I said that Koheleth was too pessimistic to remain long under the

influence of hedonism. I might have said that he was too thoughtful; a

rational man could not, without the anticipations of faith, close his

mind to the suggestions of pessimism in the circumstances of Koheleth’s

age. Better thoughtful misery than thoughtless mirth, is the keynote of

the triad of maxims (vii. 2-6) on the compensations of misery which

follows the dreary sentence praising death, in vii. 1.[308] Resignation

is the secret of inward peace; ‘with a sad face the heart may be

cheerful.’ Not only in view of the great problem of existence, but in

your everyday concerns, restrain your natural impulses whether to

towering passion or to brooding vexation at the wrongness or the

slowness of the course of human affairs (vii. 8, 9). Above all, do not

give way to an ignorant idealism. It is unwise to ask ‘How is it that

the former days were better than these?’ (vii. 10.) The former time, so

bright and happy, and the present, with its predominant gloom, were

alike ordained by God (vii. 13 should follow vii. 10); and as a last

consolation for cool and rational thinkers, be sure that there is nought

to fear after death; there are no torments of Gehenna. This in fact is

the reason why God ordains evil; there being no second life, man must

learn whatever he can from calamity in this life.

On a good day be of good cheer, and on an evil day consider (this):

God hath also made this (viz. good) equally with that (evil), on the

ground that man is to experience nothing at all hereafter[309] (vii.

14; comp. ix. 10).

Thus, not only ‘be not righteous over much’ (vii. 16), but ‘do not

believe over much’ is the teaching of our rationalist-thinker. There is

neither good nor evil after death. But is there no _present_ judgment?

Yes; but this is not a thought of life and hope. It is a true ‘religion’

to him; it binds him in his words as well as his actions. But although

Hooker so admired the saying in v. 2 (‘God is in heaven, and thou upon

earth, therefore let thy words be few’) as to quote it in one of his

finest passages,[310] yet the context of v. 2 sufficiently shows how

different was the quality of the reverence of the two writers. Be

careful to pay thy vows, says Koheleth, lest when thou invokest God’s

name, His angel should appear, and call thee to account.

Suffer not thy mouth to bring punishment upon thy body; and say not

before the angel, It was an oversight;[311] wherefore should God be

angry at thy voice, and destroy the work of thy hands?’ (v. 6.)

To Koheleth the mention of the divine name is a possible source of

danger; to Hooker God is One ‘whom to know is life, and joy to make

mention of his name.’ Koheleth has only fear for God’s holy name—a fear

which is not indeed ineffectual but very pale and cheerless; Hooker, a

‘perpetual fear and love,’ and the love gives a new quality and a new

efficacy to the fear.

Footnote 307:

Hitzig in his commentary refers to the history of the high priest

Onias and his nephew Joseph. Afterwards he recalled this opinion; but

we may be thankful to him for directing attention to this curious and

instructive historical episode.

Footnote 308:

The mechanical juxtaposition of the two halves of ver. 1 is obvious.

The proverb gains considerably, if read with Bickell’s very plausible

supplements,

‘Better is a good name than precious ointment,

[but wisdom is still better than fame;

better is not-being than being]

and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.’

The ‘wisdom’ meant will be that of resignation and renunciation.

Footnote 309:

‘Hereafter’ is, literally, ‘after him’ (for the meaning of which see

iii. 22, vi. 12); ‘experience,’ literally ‘find’ (comp. Prov. vi. 33).

For other views, see Wright, who objects to the above explanation that

it ‘is opposed to the teaching of Koheleth respecting a future

judgment.’ But the question is, Did Koheleth believe in a future

judgment?

Footnote 310:

_Eccles. Polity_, i, 2, § 3.

Footnote 311:

There is a touch of humour here; comp. the wretch in the fable who

called Death to his aid, but refused him when he came. Klostermann has

done well in reviving this interpretation, which, in Germany at least,

had been generally abandoned. (Delitzsch thinks the ‘angel’ is the

priest whom the man who has vowed approaches with a request to be

released from his vow. This is supported by Mal. ii. 7, where the

priest is called ‘the messenger of Jehovah Sabáoth;’ but see the notes

of Ginsburg and Kingsbury. Renan renders, _à l’envoyé des prêtres_.)

The angel is the destroying angel, whose action is discerned by faith

in the judicial calamities which, sometimes at least, overtake the

wrong-doer. (So the Targum, but postponing the appearance of the angel

to the _future_ judgment.)

CHAPTER IV.

FACTS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE.

At vii. 15 a new section begins, consisting almost entirely of the

author’s personal experiences, very loosely connected; it continues as

far as ix. 12. A curious passage at the outset appears to describe

virtue as residing in the mean between two extremes (vii. 15-18). The

appearance however is deceptive: it is as much out of place to quote

Aristotle’s famous definition of virtue (μεσότης δύο κακιῶν), as

Buddha’s counsel to him who would attain perfection to ‘exercise himself

in the medium course of discipline.’ Koheleth merely offers practical

advice how to steer one’s ship between the rocks. Do not, he says, make

your life a burden by excessive legalism. But on the other hand, do not

earn the reputation of caring nothing for the precepts of the law. That

were folly, and would bring you to an early death.[312] Koheleth

expresses this sharply and enigmatically; do not be too ‘righteous,’ and

do not be too ‘wicked.’ ‘Righteous’ and ‘wicked’ are both to be taken in

the common acceptation of those terms in the religious world: the words

are used ironically. Our author’s only theory of virtue is that no

theory is possible. The ‘wisdom’ which both gives ‘defence’ and

‘preserves life’ (vii. 12) is the practical wisdom of resignation and

moderation. Of essential wisdom (or philosophy as we should call

it[313]) he says, alluding to Job xxviii. 12-23, that it is ‘far off,

and exceeding deep; who can find it out?’ (vii. 24.) The old theory,

which claimed to give the secret of history, and which even afterwards

satisfied some wise men (e.g. Sirach)—the theory that the good are

rewarded and the bad punished in this world—is not borne out by

Koheleth’s experience,—

There is (many) a righteous man who perishes in spite of his

righteousness, and there is (many) an ungodly man who lives long in

spite of his wickedness (vii. 15; contrast the interpolated passage

viii. 12, 13).

But though Koheleth, like Job, despairs of essential wisdom, he ‘turns’

with hope to the wide field of wisdom—or, as he calls it, ‘wisdom and

reasoning,’ i.e. moral inquiries pursued on the inductive method. And

what is the result of his inquiry? He gives it with much deliberateness,

stating that he (viz. ‘_the_ Koheleth,’ see on xii. 8) has put one fact

to another in order to form a conclusion (ver. 27) and it is that

women-tempters are more pernicious than Death (man’s great enemy

personified, as so often). Or, putting it in other words, which I am

forced to paraphrase to bring out their meaning—words to which the

well-known poem of Simonides is chivalry itself—‘A few rare specimens of

uncorrupted human nature I have found, so rare that one may reckon them

as one among a thousand; but not one of these truly human creatures was

a woman.’[314] The latter statement is the stronger, and shows that our

author agrees with Ecclus. xxv. 19, that ‘all wickedness is but little

to the wickedness of a woman.’ And so much in earnest is he, that he

even tries a third mode of expressing his conclusion. Carefully limiting

himself he says, ‘Lo! this only have I found; that God made mankind

upright, but they have sought out many contrivances’ (ver. 29); that is,

men and women are both born good, but are too soon sophisticated by

civilisation (and the leaders in this downward process, we may infer

from the context, are the women). Koheleth scarcely means to imply that

civilisation is bad in itself; if he does, the few good men he has met

must apparently have been hermits! But though not essentially immoral,

the inventive or contriving faculty (so wonderful to Sophocles) seems to

Koheleth the chief source of moral danger.

But are these the only results of Koheleth’s wide induction from the

facts of contemporary life? Yes; a time such as this ‘when man rules

over man to his hurt’ (viii. 9) suggests, not only prudential maxims,

but this sad conclusion, already (vii. 15) mentioned by anticipation,

that the fate proper to the wicked falls upon the righteous, and that

proper to the righteous on the wicked (viii. 14), or to express this in

the concrete,

And in accordance with this I have seen ungodly men honoured, and

that too in the holy place (i.e. the temple; comp. Isa. xviii. 7);

but those who had acted rightly had to depart and were forgotten in

the city. This too is vanity[315] (viii. 10).

No wonder that wickedness is rampant! It requires singular courage to do

right when Nemesis delays her visit; or, as Koheleth puts it, in

language which sorely displeased a later editor,

Because sentence against a wicked work is not executed speedily,

therefore men have abundant courage to do evil. For I know that it

even happens that a sinner does evil for a long time, and yet lives

long, whilst he who fears before God is short-lived as a shadow

(viii. 12, 13).

Koheleth does not, of course, include himself among the reckless

evil-doers. He acquiesces in the painful inconsistencies of the world,

and seems to comfort himself with the relatively best good—‘to eat and

drink and be merry’ (viii. 15). Charity may perhaps suggest that this is

not said without bitter irony.

Then follows a clumsy but affecting passage (viii. 16, 17) on the

uselessness of brooding (as the author had so long done) over the

mysteries of human life, which introduces the concluding part of the

section (ix. 1-12). These twelve verses are full of a restrained

passion. Such being the unfree condition of man that he cannot even

govern his sympathies and antipathies, and so regardless of moral

distinctions the course of destiny, and there being no hereafter,[316]

what remains but to take such pleasure as life—especially wedded

life—can offer, and to carry out one’s plans with energy? Yet, alas! it

is only too true that neither success nor freedom of action can be

reckoned upon, for ‘the race is not to the swift,’ and men are ‘snared’

like the fishes and the birds.

The section which begins at ix. 13 is of still more varied contents. It

begins with a striking little story about the ‘poor wise man,’ a

Themistocles in common life, ‘who by his wisdom delivered the city, and

no one remembered that poor man’ (ix. 14, 15). Surely here (as in iv.

13, 14, viii. 10) we catch the echo of contemporary history. It is not a

generalisation (comp. Prov. xxi. 22), but a fact which the author gives

us, and it may plausibly be conjectured that he was the ‘poor wise man’

himself. The rest of the section (down to x. 15) contains proverbs on

wisdom and folly, and some bitterly ironical remarks on the exaltation

of servants and burden-bearers[317] above the rich and the princely.

Footnote 312:

As Plumptre well remarks, the vices thought of and the end to which

they lead are those of sensual license (comp. Prov. vii. 25-27).

Footnote 313:

In Koheleth’s phrase, ‘that which is;’ comp. Wisd. vii. 17-21, where

‘the infallible knowledge of the things that are’ is equivalent to a

perfect natural science. Here a similar phrase means rather

philosophy.

Footnote 314:

So Klostermann. The ordinary interpretation is, ‘One man among a

thousand (men) I have found, but a woman among all these I have not

found;’ i.e. I have tested a thousand men and a thousand women; I have

found one true man, but not one true woman. The objection is that

_’ādām_ elsewhere (e.g. ver. 29) means human beings without

distinction of sex.

Footnote 315:

Following Bickell. In viii. 10 it is the linguistic form, and in viii.

12, 13 the contents of the Massoretic text which excite suspicion. The

former verse is thus rendered by Delitzsch, ‘And then I have seen the

wicked buried, and they entered into (their ‘perpetual house,’ the

grave): but they that had done right had to depart (into exile) from

the holy place (Jerusalem; cf. II. Isa. xlviii. 2), and were forgotten

out of the city: this too is vanity.’

Footnote 316:

The view expressed in ix. 10 is, I hope, very far from being the

private belief of the many preachers who are accustomed to quote it.

See the chapter on Ecclesiastes from a religious point of view.

Footnote 317:

Correcting the text in x. 6 with A. Krochmal.

CHAPTER V.

THE WISE MAN’S PARTING COUNSELS.

A new section begins at x. 16—no ingenuity avails to establish a

connection with the preceding verses. We are approaching our goal, and

breathe a freer air. From the very first the ideas and images presented

to us are in a healthier and more objective tone. The condemnation

expressed in ver. 16 does credit to the public spirit of the writer,

and, I need hardly say, is not really inconsistent (as Hitzig supposed)

with the advice in ver. 20. In the words—

Even among thine acquaintance[318] curse not the king, and in thy

bedchambers curse not the rich; for the birds of the heaven may

carry the voice [comp. the cranes of Ibycus] and that which hath

wings may report the word—

Dean Plumptre perhaps rightly sees ‘the irony of indignation’ which

‘veils itself in the garb of a servile prudence.’ There is no necessity

to reduce Koheleth to the moral level of Epicurus, who is said to have

deliberately preferred despotism and approved courting the monarch.

It is a still freer spirit which breathes in the remainder of the book.

Let courtiers waste their time in luxury (x. 18), but throw thou thyself

unhesitatingly into the swift stream of life. Be not ever forecasting,

for there are some contingencies which can no more be guarded against

than the falling of rain or of a tree (xi. 3, 4). Act boldly, then, like

the corn-merchants, who speculate on such a grand scale,—

Send forth thy bread upon the wide waters [lit. upon the face of the

waters], for thou mayst find it [i.e. obtain a good return for it]

after many days (xi. 1).

But since fortune is capricious, do not risk thine all on a single

venture. ‘Ships are but boards, sailors but men’ &c., as Shylock says.

Divide thy merchandise, and so, if one vessel is wrecked or plundered,

much may still be saved; or—another possible interpretation—store thy

property in various hiding-places, so that, in case of some political

revolution, thine all may not be taken from thee,—

Make seven portions, and also eight; for thou knowest not what evil

shall be upon the earth (or, the land) (xi. 2).

