The construction of ver. 20b and ver. 21 in the Hebrew thus becomes more idiomatic (comp. χθές τε καὶ πρώην), though not free from ambiguity. The words may mean either that the compiler took long over his work, or that this was not the first occasion of his writing. On the latter explanation the passage may imply that the compiler of this anthology also wrote chaps. i.-ix. (comp. i. 6b). His hortatory style and predilection for grouping verses may seem to plead for this view. There are however no important points of contact in phraseology between the work before us and Prov. i.-ix.,^[179] and certainly the appendix falls far below the standard of the Introduction. At any rate, it is undoubted that these ‘words of the wise’ appeared long after the ‘Solomonic’ proverbs. The peculiarities of style referred to show this, and also the imitation of some of the ‘Solomonic’ proverbs in the ‘words of the wise;’ (comp. xi. 14 with xxiv. 5, 6; xiii. 9 with xxiv. 19, 20; xxii. 14a with xxiii. 27).

There is no occasion to suppose that all these proverbs come from one period; but the hand of a compiler is more conspicuous here than in the first anthology. He has not indeed removed repetitions (see xxii. 28a, xxiii. 10a; xxiii. 17a, xxiv. 1a; xxiii. 18, xxiv. 14), but the personal element preponderates so much that he might fairly have prefixed his own name as the author. Artistically, he may perhaps be found wanting. He has left one tristich (i.e. a proverb of three lines), viz. xxii. 29; two pentastichs (i.e. proverbs of five lines), viz. xxiii. 4, 5. xxiv. 13, 14; and one heptastich (i.e. a proverb of seven lines), viz. xxiii. 6-8. Unsymmetrical as these may be, it seems hazardous, unless there be any specially doubtful passage, to restore symmetry (i.e. to convert tristichs into tetrastichs, and so on) by inserting words conjecturally. There are a few distichs (xxii. 28, xxiii. 9, xxiv. 7, 8, 9, 10), thus affording a slight point of contact with the first anthology; more tetrastichs (xxii. 22, 23; 24, 25; 26, 27; xxiii. 10, 11; 15, 16; 17, 18; xxiv. 1, 2; 3, 4; 5, 6; 15, 16; 17, 18; 19, 20; 21, 22), and hexastichs (xxiii. 1-3; 12-14; 19-21; 26-28; xxiv. 11, 12). One octastich occurs (xxiii. 22-25), and one long poem, in the main a group of distichs, referred to again below (xxiii. 29-35).

Beautiful in form, the proverbs of this collection certainly are not; one cannot apply to the author the saying in xxiv. 26, ‘He kisses the lips who answers in suitable words.’ The contents however are not without points of interest. In xxiii. 1-3 we have a picture of a man of the middle class admitted to the table of a governor. Being unused to ‘dainties,’ he is tempted to excess; as a restraint, the ‘wise man’ bids him consider the capriciousness of princely favour (comp. Ecclus. ix. 13). The abuse of luxuries such as wine and meat was in fact a sore evil in the eyes of this writer (see the caution in xxiii. 20, 21 in the Septuagint version, which reminds one of vii. 14). He has even left us a poem on the evils of drunkenness (xxiii. 29-35) which contains several striking details from its satirical opening, ‘Who hath oi, who hath aboi?’ (interjections expressing pain), to the picturesque comparison of the drunkard to a man ‘that lieth upon the top of a mast,’^[180] which shows incidentally that sea-life was by this time a familiar experience. Another interesting passage, though marred by its obscurity, is that in xxiv. 11, 12. The innocent victims of a miscarriage of justice are about to be dragged away to execution; the pupil of the wise is exhorted to ‘deliver’ them, by intervening with resistless energy, like the St. Ives of a favourite Breton legend, and testifying to the innocence of the sufferers (see xxxi. 8). He may of course refuse, thinking to pretend afterwards that he had not heard of the case; but God knows all, and will requite falsehood, not perhaps at once, but at a future time, when ‘the lamp of the wicked shall be put out’ (xxiv. 20). The wise men, as we have seen, clung firmly to the doctrine of retribution in some one of its various forms. We are not therefore surprised that a book of proverbs should conclude with a dissuasion from consorting with lawless persons, and an earnest advice to ‘fear Jehovah and the king’ (xxiv. 21).

