Solomon and Solomonic Literature

The praise of the virtuous woman, at the close of the Proverbs, is given a Jahvist turn by verse 30: “Favour is deceitful and beauty vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.” But the Solomonists also had their ideas of the virtuous woman, and of beauty, these being beautifully expressed in a series of dramatic idylls entitled The Song of Songs. To this latter, in the original title, is added, “which is Solomon’s”; and it confirms what has been said concerning the superstitious awe of everything proceeding from Solomon, and the dread of insulting the Holy Spirit of Wisdom supernaturally lodged in him, that we find in the Bible these passionate love songs. And indeed Solomon must have been superlatively wise to have written poems in which his greatness is slightly ridiculed. That of course would be by no means incredible in a man of genuine wisdom—on the contrary would be characteristic—if other conditions were met by the tradition of his authorship.

At the outset, however, we are confronted by the question whether the Song of Songs has any general coherency or dramatic character at all. Several modern critics of learning, among them Prof. Karl Budde and the late Edward Reuss, find the book a collection of unconnected lyrics, and Professor Cornill of Königsberg has added the great weight of his name to that opinion (Einleitung in das Alte Testament. 1891). Unfortunately Professor Cornill’s treatment is brief, and not accompanied by a complete analysis of the book. He favors as a principle Reuss’s division of Canticles into separate idylls, and thinks most readers import into this collection of songs an imaginary system and significance. This is certainly true of the “allegorical” purport, aim, and religious ideas ascribed to the book, but Professor Cornill’s reference to Herder seems to leave the door open for further treatment of the Song of Songs from a purely literary standpoint. He praises Herder’s discernment in describing the book as a string of pearls, but passes without criticism or denial Herder’s further view that there are indications of editorial modifications of some of the lyrics. For what purpose? Herder also pointed out that various individualities and conditions are represented. This indeed appears undeniable: here are prince and shepherd, the tender mother, the cruel brothers, the rough watchman, the dancer, the bride and bridegroom. The dramatis personæ are certainly present: but is there any drama?

Admitting that there was no ancient Hebrew theatre, the question remains whether among the later Hellenic Jews the old songs were not arranged, and new ones added, in some kind of Singspiele or vaudeville. There seems to be a chorus. It is hardly consistent with the general artistic quality of the compilation that the lady should say “I am swarthy but comely,” or “I am a lily of the valley” (a gorgeous flower). Surely the compliments are ejaculations of the chorus. And may we not ascribe to a chorus the questions, “Who is this that cometh up out of the wilderness?” etc. (iii. 6–10.) “What is thy beloved more than another beloved”? (v. 9.) “Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved”? (viii. 5).

As in the modern vaudeville songs are often introduced without any special relation to the play, so we find in Canticles some songs that might be transposed from one chapter to another without marring the work, but is this the case with all of them? The song in the first chapter, for instance, in which the damsel, brought by the King into his palace, tells the ladies of the home she left, and of maltreatment by her brothers, who took her from her own vineyard and made her work in theirs, where she was sunburnt,—this could not be placed effectively at the end of the book, nor the triumphant line, “My vineyard, which is mine own, is before me,” be set at the beginning. This is but one of several instances that might be quoted. Even pearls may be strung with definite purpose, as in a rosary, and how perfectly set is the great rose,—the hymn to Love in the final chapter! Or to remember Professor Cornill’s word Scenenwechsel, along with his affirmation that the love of human lovers is the burden of the “unrivalled” book, there are some sequences and contrasts which do convey an impression of dissolving views, and occasionally reveal a connexion between separate tableaux. For example the same words (which I conjecture to be those of a chorus) are used to introduce Solomon in pompous palanquin with grand escort, that are presently used to greet the united lovers.

These are five chapters apart, yet surely they may be supposed connected without Hineininterpretation. Any single contrast of this kind might be supposed a mere coincidence, but there are two others drawn between the swarthy maiden and the monarch. The tableau of Solomon in his splendor dissolves into another of his Queen Mother crowning him on the day of his espousal: that of Shulamith leaning on her beloved dissolves into another of her mother pledging her to her lover in espousals under an apple tree. And then we find (viii. 11, 12) Solomon’s distant vineyards tended by many hirelings contrasted with Shulamith’s own little vineyard tended by herself.

