The Book of
Job.

From the Jewish philosophy of Solomon as embodied in the Proverbs, flowed a stream of writings and ideas which ceased only with the destruction of the nation. Of these, perhaps, the most remarkable is the Book of Job. Whether it were written years. or centuries afterwards, whether we regard its author as an Idumæan or an Israelite, its derivation from the age of Solomon is equally evident. Nothing but the wide contact of that age with the Gentile world could, humanly speaking, have admitted either a subject or a scene so remote from Jewish thought and customs, as that of Job. And, again, the special locality of the story, Edom, agrees with the peculiar atmosphere of the "wisdom" of Solomon. Job, the Edomite chief, was the greatest of "the children of the East," with whose wisdom that of Solomon is expressly compared.2 The Edomite Theman, whence came Eliphaz, was celebrated for its "wis dom." The whole book is one grand "proverb" or "parable." It is a proof that the mode of instructing by fiction the gift of reproducing a past age in order to give lessons to the present is not, as we sometimes think, a peculiarly modern idea. The definition of "Wisdom" is given, with a particularity worthy of the Proverbs. The likeness to the Proverbs of Agur is almost verbal. The allusions to the horse, the peacock, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus, are such as in Palestine could hardly have been made till after the formation of Solomon's collections. The knowledge of Egypt and Arabia is what could only have been acquired after the diffusion of Solomon's commerce. The ques

1 Job i. 3.

2 1 Kings iv. 30.

3 Job. xv. 1, 10, 18, 19; Jer. xlix. I; Obadiah 8, 9; Baruch iii. 22.

The whole of this argument is powerfully stated in Rénan, Livre de Job, Pref. p. xxvii.

4 Job xxviii. 20-28.

tions discussed are the same as those which agitate the mind of Solomon, but descending deeper and deeper into the difficulties of the world. The whole book is a discussion of that great problem of human life which appears in Ecclesiastes and in the Book of Psalms, What is the intention of Divine Providence in allowing the good to suffer? The greatness and the calamities of Job are given in the most lively forms. The three aged friends are the "liars for God," the dogged defenders of the traditional popular belief. Elihu is the new wisdom of the rising world, that, like the Grecian Chorus, with the sanction of the Almighty, sets at naught the subtile prejudices of the older generation. The scanty faith of the Patriarch comes out from the trial triumphant. It is the Prometheus, the Faust, as it has been well called, of the most complete age of Jewish civilization.

The Book of Ecclesiastes, which, in its style of mingled precept and apologue, still retains so much of the framework of the Proverbs that Symmachus, in his Greek translation, calls it "the Speaker of Proverbs," must be reserved for the close of Solomon's reign. But the line of sacred literature did not end with Ecclesiastes. The Septuagint and Vulgate add two more to complete what are called the five "Libri Sapientiales." Of these the first is the one book, expressly called by the name which properly belongs to them all, "The Wisdom of Solomon." The traditions of exact authorship, which had begun to fluctuate in Ecclesiastes, waver still more in the Book of Wisdom. Clem- The Book ent of Alexandria, Cyril, Origen, Tertullian, of Wisdom. Cyprian, Lactantius, and Epiphanius believed that it was written by the great King whose name it bears. All critics now are of opinion that it was the work of an Alexandrian Jew. But it is one link more in the chain

by which the influence of Solomon communicated itself to succeeding ages. As the undoubted "Wisdom," or Proverbs of Solomon, formed the first expression of the contact of Jewish religion with the philosophy of Egypt and Arabia, so the apocryphal so the apocryphal "Wisdom of Solomon " is the first expression of the contact of Jewish religion with the Gentile philosophy of Greece. Still the apologue and the warning to kings keeps up the old strain; still the old Wisdom" makes her voice to be heard; and out of the worldly prudence of Solomon springs, for the first time, in distinct terms, "the hope full of " immortality." 1

Ecclesias

66

One further step remains. "The wisdom of Joshua, Book of "the son of Sirach," through its Latin title ticus. known as "Ecclesiasticus," is a still more direct imitation of the works of Solomon, - according to St. Jerome, not merely of the Proverbs, but of the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Canticles all in one. We might now seem to have reached the verge to which "the Wisdom of Solomon" extended. But it is just at this moment that it strikes out in two new lines, each of the utmost importance in the history of the chosen people — each, by a continuous process, carried back to Solomon himself.

