The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom,
i.e. the foundation of true wisdom (its ‘root,’ Ecclus. i. 20) is reverence. The disciple is to begin by taking this upon trust, but when further advanced he will see that it is the shortest way to his goal, true wisdom having an objective existence in the unseen world. At present he is simply to follow the ‘direction’ of those wiser than himself:—our moralist is as zealous for a tōra as the author of Deuteronomy. But though serious and authoritative, he is never stern; indeed, to enforce his appeal he breaks through a Hebrew writer’s usual veil of reticence and describes his own home-life (iv. 3, 4). He can enter into the feelings of the young, for he too has ‘borne the yoke in his youth’ (Lam. iii. 27), and learned to prefer it to ‘unchartered freedom.’ The whole of chap. iv. is devoted to a summary of the wise doctrine which he received from his father; indeed, throughout the book he shows a wonderful appreciation of the parental and the filial relations, and, according to Ewald’s arrangement (see below), begins each section with an exhortation to listen to parental instruction. He himself feels like a father to his young disciples (iv. 1).
The errors to which his hearers are specially tempted are highway robbery (i. 11-18, iv. 16, 17) and unchastity (ii. 16, v. 3-20, vi. 24-35, vii. 5-27, ix. 13-18). From the time that the simplicity of the ancient life began to give way to the inroads of luxury, we meet in the Biblical writings with complaints of acts of violence leading to murder (see, for instance, in the prophecies, Isa. i. 15, v. 7, xxxiii. 15, Mic. iii. 10, Jer. ii. 34, xxii. 17, Isa. lix. 3, 7, and in a collection of proverbs contemporary with our book, Prov. xxiv. 15, 16). ‘At no time,’ as Dean Plumptre well remarks, ‘has Palestine ever risen to the security of a well-ordered police-system;’ even down to the fall of Jerusalem, bands of robbers defied the authority of the central government. The remarkable thing is that young men in the higher circles of society (for such our moralist appears to address) should be thought capable of joining the banditti, at a time when ‘bandit’ could not be synonymous with ‘patriot.’ Our moralist contents himself with dissuading his disciple from doing so, on the ground of the retribution which will follow (i. 18, 19). The exhortation to industry, with its slow but sure profits, comes later, and in a less appropriate place (vi. 6-8). But the other besetting sin of youth is still more earnestly denounced as the most glaring specimen of ‘folly.’ Once indeed the ‘strange, or alien, woman,’ i.e. the adulteress, is introduced dramatically as ‘Madam Folly’ (ix. 13). The picture is remarkable, and forms a designed contrast to that at the beginning of the chapter. She sits at the door of her house, counterfeiting her great rival Wisdom (comp. ver. 14 with ver. 3, and ver. 16 with ver. 4), like Dante’s Siren; but the disciple of the ‘wise man’ knows
... that phantoms are there,
and that her guests are in the depths of Sheól
(ix. 18; comp. ii. 18, xxi. 16).
‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?’ is the problem for our moralist to solve. He does so by insisting on an education conducted in reliance on divine Wisdom. The reward of diligent attention to the earlier lessons (for each chapter is a lesson, and its repetitions have a pedagogic justification) is the famous portrait of Wisdom in viii. 22-31. She (for Wisdom, khokma, is a feminine word) has indeed been mentioned before (i. 20, iii. 13-20, iv. 5-9), but from viii. 1 to ix. 6 the poet is absorbed in his grand personification. Wisdom is now presented to us, in the familiar dialect of poetry, as the firstborn Child of the Creator. There is but one Wisdom; though her forms are many, in her origin she is one. The Wisdom who presided over the ‘birth’ of nature is the same who by her messengers (the ‘wise men’) calls mankind to turn aside from evil (ix. 3). There can therefore be no real disharmony between nature and morality; the picture leaves no room for an Ahriman, in this and other respects resembling the Cosmogony in Gen. i. and portions of the striking descriptions in Job xxvi., xxviii., xxxviii. There is also no time when we can say that ‘Wisdom was not.’ Faith declares that even in that primitive Chaos of which our reason has a horror divine Wisdom reigned supreme. The heavenly ocean, the ancient hills, the combination of countless delicate atoms to form the ground, the fixing of the vault of heaven on the world-encircling ocean, the separation of sea and dry land[[222]]—all these were later works of God than the Architect through whom He made them. And how did the Architect work? By a ‘divine improvisation’ which allowed no sense of effort or fatigue, and which still continues with unabated freshness. But though her sportive path[[223]] can still be traced in the processes of nature, her highest delight is in the regeneration of the moral life of humanity. The passage runs thus—
Jehovah produced[[224]] me as the beginning of his way,
as the first of his works, long since.
From of old I received my place,