The theory that the book is a collection of bridal songs, and that the mention of Solomon is due to an eastern custom of designating the bridegroom and bride as Solomon and Queen Shulamith, during their honeymoon, does not seem consistent with the fact that in several allusions to Solomon his royal state is slighted, whereas only compliments would be paid to a bridegroom. Moreover the two—Shulamith and Solomon—are not as persons named together. It will, I think, appear as we proceed that the Shelomoh (Solomon) of Canticles represents a conventionalisation of the monarch, with some traits not found in any other book in the Bible. A verse near the close, presently considered, suggests that the bride and bridegroom are at that one point metaphorically pictured as a Solomon and Solomona, indicating one feature of the Wise Man’s conventionalization.

Renan assigned Canticles the date B. C. 992–952, mainly because in it Tirza is coupled with Jerusalem. Tirza was a capital only during those years, and at any later period was too insignificant a town to be spoken of as in the Song vi. 4:

But the late Russell Martineau, a thorough and unbiassed scholar, points out in the work phrases from Greek authors of the third century B. C., and assigns a date not earlier than 247–222.1 But may it not be that the Alexandrian of the third century built on some earlier foundation, as Shakespeare adapted the “Pound of Flesh” and the “Three Caskets” (Merchant of Venice) from tales traceable as far back as early Buddhist literature? or as Marlowe and Goethe used the mediæval legend of Faustus?

The several songs can hardly be assigned to one and the same century. The coupling of Tirza and Jerusalem points to a remote past for that particular lyric, and is it credible that any Jew after Josiah’s time could have written the figleafless songs so minutely descriptive of Shulamith’s physical charms? Could any Jewish writer of the third century before our era have written iv. 1–7 or vii. 1–9, regarding no name or place as too sacred to be pressed into his hyperboles of rapture at every detail of the maiden’s form, and have done this in perfect innocency, without a blush? Or if such a poet could have existed in the later Jahvist times, would his songs have found their place in the Jewish canon? As it was the book was admitted only with a provision that no Jew under thirty years of age should read it. That it was included at all was due to the occult pious meanings read into it by rabbins, while it is tolerably certain that the realistic flesh-painting would have been expunged but for sanctions of antiquity similar to those which now protect so many old classics from expurgation by the Vice Societies. These songs, sensuous without sensuality, with their Oriental accent, seem ancient enough to have been brought by Solomon from Ophir.

On the other hand a critical reader can hardly ascribe the whole book to the Solomonic period. The exquisite exaltation of Love, as a human passion (viii. 6, 7), brings us into the refined atmosphere amid which Eros was developed, and it is immediately followed by a song that hardly rises above doggerel (viii. 8, 9). This is an interruption of the poem that looks as if suggested by the line that follows it (first line of verse 10) and meant to be comic. It impresses me as a very late interpolation, and by a hand inferior to the Alexandrian artist who in style has so well matched the more ancient pieces in his literary mosaic. Herder finds the collection as a whole Solomonic, and makes the striking suggestion that its author at a more mature age would take the tone of Ecclesiasticus.

Considered simply as a literary production, the composition makes on my own mind the impression of a romance conveyed in idylls, each presenting a picturesque situation or a scene, the general theme and motif being that of the great Solomonic Psalm.

This psalm (xlv.), quoted and discussed in chapter III., brings before us a beautiful maiden brought from a distant region to the court, but not quite happy: she is entreated to forget her people and enjoy the dignities and luxuries offered by her lord, the King. This psalm is remarkable in its intimations of a freedom of sentiment accorded to the ladies wooed by Solomon, and the same spirit pervades Canticles. Its chief refrain is that love must not be coerced or awakened until it please. This magnanimity might naturally connect the name of Solomon with old songs of love and courtship such as those utilised and multiplied in this book, whose composition might be naturally entitled “A Song (made) of Songs which are Solomon’s.”