Much need not be said of the second appendix (xxiv. 23-34). ‘These also are by wise men,’ writes the collector, implying that he is to be distinguished from the editor of the preceding collection. The proverbs are all^[181] either in two, four, or six lines, except ver. 27, where however it is possible that some words have dropped out.^[182] At the end comes a parable or apologue professedly drawn from the writer’s experience (reminding us in this of vii. 6-23, but still more of Job v. 3-5). The scene is laid in a vineyard which has run to waste and become a wilderness from the carelessness of its owner (comp. xx. 4). The mashal (xxiv. 30-32) has been lengthened by the addition of two verses from vi. 9, 10, originally no doubt a marginal note. It was needless; the story (if story it can be called) is more vivid in its brevity, and forms a fitting close to this section of proverbial wisdom.

The next proverbial anthology (xxv.-xxix.) like its chief predecessor is described in the heading as ‘Proverbs of Solomon.’^[183] The social state however presupposed in many of them is so different from that of the Solomonic age that we may at once reject the theory of the wise king’s authorship. Another name with which in xxv. 1 the work is connected is that of Hezekiah, who has been suggestively called ‘the Pisistratus of Judah.’ The comparison halts, no doubt; for Pisistratus and his ‘companions’ meant to collect the whole of the Homeric poems, whereas completeness can hardly have been the object of those ‘friends (or counsellors) of Hezekiah’ who ‘collected’^[184] the ‘Proverbs of Solomon’ in xxv. 2-xxix. 27; at least, we know that there was much proverbial wisdom in circulation which had as good or as bad a claim to be called ‘Solomonic’ as the sayings which they have admitted into their anthology. It may indeed well be doubted whether the compilers had any thought of collecting the relics (now already more than 200 years old) of the wise king. The style of these proverbs makes such a hypothesis even more improbable than in the case of x. 1-xxii. 16. The words with which the heading begins are of course not decisive, especially as the whole verse appears to be due, not to the royal officials who are spoken of, but to the author of the heading in xxiv. 23a (both headings begin with ‘these also’). That Hezekiah was the instigator of the compilation, need not however be disputed. Even if not himself an author,^[185] he may well have shared his friend Isaiah’s interest in literature; and besides, it was at that time one of the glories of a great king to be the founder of a library.^[186] The word used in describing the activity of his commissioners means literally ‘transferred’ (from one place to another), and will equally well apply to the noting down of oral traditions and to the making extracts from existing collections. Among the latter, the ‘Proverbs of Solomon’ in x. 1-xxii. 16 are of course to be included, though it is not quite certain whether the compilers of the later anthology had the book before them. It is true that nine proverbs are the same in the two books either absolutely (xxv. 24 = xxi. 9, xxvi. 22 = xviii. 8, xxvii. 12 = xxii. 3, xxvii. 13 = xx. 16) or virtually (xxvi. 13 = xxii. 13, xxvi. 15 = xix. 24, xxviii. 6 = xix. 1, xxviii. 19 = xii. 11, xxix. 13 = xxii. 2), besides two which agree in one line (xxvii. 21 = xvii. 3, xxix. 22 = xv. 18; comp. also xxvii. 15, xix. 13). But there still remains the question, Why the collectors took so little and left so much of manifest antiquity, and to this question we cannot expect to find an answer. All that we can say is that their compilation has striking characteristics of its own. In technicalities they admit a greater variety than those of the first anthology. They allow not only distichs but tristichs (xxv. 8, 13, 20, xxvii. 10, 22, xxviii. 10), tetrastichs (xxv. 4, 5, xxv. 9, 10, xxv. 21, 22, xxvi. 18, 19, xxvi. 24, 25, xxvii. 15, 16), and in one case a pentastich^[187] (xxv. 6, 7), agreeing in this respect with the two appendices of the first anthology. There is also a long mashal, analogous to some we have had already, which can only with some laxity be called a proverb, and which extends over ten distichs (xxvii. 23-27). With regard to parallelism, the antithetic kind, which predominates in the first ‘Solomonic’ anthology, is rare in this collection, except in chaps. xxviii., xxix.; sometimes indeed there is no parallelism at all (see xxv. 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, xxvi. 18, 19, xxvii. 1, xxix. 12). As a compensation, similitudes abound in the three first chapters of the collection. Sometimes the comparison is expressed, e.g.

at other times it is implied by the juxtaposition of the two objects, e.g.

