further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. of their people (Jerem. ii. 8, iii. 15, xlix. 19, 1. 44; Ezek. xxxiv. passim), and of God as the great Shepherd of Israel (Ps. xxiii. 1, lxxx. 1, and by implication, Ezek. xxxiv. 23). We have to choose accordingly between the two latter meanings. The words either assert that all the varied forms of the wisdom of the wise come from God, or that all the opinions, however diversified, which are uttered by "the masters of assemblies,' are subject to the authority of the President of the assembly. The first gives, it is believed, the most satisfactory meaning, and so taken, the words express the truth declared, without symbolism, in 1 Cor. xii. I-II. It was not, perhaps, without some reference to this thought, though scarcely to this passage, that our Lord claimed for Himself as the one true Guide and Teacher of mankind the title of the "Good Shepherd," and condemned all that had come before Him, assuming that character, as thieves and robbers (John x. 8, 11), and that St Peter speaks of Him as the "chief Shepherd" (1 Pet. v. 4) over all who exercise a pastoral office in the Church of Christ. 12. And further, by these, my son, be admonished] Better, And for more than these (i.e. for all that lies beyond), be warned. The address "" my son" is, as in Prov. i. 1, ii. 1, x. 15, that of the ideal teacher to his disciple. It is significant, as noted above, that this appears here for the first time in this book. of making many books there is no end] The words, which would have been singularly inappropriate as applied to the scanty literature of the reign of the historical Solomon, manifestly point to a time when the teachers of Israel had come in contact with the literature of other countries, which overwhelmed them with its variety and copiousness, and the scholar is warned against trusting to that literature as a guide to wisdom. Of that copiousness, the Library at Alexandria with its countless volumes would be the great example, and the inscription over the portals of that at Thebes that it was the Hospital of the Soul (iarpeîov yuxñs, Diodor. Sic. I. 49) invited men to study them as the remedy for their spiritual diseases. Conspicuous among these, as the most voluminous of all, were the writings of Demetrius Phalereus (Diog. Laert. v. 5. 9), and those of Epicurus, numbering three hundred volumes (Diog. Laert. x. 1. 17), and of his disciple Apollodorus, numbering four hundred (Diog. Laert. x. 1. 15), and these and other like writings, likely to unsettle the faith of a young Israelite, were probably in the Teacher's thought. The teaching of the Jewish Rabbis at the time when Koheleth was written was chiefly oral, embodying itself in maxims and traditions, and the scantiness of its records must have presented a striking contrast to the abounding fulness of that of the philosophy of Greece. It was not till a much later period that these traditions of the elders were collected into the Mishna and the Gemara that make up the Talmud. Scholars sat at the feet of their teacher, Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear 13 God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judg- :4 and drank in his words, and handed them on to their successors. The words of the wise thus orally handed down are contrasted with the 66 many books." much study is a weariness of the flesh] The noun for "study" is not found elsewhere in the O. T., but there is no doubt as to its meaning. What men gain by the study of many books is, the writer seems to say, nothing but a headache, no guidance for conduct, no solution of the problems of the universe. They get, to use the phrase which Pliny (Epp. VII. 9) has made proverbial, "multa, non multum." We are reminded of the saying of a higher Teacher that " one thing is needful" (Luke x. 42). The words of Marcus Aurelius, the representative of Stoicism, when he bids men to "free themselves from the thirst for books" (Medit. II. 3), present a striking parallel. So again, "Art thou so unlettered that thou canst not read, yet canst thou abstain from wantonness, and be master of pain and pleasure (Meditt. VII. 8). 13. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter] The word for "let us hear" has been taken by some scholars as a participle with a gerundial force, "The sum of the whole matter must be heard," but it admits of being taken as in the English version, and this gives a more satisfying meaning. The rendering "everything is heard," i.e. by God, has little to recommend it, and by anticipating the teaching of the next verse introduces an improbable tautology. The words admit of the rendering the sum of the whole discourse, which is, perhaps, preferable. Fear God, and keep his commandments] This is what the Teacher who, as it were, edits the book, presents to his disciples as its sum and substance, and he was not wrong in doing so. In this the Debater himself had rested after his many wanderings of thought (ch. v. 7, and, by implication, xi. 9). Whatever else might be "vanity and feeding on wind," there was safety and peace in keeping the commandments of the Eternal, the laws which are not of to-day or yesterday." for this is the whole duty of man] The word "duty" is not in the Hebrew, and we might supply "the whole end," or "the whole work," or with another and better construction, This is for every man: i.e. a law of universal obligation. What is meant is that this is the only true answer to that quest of the chief good in which the thinker had been engaged. This was, in Greek phrase, the epyov or "work" of man, that to which he was called by the very fact of his existence. All else was but a máρepyov, or accessory. 