The heroine, whose name is Shulamith,—(feminine of Shelomoh, Solomon)2—is an only daughter, cherished by her apparently widowed mother but maltreated by her brothers. Incensed against her, they compel Shulamith to keep their vineyards to the neglect of her own. She becomes sunburnt, “swarthy,” but is very “attractive,” and is brought by Solomon to his palace, where she delights the ladies by her beauty and dances. In what I suppose to be one of the ancient Solomonic Songs embodied in the work it is said:

Thus far the motif seems to be that of a Cinderella oppressed by brothers but exalted by the most magnificent of princes. But here the plot changes. The magnificence of Solomon cannot allure from her shepherd lover this “lily of the valley.” Her lover visits her in the palace, where her now relenting brothers (vi. 12) seem to appear (though this is doubtful) and witness her triumphs; and all are in raptures at her dancing and her amply displayed charms—all unless one (perhaps the lover) who, according to a doubtful interpretation, complains that they should gaze at her as at dancers in the camps (vi. 13).4

Although Russell Martineau maintained, against most other commentators, that Solomon is only a part of the scene, and not among the dramatis personæ, the King certainly seems to be occasionally present, as in the following dialogue, where I give the probable, though of course conjectural, names. The dancer has approached the King while at table.

Solomon—

Shulamith, who, on leaving the King, meets her jealous lover—

Shepherd Lover—

Shulamith—

Chorus, or perhaps the Lover—

Shepherd Lover—

Shulamith—

Thus we find the damsel anointing the king with her spikenard, but for her the precious fragrance is her shepherd. Against the plaits of gold and studs of silver offered in the palace (i. 2) her lover can only point to his cottage of cedar and fir, and a couch of grass. She is content to be only a flower of the plain and valley, not for the seraglio. Nevertheless she remains to dance in the palace; a sufficient time there is needed by the poet to illustrate the impregnability of true love against all other splendors and attractions, even those of the Flower of Kings. He however puts no constraint on her, one song, thrice repeated, saying to the ladies of the harem—

This refrain is repeated the second time just before a picture of Solomon’s glory, shaded by a suggestion that all is not brightness even around this Prince of Peace. The ladies of the seraglio are summoned to look out and see the passing of the King in state, seated on his palanquin of purple and gold, but escorted by armed men “because of fear in the night.” In immediate contrast with that scene, we see Shulamith going off with her humble lover, now his bride, to his field and to her vineyard, and singing a beautiful song of love, strong as death, flame-tipped arrow of a god, unquenchable, unpurchaseable.

Though according to the revised version of vi. 12 her relatives are princely, and it may be they who invite her to return (vi. 13), she says, “I am my beloved’s.” With him she will go into the field and lodge in the village (vii. 10, 11). She finds her own little garden and does not envy Solomon.

There was, as we see in Koheleth, a prevailing tradition that Solomon felt the hollowness of his palatial life. “See life with a woman thou lovest.” The wife is the fountain:

This perhaps gave rise to a theory that the shepherd lover was Solomon himself in disguise, like the god Krishna among the cow-maidens. It does not appear probable that any thought of that kind was in the writer of this Song. Certainly there appears not to be any purpose of lowering Solomon personally in enthroning Love above him. There is no hint of any religious or moral objection to him, and indeed throughout the work Solomon appears in a favourable light personally,—he is beloved by the daughters of Jerusalem (v. 10)—though his royal estate is, as we have seen, shown in a light not altogether enviable. Threescore mighty men guard him: “every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night,” and the day of his heart’s gladness was the day of his espousals (iii. 8, 11).

It is not improbable that there is an allusion to Solomon’s magic seal in the first lines of the hymn to Love (viii. 6). The legend of the Ring must have been long in growing to the form in which it is found in the Talmud, where it is said that Solomon’s “fear in the night” arose from his apprehension that the Devil might again get hold of his Ring, with which he (Aschmedai) once wrought much mischief. (Gittin. Vol. 68, col. 1, 2). The hymn strikes me as late Alexandrian:

Excluding the interrupting verses 8 and 9, the hymn is followed by a song about Solomon’s vineyard, preceded by two lines which appear to me to possess a significance overlooked by commentators. Shulamith (evidently) speaks:

The word “peace” is Shalôm; it is immediately followed by Shelomoh (Solomon, “peaceful”); and Shulamith (also meaning “peaceful”), thus brings together the fortress of her lover’s peace, her own breast, and the fortifications built by the peaceful King (who never attacked but was always prepared for defence). Here surely, at the close of Canticles, is a sort of tableau: Shalôm, Shulamith, Shelomoh: Peace, the prince of Peace, the queen of Peace. If this were the only lyric one would surely infer that these were the bride and bridegroom, under the benediction of Peace. It is not improbable that at this climax of the poem Shulamith means that in her lover she has found her Solomon, and he found in her his Solomona,—their reciprocal strongholds of Shalôm or Peace.