This is not, of course, the usual explanation of these two verses, which

are enigmas fairly admitting of more than one solution. Most

commentators understand them as recommending beneficence, which ver. 2

requires to be of extensive range, and which ver. 1 compares to cakes of

bread thrown upon the water, and gathered up no one knows by whom. So

perhaps (besides Rashi, Aben Ezra, Ginsburg &c.) Goethe in the

_Westöstliche Divan_—

Was willst du untersuchen

Wohin die Milde fliesst!

Ins Wasser wirf dein Kuchen—

Wer weiss wer sie geniesst![319]

I do not think that this suits the context, which suggests activity and

caution as the two good qualities recommended by Koheleth. But it is

very possible that the proverb was a popular one which the author took

up, giving it a fresh application.

Such is the author’s parting advice to the elder part of his

readers,—not very elevated, but not without a breath of courageous faith

(xi. 5). Not that he has given up his advocacy of pleasure. Side by side

with work, a man should cherish, even to the very last, all those

sources of joy which God Himself has provided, remembering the long dark

days which await him in Sheól. Then, at ver. 9, he addresses the young,

and in measured distichs intreats them to enjoy life while they may.

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,

and let thy heart gladden thee in the flower of thine age;

and walk in the ways of thy heart

and according to the sight of thine eyes;

And banish discontent from thy heart,

and put away evil from thy flesh:—

for youth and the prime of life are vanity.

Between lines 4 and 5 we find the received text burdened with a prosaic

insertion, which is probably not due to an after-thought on the part of

the writer, but to the anxiety of later students to rescue the orthodoxy

of the book. The insertion consists of the words, Rabbinic in expression

as well as in thought, ‘But know that for all this God will bring thee

into the judgment.’[320] It was the wisdom of true charity to insert

them; but it is our wisdom as literary students to ‘banish discontent’

with the discord which they introduce by restoring the passage to its

original form.

At this point Koheleth turns away from the young to those (presumably)

of his own age. Again there are traces at least of a series of distichs

which must once have stood here, but either the author or one of his

editors, or both, have so far worked over them that the series is no

longer perfect. The first suspected instance of this ‘overworking’

occurs at the very outset. ‘Remember thy Creator in the flower of thine

age,’ are the opening words of Koheleth’s second address. They are

usually explained as taking up the idea of the last judgment expressed

at the close of xi. 9. ‘Since God,’ to quote Dr. Ginsburg’s paraphrase,

‘will one day hold us accountable for all the works done in the body, we

are to set the Lord always before our eyes.’ The importance of this

passage, when thus interpreted, is manifest. It suggests that Koheleth

had struggled through his many difficulties to an assured doctrinal and

practical position, and that it is not mere rejoicing, but ‘rejoicing in

the Lord,’ that Koheleth recommends in xii. 1—an edifying view of the

old man’s final result which every one must desire to be true if only it

be consistent with the rest of the book. I fear that this is not the

case. Elsewhere in the book sensuous pleasure in moderation is praised

without any reference to God, and in the immediate neighbourhood of this

verse the motive given for rejoicing is not the thought of God, but that

of the many days of darkness (i.e. of Sheól) which are coming. Besides,

the exhortation ‘Remember thy Creator’ does not perfectly suit the close

of the verse, or indeed of the section. What is the natural inference

from the fact that at an advanced age life becomes physically a burden?

Surely this—that man should enjoy life while his powers are fresh.

Cannot an _old man_ ‘remember’ his Creator? (To ‘remember’ is to think

upon; it is not a synonym for conversion.) The text therefore is almost

certainly incorrect.

Has an editor, then, tampered with the text of the opening words of the

exhortation? May we, for instance, follow Grätz and read, for _bōr’éka_

‘thy Creator,’ _bōr’ka_ ‘thy fountain’ (lit. thy cistern), taking this

as a metaphorical expression for ‘thy wife’ or ‘thy wedlock’ (as in

Prov. v. 15-18)? The objection certain to be raised is that the text

when thus corrected brings the book to a lame and impotent conclusion.

It may be true, as Bishop Temple has said, that chastity and monotheism

are the chief legacies which the Jewish Church has bequeathed to

mankind.[321] There is nothing in an exhortation to prize a pure married

life unworthy of a high-minded Jewish teacher. But in this connection it

is certainly to a Western reader strange, and one is sorely tempted to

suppose a displacement of the words, and, following Bickell, to make the

distich—

And remember thy fountain

in the flower of thine age—

the conclusion of the stanzas beginning at xi. 9. This, it is true,

involves (1) the excision of the words ‘for youth and the prime of life

are vanity,’ and (2) an alteration of the construction of xii. 1, 2

(reading ‘and evil days shall come’ &c.). This violent change is no

doubt justified by Bickell on metrical grounds, but as I cannot

unreservedly adopt his metrical theory, I have not sufficient excuse for

accepting his rearrangement of the text.

I wish some better remedy than that of Grätz could be devised. I would

gladly close these Meditations with admiration as well as sympathy. But

at the risk of being called unimaginative, I must venture to criticise

the entire conclusion of the original Book of Koheleth (xii. 1-7). Most

English critics admire the poem on the evils of old age which follows on

the earnest ‘Remember,’ and naturally think that it requires some

specially sublime saying to introduce it. I do not join them in their

admiration, and consequently find it easier to adopt what seems to some

the ‘low view’ of Dr. Grätz. Observe that we have already met with an

eulogy of wedded bliss side by side with a gloomy picture of death in an

earlier section (ix. 9, 10).

This is the poem (if we may call it so) with which the second

exhortation of Koheleth is interwoven—

Ere the evil days come, and the years approach

of which thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them:

Ere the sun be darkened, and the light, and the moon, and the stars,

and the clouds keep returning after heavy rains [_the winter rains_,

i.e. old age]:

In the day when the keepers of the house [_the hands and arms_]

tremble,

and the strong men [_the feet and legs_] bow themselves,

and the grinding-maids [_the teeth_] cease because they are few,

and the (ladies) who look out at the lattice [_the eyes_] are

darkened:

And the doors [_the lips_] are shut towards the street,

while the sound of the grinding is low,

And the voice riseth into a sparrow’s [‘_childish treble_’]

and all the daughters of song [_words_] are faint.

They are afraid too of a steep place,

and terror besets every way;

and the almond-tree is in bloom [_white hair_[322]],

and the locust drags itself along,

and the caper-berry fails [_to excite the appetite_],

For the man is on the way to his eternal home,

and the mourners go about in the street.

Ere the silver string [_the tongue_] be tied,

and the golden bowl [_the head_] break,

and the pitcher [_the heart_] be shivered at the fountain,

and the windlass [_the breathing apparatus_] break into the pit.

With a little determination the traces of development in the Biblical

literature can be more or less effaced. The pious but unphilological

editors of Koheleth were not deficient in this quality. After altering

the introduction of the poem on old age they proceeded to furnish it

with a _finale_. Not only the opening words of ver. i., but the

comfortless expression ‘his eternal house’[323] in ver. 5 gave them

serious offence. One remedy would have been to transpose (with the

Syriac translator) two of the letters of the Hebrew, and thus change

‘home of his eternity’ into ‘home of his travail’ (i.e. the place where

‘the weary are at rest’). They preferred, however, to add two lines—

and the dust return to the earth as it was,

and the spirit return unto God who gave it.

This no doubt is a direct contradiction of iii. 21. But the ancients

probably got over this, as most moderns still do, by supposing that the

earlier passage did but express a sceptical suggestion which skimmed the

surface of Koheleth’s mind.

The excision of these words would of course not be justified in a

translation intended for popular use; but for the purposes of historical

study seems almost inevitable. It hangs together with the view adopted

as to the origin of xi. 9_b_, and implies the assumption that the Targum

rightly paraphrases, ‘and thy spirit (lit. thy breath, _nishm’thāk_)

will return to stand in judgment before the Lord who gave it thee.’ It

ought to be mentioned, however, that some critics (accepting the clause

as genuine) see in that return to God nothing more than the absorption

of the human spirit into the divine (whether in a naïve popular or in a

developed philosophical sense).[324] This will seem plausible at first

to many readers. As a Lutheran writer says, ‘Si spes, quam nos fovemus

lætissimam, Ecclesiastæ adfulsisset, non obiter ipse tetigisset et

verbis ambiguis notasset rem maximi momenti’ (Winzer, ap. Hengstenberg).

But if the Hebrew _rūakh_ means, as I think it does, the personal,

conscious, spiritual side of man in iii. 21,[325] I fail to see why it

should not bear that meaning here.

Footnote 318:

Altering the points with Klostermann.

Footnote 319:

But Goethe may have thought of the Turkish proverb, ‘Do good, throw

the loaf into the water; if the fish knows it not, the Creator does,’

or the story from the life of the Caliph Mutewekyil [Mutawakkil?]

quoted, with this proverb, from H. F. v. Diez by Dukes, _Rabbinische

Blumenlese_, pp. 73-74. Comp. also the stories in the Midrash Koheleth

on our passage.

Footnote 320:

What judgment? Present or future (i.e. after death)? The latter gives

a more forcible meaning (comp. iii. 17, xii. 14).

Footnote 321:

_Essays and Reviews_ (1869), pp. 15-17.

Footnote 322:

Does the eastern sun blanch the ‘crimson broidery’ of the

almond-blossom? From the language of travellers like Thomson and

Bodenstedt it would seem so.

Footnote 323:

The Hebrew _’ōlām_ here expresses perpetuity (comp. Jer. li. 39, Ps.

cxliii. 51, Ezek. xxvi. 20), not (as some moderns, after Aben Ezra)

long continuance. It is true, that in the Targum of Isa. xlii. 11 an

exit from the ‘eternal house’ is spoken of; but no one doubts that the

belief in the Resurrection was general in the fourth century A.D.

Footnote 324:

Mr. Tyler interprets it in a Stoic sense of absorption in the

World-Soul.

Footnote 325:

Nowack denies this meaning of _rūakh_ altogether, but this seems a

_Gewaltstreich_.

CHAPTER VI.

KOHELETH’S ‘PORTRAIT OF OLD AGE;’ THE EPILOGUE, ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN.

We have now arrived at the conclusion of the meditations of our

much-tried thinker. It is strongly poetic in colouring; but when we

compare it with the grandly simple overture of the book (i. 4-8), can we

help confessing to a certain degree of disappointment? It is the

allegory which spoils it for modern readers, and so completely spoils

it, that attempts have been sometimes made to expel the allegorical

element altogether. That the first two verses are free from allegory, is

admitted, and it is barely possible that the sixth verse may be so

too—may be, that is, figurative rather than allegorical. Poets have

delighted in these figures; how fitly does one of them adorn the lament

in Woolner’s _My Beautiful Lady_,—

Broken the golden bowl

Which held her hallowed soul!

The most doubtful part, then, is the description in vv. 3-5. I am not

writing a commentary, and will venture to express an opinion in favour

of the allegorists (it is not fair to call them satirically the

anatomists).[326] It is true that there is much variety of opinion among

them; this only shows that the allegory is sometimes far-fetched, not

that it is a vain imagination. Can there be anything more obscure than

the _canzoni_ in Dante’s _Convito_, which we have the poet’s own

authority for regarding as allegorical? And if we compare the rival

theories with that which they attempt to displace, can it be said that

Taylor’s dirge-theory,[327] or Umbreit’s storm-theory,[328] or that

adopted by Wright from Wetzstein[329] is more suitable to the poem than

the allegorical theory? Certainly the latter is a very old, if not the

oldest theory, and on a point of this sort the ancients have some claim

to be deferred to. They seem to have felt instinctively that the

intellectual atmosphere of Koheleth (as well as of the Chronicler) was

that of the later Judaism. The following story is related in a Talmudic

treatise.[330] ‘The Emperor asked R. Joshua ben Hananyah, “How is it

that you do not go to the house of Abidan (a place of learned

discussions)?” He said to him, “The mountain is snow (my head is white);

the hoar frosts surround me (my whiskers and my beard are also hoary);

its dogs do not bark (I have lost my wonted power of voice); its millers

do not grind (I have no teeth); the scholars ask me whether I am looking

for something I have not lost (referring probably to the old man feeling

here and there).”’

Once more (see i. 2) the mournful motto, ‘Vanity of vanities! saith the

Koheleth; all is vanity’ (xii. 8), and the book in its original form

closes.[331] Did the author himself attach this motto? Surely not, if

the preceding words on the return of the spirit to its God (see above,

on iii. 21) are genuine, for then ‘Vanity of vanities’ would be a patent

misrepresentation. All is _not_ ‘vanity,’ if there is in human nature a

point connecting a man with that world, most distant and yet most near,

where in the highest sense God is. If Koheleth wrote xii. 7_b_, he

cannot have written xii. 8, any more than the author of the _Imitation_

could have written _Vanitas vanitatum_ both on his first page and on his

last. Yet who but Koheleth can be responsible for it? For the later

editors of whom I have spoken, would be far from approving such a

reversal of the great charter of man’s dignity in the eighth Psalm. To

me, the motto simply says that all Koheleth’s wanderings had but brought

him back to the point from which he started. ‘Grandissima vanità,’ as

Castelli, in his dignified Italian, puts it, ‘tutto è vanità.’ All that

I can assign to the editors in this verse are the parenthetic words

‘saith the Koheleth.’ Everywhere else we find ‘Koheleth;’ here alone,

and perhaps vii. 17 (corrected text), ‘the Koheleth.’[332]

Let us now consider the Epilogue itself.

