have now arrived at the conclusion of the meditations of our much-tried thinker. It is strongly poetic in colouring; but when we compare it with the grandly simple overture of the book (i. 4-8), can we help confessing to a certain degree of disappointment? It is the allegory which spoils it for modern readers, and so completely spoils it, that attempts have been sometimes made to expel the allegorical element altogether. That the first two verses are free from allegory, is admitted, and it is barely possible that the sixth verse may be so too—may be, that is, figurative rather than allegorical. Poets have delighted in these figures; how fitly does one of them adorn the lament in Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady,—
Broken the golden bowl
Which held her hallowed soul!
The most doubtful part, then, is the description in vv. 3-5. I am not writing a commentary, and will venture to express an opinion in favour of the allegorists (it is not fair to call them satirically the anatomists).[[326]] It is true that there is much variety of opinion among them; this only shows that the allegory is sometimes far-fetched, not that it is a vain imagination. Can there be anything more obscure than the canzoni in Dante’s Convito, which we have the poet’s own authority for regarding as allegorical? And if we compare the rival theories with that which they attempt to displace, can it be said that Taylor’s dirge-theory,[[327]] or Umbreit’s storm-theory,[[328]] or that adopted by Wright from Wetzstein[[329]] is more suitable to the poem than the allegorical theory? Certainly the latter is a very old, if not the oldest theory, and on a point of this sort the ancients have some claim to be deferred to. They seem to have felt instinctively that the intellectual atmosphere of Koheleth (as well as of the Chronicler) was that of the later Judaism. The following story is related in a Talmudic treatise.[[330]] ‘The Emperor asked R. Joshua ben Hananyah, “How is it that you do not go to the house of Abidan (a place of learned discussions)?” He said to him, “The mountain is snow (my head is white); the hoar frosts surround me (my whiskers and my beard are also hoary); its dogs do not bark (I have lost my wonted power of voice); its millers do not grind (I have no teeth); the scholars ask me whether I am looking for something I have not lost (referring probably to the old man feeling here and there).”’
Once more (see i. 2) the mournful motto, ‘Vanity of vanities! saith the Koheleth; all is vanity’ (xii. 8), and the book in its original form closes.[[331]] Did the author himself attach this motto? Surely not, if the preceding words on the return of the spirit to its God (see above, on iii. 21) are genuine, for then ‘Vanity of vanities’ would be a patent misrepresentation. All is not ‘vanity,’ if there is in human nature a point connecting a man with that world, most distant and yet most near, where in the highest sense God is. If Koheleth wrote xii. 7b, he cannot have written xii. 8, any more than the author of the Imitation could have written Vanitas vanitatum both on his first page and on his last. Yet who but Koheleth can be responsible for it? For the later editors of whom I have spoken, would be far from approving such a reversal of the great charter of man’s dignity in the eighth Psalm. To me, the motto simply says that all Koheleth’s wanderings had but brought him back to the point from which he started. ‘Grandissima vanità,’ as Castelli, in his dignified Italian, puts it, ‘tutto è vanità.’ All that I can assign to the editors in this verse are the parenthetic words ‘saith the Koheleth.’ Everywhere else we find ‘Koheleth;’ here alone, and perhaps vii. 17 (corrected text), ‘the Koheleth.’[[332]]
Let us now consider the Epilogue itself.
And moreover (it should be said) that Koheleth was a wise man; further, he taught the people wisdom, and weighed and made search, (yea) composed many proverbs. Koheleth sought to find out pleasant words, and he wrote down[[333]] plainly words of truth. The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails well driven in; the members of the assemblies[[334]] have [in the case of Ecclesiastes] given them forth from another shepherd.[[335]] And as for all beyond them, my son, be warned; of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.—That which the word ‘all is vanity’ comes to:[[336]] it is understood (thus), Fear God, and keep His commandments. For this (concerns) every man. For every work shall God bring into the judgment (which shall be) upon all that is concealed and all that is manifest, whether it be good or whether it be evil.
This translation has not been reached without some emendations of the text. It seems to me that everything in this Epilogue ought to be clear. There is but one verse which contains figurative expressions; the rest is simple prose. It is only fair, however, to give one of the current renderings of those verses in which an emendation has been attempted above.