Of course my interpretations of the Song of Songs are largely conjectural, as all other interpretations necessarily are. The songs are there to be somehow explained, and it is of importance that every unbiassed student of the book should state his conjectures, these being based on the contents of the book, and not on the dogmatic theories which have been projected into it. I have been compelled, under the necessary limitations of an essay like the present, to omit interesting details in the work, but have endeavoured to convey the impression left on my own mind by a totally unprejudiced study. The conviction has grown upon me with every step that, even at the lowest date ever assigned it, the work represents the earliest full expression of romantic love known in any language. It is so entirely free from fabulous, supernatural, or even pious incidents and accents, so human and realistic, that its having escaped the modern playwright can only be attributed to the superstitious encrustations by which its beauty has been concealed for many centuries.

This process of perversion was begun by Jewish Jahvists, but they have been far surpassed by our A. S. version, whose solemn nonsense at most of the chapter heads in the Bible here reached its climax. It is a remarkable illustration of the depths of fatuity to which clerical minds may be brought by prepossession, that the closing chapter of Canticles, with its beautiful exaltation of romantic love, could be headed: “The love of the Church to Christ. The vehemency of Love. The calling of the Gentiles. The Church Prayeth for Christ’s coming.” The “Higher Criticism” is now turning the headings into comedy, but they have done—nay, are continuing—their very serious work of misdirection.

It has already been noted that the Jewish doctors exalted Bathsheba, adulteress as she was, into a blessed woman, probably because of the allusion to her in the Song (iii. 2) as having crowned her royal Son, who had become mystical; and it can only be ascribed to Protestantism that, instead of the Queen-Mother Mary, the Church becomes Bathsheba’s successor in our version: “The Church glorieth in Christ.” And of course the shepherd lover’s feeding (his flock) among the lilies becomes “Christ’s care of the Church.”

But for such fantasies the beautiful Song of Songs might indeed never have been preserved at all, yet is it a scandal that Bibles containing chapter-headings known by all educated Christians to be falsifications, should be circulated in every part of the world, and chiefly among ignorant and easily misled minds. These simple people, reading the anathemas pronounced in their Bibles on those who add anything to the book given them as the “Word of God” (Deuteronomy iv. 2, xii. 32, Proverbs xxx. 6, Revelation xxii. 18), cannot imagine that these chapter-headings are not in the original books, but forged. And what can be more brazenly fraudulent than the chapter-heading to one of these very passages (Revelation xxii. 18, 19), where nothing is said of the “Word of God,” but over which is printed: “18. Nothing may be added to the word of God, nor taken therefrom.” But even the learned cannot quite escape the effect of these perversions. How far they reach is illustrated in the fate of Mary Magdalen, a perfectly innocent woman according to the New Testament, yet by a single chapter-heading in Luke branded for all time as the “sinner” who anointed Jesus,—“Magdalen” being now in our dictionaries as a repentant prostitute. Yet there are hundreds of additions to the Bible more harmful than this,—additions which, whether honestly made or not originally, are now notoriously fraudulent. It is especially necessary in the interest of the Solomonic and secular literature in the Bible that Truth shall be liberated from the malarious well—Jahvist and ecclesiastical—in which she has long been sunk by mistranslation, interpolation, and chapter-headings. The Christian churches are to be credited with having produced critics brave enough to expose most of these impositions, and it is now the manifest duty of all public teachers and literary leaders to uphold those scholars, to protest against the continuance of the propaganda of pious frauds, and to insist upon the supremacy of truth.

In the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1897, a writer, in giving his personal reminiscences of Tennyson, relates an anecdote concerning the poet and the Rev. F. D. Maurice. Speaking of Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), Tennyson said it was the one book the admission of which into the canon he could not understand, it was so utterly pessimistic—of the earth, earthy. Maurice fired up. “Yes, if you leave out the last two verses. But the conclusion of the whole matter is, ‘Fear God and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.’ So long as you look only down upon earth, all is ‘vanity of vanities.’ But if you look up there is a God, the judge of good and evil.” Tennyson said he would think over the matter from that point of view.