And moreover (it should be said) that Koheleth was a wise man;

further, he taught the people wisdom, and weighed and made search,

(yea) composed many proverbs. Koheleth sought to find out pleasant

words, and he wrote down[333] plainly words of truth. The words of

the wise are like goads, and like nails well driven in; the members

of the assemblies[334] have [in the case of Ecclesiastes] given them

forth from another shepherd.[335] And as for all beyond them, my

son, be warned; of making many books there is no end, and much study

is a weariness of the flesh.—That which the word ‘all is vanity’

comes to:[336] it is understood (thus), Fear God, and keep His

commandments. For this (concerns) every man. For every work shall

God bring into the judgment (which shall be) upon all that is

concealed and all that is manifest, whether it be good or whether it

be evil.

This translation has not been reached without some emendations of the

text. It seems to me that everything in this Epilogue ought to be clear.

There is but one verse which contains figurative expressions; the rest

is simple prose. It is only fair, however, to give one of the current

renderings of those verses in which an emendation has been attempted

above.

Koheleth sought to find out pleasant words and that which was

written down frankly, words of truth. Words of wise men are like

goads, and like nails driven in are those which form collections

[or, the well-compacted sayings, Ewald; or, the well-stored ones,

Kamphausen]—they have been given by one shepherd.... Final result,

all having been heard:—Fear God and keep His commandments, for this

(concerns) every man.[337]

The first scholar to declare against the genuineness of the Epilogue was

Döderlein (_Scholia in libros V. T. poeticos_, 1779), who was followed

by Bertholdt (_Einleitung_, p. 2250 &c.), Umbreit, Knobel, and De

Jong.[338] It was however a Jewish scholar, Nachman Krochmal,[339] who

first developed an elaborate theory to account for the Epilogue.

According to him, it was added at the final settlement of the Canon at

the Synod of Jamnia, A.D. 90, and was intended as a conclusion not

merely for Ecclesiastes, but for the entire body of Hagiographa. He

thinks (but without any historical ground) that Ecclesiastes was added

at that time to close the Canon. The correctness of this view depends

partly on its author’s interpretation of vv. 11, 12, partly on his

definition of the object of the Synod of Jamnia (see Appendix.) The two

former verses are condensed thus,

The words of the wise are like ox-goads, and the members of the

Sanhedrin are like firm nails, not to be moved. As for more than

these, beware, my son; of making many books there is no end.

The ‘wise’ spoken of, thinks Krochmal, are the authors of the several

books of the Hagiographa, and the warning in ver. 12 is directed against

the reception of any other books into the Canon. Whether the Song of

Solomon and Ecclesiastes were to be admitted, was, according to him, a

subject of debate at the Synod referred to.

But there is no necessity whatever for this interpretation of vv. 11,

12. The phrase, ‘the words of the wise,’ is not a fit description of all

the books of the Hagiographa (of Psalms, Daniel, and Chronicles for

instance), and the warning in ver. 12 more probably has relation to the

proverbial literature in general, such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and

the Wisdom of Sirach, or at least to the Book of Proverbs, to which

Kleinert conjectures that Ecclesiastes once formed an appendix. There is

nothing in the Epilogue to suggest a reference to the Canon. The ‘many

books’ spoken of are probably such as did not proceed from thoroughly

orthodox sources. We have absolutely no information as to Jewish

literature outside the Canon. That there was a heterodox literature, has

been inferred by Ewald from Jer. viii. 8, Prov. xxx. 1-4; it is also

clear from several passages in the Book of Enoch. Tyler and Plumptre may

possibly be right in seeing here an allusion to the incipient influence

of Greek literature upon the Jews. This is at any rate more justifiable

than to assume an arrangement of the Hagiographa with Ecclesiastes for

the closing book for which there is no ancient testimony.

Krochmal’s ingenious theory has, however, been adopted by Jost, Grätz

and Renan,[340] though Renan is willing to admit that vv. 9, 10 may be

from the pen of the author himself. ‘Cet épilogue complète bien la

fiction qui fait la base du livre. Quel motif d’ailleurs eût amené à

faire postérieurement une telle addition?’[341] I do not myself hold

with Krochmal, but vv. 9-12 seem to me to hang together, and I do not

think that the author himself would be at the pains to destroy his own

fiction, whereas a later editor would naturally append the corrective

statement that the real Koheleth was not a king, but a wise man.

(Observe too that ‘Koheleth’ in ver. 8 has the article, but in vv. 9, 10

is without it, suggesting a change of writer.) I agree however with

Renan that vv. 13, 14, which differ in tone and in form from the

preceding verses, appear to be a later addition than the rest of the

Epilogue. Renan, it is true, distrusts this appearance; he fears a too

complicated hypothesis. But we must at least hold that vv. 13, 14 were

added (whether by the Epilogist or by another) by an after-thought. The

Epilogue should therefore be divided into two parts, vv. 9-12, and vv.

13, 14. In the first part, the real is distinguished from the fictitious

author; his qualifications are described; the editors of his posthumous

work are indicated; and a warning is given to the disciple of the

Epilogist (to apply the words of M. Aurelius) ‘to cast away the thirst

for books.’[342] In the second part, a contradiction is given to what

seemed an unworthy interpretation of a characteristic expression of

Koheleth’s, and the higher view of its meaning is justified—justified,

that is, to those who approach the work from the practical point of view

of those who have as yet no better moral ‘Enchiridion.’[343]

At what period was the Epilogue added? The consideration of its style

may help us at least to a negative result. The Hebrew approaches that of

the Mishna, but is yet sufficiently distinct from it to be the subject

of expository paraphrase in the Talmuds.[344] It is therefore improbable

that it was added long after the period of the author himself. Books

like Sirach and Koheleth soon became popular, and attracted the

attention of the religious authorities. Interpolation or insertion

seemed the only way to counteract the spiritual danger to unsuspicious

readers.

Footnote 326:

The title only belongs to pre-critical writers like Dr. John Smith,

who, in his _Portrait of Old Age_ (1666), sought to show that Solomon

was thoroughly acquainted with recent anatomical discoveries. In

revising my sheets, I observe that even such a fairminded student as

Dean Bradley speaks of ‘the long-drawn anatomical explanations of men

who would replace with a dissector’s report a painter’s touch, a

poet’s melody.’ But the Dean only refers to ver. 6; I understand his

language, though I think him biassed by poetic associations.

Footnote 327:

Namely, that vv. 3-5 are cited from an authorised book of dirges

(comp. 2 Chr. xxxv. 25). There seems, however, no assignable reason

for separating these verses from the context. And how can the supposed

mourners have sung the latter part of ver. 5?

Footnote 328:

This supposes the approach of death to be described under the imagery

of a gathering storm.

Footnote 329:

Namely, that the evil days of the close of life are described by

figures drawn from the ‘seven days of death,’ as the modern Syrians

designate the closing days of their winter. In a native Arabic rhyme,

February says to March, ‘O March, O my cousin, the old women mock at

me: three (days) of thine and four of mine—and we will bring the old

woman to singing (another tune).’ Wright, _Ecclesiastes_, p. 271;

Delitzsch, _Hoheslied und Kohelet_, p. 447.

Footnote 330:

_Shabbath_, 151_b_, 152_b_ (Wright, _Ecclesiastes_, p. 262). The

anecdote is given in connection with an allegoric interpretation of

our poem.

Footnote 331:

Dean Plumptre and Dr. Wright, however, make this the opening verse of

the Epilogue. But between ver. 8 and that which follows there is no

inner connection.

Footnote 332:

The object of the article is perhaps to suggest that Koheleth is not

really a proper name. In vii. 27 we should correct _ām’rāh qōheleth_

to _āmar haqqōheleth_. Probably these words are an interpolation from

the margin. They are nowhere else used in support of Koheleth’s

opinions. The author of the interpolation may have wished to indicate

his disagreement with Koheleth’s low opinion of women.

Footnote 333:

So Aquila, Pesh., Vulg., Grätz, Renan, Klostermann (_v’kāthab_).

Footnote 334:

I.e. the assemblies of ‘wise men’ or perhaps of Soferim. Surely

_ba’alē_ must refer to persons. The meaning ‘assemblies’ is justified

by Talmudic passages quoted by Grätz, Delitzsch, and Wright.

Footnote 335:

So Klostermann. ‘Shepherd’ must, I think, mean teacher (comp. Jer. ii.

8, iii. 15 &c.); the expression is suggested by the ‘goads.’ ‘One

shepherd’ (the text-reading) might mean Solomon; and we might go on to

suppose the Solomonic origin of Proverbs as well as Ecclesiastes to be

asserted in this verse. But the author of the Epilogue apparently

considers Koheleth to be merely fictitiously Solomon, but really a

wise man like any other. If so, he cannot have grouped it with

Proverbs as a strictly Solomonic work.

Footnote 336:

So Klostermann, regarding this verse down to ‘commandments’ as an

additional note on this difficult saying of Koheleth’s, which was

liable to give offence to orthodox readers. The word ‘(is) vanity’ is

supposed to have dropped out of the text. The object of the note is to

show under what limitations it can be admitted that ‘all is vanity.’

Then the writer continues, ‘For this (concerns) every man; for every

work’ &c., to show that the limiting precept is not less universally

applicable than Koheleth’s melancholy formula.

Footnote 337:

Thus Delitzsch, who takes the ‘words of the wise’ and the

‘collections’ in ver. 11 to refer at least in part, the former to the

detached sayings, and the latter to the continuous passages, which

together make up Ecclesiastes. The ‘one shepherd’ is held to be God,

so that the clause involves a claim of divine inspiration.

Footnote 338:

De Jong’s discussion of the Epilogue deserves special attention (_De

Prediker_, p. 142 &c.); comp. however Kuenen’s reply, _Onderzoek_,

iii. 196 &c.

Footnote 339:

Krochmal died in 1840, but his view on the Epilogue first saw the

light in 1851 in vol. xi. of the Hebrew journal _Morè nebūkē hazzemān_

(see Grätz, _Kohelet_, p. 47). His life is to be found in Zunz,

_Gesammelte Schriften_, ii. 150 &c.

Footnote 340:

See Jost (_Gesch. des Judenthums_, i. 42, n. 2). Derenbourg too seems

to tend in this direction (_Revue des études juives_, i. 179, note).

Reuss, Bickell, and Kleinert too agree in denying that ‘Koheleth’

composed the Epilogue. So also apparently Geiger (_Jüd. Zeitschr._,

iv. 10, Anm.)

Footnote 341:

_L’Ecclésiaste_, p. 73.

Footnote 342:

_Meditations_, ii. 3.

Footnote 343:

I designedly refer to the great work of Epictetus, as its adaptation

by Christian hands to the use of Christian believers to some extent

furnishes a parallel for the editorial adaptation of Ecclesiastes.

Footnote 344:

Delitzsch, _Hoheslied u. Koheleth_, p. 215.

CHAPTER VII.

ECCLESIASTES AND ITS CRITICS (FROM A PHILOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW).

By comparison with Ecclesiastes, the books which we have hitherto been

studying may be called easy; at any rate, they have not given rise to

equally strange diversities of critical opinion. A chapter with the

above heading seems therefore at this point specially necessary. Dr.

Ginsburg’s masterly sketch of the principal theories of the critics down

to 1860 dispenses me, it is true, from attempting an exhaustive

survey.[345] It is not the duty of every teacher of Old Testament

criticism to traverse the history of his subject afresh, any more than

it is that of the commentator as such to begin with a catena of the

opinions of previous writers. Suffice it to call attention to two of the

Jewish and two of the Christian expositors mentioned by Dr. Ginsburg,

viz. Mendelssohn and Luzzatto, and Ewald and Vaihinger. MENDELSSOHN

seems important not so much by his results as by his historical

position. His life marks an era in Biblical study, most of all of course

among the Jews, but to some extent among Christians also. His Hebrew

commentary on Koheleth deserves specially to be remembered, because with

it in 1770 he broke ground anew in grammatical exegesis. To him, as also

to VAIHINGER, the object of Koheleth is to propound the great

consolatory truth of the immortality of the soul, while EWALD, more in

accordance with facts, describes it as being rather to combine all that

is true, however sad, and profitable, and agreeable to the will of God

in a practical handbook adapted to those troublesome times. Ewald and

Vaihinger both divide the book into four sections,—(1) i. 2-ii. 26, (2)

iii. 1-vi. 9, (3) vi. 10-viii. 15, (4) viii. 16-xii. 8, with the

Epilogue xii. 9-14. The latter, whose view is more developed than

Ewald’s, and whom I refer to as closing and summing up a period,

maintains that each section consists of three parts which are again

subdivided—for Koheleth, though you would not think it, is a literary

artist—into strophes and half-strophes, and that the theme of each

section is thrown out, seemingly by chance, but really with consummate

art, in the preceding one. Thus the four sections interlace, and the

unity of the book is established. The Epilogue, too, according to

Vaihinger, can thus be proved to be the work of the author of Koheleth;

for it does but ratify and develope what has already been indicated in

xi. 9, and without it the connection of ideas would be incomplete.[346]

I think that our experience of some interpreters of the Book of Job may

predispose us to be sceptical of such ingenious subtleties, and I notice

that more recent critics show a tendency to insist less on the logical

distribution of the contents and to regard the book, not indeed as a

mere collection of rules of conduct, but at any rate as a record of a

practical and not a scholastic philosopher. This tendency is not indeed

of recent origin, though it has increased in favour of late years. Prior

the poet had already said that Ecclesiastes ‘is not a regular and

perfect treatise, but that in it great treasures are “heaped up together

in a confused magnificence;”’[347] Bishop Lowth, that ‘the connection of

the arguments is involved in much obscurity;’[348] while Herder, in his

letters to a theological student, had penned this wise though too

enthusiastic sentence, which cuts at the root of all attempts at logical

analysis,

Kein Buch ist mir aus dem Alterthum bekannt, welches die Summe des

menschlichen Lebens, seine Abwechselungen und Nichtigkeiten in

Geschäften, Entwürfen, Speculationen und Vergnügen, zugleich mit dem

was einzig in ihm wahr, daurend, fortgehend, wechselnd, lohnend ist,

reicher, eindringlicher, kürzer beschriebe, als dieses.[349]

