We need not pause here to demonstrate what no one probably will dispute, that the origin of this first anthology is impersonal. The fact that it is so may well give us the more confidence in the accuracy of the social picture which it contains. This is certainly a pleasing one, and points to a comparatively early period in the history of Judah. Commerce and its attendant luxury have not made such progress as at the time when the introduction was written; poverty is only too well known, but there seems to be a middle class with a sound moral sense, to which the writers of proverbs can appeal. It is true, says one of these, that in daily life ‘rich and poor meet together,’ but for all that ‘Jehovah is the maker of them all’ (xxii. 2), and ‘he that oppresses the poor reproaches his maker’ (xiv. 31). And if it is true on the one hand that ‘the poor is hated even of his neighbour’ (xiv. 20), and that ‘the destruction of the wretched is their poverty’ (x. 15), it is equally so on the other that ‘he that trusts in his riches shall fall’ (xi. 28), and that
Better is the poor man who walks in his blamelessness,
than he who is perverse in his ways and is rich[[173]] (xix. 1).
The strength of the land still consists in the number of small proprietors tilling their own ground. Two proverbs express an interest in these, e.g.
The poor man’s newly ploughed field gives food in abundance,
but there is that is cut off by injustice (xiii. 23).
Better is a mean man that tills for himself[[174]]
than he that glorifies himself and has no bread (xii. 9).
All the farmers however were not so diligent as those indicated in these passages. One of the numerous proverbs against laziness (then as now a prevalent vice in this part of the East[[175]]) brings before us a land-owner who is too lazy to give the order for ploughing at the right time, and so when he looks for the harvest, there is none.
When autumn comes the sluggard ploughs not;