This amusing incident must have caused a ripple of laughter in scholastic circles, now that the labors of Cheyne, Renan, Dillon, and others, have left little doubt that both of the verses cited by Maurice are later editorial additions. They alone, he admitted, could save the book, and the charm of the incident is that the verses were placed there by ancient Maurices to induce ancient Tennysons to “think over the matter from that point of view.” The result was that the previously rejected book was admitted into the canon by precisely the same force which continued its work at Faringford, and continues it to this day. Only one must not suppose that Mr. Maurice was aware of the ungenuineness of the verses. He was an honest gentleman, but so ingeniously mystical that had the two verses not been there he could readily have found others of equally transcendant and holy significance, without even resorting to other pious interpolations in the book.

Tennyson was curiously unconscious of his own pessimism. When any one questioned the belief in a future life in his presence his vehemence without argument betrayed his sub-conscious misgivings, while his indignation ran over all the conditional resentments of Job. I have heard that he said to Tyndall that if he knew there was no future life he would regard the creator of human beings as a demon, and shake his fist in His eternal face. This rage was based in a more profoundly pessimistic view of the present life than anything even in Ecclesiastes,—by which name may be happily distinguished the disordered, perverted, and mistranslated Koheleth.

It appears evident that the sentence which opens Koheleth,—in our Bibles “All is vanity, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity,”—is as mere a Jahvist chapter-heading as that of our A. S. translators: “The Preacher showeth that all human courses are vain.” It is repeated as the second of the eight verses added at the end of the work. Koheleth does not label the whole of things vanity; in a majority of cases the things he calls vain are vain; and some things he finds not vanity,—youth, and wedded love, and work that is congenial.

Renan (Histoire du Peuple d’Israël, Tome 5, p. 158) has shown conclusively, as I think, that the signature on this book, QHLT, is a mere letter-play on the word “Solomon,” and the eagerness with which the letters were turned into Koheleth (which really means Preacheress), and to make Solomon’s inner spouse a preacher of the vanities of pleasure and the wisdom of fearing God, is thus naively indicated in the successive names of the book, “Koheleth” and “Ecclesiastes.” We are thus warned by the title to pick our way carefully where the Jahvist and the Ecclesiastic have been before us; remembering especially that though piety may induce men to forge things, this is never done lightly. As people now do not commit forgery for a shilling, so neither did those who placed spurious sentences or phrases in nearly every chapter of the Bible do so for anything they did not consider vital to morality or to salvation. In Ecclesiastes we must be especially suspicious of the very serious religious points. Fortunately the style of the book renders it particularly subject to the critical and literary touchstone.

Is it necessary to point out to any man of literary instinct the interpolation bracketed in the following verses? “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart gladden thee in the flower of thy age, and walk in the paths of thy heart, and according to the vision of thine eyes [but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment], and banish discontent from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh; for youth and dawn are fleeting. Remember also thy fountain in the days of thy youth, or ever the evil days come or the years draw nigh in which thou shalt say I have no delight in them.”

It is only by removing the bracketed clause that any consistency can be found in the lyric, which Professor Cheyne compares with the following song by the ancient Egyptian harper at the funeral feast of Neferhotap:

There is no historical means of determining what writings of Solomon are preserved in the Bible and even in the apocryphal books. One may feel that Goethe recognised a brother spirit in that far epoch when he selected for his proverb:

Koheleth too appreciated this, and also (x. 12) uses almost literally Proverbs xii. 18, “The tongue of the wise is gentleness.” (Compare Shakespeare’s words, “Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.”) The lines previously cited, “Rejoice O young man, etc.,” are also probably quoted, as they are given in poetical quatrains. There are many of these quatrains introduced into the book, from the prose context of which they differ in style and sometimes in sense.

In none of these metrical quotations (as I believe them to be) is there any belief in God, the only instance in which the word “God” is mentioned being an ironical maxim about the danger coming from monarchs because of their oaths to their God, with whom they identify their own ways and wishes. Such seems to me the meaning of the lines (viii. 2, 4) which Dillon translates—

With this compare Proverbs xxi. 1, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord (Jahveh) as the water-courses; he turneth it whithersoever he will.” This proverb is evidently by a Jahvist, and Koheleth quotes another which signifies rather “Jahveh is in the king’s caprice.” But he adopts the neighbouring proverb, “To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to Jahveh than sacrifice.” Koheleth says, and this is not quoted—“To draw near to (God) in order to learn, is better than the offering of sacrifices by fools.”