But I must retrace my steps. One of my four critics has yet to be

briefly characterised—S. D. LUZZATTO of Padua, best known as the author

of a Hebrew commentary on Isaiah, but also a master in later Hebrew and

Aramaic scholarship. As a youth of twenty-four he wrote a deeply felt

and somewhat eccentrically ingenious treatise on Koheleth, which he kept

by him till 1860, when it appeared in one of the annual volumes of

essays and reviews called Ozar Nechmad. In it he maintains, with

profound indignation at the unworthy post-Exile writer, that the Book of

Ecclesiastes denies the immortality of the soul, and recommends a life

of sensuous pleasure. The writer’s name, however, was, he thinks,

Koheleth, and his fraud in assuming the name of Solomon was detected by

the wise men of his time, who struck out the assumed name and

substituted Koheleth (leaving however the words ‘son of David, king in

Jerusalem,’ as a record of the imposture). Later students, however, were

unsuspicious enough to accept the work as Solomon’s, and being unable to

exclude a Solomonic writing from the Canon, they inserted three

qualifying half-verses of an orthodox character, viz. ‘and know that for

all this God will bring thee into judgment’ (xi. 6_b_); ‘and remember

thy Creator in the days of thy youth’ (xii. 1_a_); ‘and the spirit shall

return to God who gave it’ (xii. 8_b_). This latter view, which has the

doubtful support of a Talmudic passage,[350] appears to me, though from

the nature of the case uncertain, and susceptible, as I think, of

modification, yet in itself probable as restoring harmony to the book,

and in accordance with the treatment of other Biblical texts by the

Soferim (or students and editors of Scripture). Geiger may have fallen

into infinite extravagances, but he has at any rate shown that the early

Soferim modified many passages in the interests of orthodoxy and

edification.[351] If so, they did but carry on the process already begun

by the authors of the sacred books themselves; it may be enough to

remind my readers of the gradual supplementing of the original Book of

Job by later writers. To the three passages of Koheleth mentioned above,

must be added, as Geiger saw,[352] the two postscripts which form the

Epilogue. From the close of the last century a series of writers have

felt the difficulties of this section so strongly that they have

assigned it to one or more later writers, and in truth, although these

difficulties may be partly removed, enough remains to justify the

obelising of the passage.

There is no evidence that Luzzatto ever retracted the critical view

mentioned above. To the character of the author, it is true, he became

more charitable in his later years. I do not think the worse of him for

his original antipathy. An earnest believer himself and of fiery

temperament, he could not understand the cool and cautious reflective

spirit of the much-tried philosopher;[353] and as a lover of the rich,

and, as the result of development, comparatively flexible Hebrew tongue,

he took a dislike to a writer so wanting in facility and grace as

Koheleth.[354] It was an error, but a noble one, and it shows that

Luzzatto found in the study of criticism a school of moral culture as

well as of literary insight.

The adoption of Luzzatto’s view,[355] combined with Döderlein’s as to

the epilogue, removes the temptation to interpret Koheleth as the

apology of any particular philosophical or theological doctrine. The

author now appears, not indeed thoroughly consistent, but at least in

his true light as a thinker tossed about on the sea of speculation, and

without any fixed theoretic conclusions. Without agreeing to more than

the relative lateness of the epilogue, DE JONG,[356] a Dutch scholar,

recognises the true position of Koheleth, and in the psychological

interest of the book sees a full compensation for the want of logical

arrangement. De Jong indeed was not acquainted with the theory of

Nachman Krochmal, which if sound throws such great light on the reason

of the addition of the epilogue (see end of Chap. VI.) This has been

accepted by Grätz and Renan, but, as I have ventured to think, upon

insufficient grounds. The brevity of my reference to these two eminent

exegetes must be excused by my inability to follow either of them in his

main conclusions. The glossary of peculiar words and the excursus on the

Greek translation given by the former (1871) possess a permanent value,

and there is much of historical interest in his introduction. But I

agree with Kuenen that the student who selects Grätz as his guide will

have much to unlearn afterwards.[357] In order to show that Ecclesiastes

is a politico-religious satire levelled against king Herod, with the

special object of correcting certain evil tendencies among the Jews of

that age, Grätz is compelled to have recourse to much perverse exegesis

which I have no inclination to criticise.[358] Renan’s present view

differs widely from that given in his great unfinished history of the

Semitic languages. But I shall have occasion to refer to his

determination of the date of our book later.

Among recent English students, no one will refuse the palm of acuteness

and originality to TYLER (1874). His strength lies not in translation

and exegesis, but in the consistency with which he has applied his

single key, viz. the comparison of the book with Stoic and Epicurean

teaching. He is fully aware that the book has no logical divisions.

Antithesis and contradiction is the fundamental characteristic of the

book. Not that the author contradicts himself (comp. the quotation from

Ibn Ezra in Ginsburg’s _Coheleth_, p. 57), but that a faithful index of

the contradictions of the two great philosophical schools gives a

greater point to his concluding warning against philosophy. It is the

‘sacrificio dell’ intelletto’ which the author counsels. But Mr. Tyler’s

theory or at least his point of view demands a separate consideration.

It may however be fairly said here that by general consent Mr. Tyler has

done something to make the influence of Greek philosophical ideas upon

Ecclesiastes a more plausible opinion.

To a subsequent chapter I must also beg to refer the reader for a notice

of Gustav BICKELL’S hypothesis (1884) relative to the fortunes (or

misfortunes) of the text of Koheleth. This critic is not one of those

who grant that the book had from the first no logical division, and his

hypothesis is one of the boldest and most plausible in the history of

criticism. Its boldness is in itself no defect, but I confess I

desiderate that caution which is the second indispensable requisite in a

great critic. The due admixture of these two qualities nature has not

yet granted. Meantime the greatest successes are perhaps attained by

those who are least self-confident, least ambitious of personal

distinction. Upon the whole, from the point of view of the student

proper, are there more thankworthy contributions to criticism not less

than to exegesis than the books of PLUMPTRE (1881), NOWACK (1883), and

above all the accomplished _altmeister_ Franz DELITZSCH (1875)? Whatever

has been said before profitably and well, may be known by him who will

consult these three accomplished though not faultless expositors. I

would not be supposed to detract from other writers,[359] but I believe

that the young student will not repent limiting himself, not indeed to

one, but to three commentaries.

Footnote 345:

For the Jewish traditions and theories, see further Schiffer, _Das

Buch Kohelet nach der Auffassung der Weisen des Talmud und Midrasch

und der jüdischen Erklärer des Mittelalters_, Theil 1, Leipzig, 1885;

and to complete Dr. Ginsburg’s survey of the literature, see Zöckler’s

list in Lange’s Commentary and the additions to this in the American

edition; also the preface to Wright’s treatise on Ecclesiastes.

Footnote 346:

See Vaihinger’s article in Herzog’s _Realencyclopädie_, xii. 92-106. I

have not seen his book on Ecclesiastes (1858).

Footnote 347:

Ginsburg, _Coheleth_, p. 168.

Footnote 348:

Ibid., p. 178.

Footnote 349:

_Werke_ (Suphan), x. 134.

Footnote 350:

_Shabbath_, 97_a_ (see Ginsburg, p. 98).

Footnote 351:

See his _Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel_ (1857).

Footnote 352:

_Jüdische Zeitschrift_, iv. 9 &c.

Footnote 353:

David Castelli, a cool and cautious scholar but not original, is

naturally better fitted to appreciate Koheleth (see _Il libro del

Kohelet_, Pisa, 1866).

Footnote 354:

‘Die harte, ungefügige, tiefgesunkene Sprache des Buches entzog ihm in

Luzzatto’s Auge den verklärenden Lichtglanz; er blickte mit einer

gewissen Missachtung auf den Schriftsteller, der sowenig Meister der

edlen ihn erfüllenden Sprache war’ (Geiger).

Footnote 355:

Not only Geiger, but the learned and fairminded Kalisch, has made this

view his own (_Bible Studies_, i. 65); among Christian scholars it has

been adopted by Nöldeke and Bickell (the latter includes iii. 17 among

the inserted passages, and I incline to follow him).

Footnote 356:

_De Prediker vertaald en verklaart_ door P. de Jong (Leiden, 1861).

Footnote 357:

_Theologisch Tijdschrift_, 1883, p. 114.

Footnote 358:

See however Kuenen’s condensed criticism in _Theol. Tijdschrift_, p.

127 &c.

Footnote 359:

Hitzig, for instance, has been passed over in spite of Nöldeke’s

judgment that no modern scholar has done so much for the detailed

explanation of the text. This may be true, or at least be but a small

exaggeration. No critic has so good a right to the name as Hitzig,

who, though weak in his treatment of ideas, has the keenest perception

of what is possible and impossible in interpretation. But for the

larger critical questions Hitzig has not done much; the editor of the

second edition of his commentary (Nowack) has therefore been obliged

to rewrite the greater part of the introduction. The historical

background of the book cannot be that supposed by Hitzig, nor has he

hit the mark in his description of Koheleth as ‘eine planmässig

fortschreitende Untersuchung.’ Wright fails, I venture to think, from

different causes. He is slightly too timid, and deficient in literary

art; and yet his scholarly work does honour to the Protestant clergy

of Ireland.

CHAPTER VIII.

ECCLESIASTES AND ITS CRITICS (FROM A LITERARY AND PSYCHOLOGICAL POINT OF

VIEW).

It is not every critic of Ecclesiastes who helps the reader to enjoy the

book which is criticised. Too much criticism and too little taste have

before now spoiled many excellent books on the Old Testament.

Ecclesiastes needs a certain preparation of the mind and character, a

certain ‘elective affinity,’ in order to be appreciated as it deserves.

To enjoy it, we must find our own difficulties and our own moods

anticipated in it. We must be able to sympathise with its author either

in his world-weariness and scepticism or in his victorious struggle (if

so be it was victorious) through darkness into light. We must at any

rate have a taste for the development of character, and an ear for the

fragments of truth which a much-tried pilgrim gathered up in his

twilight wanderings. Never so much as in our own time have this taste

and this ear been so largely possessed, as a recent commentary has shown

in delightful detail, and I can only add to the names furnished by the

writer that of one who perhaps least of all should be omitted, Miss

Christina Rossetti.[360] But to prove the point in my own way, let me

again select four leading critics, as representatives not so much of

philology as of that subtle and variable thing—the modern spirit, viz.

RENAN, GRÄTZ, STANLEY, and PLUMPTRE. The first truly is a modern of the

moderns, though it is not every modern who will subscribe to his

description of Ecclesiastes as ‘livre charmant, le seul livre aimable

qui ait été composé par un Juif’[361] One might excuse it perhaps if in

some degree dictated by a bitter grief at the misfortunes of his

country; pessimism might be natural in 1872. But alas! ten years later

the same view is repeated and deliberately justified, nor can the author

of Koheleth be congratulated. He is now described[362] as ‘le charmant

écrivain qui nous a laissé cette délicieuse fantaisie philosophique,

aimant la vie, tout en en voyant la vanité,’ or, as a French reviewer

condenses the delicate phrases of his author, ‘homme du monde et de la

bonne société, qui n’est, à proprement parler, ni blasé ni fatigué, mais

qui sait en toutes choses garder la mesure, sans enthousiasme, sans

indignation, et sans exaltation d’aucune espèce.’ A speaking portrait of

a Parisian _philosophe_, but does it fit the author of Ecclesiastes? No;

Koheleth has had too hard a battle with his own tongue to be a ‘charming

writer,’ and even if not exactly _blasé_ (see however ii. 1-11), he is

‘fatigued’ enough with the oppressive burdens of Jewish life in the

second century B.C. That he has no enthusiasm, and none of those visions

which are the ‘creators and feeders of the soul,’[363] is cause for

pity, not for admiration; but that he has had no visitings of _sæva

indignatio_, is an unjust inference from his acquired calmness of

demeanour. He is an amiable egoïst, says M. Renan; but would Koheleth

have troubled himself to write as he does, if egoïsm were the ripened

fruit of his life’s experience? Why does this critic give such generous

sympathy to the Ecclesiastes of the Slav race,[364] and such doubtful

praise to his great original? It is true, Koheleth _seems_ to despair of

the future, but only perhaps of the immediate future (iii. 21), and

Turgenieff does this too. ‘Will the right men come?’ asks one of the

personages of Turgenieff’s _Helen_, and his friend, as the only reply,

directs a questioning look into the distance. That is the Russian

philosopher’s last word; Koheleth has not told us his. His literary

executors, no doubt, have forced a last word upon him; but we have an

equal right to imagine one for ourselves. M. Renan ‘likes to dream of a

Paul become sceptical and disenchanted;’[365] his Koheleth is an only

less unworthy dream. M. Renan praises Koheleth for the moderation of his

philosophising; he repeatedly admits that there was an element of truth

in the Utopianism of the prophets; why not ‘dream’ that Koheleth felt,

though he either ventured not or had no time left to express it, some

degree of belief in the destiny of his country?