The first of these came directly from that contact with the Greek philosophy, of which the two apocryphal books are the earliest outward expression.

trine of Wisdom.

The exaltation and the personification of "Wisdom The Doc- lent itself to those abstract speculations which drew out the different ideas wrapt up in the Divine Essence. "Sophia," or "Wisdom," became the feminine, as "Logos," or "Reason," was the masculine, representation of the doctrine of the Divine Intelligence

1 Wisdom i. 1; vi. 1, 9; iii. 1-4; v. 1-5, &c. &c.

communicating itself to the mind of man. Accordingly, when, on Christ's appearance, the stores of the Greek language were ransacked to furnish expressions adequate to the occasion, the word "Wisdom," copía, was called forth to do service for the last time, in the Jewish history, on the grandest scale. Twice, in the New Testament itself, the term is actually applied.1 The next generation of Christian theologians found, in the pathetic expostulations of Wisdom, and the descriptions of her eternal greatness, the fittest exponents of the words and nature of Christ; and in the Eastern Church, the name has been perpetuated forever in the cathedral of its greatest see. "Santa Sophia" is the christianization and divinization of the word which was bequeathed to the Church by Solomon.

Not only

The teach

ing by Par

The other is a still more direct connection. was Christ the subject in which the name of The Wisdom of Solomon found its last and ables. highest application, but His teaching was the last and highest example of the thing itself. If we look back to the older Scriptures for the models on which, in form at least, our Lord's discourses are framed, it is, for the most part, not the Psalms, nor the Prophecies, nor the Histories, but the works of Solomon. Not only do the short moral and religious aphorisms resemble in general form the precepts of the Proverbs and of Ecclesiasticus, but the very name by which the greater part of His teaching is called is the same as that of the teaching of Solomon. He spoke in "parables" or "proverbs." The two Greek words are used promiscuously in the Evangelical narratives, and are in fact representatives of one and the same Hebrew word. It is, we might say, an accident that the Proverbs of Solomon are not 1 Luke vii. 35 ; xi. 49. 2 Παραβολή and παροιμία.

VOL. II.

2

18

called the "Parables," and that the teachings of the New Testament are called the "Parables," and not the "Proverbs," of the Gospels. The illustrations from natural objects, the selection of the homelier instead of the grander of these, are not derived from the Prophets, or from the Psalmists, but from the wise Naturalist, "who spake of trees, and beasts, and fowls, and creep"ing things, and fishes," "of the singing-birds, of the "budding fig-tree, of the fragrant vine." The teaching of Solomon is the sanctification of common sense in the Old Testament, and to that sanctification the final seal is set by the adoption of the same style and thought in the New Testament by Him who, with His Apostles, taught in "Solomon's porch," and expressly compared His wisdom to the wisdom which gathered the nations round Solomon of old.3

From this, the highest honor ever rendered to The decline Solomon, we must pass, before completing the of Solomon. cycle of his wisdom, to the sad story of his decline. The Arabian traditions relate that in the staff on which he leaned, and which supported him long after his death, there was a worm, which was secretly gnawing it asunder. The legend is an apt emblem of the dark end of Solomon's reign. As the record of his grandeur contains a recognition of the interest and value of secular magnificence and wisdom, so the record of his decline and fall contains the most striking witness to the instability of all power that is divorced from moral and religious principle. As Bacon is, in English history,

"The wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind,"

1 1 Kings iv. 33; Cant. i. 12, 13; vi 11; vii. 12, 13, &c. Comp. Sinai and Palestine, Chap. XIII.

2 John x. 23; Acts iii. 11; v. 12

3 Matt. xii. 42; Luke xi. 81.