Although the verses quoted by Maurice to Tennyson (xii. 13, 14) are not genuinely in Koheleth they correspond with sentences in the genuine text of very different import. Koheleth, though his quotations are godless, believes there is a God, and a formidable one. Sometimes he refers to him as Fate, sometimes as the unknowable, but as without moral quality. “To the just men that happeneth which should befall wrong-doers; and that happeneth for criminals which should be the lot of the upright” (viii. 14), and “neither (God’s) love nor hatred doth a man foresee” (ix. 1). God has set prosperity and adversity side by side for the express purpose of hiding Himself from human knowledge (vii. 14); not, alas, as the Yalkut Koheleth suggests, in order that one may help the other. God does benefit those who please him, and punish those who displease him; this is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to Him; but it has no relation with the humanly good and evil (viii. 11–14). As it is evident that God’s favor is not secured by good works nor his disfavor incurred by evil works, a prudent man will consider that it may perhaps be a matter of etiquette, and will be punctilious, especially “in the house of God”; he will not speak rashly and then hope to escape by saying “it was rashness.” His words had better be few, and if he makes any vow (which may well be avoided) he should perform it. But as for practical life and conduct, God, or fate, is clearly indifferent to it, consequently let a man eat his bread and quaff his wine with joy, love his wife,—the best portion of his lot,—and whatever his hand findeth to do that do with vigor, remembering that “there is no work, nor thought, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the inevitable grave.”

Such is Koheleth’s conception of life, which, except so far as it is marred by a vague notion of Fate which is fatal to philanthropy, is not very different from the idea growing in our own time. “The All is a never-ceasing whirl” (i. 8), and Koheleth advises that each individual man try to make what little circle of happiness he can around him. “O my heart!” says Omar Khayyám, “thou wilt never penetrate the mysteries of the heavens; thou wilt never reach that culminating point of wisdom which the intrepid omniscients have attained. Resign thyself then to make what little paradise thou canst here below. As for that close-barred seraglio beyond thou shalt arrive there—or thou shalt not!”

It is, however, impossible for any church or priesthood to be maintained on any such principles. Where mankind believe with Koheleth that whatever God does is forever, that nothing can be superadded to it nor aught be taken away; and that God has so contrived that man must fear Him; they will have no use for any paraphernalia for softening the irrevocable decrees of a Judgment Day already past. But Koheleth’s arrows, feathered with wit and eloquence, were logically shot from the Jahvist arquebus. It was Jahveh himself who proudly claimed that he created good and evil, and that if there were evil in a city it was his work. It was Jahveh’s own prophet, Isaiah, who cried (lxiii. 17), “O Lord, why dost Thou make us to err from Thy ways, and hardenest our heart from Thy fear?”

What then could Jahvism say when a time arrived wherein it must defend itself against a Jahveh-created world?

It was necessary that Koheleth should be answered, but who was competent for this? A fable had been invented of a Solomonic serpent who had tempted Eve to taste the fruit of knowledge which, when the man shared it, brought a curse on the earth, but the canonical prophets do not appear to have heard of it, and at any rate it was too late in the day to meet fact with fable. Nor had Jahveh’s whirlwind-answer to Job proved effectual. However, some sort of answer did come, and significantly enough it had to come from Koheleth’s own quarter, the Wisdom school. Pure Jahvism had not brains enough for the task.

The apocryphal book “Ecclesiasticus” is the antidote to Ecclesiastes. (These are the Christian names given to the two books.) This book, bearing the simple title “Wisdom,” compiled and partly written by Jesus Ben Sira early in the second century B. C., is as a whole much more than an offset to Koheleth. It is a great though unintentional literary monument to Solomon, and it is the book of reconciliation, or so intended, between Solomonism and Jahvism,—or, as we should now say, between philosophy and theology.

The newly discovered original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus xxxix. 15, xlix. 11, published by the Clarendon Press in 1897, enables us to read correctly for the first time the portraiture of Solomon in xlvii., with the assistance of Wace and other scholars:

In the last sentence I have inserted in crochets an alternative reading of Fritzsche for the three words that follow. (Rehoboam’s Ammonite mother was Naamah.)