M. Renan, in fact, seems to me at once to admire Koheleth too much, and

to justify his admiration on questionable grounds. It might have been

hoped that the unlikeness of this book to the other books of the Canon

would have been the occasion of a worthy and a satisfying estimate from

this accomplished master. A critic of narrower experience represents

Koheleth partly as a cynical Hebrew Pasquin, who satirises the hated

foreigner, Herod the Great, and the minions of his court, partly as an

earnest opponent of a dangerous and growing school of ascetics. I refer

to this theory here, not to criticise it, but to call attention to its

worthier conception of Koheleth’s character. The tendency of

Ecclesiastes Dr. Grätz considers to be opposed to the moral and

religious principles of Judaism and Christianity, but to the man as

distinguished from his book he does full justice. It is a mistake when

this writer’s theory is represented by Dean Plumptre as making Koheleth

teach ‘a license like that of a St. Simonian rehabilitation of the

flesh.’[366] Koheleth’s choice of language is not indeed in good taste,

but it was only a crude way of emphasising his opposition to a dangerous

spirit of asceticism. Such at least is Dr. Grätz’s view. ‘Koheleth is

not the slave of an egoïstic eudemonism, but merely seeks to counteract

pietistic self-mortification.’[367] Dr. Grätz thinks, too, and rightly,

that he can detect an old-fashioned Judaism in the supposed sceptical

philosopher: Koheleth controverts the new tenet of immortality, but not

that of the resurrection. I am anticipating again, but do so in order to

contrast the sympathetic treatment of the Breslau professor with the

unsympathetic or at least unsuitable portraiture of Koheleth given by

the Parisian critic.

Of all writers known to me, however, none is so sympathetic to Koheleth

as Dr. Plumptre, in whose pleasing article in Smith’s Dictionary we have

the germ of the most interesting commentary in the language. A still

wider popularity was given to the Herder-Plumptre theory by Dr. Stanley,

who eloquently describes Ecclesiastes as ‘an interchange of voices,

higher and lower, within a single human soul.’ ‘It is like,’ he

continues, ‘the perpetual strophe and antistrophe of Pascal’s _Pensées_.

But it is more complicated, more entangled, than any of these, in

proportion as the circumstances from which it grows are more perplexing,

as the character which it represents is vaster, and grander, and more

distracted.’[368] In his later work, Dr. Plumptre aptly compares the

‘Two Voices’ of our own poet (strictly, he remarks, there are three

voices in Ecclesiastes), in which, as in Koheleth, though more

decidedly, the voice of faith at last prevails over that of

pessimism.[369] I fear, however, that Dr. Plumptre’s generous impulse

carries him farther than sober criticism can justify. The aim of writing

an ‘ideal biography’ closing with the ‘victory of faith’ seems to me to

have robbed his pen of that point which, though sometimes dangerous, is

yet indispensable to the critic. The theory of the ‘alternate voices,’

of which Dr. Plumptre is, not the first,[370] but the most eloquent

advocate, seems to me to be an offspring of the modern spirit. It is so

very like their own case—the dual nature[371] which a series of refined

critics has attributed to Koheleth, that they involuntarily invest

Koheleth with the peculiar qualities of modern seekers after truth. To

them, in a different sense from M. Renan’s, Ecclesiastes is ‘un livre

aimable,’ just as Marcus Aurelius and Omar Khayyâm are the favourite

companions of those who prefer more consistent thinking.

Certainly the author of Ecclesiastes might well be satisfied with the

interest so widely felt in his very touching confidences. It is the

contents, of course, which attract so many of our contemporaries—not the

form: only a student of Hebrew can appreciate the toilsome pleasure of

solving philosophical enigmas. And yet M. Renan has made it possible

even for an _exigeant_ Parisian to enjoy, not indeed the process, but

the results, of philological inquiry, in so far as they reveal the

literary characteristics of this unique work; he has, indeed, in his

function of artistic translator, done Koheleth even more than justice.

In particular, his translations of the rhythmic passages of Koheleth

which relieve the surrounding prose are real _tours de force_. These

passages M. Renan, following M. Derenbourg,[372] regards as quotations

from lost poetical works, reminding us that such poetical quotations are

common in Arabic literature. To represent in his translation the

character of the Hebrew rhythm, which is ‘dancing, light, and

pretentiously elegant,’ M. Renan adopts the metres of Old French poetry.

‘Il s’agissait de calquer en français des sentences conçues dans le ton

dégagé, goguenard et pru-d’homme à la fois de Pibrac, de Marculfe ou de

Chatonnet, de produire un saveur analogue à celle de nos quatrains de

moralités ou de nos vieux proverbes en bouts-rimés.’ Of the poem on old

age he says that it is ‘une sorte de joujou funèbre qu’on dirait ciselé

par Banville ou par Théophile Gautier et que je trouve supérieur même

aux quatrains de Khayyâm.’[373] I should have thought the comparison

very unjust to the Persian poet. To me, I confess, the prelude or

overture (i. 4-8), though not in rhythmic Hebrew, is the gem of the

book. Questionable though its tendency may seem, if we look at the

context, its poetry is of elemental force, and appeals to the modern

reader in some of his moods more than almost anything else in the Old

Testament outside the Book of Job. I cannot help alluding to Carlyle’s

fine application of its imagery in _Sartor Resartus_, ‘Generations are

as the Days of toilsome Mankind: Death and Birth are the vesper and the

matin bells, that summon mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new

advancement.’ How differently Koheleth,—

One generation goeth, another cometh;

but the earth abideth for ever:

And the sun ariseth, and the sun goeth down,

and panteth unto his place where he ariseth:

It goeth to the south, and whirleth about unto the north,

the wind whirleth about continually;

and upon his circuits the wind returneth.

All streams run into the sea, and the sea is not full;

unto the place whither the streams go, thither they go again.

All things are full of weariness; no man can utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with

hearing.

Compare with this the words, so Greek in tone, of xi. 7, as well as the

constantly recurring formula ‘under the sun’ (e.g. i. 3, iv. 3). We can

see that even Koheleth was affected by nature, but without any

lightening of his load of trial. The wide-open eye of day seemed to mock

him by its unfeeling serenity. He lacked that susceptibility for the

whispered lessons of nature which the poet of _Job_ so pre-eminently

possessed; he lacked too the great modern conception of progress,

embodied in that fine passage from Carlyle. He was prosaic and

unimaginative, and it is partly because there is so little poetry in

Ecclesiastes that there is so little Christianity. But I am already

passing to another order of considerations, without which indeed we

cannot estimate this singular autobiography aright. We have next to

consider Koheleth from a directly religious and moral point of view.

Footnote 360:

See especially her early sonnet ‘Vanity of Vanities,’ and her striking

poem ‘A Testimony.’

Footnote 361:

_L’Antéchrist_, p. 101.

Footnote 362:

_L’Ecclésiaste_, pp. 24, 90.

Footnote 363:

Mordecai in _Daniel Deronda_.

Footnote 364:

See his funeral _éloge_, reprinted in _Academy_, Oct. 13, 1883, p.

248.

Footnote 365:

_L’Antéchrist_, p. 200.

Footnote 366:

_Ecclesiastes_, p. 8.

Footnote 367:

Grätz, _Kohelet_, p. 33.

Footnote 368:

_Jewish Church_, ii. 256.

Footnote 369:

_Ecclesiastes_, pp. 53, 259.

Footnote 370:

See the passage from Herder quoted in Appendix (end).

Footnote 371:

Comp. Jacobi’s confession (imitated by Coleridge?) that he was with

the head a heathen, and with the heart a Christian.

Footnote 372:

_Revue des études juives_, i. 165-185. I do not myself see why

Koheleth, who sought ‘pleasant words,’ should not have written poetry

as well as prose.

Footnote 373:

_L’Ecclésiaste_, pp. 83, 84.

CHAPTER IX.

ECCLESIASTES FROM A MORAL AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW.

We have seen how large a Christian element penetrates and glorifies the

bold questionings of the Book of Job. Whatever be our view on obscure

problems of criticism, the character-drama which the book in its present

form presents is one which it almost requires a Christian to appreciate

adequately. It is different with the Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘He who will

allow that book to speak for itself, and does not read other meanings

into almost every verse, must feel at every step that he is breathing a

different atmosphere from that of the teaching of the Gospels.’[374]

Still more is this the case if we claim the right of free criticism, and

deny that the hints of a growing tendency to believe are due to the

morbidly sceptical author of the book (if it may be called a book).

Certainly the religious use of Koheleth is more directly affected by

modern criticism and exegesis than that of any other Old Testament

writing. The early theologians could dispense with criticism, because

they so frequently allegorised or unconsciously gave a gentle twist to

the literal meaning. But we, if for a religious purpose we use the book

uncritically, must be well aware that we often misrepresent both the

author of Koheleth himself and Christian faith. Let me only mention

three texts in the use of which this misrepresentation very commonly

takes place. The fixity of the spiritual state in which a man is at

death may or may not be an essential Christian doctrine, but we have no

right to quote either Koheleth’s despairing description of the inert

life of the shades (ix. 10), or the proverbial saying on the

unalterableness of the laws of nature (xi. 3), in support of this; nor

is it well to adopt a phrase (descriptive of Sheól) from xii. 5, which

favours the false idea expressed in the too common ‘Here lieth’ of the

churchyard. Anticipations of really fundamental Christian doctrines are,

I admit, rarely sought for in Ecclesiastes. It is well that this should

be so. How completely the evangelical elements in Jewish religion had

been obscured later on in this period, we have seen from the Wisdom of

Sirach. It seemed in fact as if the only alternatives then for a

thoughtful Jew were a more or less strict legal orthodoxy and a resigned

acquiescence in things as they were, brightened only by gleams, eagerly

hailed, of intellectual or sensuous pleasure. Sirach chose the former of

these, Koheleth the latter. Koheleth’s was not in itself the better

choice. But the worse alternative needed perhaps to be stated as

forcibly as possible, that men might see the rock and avoid shipwreck.

Ecclesiastes, like the first part of Goethe’s _Faust_, may, with the

fullest justice, be called an apology for Christianity, not as

containing anticipations of Christian truth—the error of

Hengstenberg;[375] but inasmuch as it shows that neither wisdom, nor any

other human good or human pleasure, brings permanent satisfaction to

man’s natural longings. It is at any rate a contribution towards the

negative criticism with which such an apology must begin, just as the

Book of Job is a contribution, or a series of contributions, towards a

more perfect and evangelical theodicy.

There is at least one point, then, which the moral and religious critic

of Ecclesiastes can adopt out of all the strangely distorted views of

patristic writers, so ably summed up by Dr. Ginsburg in his

Introduction, viz. that the gloomy sentence, _Vanitas vanitatum_, is

perfectly accurate when applied to the life of Koheleth, but only to a

life like his. Thomas à Kempis could prelude with two verses from

Koheleth (i. 2, 8), but he could only prelude. A life of true

service—one whose centre is outside self or family or even nation—is not

vanity nor vexation of spirit: Koheleth might have added this as the

burden of a second part of his book. But did he not actually append it

as his epilogue? Did he not ‘faintly trust’ the hope of immortality

(xii. 7)? Did he not work his way back to a living faith, like ‘Asaph’

in Ps. lxxiii.? There is no question that the book was admitted into the

Canon on the assumption that he did. As a great Jewish preacher says,

the book [in its present form] opens with Nothingness, but closes with

the fear of God.[376] It is parallel in this respect to many Jewish

lives, like that of Heine, which may be described as the prodigal son’s

quest of his long-lost father. Accepting this view, we may join with

another Jewish writer in his admiration of the influences of Jewish

theism, which were then at least so strong that a consistent Jewish

sceptic was an impossibility. ‘It is this,’ he remarks, ‘that gives the

peculiar charm to this little book.’[377] It is impossible to give a

conclusive refutation of this view, which I should like to believe true,

but which seems to me to labour under exegetical difficulties. To me,

Koheleth is not a theist in any vital sense in his philosophic

meditations, and his so-called ‘last word’ seems forced upon him by

later scribes, just as Sirach’s orthodoxy was at any rate heightened in

colour by subsequent editors. To me, Derenbourg’s view is a dream,

though an edifying one. It may be that the author did return to the

simple faith of his childhood. He certainly never lost his theism,

though pale and cheerless it was indeed, and utterly unable to stand

against the assaults of doubt and despondency. It may be that history,

neglected history, taught him at last to believe in the divine guidance

of the fortunes of Israel. I would fain imagine this retracing of the

weary pilgrim’s steps; but other and less pleasing dreams to a Christian

are equally possible and I do not venture to accept the return of the

prodigal as a well-authenticated fact.

We must remember too that the troubled wanderer had not really so many

steps to retrace. Much that both Christians and Jews now regard as

essential to faith was not, in the time of Koheleth, commonly so

regarded. I am well aware of the great intuitions of some of the

psalmists at certain sublime moments, and admit that they seem to us to

lead naturally on to our own orthodoxy. But these intuitions could not

and did not possess the force of dogmas. The great doctrines of the

Resurrection and of Immortality had long to wait for a moderate degree

of acceptance (they were not held, for instance, by Sirach), and longer

still before they coalesced in a new and greater doctrine of the future

life. Koheleth’s dissatisfaction with the doctrine of present

retribution (the central point both of his heterodoxy and of Job’s)

might have helped him to accept the former of these. His acquaintance

with non-Jewish philosophical literature, if we may venture to assume

this as a fact, might have led him, as it led the author of the Wisdom

of Solomon, to embrace the hope of immortality. But though there

probably is an allusion to this hope as well-founded in xii. 7_b_, we

have seen reason to doubt whether the words came from Koheleth himself;

at any rate, they are isolated, and many do not admit the allusion.