14. For God shall bring every work into judgment] Once again the Teacher brings into prominence what was indeed the outcome of the book; though, as history shews, the careless reader, still more the reader blinded by his passions, or prejudice, or frivolity, might easily ment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. overlook it. The object of the writer had not been to preach a selfindulgence of the lowest Epicurean type, or to deny the soul's immortality, though for a time he had hesitated to affirm it, but much rather to enforce the truth, which involved that belief, of a righteous judgment (ch. xi. 9), seen but imperfectly in this life, with its anomalous distribution of punishments and rewards, but certain to assert itself, if not before, when "the spirit shall return to God who gave it " (verse 7). From the standpoint of the writer of the epilogue it was shewn that the teaching of Ecclesiastes was not inconsistent with the faith of Israel, that it had a right to take its place among the Sacred Books of Israel. From our standpoint we may say that it was shewn not less convincingly that the book, like all true records of the search after Truth, led men through the labyrinthine windings of doubt to the goal of duty, through the waves and winds of conflicting opinions to the unshaken rock of the Eternal Commandment. APPENDIX. I. I HAVE already in the "Ideal Biography" of the Author of Ecclesiastes (ch. III.), suggested a parallelism between the thoughts which have found expression in the writings of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and those that meet us in the Book with which this Volume deals. That parallelism is, I believe, deserving of more than a passing sentence, and I accordingly purpose to treat of it, as far as my limits permit, in the two following Essays. I. SHAKESPEARE AND KOHELETH. It lies almost in the nature of the case that the standpoint of a supreme dramatic artist involves the contemplation of the chances and changes of human life, of the shifting moods of human character, in something like the temper of a half-melancholy, half-genial irony. Poets, who, like Eschylus or Calderon, write in earnest to enforce what they look upon as a high and solemn truth, and to present to men the consequences of obeying or resisting it, who seek to present the working of a higher order, and characters of a loftier nobleness, than the world actually presents, have, in the nature of the case, little of that element. Those who write, as Sophocles did, impressed with the strange contrasts which human life presents in its ideal and its reality, its plans and their frustration, its aims and its results, who cannot bring themselves to think that it is the duty of the artist to present a false, even though it be a fairer, picture than what the world actually exhibits, manifest the irony of which we speak, as Bishop Thirlwall has shewn in his masterly Essay1, in its graver forms, restrained, in part, it may be, by the dignity of their own character, in part by the conditions under which they work as artists, from dealing with its applications to the lighter follies of mankind. One who, like Shakespeare, worked with greater freedom, and, it may be, out of the resources of a wider experience, was free to present that irony in both its applications. That sense of the nothingness of life, which manifests itself in the melancholy refrain of "Vanity of vanities" in Koheleth, would be sure to shew itself in such a poet, in proportion, perhaps, as he had ceased to strive after a high ideal, and learnt to look with an Epicurean tran 1 Cp. Thirlwall, "The Irony of Sophocles," Philological Museum, II. 483. Remains, III. I. quillity on the passions of those who, though puppets in his mimic drama, had yet found their archetypes in the characters of the men and women with whom he had lived, and whose weaknesses he had noted. If the story of his own life had been that of one who had sought to find satisfaction in the impulses of sense, or in affections fixed on an unworthy object, we might expect to find the tendency to dwell on the various forms of the ironical, or the pessimist, view of life, which is the natural outcome of the disappointment to which all such attempts are doomed. And this, it is believed, is what we find in Shakespeare, as the result of his personal experience, reproduced now in this aspect, now in that, according as each fitted in best with his purpose as an artist. I have already shewn in the "Ideal Biography" of ch. III. that the Sonnets of Shakespeare present a striking parallelism to the personal experience that lay at the root of the pessimist tone of thought which the confessions of Koheleth present to us. There had been the element of a friendship which he thought to be ennobling, of a love which he felt to be debasing. But we may go further than this, and say that they manifest also, and not in that passage only, the tone and temper to which that experience naturally leads. Without discussing the many problems which those mysterious poems bring before us, this at least is clear, that they speak of a life which had not been free from the taint of sensuality, of a friendship which, beginning in an almost idolatrous admiration, ended in a terrible disappointment, and that the echoes of that disappointment are heard again and again in their plaintive and marvellous sweetness. The resemblance between their utterances and those of Ecclesiastes is all the more striking, because there is not a single trace that Shakespeare had studied the book that bears that title. He does not use its peculiar watchwords, or quote its maxims. Despite of all that has been written of Shakespeare's knowledge of the Bible by Archbishop Trench, Bishop Charles Wordsworth, and others, it does not seem to have been more than a man might gain, without study, by hearing lessons and sermons when he went to Church on Sundays, and as Ecclesiastes was not prominent in the calendar of Sunday lessons, and not a favourite book with the preachers of the sixteenth century, he probably knew but little of it. We have to deal, accordingly, with the phenomena of parallelism and not of derivation. But the parallelism is, it will be admitted, sufficiently suggestive. Does Koheleth teach that "there is nothing new under the sun," that "if there is anything whereof it may be said, See this is new; it hath been already of old time, which was before us" (Eccl. i. 10), Shakespeare writes "No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change. They are but dressings of a former sight. Than think that we before have heard them told. |