Let us pause on this favourite proverb of Goethe’s. The Hebrew ‘wise men’ would not have agreed to a later sage’s depreciation of speech.^[190] ‘A word in due season, how good is it’ (xv. 23); but when not only seasonable but set off by charms of style, how much better is it! The ‘apples of gold’ in xxv. 11 are probably oranges; the ‘chased work of silver’ means either baskets of silver filagree, or, as I should like to think with Mr. Neil, the brilliant white blossoms among which the golden fruit is seen peeping out. If the ‘gold’ is figurative, why not also the ‘silver’? We are reminded of Andrew Marvell’s lines in the ‘Emigrants’ Song,’

though Marvell forgot what Addison (Spectator, No. 455) well knew, that flowers as well as fruit and leaves continue on the orange-tree for the best part of the year.

But to return to our anthology. It would almost seem as if two editors with different tastes had been concerned in it, the one responsible for chaps. xxv.-xxvii., and the other for chaps. xxviii, xxix. According to Ewald, the proverbs in the latter section are mostly somewhat older than those in the former. This is perhaps an impression rather than a judgment; and few will deny that some at least of the parabolic proverbs in the first section may be as old as those of the same class in x. 1-xxii. 16.

It is difficult to suppose that many of the proverbs in either part of the book go back to a remote date. The cheerfulness of Israel’s ‘golden prime’ is gone; society seems to have changed, not altogether for the better, even since the first great anthology was made. The king is still looked up to with awe; the book begins with a group of four sentences on the true glory of a monarch, followed by two on the right behaviour for a subject (xxv. 2-7). The king is described (surely with a touch of idealism) as inquisitive in the best sense; his ‘heart,’ or understanding, is unsearchable. But this happy view of monarchy passes away. There are several proverbs complaining of the wickedness of kings, which are almost without a parallel in the earlier collection. Ungodly rulers have made the people ‘sigh’ (xxix. 2); they have been like ‘roaring lions and ravenous bears’ to the ‘poor folk’ (xxviii. 15, 16), and have completely destroyed the freedom of social intercourse (xxviii. 12, 28). Sometimes, as in the northern kingdom after the death of Jeroboam II.,^[191] the crown has become the object of competition to a crowd of pretenders (xxviii. 2). The misery of the people has been heightened by the greed of petty tyrants, according to the forcible saying,—

What kind of oppression is meant we may learn from Micah (ii. 3),—

It is in short the same unscrupulous accumulation of landed property to which Isaiah devotes one of his solemn ‘woes’ in his earliest prophecy, and which is one of the causes of the threatened captivity (Isa. v. 8-10 13). Exile has indeed become a familiar idea to those who admitted xxvii. 8 into the anthology, if, as most think, in the pathetic words of xxvii. 8 we may hear an echo of the march of Assyrian armies, ‘to wander’ being an euphemism for going into banishment.

As a rule, however, the proverbs relate to ordinary bourgeois life. Religious proverbs occur but rarely.^[194] ‘Folly’ too is not so often mentioned as in the first collection, and the censure which it has to bear is mostly indirect and more or less satirical; see e.g. the proverb—

and especially the paradoxical exhibition of the two sides of a truth—

where the first distich dissuades from retaliating on a fool by a word or an action on his own low moral plane, while the second recommends giving his folly the exposure or the sharp answer which it so richly deserves.^[195] The wide meaning of ‘folly’ in this pair of proverbs may be illustrated by xvii. 12, where it evidently means a paroxysm of passion. Next to this noisy passionate ‘folly,’ if we may judge from the arrangement of chap. xxvi., comes the vice of idleness (xxvi. 13-16). How dangerous this was felt to be we have seen already, and the exhortation to agricultural industry in xxvii. 23-27 forms a counterpart to the meditation on the ‘field of the slothful’ in xxiv. 30-32. If the motives urged for this and other duties are not lofty, the standard is at least an easily attainable one.

Sometimes, indeed, the eye sharpened by a regard to prudence discerns moral points of some refinement.^[196] This proverb, for instance, strikes one as delicate, in spite of the prudential motive attached to it in the next verse,—

and the well-known precept on showing kindness to one’s enemies, though partly supported by the prospect of a reward (comp. xxiv. 17, 18), is so nobly expressed that an apostle can adopt it without change (Rom. xii. 20),—

Let us pause a moment on this proverb, which contrasts so strongly with the advice on the treatment of enemies given by Sirach. ‘Coals of fire on the head’ is probably here a metaphorical expression for what St. Augustine calls ‘urentes conscientiæ gemitus’ (De doctr. Christ., l. iii., c. 16). The appositeness of the phrase will be heightened if we suppose the enemy spoken of to be one who has never heard of the wise man’s rule—a man of rude, uncultured nature, and perhaps of alien race. To such a one, the being fed by the very man whom he ‘hated’ would give first of all a shock of surprise, and then a pang of intolerable remorse for his own unworthiness.^[197] I wish one could be sure that this pang was referred to as purifying as well as painful to the sufferer. A parallel passage would be a great boon. Of course we can apply the passage in the same sense as St. Paul when he followed his quotation with the words, ‘Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.’

But we should wrong our ‘wise men’ by treating them as pure utilitarians; they are often sympathetic observers of character and circumstance. For instance,—

The three appendices to the Hezekian collection (xxx., xxxi. 1-9, xxxi. 10-31) are, to take the most conservative position possible, obviously not earlier than the closing century of the Jewish state. The art of proverb-writing has declined ever since the compilation of the previous anthology. The marks of simplicity and naturalness are wanting; the enigmatical and artificial seem to be sought for. Each part of these two chapters has moreover something of its own pointing in the direction of a late origin. The two first appendices are very possibly even later than the return of the Jews from Babylon.

The first appendix begins—‘The words of Agur the son of Jakeh, the prophecy’ (or, divine utterance)^[203] (comp. xxxi, 1). The heading is enigmatical; in what sense are the ‘words’ ‘a prophecy,’ and who are the persons spoken of? The latter question we have no means of answering. The names are not found elsewhere, and have been thought to be pseudonyms (Agur might mean ‘collector’ and Jakeh ‘obedient,’ i.e. ‘religious’).^[204] As to the title ‘the prophecy,’ it must be admitted that it is not by any means an appropriate one. It is too bold to accuse the proverb-writer of claiming prophetic inspiration. (And why should the article be prefixed?) The only alternative to this is to read, with Prof. Grätz, (for hammassā ‘the prophecy’) hammōshēl ‘the proverb-writer.’ After the heading comes a group of four verses complete in itself.

It is not easy to interpret this little passage. Evidently the speaker is a ‘wise man,’ who, according to some critics, inculcates a reverent humility by reporting the fruitlessness of his own theological speculations. After long brooding over the problems of the divine nature (so they explain), the Hebrew sage was compelled to desist with the feeling of his utter incapacity. Like Israel the patriarch he strove with God, but unlike Israel he did not prevail. He knows indeed what God has done and is continually doing; He is the Omnipresent One, the Lord of wind and flood, the Author of the boundaries of the earth. But what is this great Being’s name, and (to know Him intimately) what is His son’s name? On this view of its meaning, the passage reminds one of the words of Goethe’s Faust, ‘Who can name Him, or who confess, I believe Him? Who can feel, and can be bold to say, I believe Him not?’ Or perhaps we may still better compare Max Letteris’ masterly Hebrew translation or adaptation, in which the medieval doctor has been transformed into Ben Abuyah (or Acher אַחֵר), the famous apostate from Judaism in the second century of our era. The passage with which we are concerned as illustrative of the passage before us is on page 164, and begins מִי יַזָכַּירֵהוּ וּמִי יְבַנֵּהוּ. Notice the delicate tact in the choice of the second verb, ‘Who can give Him an honourable surname?’ (comp. Isa, xliv. 5, xiv. 4.) Later on, after other names suggested by the German original, the modern Hebrew poet continues, אוֹׂ בְּיָהּ שְׁמוׂ כִי נִשְׂגָּב הַזְכּירוּ, and in a note refers to a parallel passage in a Hebrew poem by Ibn Gabirol.

I must make bold to doubt the correctness of this explanation. (1) Because it does not sufficiently account for the language of ver. 2. (2) Because upon this view of the questions of ver. 4, an Israelite’s answer would simply be, Jehovah (comp. Job xxxviii. 5, Isa. xl. 12). (3) Because it is so difficult to see why the poet should have asked further, What is His son’s name? Is not the passage rather a philosophic fragment from a school of ‘wise men,’ not so much unbelieving as critical? The speaker declares, soberly enough, that he has tried in vain by thinking to find out God. Then comes in a piece of irony. No doubt it is his own stupidity; grand theologians, such as the writer of Isa. xl. 12 &c., Job xxxviii., Prov. viii. 22 &c., may well look down upon the dullard, who has not passed through their school! ‘But who is it that is ever and anon coming down^[208] to earth, and that performed all these creative works of which you delight to speak? I have never seen him; tell me his name and his son’s name since you are so learned.’ The latter phrase may be an allusion, either (anticipating Philo, who calls Wisdom God’s Son) to the ‘I was brought forth’ in viii. 24, or more probably^[209] the primeval man (who might be called a ‘son of God’ in the sense of Luke iii. 38) spoken of in Job xv. 7, who was the embodiment of all wisdom and sat in the council of Elohim.^[210] The satirical turn of this secularistic ‘wise man’ is even perhaps traceable in the heading of his poem. He calls his work an ‘oracle,’ taking up a favourite word of the disciples of the prophets, and flinging it back to them with a laugh. Obviously too the name of the writer, if genuine, is best explained as an assumed name. [But the emphatic haggebher is very difficult. I cannot believe, with Ewald, that haggebher is said ironically, as if ‘the mighty one in his own conceit;’ comp. Isa. xxii. 17 (?), Ps. lii. 3. The analogy of Num. xxiv. 3, 15, 2 Sam. xxiii. 1, suggests that there is a corruption in the text, and that haggebher, ‘the man,’ was originally followed by words descriptive of the person referred to. Grätz boldly corrects (haggebher) lō-khayil ‘the man without strength.]

Are we surprised at this? But a strikingly parallel confession of honest scepticism is found in the Rig Veda (x. 129), though I would not of course identify the opinions of the Sanskrit and the Hebrew poet,

Who knows, who here can declare, whence has sprung—whence, this creation?... From what this creation arose; and whether [any one] made it, or not,—he who in the highest heaven is its ruler, he verily knows, or [even] he does not know.^[211]

The poet who ‘takes up his parable’ after Laithi-el calmly and uncontroversially indicates his own very different religious position. He earnestly prays that he may not ‘become a liar and ask, Who is Jehovah?’ (xxx. 9); for him the divine revelations (the outward form of which is already sacred) are amply sufficient. ‘Every utterance of God [Eloah, the sing. form, as in Job] is free from alloy’ (xxx. 5; see the commentators on Ps. xviii. 31); the divine ‘name’ declared in Ex. xxxiv. 6, should satisfy the wisest of men. Thus, like the editors of Ecclesiastes, this later writer neutralises the doubtful expressions of the poem which he has saved from perishing.

Can we avoid the impression that both these poets lived in an age of advanced religious reflection and of Scripture-study? The one is more of a philosopher, the other of a Biblical theologian; both would be at home only in the Exile or in the post-Exile period, when doubt and even scepticism lifted their heads side by side with Biblical study. Our second more believing poet seems to be thinking of Ps. xviii. 30; but the portion of that verse which he adopts assumes another colour through the warning which follows, derived from Deut. iv. 1, xiii. 1. It is no longer the ‘promise of God’ which is ‘tried’ or ‘pure,’ but the revelation of which the Jewish Church is gradually finding itself the possessor.

The poet’s prayer for himself (vv. 7-9) is followed by eight groups of proverbs, each of which describes some quality or character which is either commended or warned against, and (with the exception of the first) contains a similitude. In most of these the number four is conspicuous generally as the climax after ‘three’ (vv. 15, 18, 21, 29). The fact that similar ‘numerical proverbs’ were popular in the early Rabbinical period,^[212] gives a certain support to the view that this collection is of late origin. The groups referred to are—

One of these (vv. 15, 16) has probably suffered a slight mutilation, which has been thus remedied by Bickell,—

‘Daughters of the leech’ is a quasi-mythical expression, which no one could misunderstand (comp. ‘upon a hill the son of oil,’ Isa. v. 1). We find a similar group of four insatiables in the Sanskrit Hitopadesa.^[215]

Fire is never satisfied with fuel; nor the ocean with rivers; nor death with all creatures; nor bright-eyed women with men.

The verses are of course older than the trumpery story of the cowherd’s wife which they serve to illustrate. The coincidence with the Hebrew, being obviously accidental, is worth remembering in other connections. The two parallels, present in the Hebrew but not in this Sanskrit quaternion, are given in a quatrain of a Vedic hymn to Varuna—

The second appendix (xxxi. 1-9) consists of a single group of sayings, described as ‘the words of Lemuel, a king, the prophecy [better the proverb, reading māshāl] with which his mother instructed him.’ Possibly, as Ewald suggests, Lemuel (or rather, Lemoel, as the word is pointed in ver. 4) is an imaginary name, descriptive of the character of an ideal monarch (‘God’s own;’ comp. Lael, Num. iii. 24). It is not necessary to suppose that the poet himself lived under a native king; he may, like the author of Koheleth, have thrown himself back in imagination to Israel’s golden prime. His own period was late, judging from the unclassical Hebrew (notice the Aramaisms in vv. 2, 3, and the strange expressions in vv. 5, 8). The form of the heading suggests that these ‘words of Lemuel’ formed part of the same collection as the ‘words of Agur;’ and there is at least nothing in the contents to forbid this view. The warnings of this queen-mother^[217] (whose relation to Lemuel reminds us of that of Bathsheba to Solomon) are very homely and practical; one is against sensuality, another against drunkenness; upon which follows an admonition to defend the cause of the poor. Even if there were no native king at the time, the advice would be appropriate for all members of the upper class of society.

The third appendix (xxxi. 10-31) contains the praise of the virtuous woman. In style it is quite unlike the two preceding sections; it must come therefore from another source. It is an alphabetic poem; each distich begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This, combined with the position of the work at the close of the various collections of proverbs, of itself suggests a date not far removed on the one side or the other from the Exile period, when Hebrew literature became undoubtedly more artificial and technical. From xxxi. 23 (‘the elders of the land’) we may perhaps infer that it was written in Palestine. It is very interesting to see the ideal of womanhood formed by a late Hebrew poet. Activity appears to him the one great feminine virtue—not however the activity which is entirely devoted to trifling details, for the ideal woman ‘is like the ships of the merchant; from far she brings her food’ (ver. 14). Nor is she a stranger to sympathetic impulses; ‘she holds out her hand (with something in it) to the afflicted, and stretches forth her hands to the needy [to bring them in],’ ver. 20. Nor must we forget ‘one of the most beautiful features in the portrait’ (Delitzsch): ‘she opens her mouth with wisdom, and a law of kindness is on her tongue’ (ver. 26). But for this verse, indeed, it would read almost like satire that ‘far above pearls is her value’ (ver. 10), since no higher estimate than this has been offered for God’s choicest blessing, ‘Wisdom.’^[218]

The poet does not say that he has found such a woman (comp. Eccles. vii. 28). The picture is perhaps too brightly coloured to be drawn from reality, unless with Hitzig we bring down the composition of the poem as late as the Greek period. Most probably, it is idealistic.

‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now,’ for ‘good wine’ well describes the glorious little treatise at the head of our Book of Proverbs (i. 7-ix. 18). I do not think it is right to infer from the heading in i. 1 that its unknown author assumed the mask of Solomon. In itself such a hypothesis would not be incredible. We have the analogy of the Egyptian scribe who represents Amenemhat I. ‘rising up like a god’ and addressing to his son some instructions on the royal art of governing.^[219] But it is more natural to explain the heading as a repetition of the formula in x. 1, for the ‘Praise of Wisdom’ (to coin another title) is in fact the introduction to the following anthology,^[220] together with which and its appendices it forms the ‘older book of Proverbs.’ If we ask why an introduction was prefixed, the answer must be that the writer wished to recommend his own inspiring view of practical ethics as a branch of divine wisdom; in other words, to counteract the sometimes commonplace morality of the earlier proverbs by enveloping the reader in a purer and more ethereal atmosphere. The key-note of the anthology is nothing but Experience; that of the introductory treatise is Divine Teaching. It is a sign of moral progress that the editor of an anthology of Experience should have thought his work only half-done till he had prefixed the ‘Praise of Wisdom.’ As a wise teacher of our own time^[221] has observed, ‘It would not be untrue to say that in all essential points Experience is the teacher only of fools, of those who have gone astray through turning a deaf ear to the voice of a prior and more legitimate teacher.’ The nature of the wisdom so earnestly commended by this self-forgetting writer, we will consider presently; and our study will probably convince us that such a writer can only have arisen at an advanced period of Israel’s history. The class or circle to which he belonged, and its characteristics, can easily be determined; but the precise period only with some degree of hesitation. Without anticipating the discussion which will be given at another point, I think it may safely be laid down that each of those kindred poems—the ‘Praise of Wisdom’ and ‘Job’—must have arisen at one of three periods, marked respectively by the composition of Deuteronomy, by the Captivity, and by the Restoration. The progress of the higher Israelitish wisdom was so gradual that it does not perhaps, to the exegete as distinguished from the historian, greatly matter which of these periods we select. For my own part, however, I incline to connect at any rate the former of these works with the age of Deuteronomy. Apart from the details to be mentioned elsewhere, it is clear (I speak now of Prov. i.-ix.) that the tone of the exhortations, and the view of religion as ‘having the promise of the life that now is,’ correspond to similar characteristics of the Book of Deuteronomy. And if we turn from the contents to the form of this choice little book, the same hypothesis seems equally suitable. The prophets had long since seen the necessity of increasing their influence by committing the main points of their discourses to writing; some rhetorical passages indeed were evidently composed to be read and not to be heard. It was natural that the moralists should follow this example, not only (as in the anthologies) by remodelling their wise sayings for publication, but also by venturing on long and animated quasi-oratorical recommendations of great moral truths.

Such a recommendation, addressed especially to the young and impressionable (i. 4), lies before us in chaps. i.-ix. In grave but harmonious accents the opening verses (which refer chiefly to i. 7-ix. 18, but not without a secondary reference to the anthology which follows) describe its object and character. Then follows a motto, the first line of which occurs again near the close of the book in ix. 10 (Job xxviii. 28, Ps. cxi. 10), and which stamps the author as belonging to a new and more religious class of ‘wise men’ (see p. 121),—

i.e. the foundation of true wisdom (its ‘root,’ Ecclus. i. 20) is reverence. The disciple is to begin by taking this upon trust, but when further advanced he will see that it is the shortest way to his goal, true wisdom having an objective existence in the unseen world. At present he is simply to follow the ‘direction’ of those wiser than himself:—our moralist is as zealous for a tōra as the author of Deuteronomy. But though serious and authoritative, he is never stern; indeed, to enforce his appeal he breaks through a Hebrew writer’s usual veil of reticence and describes his own home-life (iv. 3, 4). He can enter into the feelings of the young, for he too has ‘borne the yoke in his youth’ (Lam. iii. 27), and learned to prefer it to ‘unchartered freedom.’ The whole of chap. iv. is devoted to a summary of the wise doctrine which he received from his father; indeed, throughout the book he shows a wonderful appreciation of the parental and the filial relations, and, according to Ewald’s arrangement (see below), begins each section with an exhortation to listen to parental instruction. He himself feels like a father to his young disciples (iv. 1).

The errors to which his hearers are specially tempted are highway robbery (i. 11-18, iv. 16, 17) and unchastity (ii. 16, v. 3-20, vi. 24-35, vii. 5-27, ix. 13-18). From the time that the simplicity of the ancient life began to give way to the inroads of luxury, we meet in the Biblical writings with complaints of acts of violence leading to murder (see, for instance, in the prophecies, Isa. i. 15, v. 7, xxxiii. 15, Mic. iii. 10, Jer. ii. 34, xxii. 17, Isa. lix. 3, 7, and in a collection of proverbs contemporary with our book, Prov. xxiv. 15, 16). ‘At no time,’ as Dean Plumptre well remarks, ‘has Palestine ever risen to the security of a well-ordered police-system;’ even down to the fall of Jerusalem, bands of robbers defied the authority of the central government. The remarkable thing is that young men in the higher circles of society (for such our moralist appears to address) should be thought capable of joining the banditti, at a time when ‘bandit’ could not be synonymous with ‘patriot.’ Our moralist contents himself with dissuading his disciple from doing so, on the ground of the retribution which will follow (i. 18, 19). The exhortation to industry, with its slow but sure profits, comes later, and in a less appropriate place (vi. 6-8). But the other besetting sin of youth is still more earnestly denounced as the most glaring specimen of ‘folly.’ Once indeed the ‘strange, or alien, woman,’ i.e. the adulteress, is introduced dramatically as ‘Madam Folly’ (ix. 13). The picture is remarkable, and forms a designed contrast to that at the beginning of the chapter. She sits at the door of her house, counterfeiting her great rival Wisdom (comp. ver. 14 with ver. 3, and ver. 16 with ver. 4), like Dante’s Siren; but the disciple of the ‘wise man’ knows