Either of these doctrines would have saved Koheleth from despondency had

he accepted it. From our present point of view, we must blame him for

not accepting one refuge or the other, or even that simpler belief in

the imperishableness of the Jewish race which Sirach had, and which has

preserved so many Israelitish hearts in trials as severe as Koheleth’s.

There must have been a strange weakness in his moral fibre; how else can

we account either for his want of Jewish feeling or, I would now add,

using the word in its looser sense, for his pessimism? As Huber has well

observed,[378] none of the ancient peoples was naturally less inclined

to pessimism than the Jews, so that a work like Ecclesiastes is a

portent in the Old Testament, and alien to the spirit of true Judaism. I

cannot wonder that both Jews and Christians have now and again been

repelled by this strange book[379] and denied its title to canonicity,

partly for its pessimism, partly for its supposed Epicureanism, or that

the author of the Book of Wisdom before them should have given Koheleth

the most scathing of condemnations by putting almost its very language

into the mouth of the ungodly.[380] The true student may no doubt be

equally severe upon Koheleth for his despair of wisdom and depreciation

of its delights (i. 17, 18, ii. 15, 16), which are hardly redeemed by

the utilitarian sayings in vii. 11, 12.

I cannot justify Koheleth, but I can plead for a mitigation of these

censures, and altogether defend the admission of the Book (not, of

course, as Solomonic) into the sacred Canon. Whether Jewish or not, the

pessimistic theory of life has a sound kernel. ‘Our sadness,’ as Thoreau

says, ‘is not sad, but our cheap joys. Let us be sad about all we see

and are, for so we demand and pray for better. It is the constant prayer

[of the good] and whole Christian religion.’[381] This too is the burden

of E. von Hartmann’s criticism of a crudely optimistic Christianity; and

need we reject the truth for the extravagances of the teacher? Next, as

to the preference of sensuous enjoyment to philosophic pursuits in

Koheleth. I would not seek to weaken passages like ii. 24, viii. 15, by

putting them down to the irony of a _sæva indignatio_. But as for the

depreciation of intellectual pleasure, may it not be excused by the

author’s want of a sure prospect of the ‘age to come’ such as we find in

those lines of Davenant,[382]

Before by death you nearer knowledge gain

(For to increase your knowledge you must die),

Tell me if all that knowledge be not vain,

On which we proudly in this life rely.

And as to the commendations of sensuous pleasure, have they not a

relative justification?[383] The legalism of the ‘righteous overmuch’

threatened already perhaps to make life an intolerable burden. And

though Koheleth erred in the form of his teaching, yet he did well to

teach the ‘duty of delight’ (Ruskin) and to oppose an orthodoxy which

sought, not merely to transform, but to kill nature. It is to his credit

that he touches on the relations of the sexes with such studious

reserve.[384] As a rule, the enjoyments which he recommends are those of

the table, which in Sirach’s time (Ecclus. xxxii. 3-5) and perhaps also

in Koheleth’s included music and singing,—in short, festive but refined

society. His praise of festive mirth is at any rate more excusable

morally than Omar Khayyâm’s impassioned commendations of the

wine-cup.[385] As Jeremy Taylor says, ‘It was the best thing that was

then commonly known that they should seize upon the present with a

temperate use of permitted pleasures.’[386] Lastly, the admission of the

book into the Canon is (perhaps we may say) not less providential than

that of the Song of Songs. The latter shows us human nature in simple

and healthy relations of life; the former, a human nature in a morbid

state and in depressed and artificial circumstances. How to return at

least to inward simplicity and health, the latter part (not the

Epilogue) of the Book of Job beautifully shows us.

Our great idealist poet Shelley, who so admired Job, disliked

Ecclesiastes for the same reason as the ancient heretics already

mentioned. One greater than he, our ‘sage and serious’ Milton, justifies

the sacred Scripture for the variety of its contents on the same ground

that he advocates ‘unlicensed printing.’ Both are ‘for the trial of

virtue and the exercise of truth.’ We need not, then, he says, be

surprised if the Bible ‘brings in holiest men passionately murmuring

against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus.’[387] The

Bible, according to Milton, is perfect not in spite but because of its

variety; it is like the rugged ‘mountains of God,’ not like the

symmetrical works of human art. But Milton has also reminded us that a

fool may misuse even sacred Scripture.

Footnote 374:

Dean Bradley, _Lectures on Ecclesiastes_ (1885), p. 7.

Footnote 375:

See _Der Prediger Salomo_ (1859). Hengstenberg misses, it is true, any

direct reference to the Christian hope, but finds the idea of

chastisement as a proof of divine love in iii. 18, vii. 2-4, an

emphatic affirmation of eternal life in iii. 21, and the resignation

of a faith like Job’s in iii. 11, vii. 24, viii. 17, xi. 5. Koheleth’s

questionings are therefore according to him ‘eine heilige

Philosophie.’

Footnote 376:

Preface to vol. iii. of S. Holdheim’s _Predigten_.

Footnote 377:

J. Derenbourg, _Revue des études juives_, No. 2, Oct. 1880.

Footnote 378:

_Der Pessimismus_, 1876, p. 8. Schopenhauer too calls the Jews the

most optimistic race in history.

Footnote 379:

See Appendix.

Footnote 380:

Wisd. ii. 6; comp. Plumptre, _Ecclesiastes_, p. 71 &c., Wright,

_Koheleth_, pp. 69, 70.

Footnote 381:

_Letters to Various Persons_, p. 25.

Footnote 382:

See the extracts in Trench’s _Household Book of English Poetry_, p.

405.

Footnote 383:

I do not of course assent to the form in which Grätz puts this, to

serve his hypothesis as to the age of Koheleth. See Appendix.

Footnote 384:

Once Koheleth appears as a sharp critic of the female sex (vii.

26-29).

Footnote 385:

Lagarde describes Omar as ‘ein schlemmer, der die angst des irdischen

daseins und die öde langeweile seiner noch in den anfängen stehenden

wissenschaft hinwegzuschwelgen suchte’ (_Symmicta_, 1877, p. 9). Too

hard a judgment perhaps on this changeful and impressionable nature.

See Bodenstedt’s version as well as Fitzgerald’s.

Footnote 386:

_The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying_, chap. i., sect. 3. Parts of

this chapter remind us strongly of Koheleth, and are strange indeed in

a book of Christian devotion.

Footnote 387:

_Prose Works_, ed. Bohn, ii. 69.

CHAPTER X.

DATE AND PLACE OF COMPOSITION.

Jewish tradition, while admitting a Hezekian or post-Hezekian redaction

of the book, assigns the original authorship of Ecclesiastes to Solomon.

The Song of Songs it regards as the monument of this king’s early

manhood, the Book of Proverbs of his middle age, and the

semi-philosophical meditations before us as the work of his old age. The

tradition was connected by the Aggada with the favourite legend[388] of

the discrowned Solomon, but is based upon the book itself, the passages

due to the literary fiction of Solomon’s authorship (which Bickell

indeed attributes to an interpolator) having been misunderstood. Would

that the author of the _Lectures on the Jewish Church_ had given the

weight of his name to the true explanation of these passages! The

reticence of the lines devoted in the second volume of the _Lectures_ to

Ecclesiastes has led some critics to imagine that according to Dean

Stanley, this book, like much of Proverbs, might possibly be the work of

the ‘wisest’ of Israel’s kings. Little had the author profited by Ewald

if he really allowed such an absolute legend the smallest

standing-ground among reasonable hypotheses! Whichever way we look,

whether to the social picture, or to the language, or to the ideas of

the book, its recent origin forces itself upon us. The social picture

and the ideas need not detain us here. Either Solomon was transported in

prophetic ecstasy to far distant times (the Targum on Koheleth

frequently describes him as a prophet), or the writer is a child of the

dawning modern age of Judaism. The former alternative is plainly

impossible. Political servitude, and a generally depressed state of

society (exceptional cases of prosperity notwithstanding), mark the book

as the work of a dark post-Exile period. The absence of any national

feeling equally distinguishes it from the monuments of the earlier

humanistic movement (even from Job). The germs of philosophic thought,

which cannot be explained away, supply, if this be possible, a still

more convincing argument. We shall return to these later on: at present,

let us confine ourselves to the linguistic evidence, which has been set

forth with such accuracy and completeness by Delitzsch[389] and after

him by Dr. Wright of Dublin.

The Hebrew language has no history if Ecclesiastes belongs to the

classical period; indeed, the Hebrew name of the book may seem of itself

to stamp it as of post-Exile origin (see note on Koheleth in Appendix).

The student would do well, however, to examine all the peculiar words or

forms in Delitzsch’s glossary, and to classify them for himself, under

two principal heads, (1) those which occur elsewhere but in

distinctively late-Hebrew books, (2) those only found in Koheleth, with

four subdivisions, viz., (_a_) words which can be explained from

Biblical Hebrew usage, (_b_) those which belong to the vocabulary of the

Mishna, (_c_) those of Aramaic origin and affinities, (_d_) those

borrowed from non-Semitic languages. The student should also notice the

striking grammatical peculiarities of Koheleth, especially the fact that

the ordinary historic tense (the imperfect with Waw consecutive) is

hardly ever used. The scholar’s instinct but three times reveals itself

in the adoption of this old literary idiom (i. 17, iv. 1, 7), but

elsewhere the usage of the Mishna is already law. Almost equally

important is the fact that the Hebrew mood-distinctions are so little

used in Koheleth (on which point see Delitzsch’s introduction); indeed,

we may say upon the whole that that which gives a characteristic flavour

to the old Hebrew style is ‘ready to vanish away.’ The Mishnic

peculiarities of the book are especially interesting, as confirming our

view of its origin. The author is very different in his opinions from

the doctors of the Mishna, but he resembles them in his questioning and

reflective spirit, and helped to form the linguistic instrument which

they required. Less important, but not to be ignored, are the Aramaic

elements. Even Dr. Adam Clarke, untrained scholar as he was, pronounced

that the attempts which had as yet been made to overthrow the evidence,

were ‘often trifling and generally ineffectual.’[390] The Aramaisms of

Koheleth are irreconcileable with a pre-Exile date; they can only be

paralleled and explained from the Aramaic portions of the books of Ezra

and Daniel. That they are comparatively few, only proves that the force

of the Aramaising movement has abated, and that the Hebrew language, at

any rate in the hands of some of its chief cultivators, is passing into

a new phase (the Mishnic). The judgment of Ewald, as already expressed

in 1837, appears to me on the whole satisfactory: ‘One might easily

imagine Koheleth to be the very latest book in the Old Testament. A

premature conclusion, since Aramaic influence extended very gradually

and secretly, so that one writer might easily be more Aramaic in the

colouring of his style than another. But though not [even if not] the

latest, it cannot have been written till long after Aramaic had begun

powerfully to influence Hebrew, and therefore _not before_ the last

century of the Persian rule.’[391]

For the sake of my argument, it is hardly necessary to refer to the

words of non-Semitic origin, which are (as most critics rightly hold)

but two in number; 1 פַּרְדֵּם (ii. 5, plur.) undoubtedly a Hebraised

Persian word, on which I lay no stress here, because it occurs, not only

in Neh. ii. 8, but also in Cant. iv. 13, where many critics deny that it

militates against a pre-Exile date, and 2 פִתְגָם (viii. 11), which

occurs in the Aramaic parts of Ezra and Daniel, and also in Esth. i. 20,

and while used in the Targums and in Syriac, did not become naturalised

in Talmudic. This word, too, is commonly regarded as Hebraised Persian,

but, following Zirkel, the eminent Jewish scholar Heinrich Grätz

declares it to be the Hebraised form of a Greek word. Is this possible

or probable? Are there any genuine Græcisms of language, and

consequently also of thought, in the Book of Koheleth? An important

question, to which we will return.

The date suggested by Ewald, and accepted by Knobel, Herzfeld,

Vaihinger, Delitzsch, and Ginsburg, suits the political circumstances

implied in Koheleth. The Jews had long since lost the feelings of trust

and gratitude with which in ‘better days’ (vii. 10) they regarded the

court of Persia; the desecration of the temple by Bagoses or Bagoes

(Jos. _Ant._ xi. 7) is but one of the calamities which betel Judæa in

the last century of the Persian rule. It is a conjecture of Delitzsch

that iv. 3 contains a reminiscence of Artaxerxes II. Mnemon (died about

360), who was ninety-four years old, and according to Justin (x. 1), had

115 sons, and of his murdered successor Artaxerxes III. Ochus. Probably,

if we knew more of this period, we should be able to produce other

plausible illustrations. Certainly the state of society suits the date

proposed. As Delitzsch remarks, ‘The unrighteous judgment, iii. 16; the

despotic depression, iv. 1, viii. 9, v. 8; the riotous court-life, x.

16-19; the raising of mean men to the highest dignities, x. 5-7; the

inexorable severity of the law of military service, viii. 8; the

prudence required by the organised system of espionage,—all these things

were characteristic of this period.’ Probably an advocate of a different

theory would interpret these passages otherwise; but as yet no

conclusive argument has been offered for supposing allusions to

circumstances of the Greek period.

Let me frankly admit, in conclusion, that the evidence of the Hebrew

favours a later date than that proposed by Ewald—favours, but does not

actually require it. It seems, however, that if the book be of the Greek

period, we have a right to expect some definite traces of Greek

influence. This will supply the subject of the next chapter.

At any rate, the author addresses himself to Palestinian readers. He

lives, not (I should suppose) in the country, as Ewald thought, but near

the temple, or at least has opportunities of frequenting it (v. 1,[392]

viii. 10). Some recent scholars place him in Alexandria; but the

reference to the corn trade in xi. 1 does not prove this to be correct;

indeed, the very same section contains a reference to _rain_ (so xii.

2). Sharpe[393] is alone in preferring Antioch, the capital of the Greek

kingdom of Syria. Kleinert’s remark that ‘king in Jerusalem’ (i. 12)

implies a foreign abode is met by the remark that Jerusalem was in the

writer’s time no longer a royal city. The author may have travelled, and

like Sirach have had personal acquaintance with the dangers of

court-life (either at Susa or at Alexandria). The references to the king

do not perhaps compel this supposition; ‘are not my princes altogether

kings?’ (Isa. x. 8) could be said of Persian satraps.

Footnote 388:

See the _Midrasch Kohelet_ (ed. Wünsche, 1880), or Ginsburg, p. 38.

Footnote 389:

Comp. the glossary at the end of Grätz’s commentary.

Footnote 390:

Quoted by Ginsburg, _Coheleth_, p. 197.

Footnote 391:

_Die poetischen Bücher des Alten Bundes_, Theil iv.

Footnote 392:

The ‘house of God’ must, I think, mean the temple of Jerusalem. That

of Onias IV. was not built till 160 B.C. The synagogues would not be

called ‘houses of God’ (on Ps. lxxiv. 8, see Hitzig).

Footnote 393:

_History of Hebrew Nation and its Literature_ (ed. 2), p. 344.

CHAPTER XI.

DOES KOHELETH CONTAIN GREEK WORDS OR IDEAS?

We now begin the consideration of the question, Are there any

well-ascertained Græcisms in the language and in the thought of this

obviously exceptional book? That there are many Greek loan-words in

Targumic and Talmudic, is undeniable, though Levy in his lexicon has no

doubt exaggerated their number. G. Zirkel, a Roman Catholic scholar, was

the first who answered in the affirmative, confining himself to the

linguistic side of the argument. His principal work,[394]

_Untersuchungen über den Prediger_ (Würzburg, 1792), is not in the

Bodleian Library, but Eichhorn’s review in his _Allgemeine Bibliothek_,

vol. iv. (1792), contains a summary of Zirkel’s evidence from which I

select the following.

(_a_) יָפֶה, in sense of καλός ‘becoming’ (iii. 11, v. 17). This is

one of the Græcisms which commend themselves the most to Grätz and

Kleinert. The former points especially to v. 17, where he takes טוב

אשר יפה together as representing καλὸν κἀγαθόν (comp. Plumptre on v.

18). The construction, however, is mistaken (see Delitzsch). The

second אשר indicates that יפה is a synonym of וטב ‘excellent.’ The

notion of the beautiful can be developed in various ways. The sense

‘becoming,’ characteristic of later Hebrew, is more distinctly

required in iii. 11.

(_b_) ‘In the clause לָמָּה חָכַמְתִּי אֲנִי אָז יֹתֵר (ii. 15) the

words אָז יֹתֵר must signify ἔτι μᾶλλον: quid mihi prodest majorem

adhuc sapientiæ operam dare?’ But the demonstrative particle אז

means, not ἔτι, but ‘in these circumstances’ (Jer. xxii. 15). Its

position and connection with יתר are for emphasis. The fact of

experience mentioned makes any special care for wisdom unreasonable.

(_c_) ‘עֳשׂׂות טוֹב (iii. 12) is a literal translation of εὖ

πράττειν.’ This is accepted by Kleinert and also by Tyler. The very

next verse seems to explain this phrase by ראה טוב (comp. v. 17);

certainly the ethical meaning is against the analogy of ii. 24, iii.

22, and similar passages. But should we not, with Grätz and Nowack,

correct רְאוֹת טוב in iii. 12?

(_d_) ‘כִּי הָאֱלֹהִים וגו (v. 19) must mean, God gives him joy of

heart. ענה “respondere” seems to have borrowed the meaning

“remunerari” from ἀμείβεσθαι, which has both senses. The ancient

writer of the book thought thus in Greek, ὅτι θεὸς ἀμείβεται (αὐτὸν)

εὐφροσύνῃ τῆς καρδίας.’ Zirkel forgets Ps. lxv. 6. See however

Delitzsch.

(_e_) הֲלָךּ־נֶפֶשׁ (vi. 9) = ὁρμὴ τῆς ψυχῆς [M. Aurelius iii. 15].

But the phrase is idiomatic Hebrew for ‘roving of the desire.’

(_f_) יֵצֵא אֶת־כֻּלָּם (vii. 18). ‘The Hebrew writer found no other

equivalent for μέσην βαδίζειν.’ But unless he borrowed the idea

(that of cultivating the mean in moral practice), why should he have

tried to express the technical term?

(_g_) כִּי־זֶה כָּל־הָאָדָם (xii. 13). ‘A pure Græcism, τοῦτο παντὸς

ἀνθρὼπου.’ But how otherwise could the idea of the universal

obligation to fear God have been expressed? Comp. the opening words

of iii. 19.

To these may be added (h) ביום טובה (vii. 14) = εὐημερία (see

however xii. 1); (i) the ‘technical term’ טור (i. 13, ii. 3, vii.

25) = σκέπτεσθαι [but good Hebrew for ‘to explore’]; (k) פתגם (viii.

11) = φθέγμα; (l) פרדם (ii. 15) = παράδεισος (see above).

No one in our day would dream of accepting these ‘Græcisms’ in a mass.

Zirkel tried to prove too much, as Grätz himself truly observes. Any

peculiar word or construction he set down as un-Hebraic and hurried to

explain it by some Greek parallel, ignoring the capacity of development

inherent in the Hebrew language. His attempt failed in his own

generation. Three recent scholars however (Grätz, Kleinert, and Tyler),

have been more or less captivated by his idea, and have proposed some

new and some old ‘Græcisms’ for the acceptance of scholars. To me it

seems that, their three or four very disputable words and phrases are

not enough. If the author of Koheleth really thought half in Greek, the

Greek colouring of the language would surely not have been confined to

such a few expressions. If מה־שהיה (vii. 24) were really derived from τὸ

τί ἐστιν, as Kleinert supposes, should we not meet with it oftener? But

the phrase most naturally means, not ‘the essence of things,’ but ‘that

which hath come into existence;’ phenomena are not easily understood in

their ultimate causes, is the simple meaning of the sentence. I have

said nothing as yet of the supposed Græcism in the epilogue—the last

place where we should have expected one (considering ver. 12). But Mr.

Tyler’s proposal to explain הַכֹּל (xii, 13) by τὸ καθόλου or τὸ ὅλον (a

formula introducing a general conclusion), falls to the ground, when the

true explanation of the passage has been stated (see p. 232).

There are therefore no Græcisms in the language of the book. Of course

_ideas_ may have been derived from a Greek source notwithstanding. The

book, as we have seen already, is conspicuous by its want of a native

Jewish background, nor does it show any affinity to Babylonian or

Persian theology. It obviously stands at the close of the great Jewish

humanistic movement, and gives an entirely new colour to the traditional

humanism by its sceptical tone and its commendations of sensuous

pleasure. It is not surprising that St. Jerome should remark on ix. 7-9,

that the author appears to be reproducing the low ideas of some Greek

philosophers, though, as this Father supposes, only to refute them.

‘Et hæc inquit, aliquis loquatur Epicurus, et Aristippus et

Cyrenaici et cæteræ pecudes Philosophorum. Ego autem, mecum

diligenter retractans, invenio’[395] &c.

Few besides Prof. Salmon would accept the view that Eccles. ix. 7-9 and

similar passages are the utterances of an infidel objector (see Bishop

Ellicott’s Commentary); but it is perfectly possible to hold that there

are distinctively Epicurean doctrines in the Koheleth. The later history

of Jewish thought may well seem to render this opinion probable. How

dangerously fascinating Epicureanism must have been when the word

‘Epicuros’ became a synonym in Rabbinic Hebrew for infidel or even

atheist.[396] It is indeed no mere fancy that just as Pharisaism had

affinities with Stoicism, so Sadducæism had with Epicureanism. As

Harnack well says, ‘No intellectual movement could withdraw itself from

the influences which proceeded from the victory of the Greeks over the

Eastern world.’[397] Mr. Tyler,[398] however, and his ally Dean

Plumptre, have scarcely made the best of their case, the Epicurean

affinities which they discover in Koheleth being by no means striking.

Much use is made of the _De Rerum Naturâ_ of Lucretius—a somewhat late

authority! But if points of contact with Lucretius are to be hunted for,

ought we not also to mention the discrepancies between the ‘wise man’

and the poet? If Lucr. i. 113-116 may be used to illustrate Eccles. iii.

21, must we not equally emphasise the difference between the festive

mirth recommended by Koheleth (ix. 7, 8 &c.) and the simple pleasures so

beautifully sung by Lucretius (ii. 20-33), and which remind us rather of

the charming naturalness of the Hebrew Song of Songs?[399] The number of

vague analogies between Koheleth and Epicureanism might perhaps have

been even increased, but I can find no passage in the former which

distinctly expresses any scholastic doctrine of Epicureanism. For

instance the doctrine of Atomism assumed for illustration by Dean

Plumptre,[400] cannot be found there by even the keenest exegesis; the

plurality of worlds is not even distantly alluded to, and the denial of

the spirit, if implied in iii, 21 (see p. 212), is only implied in the

primitive Hebrew sense, familiar to us from Job and the Psalter. The

recommendation of ἀταραξία (to use the Epicurean term), coupled with

sensuous pleasure (v. 18-20), requires no philosophic basis, and is

simply the expression of a _pococurante_ mood, only too natural in one

debarred from a career of fruitful activity. Lastly, there is nothing in

the phraseology either of the Hebrew or of the Septuagint to suggest an

acquaintance with Epicureanism.

A stronger case can be made for the influence of Stoicism. The undoubted

Oriental affinities of this system and its moral and theological spirit

would, as Mr. Tyler observes, naturally commend it to a Jewish writer.

We know that, at a somewhat later day, Stoicism exercised a strong

fascination on some of the noblest Jewish minds. Philo,[401] the Book of

Wisdom, and the so-called Fourth Book of Maccabees, have undeniable

allusions to it; and more or less probable vestiges of Stoicism have

been found in the oldest Jewish Sibyl[402] (about B.C. 140) and in the

Targum of Onkelos.[403] But how does the case stand with Koheleth? First

of all, are there any traces of Stoic terminology? That terminology

varied no doubt within certain limits, and could not be accurately

reproduced in Hebrew. Still even under the contorted forms of expression

to which a Hebrew-writing Stoic or semi-Stoic might be driven we could

hardly fail to recognise the familiar Stoic expressions, εἱμαρμένη,

πρόνοια, φαντασία, φύσις, φρόνησις, ἀρετή. The Septuagint version ought

to help us here. But among the twenty words almost or entirely peculiar

to the Greek of Ecclesiastes, the only two technical philosophic terms

are σοφία and γνῶσις.

Next, can we detect references to distinctive Stoic doctrines? Mr. Tyler

lays great stress in his reply on the Catalogue of Times and Seasons

(iii. 1-8), which he regards as an expansion of the Stoic ὁμολογουμένως

ζῆν But the idea that there is an appointed order of things, and that

every action has its place in it, is much more a corollary of the

doctrine of Destiny than of the doctrine of Duty. The essence of the

latter doctrine is that men were meant to conform and ought to conform

to the Universal Order, acquiescing in that which is inevitable, shaping

in the best way that which is possible to be moulded. Upon this the

practical ethics of Stoicism depend. But this is the very point which is

absent in Ecclesiastes. The Catalogue of Times and Seasons ends not with

the Stoic exhortation ἐκπληροῦ τὴν χώραν, ‘Fulfil thy appointed part,’

but with the despondent reflection of the Fatalist, ‘What profit hath he

that worketh in that wherein he toileth?’ (iii. 9.) A second argument is

that the idea ‘There is no new thing under the sun’ (i. 9) is a phase of

the Stoic doctrine of cyclical revolutions. But all that which gave form

and colour to the Stoic doctrine is entirely absent—especially, as Mr.

Tyler himself admits, the idea of ἐκπύρωσις. The idea, as it is found in

Ecclesiastes, has nothing Stoic or even philosophical about it. It is

simply an old man’s observation that human actions, like natural

phenomena, tend to repeat themselves in successive generations.[404]

That there are analogies between Stoicism and the ideas of Koheleth need

not be denied; Dr. Kalisch has collected some of them in his very

interesting philosophico-religious dialogue.[405] Prominent among these

is the peculiar use of the terms ‘madness’ and ‘folly.’ ‘From the

followers of Zeno,’ remarks Dean Plumptre,[406] ‘he learned also to look

upon virtue and vice in their intellectual aspects. The common

weaknesses and follies of mankind were to him, as to them, only so many

different forms and degrees of absolute insanity (i. 17, ii. 12, vii.

25, ix. 3).’ But this division of mankind into wise men and fools is

common to the Stoa with the ancient Hebrew sages who ‘sat in the gate.’

When the great populariser of Stoicism says, ‘Sapientia perfectum bonum

est mentis humanæ,’[407] he almost translates more than one of the

proverbs which we have studied already. Another point of contact with

Stoicism is undoubtedly the Determinism of the book, which, as Prof.

Kleinert observes, leaves no room for freedom of the will, and fuses the

conceptions of εἱμαρμένη and πρόνοια (see especially chap. iii.). But

such Determinism need not have been learned in the school of Zeno. It is

genuinely Semitic (did not Zeno come from the Semitic Citium?) What is

the religion of Islam but a grandiose system of Determinism? Indeed,

where is virtual Determinism more forcibly expressed than in the Old

Testament itself (e.g., Isa. lxiii. 17)?