It will be noticed that early in the second century B. C. there remained no trace of the anathemas on Solomon for his foreign or his idolatrous wives. He is now simply accused of being too fond of women,—a charge not known to the canonical books.

The verse 18 attests the correctness of the view taken of the forty-fifth Psalm in chapter III., written before this Clarendon Press volume appeared. It thus becomes certain that the Psalm was recognised as written in Solomon’s time, and that it was he who was there addressed as “God” (“the glorious name”).

The mention of this fact in “Wisdom,” and the enthusiasm pervading every sentence of the tribute to Solomon, despite his alleged sensuality, supply conclusive evidence that the cult of Solomon had for more than eight centuries been continuous, that it was at length prevailing, and that it had become necessary for a broad wing of Jahvism to include the Solomonic worldly wisdom and ethics.

Jesus Ben Sira states that he found a book written by his learned grandfather, whose name was also Jesus, who had studied many works of “our fathers,” and added to them writings of his own. The anonymous preface states that Sira, son of the first Jesus, left it to his son, and that “this Jesus did imitate Solomon.”

It is not said that Sira contributed anything to this composite work, yet there appear to be three minds in it. There is a fine and free philosophy which savors of the earliest traditions of the Solomonic School; there is an exceptionally morose Jahvism; and there is also mysticism, an attempt to rationalise and soften the Jahvism, and to solemnise the philosophy, so as to blend them in a kind of harmonious religion. I cannot help feeling that Sira or some friend of his must have inserted the Jahvism between the grandfather and the grandson.

However this may be, it is evident that Jesus Ben Sira was too reverent to seriously alter anything in the volume before him, for the contrast is startling between the hard Jahvism and the philosophy of life. Their inclusion in one work is like the union of oil and vinegar. The Jahvism is curiously bald: fear Jahveh, keep his commandments, pay your tithes, say your prayers, be severe with your children (especially daughters), never play with them, guard your wife vigilantly, flog your servants. The philosophy is quite incongruous with this formalism and rigidity, most of the maxims being elaborated with care, and only proverbs in form. Some of them are almost Shakespearian in artistic expression:

About the rendering of xli. 15 there is some doubt, and I give this conjecture:

In the Bible which belonged to the historian Gibbon, loaned by the late General Meredith Read to the Gibbon exhibition in London, I observed a pencil mark around these sentences in “Wisdom”:

To Jesus Ben Sira we may, I believe, ascribe the following:

This has an interesting correspondence with the beautiful rapture of the Persian Sâdi:

To Jesus Ben Sira may be safely ascribed the passages that bear witness to the pressure of problems which, though old, appear in new forms under Hellenic influences. They grow urgent and threaten the foundations of Jahvism. It was no longer sufficient to say that Jahveh rewarded virtue and piety, and punished vice and impiety in this world. Job had demanded the evidence for this, and the centuries had brought none. Job was awarded some recompense in this world, but that happy experience did not attend other virtuous sufferers.

The doctrine of one writer in “Wisdom” is simply predestination. Paul’s potter-and-clay similitude is anticipated, and the Parsi dualism curiously adapted to Jahvist monotheism: “Good is set against evil, life against death, the godly against the sinner and the sinner against the godly: look through all the works of the Most High and there are two and two, one against another.” But the liberal son of Sira is more optimist: “All things are double, one against another, but he hath made nothing imperfect: one thing establisheth the good of another.” Freedom of the will is asserted: “Say not, he hath caused me to err, for he hath no need of the evildoer. He made man from the beginning and left him in the hand of his (own) counsel.... He hath set fire and water before thee, stretch forth thy hand to whichever thou wilt. Before man is the living and the not-living, and whichever he liketh shall be given him.”

But the doctrine of human free agency is pregnant with polemics; it has so been in Christian history, as is proved by the Pelagian, Arminian, Jesuit, and Wesleyan movements. There are indications in Ben Sira’s work that the foundations of Jahvism were threatened by a moral scepticism. His own celebration of the Fathers was enough to bring into dreary contrast the tragedies of his own time and glories of the Past, when “Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and fig-tree, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, all the days of Solomon.” What shelter now in the divine fig-tree, which could bear nothing but legendary or predictive leaves? The curse on the barren tree was near at hand when Jesus Ben Sira uttered his pathetic complaint, veiled in prayer: