On which we proudly in this life rely.
And as to the commendations of sensuous pleasure, have they not a relative justification?[[383]] The legalism of the ‘righteous overmuch’ threatened already perhaps to make life an intolerable burden. And though Koheleth erred in the form of his teaching, yet he did well to teach the ‘duty of delight’ (Ruskin) and to oppose an orthodoxy which sought, not merely to transform, but to kill nature. It is to his credit that he touches on the relations of the sexes with such studious reserve.[[384]] As a rule, the enjoyments which he recommends are those of the table, which in Sirach’s time (Ecclus. xxxii. 3-5) and perhaps also in Koheleth’s included music and singing,—in short, festive but refined society. His praise of festive mirth is at any rate more excusable morally than Omar Khayyâm’s impassioned commendations of the wine-cup.[[385]] As Jeremy Taylor says, ‘It was the best thing that was then commonly known that they should seize upon the present with a temperate use of permitted pleasures.’[[386]] Lastly, the admission of the book into the Canon is (perhaps we may say) not less providential than that of the Song of Songs. The latter shows us human nature in simple and healthy relations of life; the former, a human nature in a morbid state and in depressed and artificial circumstances. How to return at least to inward simplicity and health, the latter part (not the Epilogue) of the Book of Job beautifully shows us.
Our great idealist poet Shelley, who so admired Job, disliked Ecclesiastes for the same reason as the ancient heretics already mentioned. One greater than he, our ‘sage and serious’ Milton, justifies the sacred Scripture for the variety of its contents on the same ground that he advocates ‘unlicensed printing.’ Both are ‘for the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth.’ We need not, then, he says, be surprised if the Bible ‘brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.’[[387]] The Bible, according to Milton, is perfect not in spite but because of its variety; it is like the rugged ‘mountains of God,’ not like the symmetrical works of human art. But Milton has also reminded us that a fool may misuse even sacred Scripture.
CHAPTER X.
DATE AND PLACE OF COMPOSITION.
Jewish tradition, while admitting a Hezekian or post-Hezekian redaction of the book, assigns the original authorship of Ecclesiastes to Solomon. The Song of Songs it regards as the monument of this king’s early manhood, the Book of Proverbs of his middle age, and the semi-philosophical meditations before us as the work of his old age. The tradition was connected by the Aggada with the favourite legend[[388]] of the discrowned Solomon, but is based upon the book itself, the passages due to the literary fiction of Solomon’s authorship (which Bickell indeed attributes to an interpolator) having been misunderstood. Would that the author of the Lectures on the Jewish Church had given the weight of his name to the true explanation of these passages! The reticence of the lines devoted in the second volume of the Lectures to Ecclesiastes has led some critics to imagine that according to Dean Stanley, this book, like much of Proverbs, might possibly be the work of the ‘wisest’ of Israel’s kings. Little had the author profited by Ewald if he really allowed such an absolute legend the smallest standing-ground among reasonable hypotheses! Whichever way we look, whether to the social picture, or to the language, or to the ideas of the book, its recent origin forces itself upon us. The social picture and the ideas need not detain us here. Either Solomon was transported in prophetic ecstasy to far distant times (the Targum on Koheleth frequently describes him as a prophet), or the writer is a child of the dawning modern age of Judaism. The former alternative is plainly impossible. Political servitude, and a generally depressed state of society (exceptional cases of prosperity notwithstanding), mark the book as the work of a dark post-Exile period. The absence of any national feeling equally distinguishes it from the monuments of the earlier humanistic movement (even from Job). The germs of philosophic thought, which cannot be explained away, supply, if this be possible, a still more convincing argument. We shall return to these later on: at present, let us confine ourselves to the linguistic evidence, which has been set forth with such accuracy and completeness by Delitzsch[[389]] and after him by Dr. Wright of Dublin.
The Hebrew language has no history if Ecclesiastes belongs to the classical period; indeed, the Hebrew name of the book may seem of itself to stamp it as of post-Exile origin (see note on Koheleth in Appendix). The student would do well, however, to examine all the peculiar words or forms in Delitzsch’s glossary, and to classify them for himself, under two principal heads, (1) those which occur elsewhere but in distinctively late-Hebrew books, (2) those only found in Koheleth, with four subdivisions, viz., (a) words which can be explained from Biblical Hebrew usage, (b) those which belong to the vocabulary of the Mishna, (c) those of Aramaic origin and affinities, (d) those borrowed from non-Semitic languages. The student should also notice the striking grammatical peculiarities of Koheleth, especially the fact that the ordinary historic tense (the imperfect with Waw consecutive) is hardly ever used. The scholar’s instinct but three times reveals itself in the adoption of this old literary idiom (i. 17, iv. 1, 7), but elsewhere the usage of the Mishna is already law. Almost equally important is the fact that the Hebrew mood-distinctions are so little used in Koheleth (on which point see Delitzsch’s introduction); indeed, we may say upon the whole that that which gives a characteristic flavour to the old Hebrew style is ‘ready to vanish away.’ The Mishnic peculiarities of the book are especially interesting, as confirming our view of its origin. The author is very different in his opinions from the doctors of the Mishna, but he resembles them in his questioning and reflective spirit, and helped to form the linguistic instrument which they required. Less important, but not to be ignored, are the Aramaic elements. Even Dr. Adam Clarke, untrained scholar as he was, pronounced that the attempts which had as yet been made to overthrow the evidence, were ‘often trifling and generally ineffectual.’[[390]] The Aramaisms of Koheleth are irreconcileable with a pre-Exile date; they can only be paralleled and explained from the Aramaic portions of the books of Ezra and Daniel. That they are comparatively few, only proves that the force of the Aramaising movement has abated, and that the Hebrew language, at any rate in the hands of some of its chief cultivators, is passing into a new phase (the Mishnic). The judgment of Ewald, as already expressed in 1837, appears to me on the whole satisfactory: ‘One might easily imagine Koheleth to be the very latest book in the Old Testament. A premature conclusion, since Aramaic influence extended very gradually and secretly, so that one writer might easily be more Aramaic in the colouring of his style than another. But though not [even if not] the latest, it cannot have been written till long after Aramaic had begun powerfully to influence Hebrew, and therefore not before the last century of the Persian rule.’[[391]]
For the sake of my argument, it is hardly necessary to refer to the words of non-Semitic origin, which are (as most critics rightly hold) but two in number; 1 פַּרְדֵּם (ii. 5, plur.) undoubtedly a Hebraised Persian word, on which I lay no stress here, because it occurs, not only in Neh. ii. 8, but also in Cant. iv. 13, where many critics deny that it militates against a pre-Exile date, and 2 פִתְגָם (viii. 11), which occurs in the Aramaic parts of Ezra and Daniel, and also in Esth. i. 20, and while used in the Targums and in Syriac, did not become naturalised in Talmudic. This word, too, is commonly regarded as Hebraised Persian, but, following Zirkel, the eminent Jewish scholar Heinrich Grätz declares it to be the Hebraised form of a Greek word. Is this possible or probable? Are there any genuine Græcisms of language, and consequently also of thought, in the Book of Koheleth? An important question, to which we will return.
The date suggested by Ewald, and accepted by Knobel, Herzfeld, Vaihinger, Delitzsch, and Ginsburg, suits the political circumstances implied in Koheleth. The Jews had long since lost the feelings of trust and gratitude with which in ‘better days’ (vii. 10) they regarded the court of Persia; the desecration of the temple by Bagoses or Bagoes (Jos. Ant. xi. 7) is but one of the calamities which betel Judæa in the last century of the Persian rule. It is a conjecture of Delitzsch that iv. 3 contains a reminiscence of Artaxerxes II. Mnemon (died about 360), who was ninety-four years old, and according to Justin (x. 1), had 115 sons, and of his murdered successor Artaxerxes III. Ochus. Probably, if we knew more of this period, we should be able to produce other plausible illustrations. Certainly the state of society suits the date proposed. As Delitzsch remarks, ‘The unrighteous judgment, iii. 16; the despotic depression, iv. 1, viii. 9, v. 8; the riotous court-life, x. 16-19; the raising of mean men to the highest dignities, x. 5-7; the inexorable severity of the law of military service, viii. 8; the prudence required by the organised system of espionage,—all these things were characteristic of this period.’ Probably an advocate of a different theory would interpret these passages otherwise; but as yet no conclusive argument has been offered for supposing allusions to circumstances of the Greek period.
Let me frankly admit, in conclusion, that the evidence of the Hebrew favours a later date than that proposed by Ewald—favours, but does not actually require it. It seems, however, that if the book be of the Greek period, we have a right to expect some definite traces of Greek influence. This will supply the subject of the next chapter.
At any rate, the author addresses himself to Palestinian readers. He lives, not (I should suppose) in the country, as Ewald thought, but near the temple, or at least has opportunities of frequenting it (v. 1,[[392]] viii. 10). Some recent scholars place him in Alexandria; but the reference to the corn trade in xi. 1 does not prove this to be correct; indeed, the very same section contains a reference to rain (so xii. 2). Sharpe[[393]] is alone in preferring Antioch, the capital of the Greek kingdom of Syria. Kleinert’s remark that ‘king in Jerusalem’ (i. 12) implies a foreign abode is met by the remark that Jerusalem was in the writer’s time no longer a royal city. The author may have travelled, and like Sirach have had personal acquaintance with the dangers of court-life (either at Susa or at Alexandria). The references to the king do not perhaps compel this supposition; ‘are not my princes altogether kings?’ (Isa. x. 8) could be said of Persian satraps.