Fire is never satisfied with fuel; nor the ocean with rivers; nor death with all creatures; nor bright-eyed women with men.
The verses are of course older than the trumpery story of the cowherd’s wife which they serve to illustrate. The coincidence with the Hebrew, being obviously accidental, is worth remembering in other connections. The two parallels, present in the Hebrew but not in this Sanskrit quaternion, are given in a quatrain of a Vedic hymn to Varuna—
The path of ships across the sea,
The soaring eagle’s flight he knows.[[216]]
The second appendix (xxxi. 1-9) consists of a single group of sayings, described as ‘the words of Lemuel, a king, the prophecy [better the proverb, reading māshāl] with which his mother instructed him.’ Possibly, as Ewald suggests, Lemuel (or rather, Lemoel, as the word is pointed in ver. 4) is an imaginary name, descriptive of the character of an ideal monarch (‘God’s own;’ comp. Lael, Num. iii. 24). It is not necessary to suppose that the poet himself lived under a native king; he may, like the author of Koheleth, have thrown himself back in imagination to Israel’s golden prime. His own period was late, judging from the unclassical Hebrew (notice the Aramaisms in vv. 2, 3, and the strange expressions in vv. 5, 8). The form of the heading suggests that these ‘words of Lemuel’ formed part of the same collection as the ‘words of Agur;’ and there is at least nothing in the contents to forbid this view. The warnings of this queen-mother[[217]] (whose relation to Lemuel reminds us of that of Bathsheba to Solomon) are very homely and practical; one is against sensuality, another against drunkenness; upon which follows an admonition to defend the cause of the poor. Even if there were no native king at the time, the advice would be appropriate for all members of the upper class of society.
The third appendix (xxxi. 10-31) contains the praise of the virtuous woman. In style it is quite unlike the two preceding sections; it must come therefore from another source. It is an alphabetic poem; each distich begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This, combined with the position of the work at the close of the various collections of proverbs, of itself suggests a date not far removed on the one side or the other from the Exile period, when Hebrew literature became undoubtedly more artificial and technical. From xxxi. 23 (‘the elders of the land’) we may perhaps infer that it was written in Palestine. It is very interesting to see the ideal of womanhood formed by a late Hebrew poet. Activity appears to him the one great feminine virtue—not however the activity which is entirely devoted to trifling details, for the ideal woman ‘is like the ships of the merchant; from far she brings her food’ (ver. 14). Nor is she a stranger to sympathetic impulses; ‘she holds out her hand (with something in it) to the afflicted, and stretches forth her hands to the needy [to bring them in],’ ver. 20. Nor must we forget ‘one of the most beautiful features in the portrait’ (Delitzsch): ‘she opens her mouth with wisdom, and a law of kindness is on her tongue’ (ver. 26). But for this verse, indeed, it would read almost like satire that ‘far above pearls is her value’ (ver. 10), since no higher estimate than this has been offered for God’s choicest blessing, ‘Wisdom.’[[218]]
The poet does not say that he has found such a woman (comp. Eccles. vii. 28). The picture is perhaps too brightly coloured to be drawn from reality, unless with Hitzig we bring down the composition of the poem as late as the Greek period. Most probably, it is idealistic.
CHAPTER V.
THE PRAISE OF WISDOM.
‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now,’ for ‘good wine’ well describes the glorious little treatise at the head of our Book of Proverbs (i. 7-ix. 18). I do not think it is right to infer from the heading in i. 1 that its unknown author assumed the mask of Solomon. In itself such a hypothesis would not be incredible. We have the analogy of the Egyptian scribe who represents Amenemhat I. ‘rising up like a god’ and addressing to his son some instructions on the royal art of governing.[[219]] But it is more natural to explain the heading as a repetition of the formula in x. 1, for the ‘Praise of Wisdom’ (to coin another title) is in fact the introduction to the following anthology,[[220]] together with which and its appendices it forms the ‘older book of Proverbs.’ If we ask why an introduction was prefixed, the answer must be that the writer wished to recommend his own inspiring view of practical ethics as a branch of divine wisdom; in other words, to counteract the sometimes commonplace morality of the earlier proverbs by enveloping the reader in a purer and more ethereal atmosphere. The key-note of the anthology is nothing but Experience; that of the introductory treatise is Divine Teaching. It is a sign of moral progress that the editor of an anthology of Experience should have thought his work only half-done till he had prefixed the ‘Praise of Wisdom.’ As a wise teacher of our own time[[221]] has observed, ‘It would not be untrue to say that in all essential points Experience is the teacher only of fools, of those who have gone astray through turning a deaf ear to the voice of a prior and more legitimate teacher.’ The nature of the wisdom so earnestly commended by this self-forgetting writer, we will consider presently; and our study will probably convince us that such a writer can only have arisen at an advanced period of Israel’s history. The class or circle to which he belonged, and its characteristics, can easily be determined; but the precise period only with some degree of hesitation. Without anticipating the discussion which will be given at another point, I think it may safely be laid down that each of those kindred poems—the ‘Praise of Wisdom’ and ‘Job’—must have arisen at one of three periods, marked respectively by the composition of Deuteronomy, by the Captivity, and by the Restoration. The progress of the higher Israelitish wisdom was so gradual that it does not perhaps, to the exegete as distinguished from the historian, greatly matter which of these periods we select. For my own part, however, I incline to connect at any rate the former of these works with the age of Deuteronomy. Apart from the details to be mentioned elsewhere, it is clear (I speak now of Prov. i.-ix.) that the tone of the exhortations, and the view of religion as ‘having the promise of the life that now is,’ correspond to similar characteristics of the Book of Deuteronomy. And if we turn from the contents to the form of this choice little book, the same hypothesis seems equally suitable. The prophets had long since seen the necessity of increasing their influence by committing the main points of their discourses to writing; some rhetorical passages indeed were evidently composed to be read and not to be heard. It was natural that the moralists should follow this example, not only (as in the anthologies) by remodelling their wise sayings for publication, but also by venturing on long and animated quasi-oratorical recommendations of great moral truths.
Such a recommendation, addressed especially to the young and impressionable (i. 4), lies before us in chaps. i.-ix. In grave but harmonious accents the opening verses (which refer chiefly to i. 7-ix. 18, but not without a secondary reference to the anthology which follows) describe its object and character. Then follows a motto, the first line of which occurs again near the close of the book in ix. 10 (Job xxviii. 28, Ps. cxi. 10), and which stamps the author as belonging to a new and more religious class of ‘wise men’ (see p. [121]),—