Those who adopt the view which I am controverting are apt to appeal to

somewhat late philosophic authorities. I cannot here discuss the

parallelisms which have been found in the Meditations or Self-communings

(Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν) of the great Stoic emperor. Some, for instance, consider

the ῥύσεις καὶ ἀλλοιώσεις which ‘renew the world continually’ (_M. A._

vi. 15) and the περιοδικὴ παλιγγενεσία τῶν ὅλων (_M. A._ xi. 1) to be

alluded to in Eccles. i. 5-9. More genuine are some at least of the

other parallelisms, e.g. Eccles. i. 9, _M. A._ vi. 37, vii. 1, x. 27,

xii. 26; Eccles. ii. 25, _M. A._ ii. 3 (_ad init._); Eccles. iii. 11,

_M. A._ iv. 23 (ad init.); Eccles. vi. 9, _M. A._ iv. 26; Eccles, xi. 5,

_M. A._ x. 26. I admit that there is a certain vague affinity between

the two thinkers; both are earnest, both despair of reforming society,

both have left but a fragmentary record of their meditations. But the

‘humanest of the Roman race’[408] stands out, upon the whole, far above

the less cultured and more severely tried Israelite. Alike in

intellectual powers and in moral elevation the soul of the Roman is of a

truly imperial order. He is not, like Koheleth, a ‘malist’ (see pp.

201-202); he boldly denies evil, and his strong faith in Providence

cannot be disturbed by apparent irregularities in the order of things.

It is true that this does but make the sadness of his golden and almost

Christian book the more depressing. But the book _is_ ‘golden.’[409]

Koheleth and M. Aurelius alike call forth our pity and admiration, but

in what different proportions!

If, then, there are points of agreement between Koheleth and M.

Aurelius, there must also of necessity be points of disagreement. Every

page of their writings would, I think, supply them. Suffice it to put

side by side the saying of Koheleth, ‘God is in heaven, and thou upon

earth’ (v. 2), and M. Aurelius’ invocation of the world as the ‘city of

God’ (iv. 23). The comparison suggests one of the greatest discrepancies

between Koheleth and the Stoics—the doctrine of God. Such faith as the

former still retains is faith in a transcendent and not an immanent

Deity. The germs of a doctrine of Immanence which the older

Wisdom-literature contains (Kleinert quotes Ps. civ. 30, Job xxvi. 13),

have found no lodgment in the mind of our author, who is more affected

by the legal and extreme supernaturalistic[410] point of view than he is

perhaps aware.

Mr. Tyler’s introduction to his _Ecclesiastes_ is a work of great

acuteness and originality, and seeks to provide against all reasonable

objections; I cannot do justice to it here. One part of his theory,

however, is too remarkable to be passed over (see above, pp. 240, 241).

He supposes that Stoic and Epicurean doctrines were deliberately set

over against each other by the wise man who wrote our book, in order by

the clash of opposites to deter the reader from dangerous and

unsatisfying investigations. The goal of the author’s philosophising

thus becomes the negation of all philosophy, and this ‘sacrificio dell’

intelletto’ he insinuatingly commends by the subtlest use of artifice.

Such a theory may have occurred to one or another early writer (see

Ginsburg), but seems out of harmony with the character of the author as

revealed in his book. He is not such a weak-kneed wrestler for truth.

You may fancy him sometimes a Stoic, sometimes an Epicurean; but he

always speaks like a man in earnest, however his opinions may change

through the fluctuations of his moods. Mr. Tyler’s theory confounds

Koheleth’s point of view with that of a far inferior thinker, the author

of Ecclesiasticus (see above, p. 199).

I cannot, therefore, be persuaded to explain this enigmatical book by a

supposed contact with Greek philosophy such as we do really find in the

Book of Wisdom. I have no prejudice against the supposition in itself.

It would help me to understand the Hellenising movement at a later day

if Stoic and (still more) Epicurean ideas had already filtered into the

minds of the Jewish aristocracy. The denunciations in the Book of Enoch

(xciv. 5, xcviii. 15, civ. 10) not impossibly refer to a heretical

philosophical literature (see p. 233); the only question is, To a native

or to a half foreign literature? I see no sufficient reason at present

for adopting the latter alternative. Koheleth is really a native Hebrew

philosopher, the first Jew who, however awkwardly and ineffectually,

‘gave his mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all things that

are done under heaven’ (i. 13). Very touching in this light are the

memoranda which he has left us. They are incomplete enough; Koheleth is

but the forerunner of more systematic philosophisers. His ideas are

nothing less than scholastic; how could we expect anything different,

his first object being in all probability to soothe the pain of an

inward struggle by giving it literary expression? If, however, I was

compelled to suggest a secondary reference to any foreign system, I

could most easily suppose one to the pessimistic teaching of Hegesias

Peisithanatos, who, after Ptolemy Soter and Philadelphus had made

Alexandria the seat of the world’s commerce and the centre of Greek

literature and culture, was seized with the thought of the vanity of all

things, of the preponderance of evil, and of the impossibility of

happiness.[411] Koheleth’s teaching would be a safeguard to any Jew who

might be tempted by this too popular philosopher. He admits ματαιότης

ματαιοτήτων, but insists that, granting all drawbacks, ‘the light is

sweet’ (xi. 7), the living are better off than the dead (ix. 4-6), and

sensuous pleasure, used in moderation, is at least a relative good (ii.

24); also that it is futile to inquire ‘why the former days (of the

earlier Ptolemies?) were better than these’ (vii. 10), and, if a later

view of his meaning may be trusted, he sought to displace the many

dangerous books which were current by words which were at once

pleasantly written and objectively true (xii. 10, 12).

Koheleth is a native Hebrew philosopher. The philosophy of an eastern

sage is not to be tied up in the rigid formulæ of the West. Easterns may

indeed take kindly to Western doctrines; but where they think

independently, they eschew system. Koheleth’s seeming Stoicism is, as we

have seen, of primitive Hebrew affinities; his seeming Epicureanism, if

it be not sufficiently explained as a mental reaction against the gloom

of the times, may perhaps be connected more or less closely, not with

the schools of Greek philosophers, but with the banquet-halls of Egypt.

The Hebrew writer’s invitations to enjoy life remind us of the call to

‘drink and be happy,’ which accompanied the grim symbolic ‘coffin,’ or

mummy, at Egyptian feasts (probably they were funeral-feasts), according

to Herodotus (ii. 78), and of the festal dirges translated by Goodwin

and Stern.[412] A stanza in one of the latter may be given here. It is

from the song supposed to be sung by the harper at an anniversary

funeral feast in honour of Neferhotep, a royal scribe, and still to be

seen cut in the stone at Abd-el-Gurna, in the Theban necropolis. As

Ebers has remarked,[413] the song ‘shows how a certain fresh delight in

life mingled with the feelings about death that were prevalent among the

ancient Egyptians, who celebrated their festivals more boisterously than

most other peoples.’ By a poetic fiction, the dead man is supposed to be

present, and to listen to the song.

Make a good day, O holy father!

Let odours and oils stand before thy nostril.

Wreaths of lotus are on the arms and the bosom of thy sister,

Dwelling in thy heart, sitting beside thee.

Let song and music be before thy face,

And leave behind thee all evil cares!

Mind thee of joy, till cometh the day of pilgrimage,

When we draw near the land which loveth silence.

We have seen that the Wisdom of Sirach betrays a taste for Egyptian

festivity (p. 191). May we not suppose that Koheleth too had travelled

to Alexandria? This view commends itself to Kleinert, and I have no

objection to it with due limitations. Koheleth may have envied and

sought to copy the light-hearted gaiety of the valley of the Nile. But

we ought not to conceal the fact that the lines quoted above are

followed by others which have no parallel in Koheleth.

Good for thee then will have been (an honest life),

Therefore be just and hate transgressions,

For he who loveth justice (will be blest).

(They in the shades) are sitting on the bank of the river,

Thy soul is among them, drinking its sacred water.

... (woe to the bad one!)

He shall sit miserable in the heat of infernal fires.

There is a wide difference between a people who believed in a happy

Amenti where Osiris himself dwelt and the Jew who doubted much but

believed firmly in Sheól. I admit then the probability that the latter

had travelled, and was not unaffected by the brightness of Egyptian

society, but I see no reason to suppose that he knew and was influenced

by the expressions of Egyptian songs. The resemblances adduced are to me

as fortuitous as those between the love-poems of the Nile valley and the

Hebrew Song of Songs, or (we may add) as that striking one between

Eccles. i. 4 and some of the opening lines of the ‘Song of the Harper,’—

Men pass away since the time of Ra [the sun of day]

And the youths come in their stead.

Like as Ra reappears every morning,

And Tum [the sun of night] sets in the horizon,

Men are begetting,

And women are conceiving.[414]

I make no excuse for the length of this inquiry. If we could trace Greek

influences, linguistic or philosophical, in the strange book before us,

its date would be decided. Taking into account the circumstances of the

writer, we might assign it to the reign of Ptolemy IV. Philopator, when

the Egyptian rule began to be calamitous for Judæa. Kleinert would place

it rather in one of the early, fortunate reigns (_Herzog-Plitt_, xii.

173); but he forms perhaps too favourable a view of the social picture

in Koheleth. Hitzig, who gives a very restricted range to Greek

philosophical influence upon our book, and accepts none of Zirkel’s

Græcisms, fixes the date in the first year of Ptolemy V. Epiphanes.

Geiger, Nöldeke, Kuenen, Tyler, and Plumptre, on various grounds, think

this the most probable period,[415] and the view is endorsed by Zeller,

the historian of Greek philosophy.

A Maccabæan and still more a Herodian date seem to me absolutely

excluded, though Zirkel and Renan have advocated the one, and Heinrich

Grätz (see p. 240) the other. The book is certainly pre-Maccabæan, not

merely because of a Talmudic anecdote,[416] but because of its want of

religious fervour (comp. Esther) and its cosmopolitanism. The germs of

the Jewish parties may be there, but only the germs. To me Hitzig’s is

the latest possible date; but if we _must_ admit a vague and indirect

Greek influence, should we not place the book a little earlier as

suggested above? But I do not see that we _must_ admit even a vague

Greek influence. The inquiring spirit was present in the class of ‘wise

men’ even before the Exile, and the circumstances of the later Jews

were, from the Exile onwards, well fitted to exercise and develope it.

Hellenic teaching was in no way necessary to an ardent but unsystematic

thinker like Koheleth. _The date proposed by Ewald and Delitzsch is on

this and other grounds probable, and on linguistic grounds not

impossible._

There are two recent treatises on the philosophical affinities of

Koheleth which may be mentioned here, though only the first is known to

me. Paul Kleinert, who has long made a special study of Koheleth (see

his _Prediger Salomo_, 1864), contributed to the _Theolog. Studien und

Kritiken_, 1883, p. 761, &c., a striking paper called ‘Sind im Buche

Koheleth ausserhebräische Einflüsse anzuerkennen,’ and August Palm in

1885 published a _programme_ entitled ‘_Qohelet und die

nacharistotelische Philosophie_’ (Mannheim).

Footnote 394:

He also published _Der Prediger Salomon; ein Lesebuch für den jungen

Weltbürger; übersetzt und erklärt_ (1792). The very title bears the

mark of the century.

Footnote 395:

_Opera_, ii. (1699), 765 (_Comm. in Ecclesiasten_). Comp. the use made

of Koheleth’s phraseology by the author of Wisdom (ii. 6-10).

Footnote 396:

See _Sanhedrin_, x. 1:—אלו שאין להם חלק לעולם הבא האומר אין תחית המתים

מן התורה ואין תורה מן שמים ואפיקורום.—Comp. _Aboth_, ii. 14 (10

Taylor), and _Genesis Rabbah_, 19 (‘the serpent was Epicuros’).

Footnote 397:

_Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte_, p. 46.

Footnote 398:

See his _Ecclesiastes, a Contribution to its Interpretation_, &c.

(1874). The main results of this work were accepted by Prof.

Siegfried, who reviewed it in the _Zeitschrift f. wissenschaftl.

Theologie_, 1875, pp. 284-291.

Footnote 399:

This discrepancy I had noted down before observing that Dean Plumptre

had quoted the very same passage of Lucretius as a parallel to Eccles.

ii. 24. For my own view of Koheleth’s recommendations, see p. 253.

Lucretius seems to me, in this strain, to soar higher than Koheleth;

Omar Khayyâm to fall below him.

Footnote 400:

_Ecclesiastes_, p. 47.

Footnote 401:

Philo alludes, e.g., to the Stoic doctrine of revolutions (which some

have found in Koheleth) and remarks that the Stoics think of God as of

a boy who builds up sandhills, and then throws them down again.

Footnote 402:

Hilgenfeld, _Jüdische Apokalyptik_, p. 51, &c.

Footnote 403:

See Deut. viii. 18, and especially Gen. ii. 7 (Neubürger in Grätz’s

_Monatsschrift_, 1873, p. 566).

Footnote 404:

For this criticism upon Mr. Tyler’s view of iii. 1-8, I am indebted to

Dr. Hatch.

Footnote 405:

_Path and Goal_, p. 116. But see p. 92.

Footnote 406:

_Ecclesiastes_, p. 45.

Footnote 407:

Seneca, Ep. 89, quoted by Bruch, _Weisheitslehre der Hebräer_, p.

253, with reference to the teaching of Proverbs.

Footnote 408:

R. H. Stoddard, _The Morals of M. Aurelius_.

Footnote 409:

Comp. Niebuhr, _Lectures on the History of Rome_, iii. 247.

Footnote 410:

The phrase is objectionably modern, but in this connection could not

be avoided.

Footnote 411:

Zeller, _Philosophie der Griechen_, ii. 1, p. 278.

Footnote 412: