[220]. Its close relation to the first of the two great anthologies is shown by the linguistic points of contact between the two works (see [Chap. VI.])
[221]. Rev. J. H. Thorn.
[222]. The poet, we can see, has not arranged the creative works as carefully as the cosmogonist in Genesis.
Pleaseth him, the Eternal Child,
To play his sweet will, glad and wild.—Emerson, Wood Notes.
[224]. ‘Produced’ seems the best rendering (Sept., ἔκτισε), in the sense of ‘creating,’ not (as Del.) of ‘revealing,’ for which there is no authority. The secondary meaning ‘possessed’ (Aquila &c. ἐκτήσατο, Vulg. possedit; comp. Eccles. xxiv. 6) is less agreeable to the context (see Hitzig’s note). There is the same diversity of rendering in Gen. xiv. 19-22. On the patristic expositions of this passage, see Dean Goode, The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice, ed. 1, i. 299. The ante-Nicene Fathers mostly apply it to the divine generation of the Son, the post-Nicene to the generation of the human nature of Christ. Basil and Epiphanius are exceptions. The former applies the passage to ‘that wisdom which the apostle mentions’ (in 1 Cor. i. 21): the latter expresses a strong opinion that ‘it does not at all speak concerning the Son of God.’
[225]. Comp. Milton’s noble conception of the Creator’s golden compasses (Par. Lost, vii. 225, 6).
[226]. Comp. Delitzsch, System der christlichen Apologetik, § 16, where the history of this conception in Jewish literature is traced in connection with that of the Logos-idea; also Ewald, Die Lehre der Bibel von Gott, iii. 74-77.
[227]. In Wisd. vii. 22 &c. the language appears to some to rise above poetical personification, and to imply a conscious hypostatising of Wisdom. Dante, a good judge on this point, certainly thought otherwise (Convito, iii. 15); he evidently holds that the Sophia of the Book of Wisdom is precisely analogous to his own very strong personification of divine Philosophy. Still such language may have partly prepared the way for the well-known Gnostic myth of Achamoth or Sophia (comp. Baur, Three First Centuries, E. T., i. 207). It was well, as Plumptre remarks, that Philo adopted Logos rather than Sophia as the name of the creative energy. A system in which Sophia had been the dominant word might have led to an earlier development of Mariolatry (Introduction to Proverbs in the Speaker’s Commentary).