There is no occasion to suppose that all these proverbs come from one period; but the hand of a compiler is more conspicuous here than in the first anthology. He has not indeed removed repetitions (see xxii. 28a, xxiii. 10a; xxiii. 17a, xxiv. 1a; xxiii. 18, xxiv. 14), but the personal element preponderates so much that he might fairly have prefixed his own name as the author. Artistically, he may perhaps be found wanting. He has left one tristich (i.e. a proverb of three lines), viz. xxii. 29; two pentastichs (i.e. proverbs of five lines), viz. xxiii. 4, 5. xxiv. 13, 14; and one heptastich (i.e. a proverb of seven lines), viz. xxiii. 6-8. Unsymmetrical as these may be, it seems hazardous, unless there be any specially doubtful passage, to restore symmetry (i.e. to convert tristichs into tetrastichs, and so on) by inserting words conjecturally. There are a few distichs (xxii. 28, xxiii. 9, xxiv. 7, 8, 9, 10), thus affording a slight point of contact with the first anthology; more tetrastichs (xxii. 22, 23; 24, 25; 26, 27; xxiii. 10, 11; 15, 16; 17, 18; xxiv. 1, 2; 3, 4; 5, 6; 15, 16; 17, 18; 19, 20; 21, 22), and hexastichs (xxiii. 1-3; 12-14; 19-21; 26-28; xxiv. 11, 12). One octastich occurs (xxiii. 22-25), and one long poem, in the main a group of distichs, referred to again below (xxiii. 29-35).
Beautiful in form, the proverbs of this collection certainly are not; one cannot apply to the author the saying in xxiv. 26, ‘He kisses the lips who answers in suitable words.’ The contents however are not without points of interest. In xxiii. 1-3 we have a picture of a man of the middle class admitted to the table of a governor. Being unused to ‘dainties,’ he is tempted to excess; as a restraint, the ‘wise man’ bids him consider the capriciousness of princely favour (comp. Ecclus. ix. 13). The abuse of luxuries such as wine and meat was in fact a sore evil in the eyes of this writer (see the caution in xxiii. 20, 21 in the Septuagint version, which reminds one of vii. 14). He has even left us a poem on the evils of drunkenness (xxiii. 29-35) which contains several striking details from its satirical opening, ‘Who hath oi, who hath aboi?’ (interjections expressing pain), to the picturesque comparison of the drunkard to a man ‘that lieth upon the top of a mast,’[[180]] which shows incidentally that sea-life was by this time a familiar experience. Another interesting passage, though marred by its obscurity, is that in xxiv. 11, 12. The innocent victims of a miscarriage of justice are about to be dragged away to execution; the pupil of the wise is exhorted to ‘deliver’ them, by intervening with resistless energy, like the St. Ives of a favourite Breton legend, and testifying to the innocence of the sufferers (see xxxi. 8). He may of course refuse, thinking to pretend afterwards that he had not heard of the case; but God knows all, and will requite falsehood, not perhaps at once, but at a future time, when ‘the lamp of the wicked shall be put out’ (xxiv. 20). The wise men, as we have seen, clung firmly to the doctrine of retribution in some one of its various forms. We are not therefore surprised that a book of proverbs should conclude with a dissuasion from consorting with lawless persons, and an earnest advice to ‘fear Jehovah and the king’ (xxiv. 21).
Much need not be said of the second appendix (xxiv. 23-34). ‘These also are by wise men,’ writes the collector, implying that he is to be distinguished from the editor of the preceding collection. The proverbs are all[[181]] either in two, four, or six lines, except ver. 27, where however it is possible that some words have dropped out.[[182]] At the end comes a parable or apologue professedly drawn from the writer’s experience (reminding us in this of vii. 6-23, but still more of Job v. 3-5). The scene is laid in a vineyard which has run to waste and become a wilderness from the carelessness of its owner (comp. xx. 4). The mashal (xxiv. 30-32) has been lengthened by the addition of two verses from vi. 9, 10, originally no doubt a marginal note. It was needless; the story (if story it can be called) is more vivid in its brevity, and forms a fitting close to this section of proverbial wisdom.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SECOND COLLECTION AND ITS APPENDICES.
The next proverbial anthology (xxv.-xxix.) like its chief predecessor is described in the heading as ‘Proverbs of Solomon.’[[183]] The social state however presupposed in many of them is so different from that of the Solomonic age that we may at once reject the theory of the wise king’s authorship. Another name with which in xxv. 1 the work is connected is that of Hezekiah, who has been suggestively called ‘the Pisistratus of Judah.’ The comparison halts, no doubt; for Pisistratus and his ‘companions’ meant to collect the whole of the Homeric poems, whereas completeness can hardly have been the object of those ‘friends (or counsellors) of Hezekiah’ who ‘collected’[[184]] the ‘Proverbs of Solomon’ in xxv. 2-xxix. 27; at least, we know that there was much proverbial wisdom in circulation which had as good or as bad a claim to be called ‘Solomonic’ as the sayings which they have admitted into their anthology. It may indeed well be doubted whether the compilers had any thought of collecting the relics (now already more than 200 years old) of the wise king. The style of these proverbs makes such a hypothesis even more improbable than in the case of x. 1-xxii. 16. The words with which the heading begins are of course not decisive, especially as the whole verse appears to be due, not to the royal officials who are spoken of, but to the author of the heading in xxiv. 23a (both headings begin with ‘these also’). That Hezekiah was the instigator of the compilation, need not however be disputed. Even if not himself an author,[[185]] he may well have shared his friend Isaiah’s interest in literature; and besides, it was at that time one of the glories of a great king to be the founder of a library.[[186]] The word used in describing the activity of his commissioners means literally ‘transferred’ (from one place to another), and will equally well apply to the noting down of oral traditions and to the making extracts from existing collections. Among the latter, the ‘Proverbs of Solomon’ in x. 1-xxii. 16 are of course to be included, though it is not quite certain whether the compilers of the later anthology had the book before them. It is true that nine proverbs are the same in the two books either absolutely (xxv. 24 = xxi. 9, xxvi. 22 = xviii. 8, xxvii. 12 = xxii. 3, xxvii. 13 = xx. 16) or virtually (xxvi. 13 = xxii. 13, xxvi. 15 = xix. 24, xxviii. 6 = xix. 1, xxviii. 19 = xii. 11, xxix. 13 = xxii. 2), besides two which agree in one line (xxvii. 21 = xvii. 3, xxix. 22 = xv. 18; comp. also xxvii. 15, xix. 13). But there still remains the question, Why the collectors took so little and left so much of manifest antiquity, and to this question we cannot expect to find an answer. All that we can say is that their compilation has striking characteristics of its own. In technicalities they admit a greater variety than those of the first anthology. They allow not only distichs but tristichs (xxv. 8, 13, 20, xxvii. 10, 22, xxviii. 10), tetrastichs (xxv. 4, 5, xxv. 9, 10, xxv. 21, 22, xxvi. 18, 19, xxvi. 24, 25, xxvii. 15, 16), and in one case a pentastich[[187]] (xxv. 6, 7), agreeing in this respect with the two appendices of the first anthology. There is also a long mashal, analogous to some we have had already, which can only with some laxity be called a proverb, and which extends over ten distichs (xxvii. 23-27). With regard to parallelism, the antithetic kind, which predominates in the first ‘Solomonic’ anthology, is rare in this collection, except in chaps. xxviii., xxix.; sometimes indeed there is no parallelism at all (see xxv. 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, xxvi. 18, 19, xxvii. 1, xxix. 12). As a compensation, similitudes abound in the three first chapters of the collection. Sometimes the comparison is expressed, e.g.
As the cold of snow in the heat[[188]] of harvest
is a faithful messenger to those that send him:
he refreshes the soul of his master (xxv. 13);
at other times it is implied by the juxtaposition of the two objects, e.g.
Apples of gold in chased work of silver,