The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job – Koheleth – Agur by Emile Joseph Dillon (page 2)

And that thou shouldst set thine heart upon him? That thou shouldst visit him every morning, And try him every moment?”[55]

Bildad, the Traditionalist _par excellence_, then addresses a sharp reproof to the just man who refused to recognise as mercy in God the conduct which, were a man responsible for it, he must needs condemn as wickedness. He bids him inquire of bygone generations what they thought of the goodness of the Creator, and asks him to be guided by the wisdom of his fore-fathers, who lived and throve on the spiritual food of retribution which he now rejects with loathing. This attack provokes a new outburst on the part of Job, who ironically paraphrases and develops the ideas of his comforters, deriding the notion that the deity can change right into wrong or that true morality needs the divine will as a basis.

“How should man be in the right against God? If he long to contend with him,
He cannot answer him one of a thousand.”[56]

“Lo, he glideth by me and I see him not; And he passeth on, but I perceive him not.”[57]

His friends had recommended him to pray for pardon and repent, and had promised him the return of his happiness as a consequence. But Job scouts the idea. His righteousness, if he indeed possess it, is his own; no prayers can add to, no punishment can take from, that.

“I must make supplication unto his judgment, Who doth not answer me, though I am righteous!”[58]

And as for a God who being almighty is yet unjust, prayer would be superfluous, no supplications would avail aught with Him; He would cause even incarnate holiness to appear wicked in its own eyes.

“Though I were just, my own mouth would condemn me; Though I were faultless, he would make me crooked.”

For even the will of a created being is in the hands of its Creator, and is not, cannot be, free. Job feels and knows that he is right-minded and good, and he puts the testimony of his own conscience above the decrees of any beings, human or divine, which, whatever else they may achieve, cannot shake the foundations of true justice and morality, which are eternal.

“Faultless I am, I set life at naught; I spurn my being, therefore I speak out.”[59]

And the outcome of his outspokenness is a solemn charge of injustice against God,[60] a sigh of profound regret that he was ever born into this miserable world, and a wish that his sufferings might “come to an end before he should return to the land of darkness and of gloom” whence he came.

After this, Zophar, the third comforter, opens his lips for coarse vituperation rather than sharp rebuke, and regrets that God Himself does not feel moved to give a practical lesson of wisdom to the conceited “prattler,” who persists in believing in his own innocence in spite of the unmistakable judgment of his just Creator and the unanimous testimony of his candid friends. Job’s reply to this vigorous advocate of God is even more powerful and indignant than any of the foregoing. He repeats and emphasises his indictment against the Deity. No omnipotent being who was really just and good could approve, or even connive at, much less practise, the scandalous injustice which characterises the conduct of the universe and the so-called moral order, and of which his own particular grievances are a specimen. Not that the curious spectacle that daily meets our eye, wherein wickedness and hypocrisy are prosperous and triumphant while truth and integrity are trampled under foot, is necessarily incompatible with absolute and eternal justice; it is irreconcileable only with the attributes of a personal deity, an almighty and just creator, who would necessarily be responsible for these evils as for all things else, if he existed. If the world be the work of an omnipotent maker, its essential moral characteristic partakes of the nature of his attributes; and the main moral feature of our world is evil, and not good. This is the ever-recurring refrain of Job’s discourses. Nor does he hesitate when occasion offers to proclaim his conviction in the plainest of plain language, for he entertains no fear of what may further befall him.

“Lo, let him kill me, I cherish hope no more, Only I will justify my way before his face.”[61]

The three friends return a second time to the charge, each one speaking in the same order as before, and each one eliciting a separate reply, in which Job reaffirms his innocence, reiterates his indictment against the Most High, and reproaches his comforters with their off-hand condemnation of an attitude resulting from sufferings which they are slow to realise and from knowledge which they are unable to grasp. In his rejoinder to Zophar, he lays special stress upon the prosperity and success of the wicked who scoff at the laws of God and yet “while away their days in bliss.” If God will not punish them, is He just? If He cannot, is He almighty? As He does not, why speak of the moral order of His world or of the moral attributes of Himself?

Ehphaz opens the third series of speeches by accusing his friend of selfishness, dishonesty, hard-heartedness and avarice, on no better grounds than the assumption that God’s justice warrants us in believing that where punishment is inflicted there also must sin have been committed. Job, instead of condescending to refute the charge, ironically admits it, and then bitterly remarks that he would like to know how God would justify His conduct and convict him of sin if only they both could argue out the question together on terms of equality. But in all the universe he looks for God in vain:

“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, And backward, but I cannot perceive him.”[62]

Bildad then proceeds to emphasise the omnipotence of the Creator with whom the human worm, the maggot, dares to enter into judgment, and Job replies to all three, refuting them out of their own mouths. His conscience, he tells them, is proof sufficient of his right conduct, whereas his misery, by their own admission, proves nothing at all.

“Till I die, I will not yield up my integrity! My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go, My heart doth not censure any one of my days.”[63]

As for the argument from punishment to sin, all three friends had in the course of their speeches laid it down that the lines on which the universe is governed are known to no man. If this be so, who are they that have surprised the secret and found the clue to the enigma? Who revealed to them that retribution is the basis of the moral order? Man knows nothing, can never hope to know anything, of the inner working of the world, of the why and the wherefore of our miserable being and of the existence of all things. The Godhead alone could fathom these mysteries,[64] if He existed.

Job takes no notice of the succeeding brief remarks of Zophar in his final and longest discourse which, replete with sorrowful reminiscences of his past happy life, is less defiant than any of those that preceded. Wandering in thought through the necropolis of buried hopes, fears and achievements, he seems to inhale an atmosphere of soothing melancholy that softens and subdues his wild passion. The vibration of past efforts and of deeds long since done, trembling along his tortured frame, causes even saddest thoughts to blend with sweet sensations. Then turning from what once was to what now is, and missing the logical nexus between the two states, he solemnly calls upon God to produce it, if He can:

“Here is my signature; let the Almighty answer me, And hear the indictment which my adversary hath written.”[65]

Scarcely has Job finished speaking when Jahveh appears in a whirlwind and the heart of the clouds is cloven by a voice of thunder startling the silent air. The purpose of His coming is to prove men’s ignorance, not to enlighten it, at least not beyond the degree involved by affixing the highest seal to the negative views expressed by the hero. He plies Job with a number of questions on cosmology, astronomy, meteorology, &c., with a view to show that we are ignorant of the ultimate reason of even the most familiar objects and phenomena, and practically know nothing about anything. The natural conclusion is that they are unknowable, and that intellect, knowledge, consciousness, is something secondary, accidental, and as transitory as the life it accompanies. To make an exception in favour of Jahveh Himself, would be to lose sight of the important fact that His apparition was never meant by the poet to be taken literally.[66]

It is neither more nor less than a symbol of the insight which Job obtains into the nature of things, of the light which enables him to see that there is naught but darkness now and for ever. He perceives by the simplest, clearest, and most conclusive of all mental processes, a direct intuition, the truth of the ideas to some of which he had but coldly assented before–viz., that things are but shadows and existence an evil; that underlying every being, animate and inanimate, there is a force existing outside the realm of time and space, and that it is at bottom identical with the human will; that eternal justice lies at the root of everything, is the ultimate basis of all existence; that the sufferings of men, innocent or guilty, and the prevalence of evil are incompatible with a personal creator; that intellect is secondary, and barely sufficient for the practical needs of life, after which it ceases to be an attribute of whatever of man may outlive his body; and, finally, that as we can know nothing beyond the bare fact that there is an absolute law of compensation from which there is no exemption, it behoves us to cultivate ethics rather than science, and to resign ourselves uncomplainingly to the inevitable.

However unpalatable these final conclusions may appear to pious readers accustomed to seek in the Book of Job for the most striking proofs of some of the principal teachings of the Christian dispensation, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to study the work in its restored form and arrive at any other. With Job, God and wisdom are synonymous. And of the latter he says:

“But wisdom–whence shall it come?
And where is the place of understanding? It is hid from the eyes of all living,
Our ears alone have heard thereof.”[67]

These words were uttered before he had obtained the insight which brought resignation in its train. He alludes to them in his last brief discourse.

“I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, But now mine eye hath beheld thee;
Therefore I resign and console myself, Though in dust and ashes.”[68]

Professor Bickell puts the matter very lucidly in his short but comprehensive introduction to the poem: “As long as Job, solicitous for his understanding, demanded an explanation of his unutterable suffering, whereby the mysterious, piteous condition of mankind is shadowed forth, his seeking was vain, and he ran the risk of loosing himself in the problems of eternal justice, the worth of upright living, and even the existence of God; for an unjust, ruthless, almighty being is no God. But by means of the theophany–which is to be understood merely as a process in his own heart, and which clearly shows him the impotence of feeble man to unravel the world-enigmas–he attains to insight; not, indeed, of a positive kind such as a knowledge of the ways of God would confer, but negative insight by means of that resignation which flows from excess of pain. It is thus that his own heroic saying is fulfilled about the reaction of unmerited suffering upon the just man.”[69]

“But the righteous holds on his way, And the clean-handed waxeth ever stronger.”[70]

Footnotes:

[51] The prologue is contained in chaps. i.-ii.; the epilogue in chap. xlii. 7-17 of our English Bibles.

[52] Strophe xxxv.

[53] Strophe lii.

[54] Psa. viii. 4, 5.

[55] Strophe liii.

[56] Strophe lxv.

[57] Strophe lxix.

[58] Strophe lxxi.

[59] Strophe lxxiii.

[60] Strophe lxxiv-lxxviii.

[61] Strophe cxv. _Cf_. strophe clxix., where he dares his friend to prove him guilty of blasphemy when he is merely giving expression to the truth:

“If indeed ye will glorify yourselves above me, And prove me guilty of blasphemy;
Know, then, that God hath wronged me!”

[62] Strophe ccxvii.

[63] Strophe ccxxx.

[64] As Professor Bickell rightly remarks: “At bottom what Job means is, that God alone knows the meaning of our sorrowful existence, if, indeed, He does know it” (“Das Buch Job,” p. 5).

[65] Strophe cclxxvi.

[66] The mere circumstance that the Deity is no longer called by His usual name when He appears in the whirlwind is of itself an indication that the poet was not alluding to God.

[67] Strophe ccxxxiv.

[68] Strophe cccix.

[69] _Cf._ Bickell, _op. cit._ pp. 8-9.

[70] Strophe clvi.

KOHELETH

* * * * *

[Greek: Archaen men mae phynai epichthonioisin ariston Maed’ eisidein augas oxeos aeeliou. Phynta d’hopos okista pylas Aidao peraesai, Kai keisthai pollaen gaen epamaesamenon.]

Theognis.

* * * * *

CONDITION OF THE TEXT

Of all the books of the Old Testament, not excepting the Song of Songs, none offers such rich materials to the historian of philosophy or such knotty problems to the philological critic as Koheleth[70] or Ecclesiastes. This interesting treatise is, in its commonly received shape, little more than a tissue of loose disjointed aphorisms and contradictory theses concerning the highest problems of ethics and metaphysics. The form of the work is characterised by an utter lack of plan; the matter by almost impenetrable obscurity. So completely entangled are the various threads of thought, that few commentators or critics possessed the needful degree of hope and courage to set about unravelling them. One paragraph, for instance, is saturated with Buddhistic pessimism; another breathes a spirit of religious resignation, of almost hearty hopefulness; this sentence lays down a universal principle which is absolutely denied by the next; the thesis is followed by proofs, in the very midst of which lurks the antithesis; a series of profound remarks upon one subject is suddenly interrupted by bald statements about another, the irrelevancy of which is suggestive of the ravings of a delirious fever patient. Thus one verse begins[71] by recommending men to make the most of their youth by following the bent of their inclinations and the desire of their eyes, such enjoyment being a gift of God,[72] and finishes by threatening all who act upon the advice with condign punishment to be ultimately dealt out by God Himself; and the very next verse proceeds to draw the logical conclusion, which oddly enough, runs thus: “_therefore_ drive sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh.” In one place[73] the writer solemnly and sadly affirms that the destiny of the upright and the wicked, the wise and the foolish is wholly alike; in another[74] he seems to proclaim that the unrighteous shall suffer for their evil-doing, while the God-fearing shall be rewarded with long life, which again he stoutly denies shortly before and immediately afterwards. It is impossible to read chap. ii. 11 and 12 without coming to the conclusion that we either have to do with the incoherent ravings of a disordered mind, or else that the leaves of the original manuscript were dislocated and then put together haphazard.[75] The “for” that connects the seventh and eighth verses of chapter vi. is forcibly suggestive of the line of argument which made Tenterden Steeple the cause of Goodwin Sands, while the nexus between the sixth and seventh verses of chapter xi. is scarcely more obvious than that which is to be found between any two of the nonsense verses that amuse intelligent children in “Alice in Wonderland.” And yet this production, in its present chaotic condition, has been, and is still, gravely attributed to the pen of King Solomon in his character as the ideal sage of humanity![76]

Footnotes:

[70] The most satisfactory translation of the word Koheleth is, the Speaker. “Preacher” conveys a modern and incorrect notion.

[71] xi. 9.

[72] ii. 24.

[73] ix. 2.

[74] viii. 12, 13.

[75] The verses in question are: “11. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all _was_ vanity and vexation of spirit, and _there was_ no profit under the sun. 12. And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly: for what _can_ the man _do_ that cometh after the king _even_ that which hath been already done.”

[76] Only, however, by the strictest of orthodox theologians, who admiringly attribute to the Holy Spirit a hopeless confusion of ideas which they would resent as insulting if predicated of themselves. As a matter of historic fact, Solomon, so far from meriting his reputation as a philosopher, was a rough-and-ready kinglet, who ruled his subjects with a rod of iron and ground them down with intolerable burdens.

* * * * *

PRIMITIVE FORM OF THE BOOK

The desperate efforts of professional theologians to smooth away, explain, and reconcile all these incoherences and contradictions, constitute one of the most marvellous exhibitions of mental acrobatics recorded even in the history of hermeneutics. Many of these exegetes set out on the assumption that a revelation vouchsafed to Solomon could not possibly embody any statement incompatible with the truths of Christianity which emanate from the same eternal source; and they all firmly held that at the very least it must be in harmony with the fundamental dogmas common to Judaism and the teachings of Christ. In reality, what this generous hypothesis came to, whenever there was no question of text criticism involved, was a substitution of the human ideal for the divine execution. The best accredited contemporary theologians however, Catholic and non-Catholic, have insight enough to descry the stamp of true inspiration in a book which enshrines some of the highest truths laid down in the Sermon on the Mount combined with a good deal that obviously clashes with theological dogmas formulated at a much later date for the behoof of a very different social organism. In any case the original work, as it appears to have issued from the hand of “Koheleth,” was composed in a spirit as conducive to true morality as the sublime eloquence of Isaiah or the absolute resignation of the author of the 73rd Psalm. Critics who succeeded in satisfactorily solving many of the philological, philosophical, and historical problems suggested by Koheleth utterly failed to find therein any traces of an intelligible plan. It was reserved to Professor Bickell, of Vienna, to point out what seem to be the true lines on which alone it is possible to arrive at a solution alike satisfactory to the reader and respectful to the author. His theory[77]–it is, and it can be no more than a theory–which has already received the adhesion of some of the most authoritative Bible scholars on the Continent, may be briefly summed up as follows: The present disordered condition of the book, Koheleth, is the result of the shifting of the sheets of the Hebrew manuscript from their original places and of the addition of a number of deliberate interpolations. The latter are of two kinds: those which seemed necessary for the purpose of supplying the cement required to join together the unconnected verses which, in consequence of the dislocation, were unexpectedly placed side by side, and the passages composed with the object of toning down, or serving as a counterpoise to the very unorthodox views of the writer.

Professor Bickell’s assumption involves no inherent improbability, runs counter to no ascertained facts, and is therefore perfectly tenable. What it supposes to have occurred to Koheleth has, in fact, often happened to other works, religious and profane. It can be conclusively shown, for instance, that certain leaves of the Book of Ecclesiasticus dropped, in like manner, from the Greek Codex, whereby three chapters were transposed from their original places; for the Latin and Syriac versions, which were made before the accident, still exhibit the original and only intelligible arrangement. An old Syriac manuscript of the poems of Isaac of Antioch, now in the Vatican Library, suffered considerably from a similar mishap, and various other cases in point have come under the notice of orientalists and archaeologists.[78] In the present instance, what is believed to have taken place is this. The Hebrew Codex, of which no translation had as yet been made, consisted of a series of fascicules, each one of which contained four sheets once folded, or four double leaves, the average number of characters on each single leaf amounting to about 525.[79] The Codex, which most probably included other treatises preceding and following Koheleth, possessed an unknown number of fascicules, Koheleth beginning on the sixth leaf of one and ending on the third of the fourth following. According to the hypothesis we are considering, the middle fascicules becoming loose, fell out of the Codex, and were found by some one who was utterly unqualified to replace them in position. This person took the inner half of the second,[80] folded it inside out, and then laid it in the new order[81] immediately after the first fascicule. Next came the inner sheet of the third fascicule,[82] followed by the outside half of the second,[83] in the middle of which the two double leaves, 13, 18, and 14, 17, had already been inserted.[84] Although the fourth fascicule had kept its place, it was not on this account preserved from the effects of the confusing changes caused by the loosening of the ligature, for between its two first leaves the remaining sheet of the third fascicule[85] found a place. Finally, leaf 17 becoming separated from its new environment, found a definite resting-place between 19 and 21.[86] The result of this dislocation was the utter disappearance of all trace of plan in the work, the incoherences of which would be still more numerous and glaring, had it not been for the transitional words and phrases that were soon after interpolated for the purpose of welding together passages that were never intended to dovetail.[87]

Such is the ingenious theory. The degree of probability attaching to it depends partly on the weight of corroborative evidence to be found in the book itself, and partly on the completeness with which it explains the many difficulties which the traditionalist view could but formulate. Thoroughly to sift and weigh this evidence, much of which is of a purely philological character, would require a book to itself; but it will not be amiss to give one or two instances of the nature of the arguments relied upon.

Chap. x. 1, in the present text, is wholly corrupt, owing to the circumstance that several interpolations were inserted in it at a later date. Now a little reflection suffices to show that these additions consist of words taken from chap. vii. 1. But if the book had been composed as it now stands, such a transposition would be practically impossible, because chap. x. is separated from chap. vii. by too great an interval. In the original sequence, however, which Prof. Bickell’s theory supposes and restores, there was no difficulty. There the leaf ix. 11-x. 1 was followed by two leaves containing vi. 8-vii. 22, so that the words “precious,” and “wisdom is better than glory,” might have been easily shifted to x. 1 from the margin of vii. 1.

Again, in the primitive sequence viii. 4 was immediately followed by x. 2. After the dislocation of the leaves it was erroneously placed before viii. 6, a few words having been previously interpolated between the two, solely in the interests of orthodoxy.[88] In order to bridge over the gap between them, a transitional half verse was strung together, in an absolutely mechanical manner, from words that precede or follow. And the words that precede and follow are those which we find in the primitive arrangement of the manuscript, not in the present sequence. Thus, at the bottom of the leaf containing viii. 4, the first words, “leb chakham,”[89] of the following verse (x. 2) were inserted, and then by inadvertence repeated on the next leaf. Seeing these words, the author of the transition made them the subject of his new verse. He selected the grammatical objects of the sentence from the verse which follows in the new sequence,[90] and took the verb from the preceding half verse, which is itself an older interpolation.

Lastly, Koheleth’s treatise, which in our Bibles is utterly devoid of order or sequence, falls naturally, in its restored form, into two distinct halves: a speculative and a practical, distinguished from each other by characteristics proper to each, which there is no mistaking. The former, for instance, contains but few metrical passages, whereas the latter is composed of poetry and prose in almost equal proportions. The ethical part continually addresses the reader himself in the second person singular, while the discursive section never does. In a word, internal evidence leaves no doubt that, whether the dislocation of the chapters was the result of accident or design, this was the ground plan of the original treatise.

Footnotes:

[77] Professor Cheyne discusses Bickell’s theory with the caution characteristic of English theology and the fairness of unprejudiced scholarship (“Job and Solomon,” p. 273 fol.).

[78] _Cf_. for instance, Cornill, “Theologisches Literaturblatt,” Sept. 19, 1884.

[79] This mean estimate tallies with calculations made by the late Professor Lagarde for another book of the Old Testament.

[80] The leaves 6, 7, 8, 9.

[81] The pages following each other thus: 8, 9, 6, 7.

[82] Leaves 15 and 16.

[83] 4, 5, 10, 11.

[84] So that the order was then: 4, 5, 13, 14, 17, 18, 10, 11.

[85] 12, 19.

[86] The sequence of the leaves was then; 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 6, 7, 15, 16, 4, 5, 13, 14, 18, 10, 11, 20, 12, 19, 17, 21, 22.

[87] The most practical and simple way of realising Professor Bickell’s theory is to make a little book of four fascicules of four double leaves each. On these leaves write the contents of the original manuscript leaves in chapter and verse numbers. On each of the three last leaves of the first fascicule (counting, as in Hebrew, from right to left) write i. 1-ii. 11. On the first two leaves of the second fascicule write v. 9-vi. 7 (this must be written on each of the leaves, as it is not quite certain how they were divided). On third and fourth leaves of the second fascicule write iii. 9-iv. 8; on each of the fifth and sixth leaves, ii. 12-iii. 8. On the seventh and eighth leaves, viii. 6-ix. 3. Then comes the third fascicule. On the first leaf, write ix. 11-x. 1; on the second and third leaves, vi. 8-vii. 22 on the fourth and fifth leaves, iv. 9-v. 8; on the sixth leaf, x. 16-xi. 6; on the seventh leaf, vii. 23-viii. 5; on the eighth leaf, x. 2-15. Lastly comes the fourth fascicule. On the first leaf, ix. 3-10, on the second and third leaves, xi. 7-xii. 8.

[88] The first half of viii. 5: “Whoso keepeth the commandment shall feel no evil thing.” This interpolation is older than the accident to the MS.

[89] The heart of the wise.

[90] viii. 6.

* * * * *

KOHELET’S THEORY OF LIFE

Read in its primitive shape, the book is a systematic disquisition on the questions, What positive boon has life in store for us? to which the emphatic answer is “None;” and How had we best occupy the vain days of our wretched existence? which the author solves by recommending moderate sensuous enjoyment combined with healthy activity. He begins his gloomy meditations with a general survey of the wearisome working of the machinery of the world, wherein is neither rest nor profit. Everything is vanity, and the pursuit of wind.[91] Existence in all its myriad forms is an aimless, endless, hopeless endeavour. The very clod of earth manifests its striving, in gravitation, for the attainment of a central point without dimensions, which, if realised, would entail its own annihilation; the solids tend to become liquids, the liquids to resolve themselves in vapour. The plant grows from germ through stem and leaf to blossom and fruit, which last is but the beginning of a new germ that again develops through flower to fruit, and so on for ever and ever. In animals, life is the same restless, aimless, unsatisfied striving, in the first place after reproduction, followed by the death of the individual and the appearance of a new one which in turn runs through all the stadia of the old. The very matter of all organisms is ever changing. As for man, his whole life is but one long series of yearnings after objects, each one of which presents itself to his will as the one great goal until attained, whereupon it is cast aside to make way for another. We know what we long for to-day, we shall know what we shall seek to-morrow; but what the human race supremely desires, its ultimate aim and end, no man can say. Existence is a futile beating of the air, a clutching of the wind. The living make way for the unborn, the dead nourish the living; no one possesses ought that was not torn from some other being; strife and hate, evil and pain are the commonplaces of existence; life and death follow each other everlastingly. All striving is want and therefore suffering, until it is satisfied, when it assumes the form of disappointment; for no satisfaction is lasting. In a word, the universe is a wheel that revolves on its axis for ever–and there is no ultimate aim or end in it all.[92] Knowledge, wisdom, and enjoyment, each of which Koheleth characterises by a distich, are likewise vain, or worse. What, then, is the secret of “happiness”? Surely not wealth, which the Preacher himself having possessed and applied to “useful” and “good” purposes, proved emptiness in the end.[93] Wealth, indeed, is nothing if not a means to happiness, yet experience tells us that the pains endured in striving for it, and the anxiety suffered in preserving it, effectually destroy our capacity for enjoying the bliss which it is supposed to insure, long before misfortune or death snatches it from our grasp.[94]

Vain as pleasure is, in a world of positive evils it is at least a negative good, in that it helps to make us forget the vanity of the days of our life.[95] For this reason, no doubt, it is well-nigh unattainable, the many being deprived of the means, the few of the capacity, of enjoyment.[96]

Passing on to the consideration of wisdom, the Hebrew philosopher finds it equally empty and vain, because subject to the same limitations and characterised by the same drawbacks. It is caviare to the million, and a fresh source of sorrow to the few. Man is tortured with a thirst for knowledge, and yet all the springs at which it might have been allayed are sealed up. Unreal shadows are the objects of human intuition, we are denied a glimpse of the underlying reality. For it is unknowable.

Even the little we can know is not inspiriting. Take our fellow-men, their ways and works, for instance, and what do we behold? Their own evil-doing, injustice, and violence, drag them down to the level of the brute; and that this is their natural level is obvious, if we bear in mind that the end of men is that of the beasts of the fields,[97] and that the ruling power within them, the mechanism, so to say, of these living and feeling automata is love of life. Consider men at their best–when cultivating such relative “virtues” as industry, zeal, diligence in their crafts and callings, and we find these “good” actions tainted at the very source: love of self and jealousy of others being the determining motives.[98] In any case we see that work is no help to happiness, for it is too evident that toil and moil–even that of the writer himself, who knows full well that he is labouring for a stranger–is but the price we pay, not for real pleasure, but for carking care and poignant grief.[99] Such being the bitter fruits of knowledge, the tree on which they flourish is scarcely worth cultivating.

Wisdom in its ethical aspect, as a rule of right conduct, is unavailing as a weapon to combat the Fate that fights against man. Nay, it is not even a guarantee that we shall be remembered by those who come after us, and whose lot we have striven to render less unbearable than our own. The memory of the dead is buried in their graves,[100] and the wheels of the vast machine revolve as if they had never lived. For a man’s moral worth goes for nothing in the scale against Fate, whose laws operate with crushing regularity, unmodified by his virtues or his crimes.[101] Indeed, if there be any perceptible difference between the lot of the upright and that of the wicked, it is often to the advantage of the latter, who are furthered by their fierce recklessness and borne onwards by ambition.[102] The knowledge of this curious state of things serves but to encourage evil-doers.[103] The obvious conclusion is that instead of fighting against Fate which is unalterable–“I discovered that whatever God doeth is forever”[104]–we should resign ourselves to our lot and draw the practical inference from the fact that life is an evil.

Wisdom in its practical aspect is equally unpromising. In no walk of life is success the meed of merit or victory the unfailing guerdon of heroism.[105] Such wisdom as is within man’s reach is often a positive disadvantage in life, owing to the modesty it inspires as pitted against the self-confidence of noisy fools. Besides, should it contrive to build up a stately structure, a small dose of folly, with which all human wisdom is largely alloyed, is capable, in an instant, of undoing the work of years.[106] In a word, the wise man is often worse off than the fool; and in any case, no degree of wisdom can influence the laws of the universe; what happens is foredoomed; a man’s life-journey is mapped out beforehand, and it is hopeless to struggle with the Will which is mightier than his own. As we know not what is pre-arranged, we can never find out what will dovetail with our true interests or is really good for man.[107]

Footnotes:

[91] i. 2-11

[92] _Cf._ Schopenhauer, vol. i. 401-402, and _passim_.

[93] ii. 3-11.

[94] v. 9-16.

[95] Pain, then, for Koheleth, as for a greater than Koheleth, is something positive; pleasure, on the contrary, negative. “We feel pain, but not painlessness; we feel care, but not exemption from it; fear, but not safety…. Only pain and privation are perceived as positive and announce themselves; well-being, on the contrary, is merely negative. Hence it is that we are never conscious of the three greatest boons of life–health, youth, and freedom as such, so long as we possess them, but only when we have lost them: for they too are negations…. The hours fly the quicker the pleasanter they are; they drag themselves on the slowlier the more painfully they are passed, because pain, not enjoyment, is the something positive whose presence makes itself felt.”–Schopenhauer, ed. Grisebach, ii. 676, 677.

[96] v. 17-vi. 7; iii. 9, 12-13.

[97] iii. 19-iv. 3.

[98] iv. 4-6.

[99] iv. 7, 8; ii. 18-23.

[100] ii. 13-16.

[101] iii. 1-8, viii. 6-8.

[102] viii. 9-14.

[103] viii. 14, ix. 3.

[104] iii. 14.

[105] ix. 11-12.

[106] ix. 13-18, x. 1.

[107] vi. 8, 10-12.

* * * * *

PRACTICAL WISDOM

Having thus cleared the ground in the first part of the treatise, Koheleth proceeds to erect his own modest system in the second. As life offers us no positive good, those who, in spite of this obvious fact, desire it, must make the best of such negative advantages as are within their grasp. Although so far from being a boon, it is an evil, yet it may, he points out, be rendered less irksome by following certain practical rules; and warming to his subject, he winds up with an exhortation to snatch such pleasures as are within reach, for when all accounts have been finally cast up and everything has been said and done, all things will prove vanity, and a grasping of wind.

The ethics open with six metrical strophes composed, so to say, in the minor key, which harmonises with the disheartening conclusions of the foregoing. The theme is the Horatian _Levius fit patientia quicquid corrigere est nefas._ Death is better than life, grief more becoming than mirth, contemplation preferable to desire, deliberation more serviceable than haste.[108] The fleeting joys and the abiding evils of existence, are to be taken as we find them, seeing that it is beyond our power to alter the proportions in which they are mixed, even by the practice of virtue and the application of knowledge. Hence even in the cultivation of righteousness the rule, _Ne quid nimis_, is to be implicitly followed: “Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise.”[109] On the other hand, wisdom is not to be despised, for it hardens us against the strokes of Fate, and renders us insensible to the insults of our fellows.[110] It also teaches us the drawbacks of isolation, the benefits of co-operation, and the advantage of being open to counsel.[111] The basis of all practical wisdom being resignation to the inevitable, obedience to God is better than sacrifices destined to influence His action. What He does, is done for ever, and our efforts are powerless to alter it, or to induce Him to change it.[112] God is far off, unknowable, inaccessible, and man is here upon earth, and such prayers as we feel disposed to offer, had best be short and few; vows too, although to be carried out if once made, serve no good purpose, and are to be avoided. In a word, wild speculations and many words in matters of religion and theology are vain and pernicious.[113] That work and enterprise are beneficial in public and private life is obvious from a study of the results engendered by their opposites.[114] Simple individuals, no less than rulers, may benefit by enterprise and initiative, provided that prudence, by multiplying the possibilities of profit, leaves as little as possible to the vagaries of chance.[115] But prudence is especially needed in order to avoid the seductive wiles of woman, against whom one must be ever on one’s guard.[116] It also enjoins upon us submission to the political ruler of the day, who possesses the power to enforce his will, and is therefore a living embodiment of the inevitable.[117] In a word, this practical wisdom assumes the form of a careful adjustment of means to the end in all the ups and downs of existence.[118]

After this follows the recommendation of the negative good: the sensuous joys within our reach. Seeing that no man knows what evil is before him, nor what things will happen after him, he cannot go far astray, supposing him to be actuated by a desire to make the best of life, if he tastes in moderation of the pleasures that lie on his path, including those of labour.[119] The young generation should, in an especial manner, take this to heart and pluck the rosebuds while it may, for old age and death are hurriedly approaching to prove by their presence that all is vanity and a grasping of wind.[120]

Footnotes:

[108] vii. 1-6, vi. 9, vii. 7-9.

[109] vii. 10, 13-14, 15-18.

[110] vii. 21-22.

[111] iv. 9-16.

[112] iii. 14.

[113] v. 1-7.

[114] v. 7-8, x. 16-20.

[115] x. 1-3, 6, 4, 5.

[116] vii. 26-29.

[117] viii. 1-4, x. 2-7.

[118] x. 8-14a, 15.

[119] x. 14b, ix. 3-10, xi. 7-10.

[120] xi. 9, xii. 8.

* * * * *

KOHELETH’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Koheleth, who agrees with Job in so many other essential points, is likewise at one with him in his views on human knowledge, or, as he terms it, wisdom, which is the source of the highest good within the reach of man. The only light which we have to guide us through the murky mazes of existence, is at best but a miserable taper which serves only to render the eternal darkness painfully visible. “I set my heart to learn wisdom and understanding. And my heart discerned much wisdom and knowledge…. I realised that this also is but a grasping of wind.”[121] The scenes it reveals in the moral as well as the material order are of a nature to make us hate existence. “Then I loathed life.”[122] Indeed, the so-called moral order which, were it, in theory, what it is asserted to be in truth, might reconcile us to our lot and kindle a spark of hope in the human breast, is but the embodiment of rank immorality. “All things come alike to all indiscriminately; the one fate overtaketh the upright man and the miscreant, the clean and the unclean, him who sacrifices and him who sacrifices not, the just and the sinner.”[123] What then is life?

To this question the answer is, in effect, “The shadow of a thing which is not.” The sights and sounds of the universe are the only materials upon which the human intellect can work; and they are all alike empty, shadowy, unreal. They are the creation of the mind itself, the web it weaves from its own gossamer substance; and beyond this are nothing. Space and time, or, as Koheleth expresses it, the universe and eternity, were placed in our consciousness from the very first, and are as deceptive as the mirage of the desert.[124] Kant would define them to be functions of the brain. A projection of the organ of human thought, the world is woven of three threads–space, time, and causality–which, being identical with the mind, appear and vanish with it. The one underlying reality, whether we term it God, Nature, or Will, is absolutely unknowable,[125] and everything else is Maya or illusion.

Strange as this doctrine may sound in orthodox ears, it contains, so far, nothing incompatible with Christianity, which teaches that time and space will disappear along with this transitory existence, and that the one eternal and incomprehensible Will is outside the sphere of both and exempt from the operation of the law of cause and effect. The only difference between the two is that Christianity admits the existence of many beings outside the realm of space and time, whereas without space and time multiplicity is inconceivable, impossible.

We cannot hope to know the one reality which is and acts underneath the appearances of which our world is made up, because knowledge is for ever formed, coloured and bounded by time, space, and causation, and all three are unreal. They alone constitute succession and multiplicity, which are therefore only apparent, not existent. We can conceive nothing but what is, was, or will be (and therefore in time), nothing outside ourselves but what is in space, and absolutely nought that is not a cause or an effect. “Far off is that which is, and deep, deep, who can fathom it?”[126]

But we possess insight and understanding enough to enable us to perceive that life is a positive evil, as, indeed, all evil, pain, and suffering are positive; that pleasures are few, and being negative by their nature, merely serve to make us less sensible of the evils of existence; that happiness is a chimaera, birth a curse, death a boon,[127] and absolute nothingness (Nirvana) the only real good. The hope of improvement, progress, evolution, is a cruel mockery; for the present is but a rehearsal of the past; the future will be a repetition of both;[128] everything that is and will be, was; “what came into being had been long before, and what will be was long ago.”[129] In a word, what we term progress is but the movement of a vast wheel revolving on its axis everlastingly.

But may we not hope for some better and higher state in the future life beyond the tomb where vice will be punished and virtue rewarded? To this query Koheleth’s reply, like that given by Job, is an emphatic negative; and yet the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and of the resurrection were rapidly making headway among the writer’s contemporaries. But he descries nothing in the material or moral order of the world to warrant any such belief. What is there in material man that he should be immortal? “Men are an accident, and the beasts are an accident, and the same accident befalleth them all; as these die even so die those, and the selfsame breath have they all, nor is there any preeminence of man above beast; for all is nothingness.”[130] Nor can any such flattering hope be grounded upon the moral order, because there are no signs of morality in the conduct of the world. “To righteous men that happeneth which should befall wrong-doers, and that betideth criminals which should fall to the lot of the upright.”[131] Nay, “there are just men who perish _through_ their righteousness, and there are wicked men who prolong their lives _by means_ of their iniquity.”[132] Of divine promises and revelations Koheleth–who can hardly claim to be considered a theist, and whose God is Fate, Nature, eternal Will–knows nothing. The most favourable judgment he can pass upon such theological speculations is far from encouraging: “in the multitude of fancies and prattle there likewise lurketh much vanity.”[133] In eternal justice, however, he professes a strong belief, and, like Job, he formulates his faith in the words: “Fear thou God.”[134]

To accuse Koheleth of Epicureanism is to take a one-sided view of his philosophy. His conception of life, its pleasures and pains, is as clearly and emphatically expressed as that of the Buddha or of Schopenhauer. He is an uncompromising pessimist, who sees the world as it is. Everything that seems pleasant or profitable is vanity and a grasping of wind; there is nothing positive but pain, nothing real but the eternal Will, which is certainly unknowable and probably unconscious. These truths, however, are not grasped by every one; they are the bitter fruits of that rare knowledge, increase of which is increase of sorrow. The few who taste thereof cling too tenaciously to life, though life be wedded to sorrow and misery, to renounce such deceitful pleasures as are within their reach; and the bulk of mankind revel in the empty joys of living. To all such, Koheleth offers some practical rules of conduct to enable them to make the best of what is to be had; but the gist of his discourse is identical with those of Jesus, of the Buddha, of Schopenhauer–renunciation.

Human pleasures, whatever their origin, are limited in degree by man’s capacity for enjoyment; and this is an inborn gift, varying in different individuals but unchanging in each. Some dispositions, cheerful and sanguine by nature, tinge even the blackest clouds of misfortune with the rainbow hues of hope; others impart a sombre colour to the most auspicious event, and descry cause for dread in the most complete success, just as the bee sucks honey from the flower which yields only poison to the adder. All joys, although produced by the chemistry of our consciousness, are drawn either from within its inner sphere or from without. The former, known as intellectual pleasures, are relatively lasting because they emanate from what man is; the latter are fleeting because their source is either what he has or what he seems. These are never free from alloy; preceded by the pain of desire, they are accompanied by that of disenchantment and followed by tedium, the worst pain of all; those are exempt from all three, because instead of gratifying passing whims they free the intellect from drudging for the will and afford it momentary glimpses of truth. Wisdom therefore, for Koheleth as for Job, is the greatest boon that can fall to man’s lot.[135] And yet the law of compensation, operating here as in all other spheres, sensibility to pain is always proportionate to capacity for intellectual enjoyment.

With regard to the pleasures of possession, seeing that they are often difficult of attainment and always precarious, we must be moderate in their pursuit and make the most of such as fall to our lot. Contentment here is everything, and contentment is the result of an even balance between desire and fulfilment, the former being always in our power and the latter generally beyond our control. To such happiness as possession can bestow, it is immaterial whether our demands are lowered or our prosperity increased, just as in arithmetic it matters not whether we divide the denominator of a fraction or multiply its numerator by the same number. Therefore, “Better look with the eyes than wander with desire.”[136] The golden rule is to keep our wishes within the bounds of moderation, and to adjust them to unfavourable circumstances. The rich man who wants nothing and covets a mere trifle which is beyond his grasp, is supremely wretched, while the poor man who needs much but longs for nothing, is cheerful and contented. But even if wealth were as easily obtained as it is difficult, the law of compensation should deter us from seeking it. “Sweet is the sleep of the toiler, but his wealth suffereth not the rich man to slumber.”[137] The only enjoyments common to all men are those which consist in the satisfaction of natural wants; the pleasures which wealth can purchase over and above these are trifling, and more than outweighed by the pain of carking care which it brings in its train. He who labours for this is, therefore, cutting a stick for his own back: “all his days are sorrows and his work grief.”[138] “There is no good for man,” then–for the common run of mankind who, debarred from intellectual enjoyment, yet cling tenaciously to life–“save that he should eat and drink, and make glad his soul in his labour.”[139] Health being the condition of all enjoyment, and one of the greatest of earthly boons, care should be taken to preserve it by eating, drinking, labour, and rest, and by moderation in all things. For painlessness, which is positive, is always to be preferred to pleasure, which is negative. It matters little to the strong man that he is otherwise hale and thriving, if he suffer from an excruciating toothache or lumbago. He forgets everything else and thinks only of his misery. The world, then, being a terrestrial hell, they who love it as a dwelling-place cannot do better than try to construct a fireproof abode therein. To hunt for pleasures while exposing oneself to the risk of pain is folly; to escape suffering even at the sacrifice of enjoyments is worldly wisdom. As Aristotle put it, [Greek: _ho phronimos to alupon diokei, ou to haedu_.] But when all has been said and done, the highest worldly wisdom is but a less harmful species of folly. Existence is an evil, and the sole effective remedy renunciation.

Footnotes:

[121] i. 17, 16b.

[122] ii. 17.

[123] ix. 2.

[124] iii. 11.

[125] vii. 24, _cf_. also v. 1.

[126] vii. 24, _cf_. also viii. 16, 17.

[127] “I appraised the dead who died long since, as happier than the quick who are yet alive; but luckier than both him who is still unborn, who hath not yet witnessed the evil doings under the sun,” iv. 2, 3.

[128] In truth, time existing only in the intellect as one of the forms of intuition, there can be neither past nor future, but an everlasting now.

[129] iii. 15.

[130] iii. 19.

[131] viii. 14.

[132] vii. 15.

[133] v. 7.

[134] _Ibid._

[135] vii. 11, 12.

[136] vi. 9.

[137] v. 12.

[138] ii. 23.

[139] ii. 24.

* * * * *

THE SOURCES OF KOHELETH’S PHILOSOPHY

To what extent are these pessimistic doctrines the fruits of Koheleth’s own meditations, and how far may they be supposed to reflect the views of the nation which admitted his treatise into its sacred canon? The latter half of this question is answered by the desperate efforts made from the very beginning to correct or dilute his pessimism, and by the grave suspicion with which Jewish doctors continued to regard it, long after the “poison” had been provided with a suitable antidote. Thus the book known as the Wisdom of Solomon, which is accepted as canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, contains a flat contradiction and emphatic condemnation of certain of the propositions laid down by Koheleth, as, for instance, in ch. ii. 1-9, which is obviously a studied refutation of Koheleth’s principal thesis, couched mainly in the identical words used by the Preacher himself:

“For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: the time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell.

“For we are born of nothing, and after this we shall be as if we had not been: for the breath in our nostrils is smoke; and speech a spark to move our hearts.

“Which being put out, our body shall be ashes, and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist, which is driven away by the beams of the sun, and overpowered with the heat thereof.

“And our name in time shall be forgotten, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works.

“For our time is as the passing of a shadow, and there is no going back of our end: for it is fast sealed, and no man returneth.

“Come, therefore, and let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us speedily use the creatures as in youth.

“Let us fill ourselves with costly wine, and ointments; and let not the flower of the time pass by us.

“Let us crown ourselves with roses before they be withered; let no meadow escape our riot.

“Let none of us go without his part in luxury: let us everywhere leave tokens of joy: for this is our portion, and this our lot.”

Although the book was accepted as canonical by generations of Hebrew teachers and was quoted as such by men like Gamaliel, there was always a strong orthodox party among the Jews opposed to its teachings and apprehensive of its influence;[140] nor was it until the year 118 A.D. that the protracted dispute on the subject was at last definitely settled at the Synod which admitted Koheleth into the Canon. It was natural enough that Hebrew theologians should have hesitated to stamp with the seal of orthodoxy a book which the poet Heine calls the Canticles of Scepticism and in which every unbiassed reader will recognise a powerful solvent of the bases of theism; and the only surprising thing about their attitude is that they should have ever allowed themselves to be persuaded to abandon it.

For Koheleth’s pessimistic theory, which has its roots in Secularism, is utterly incompatible with the spirit of Judaism, whichever of its historical phases we may select for comparison. It is grounded upon the rejection of the Messianic expectations and absolute disbelief in the solemn promises of Jahveh Himself. Koheleth cherishes no hope for the individual, his nation, or the human race. The thing that hath been is the same that shall be, and what befell is the same that shall come to pass, and there is no new thing under the sun….[141] “I surveyed all the works that are wrought under the sun, and behold all was vanity and the grasping of wind.”[142] Persians had succeeded Chaldeans; Cyrus, the Anointed of Jahveh, had come and gone; Greeks had wrested the hegemony of the East from Persians, but no change had brought surcease of sorrow to the Jews. They were even worse off now than ever before. Jahveh, like Baal of old, was become deaf to His worshippers, many of whom turned away from Him in despair, exclaiming, “It is vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have kept His ordinance?”[143] Koheleth, like Job, never once mentions Jahveh’s name, but always alludes to the Eternal Will, which alone is real and unknowable, under the colourless name of Elohim. To say that he believed in a personal God in any sense in which a personal God is essential to a revealed religion, is to misunderstand ideas or to play with words.[144] And Koheleth was a type of a class. Literary men of his day having mockingly asked for the name of the Creator,[145] Koheleth answers that He is inaccessible to men, and that prayer to Him is fruitless.[146] The Jewish aristocracy of his day, desirous of embodying these views in a practical form, sought to abolish once for all the national religion, as a body of belief and practices that had been weighed in the balances and found wanting; while the party that still remained faithful to the law was composed mainly of narrow-minded fanatics, whose wild speculations, long-winded prayers and frequent vows, Koheleth considers deserving objects of derision. He himself held aloof from either camp. He took his stand outside the circle of both, surveying life from the angle of vision of the philosophical citizen of the world. But it would be idle to deny that he had far more in common with the “impious” than with the orthodox.

Thus he scornfully rejects the old doctrine of retribution, and he is never tired of affirming premisses from which the obvious and indeed only conclusion is that the popular conception of a deity who spontaneously created the universe and vigilantly watches over the Hebrew nation, is erroneous, incredible, inconceivable. The Jahveh of olden times, with His grand human passions and petty Jewish prejudices, he simply ignores. He naturally rejects the immortality of the soul–a tenet or theory which was then for the first time beginning to gain ground and to be relied upon as the only means of ultimately righting the wrongs of existence. The fact is that he had no belief in a soul as we understand it. Modern theology regards the indestructible part of man as essentially intelligent, while admitting the fact that intellect is indissolubly associated with the brain, partaking of its vicissitudes during life and vanishing with it apparently for ever at death. Job, Koheleth, and many other writers of the Old Testament hold that if anything of the man persists after the death of the individual, it is unconscious. “The living know at least that they shall die, whereas the dead know not anything at all.”[147] In a word, no other philosopher, poet, or proverb-writer of the Old Testament is less orthodox in his beliefs or less Jewish in his sentiments–and Agur alone is more aggressive in his scepticism–than Koheleth.

Much has been written about the sources from which this writer may and even must have drawn his peculiar mixture of pessimism and “Epicureanism,” and considerable stress has been laid upon the profound influence which Greek culture is supposed to have exerted upon Jewish thinkers towards the second century B.C., when the moral atmosphere was choked with “the baleful dust of systems and of creeds.” The “Epicureanism” of the man who said: “Better is sorrow than laughter,” “the heart of the wise is in the mourning house,”[148] hardly needs the hypothesis of a Greek origin to explain it. My own view of the matter, which I put forward with all due diffidence, differs considerably from those which have been heretofore expressed on the subject. I cannot divest myself of the notion that Koheleth was acquainted, and to some extent imbued, with the doctrines of Gautama Buddha, which must have been pretty widely diffused in the civilised world towards the year 205 B.C., when the present treatise was most probably composed.[149]

Buddhism, the only one of the world-religions which, springing from an abstruse system of metaphysics, brought forth such practical fruits as truthfulness, honesty, loving-kindness and universal pity, spread with extraordinary rapidity not only throughout the Indian continent but over the entire civilised world. Its apostles[150] visited foreign countries, touching and converting by their example the hearts and minds of those who were incapable of weighing their arguments, or unwilling to listen to their exhortations. They introduced a mild, tolerant, humane spirit whithersoever they went, preaching entire equality, practising perfect toleration, founding houses for meditation, erecting hospitals and dispensaries for sick men and beasts, cultivating useful plants and trees, gently suppressing cruelty to animals under any pretext,[151] and generally sowing seeds of sympathy and brotherly love of which history has noticed and described but the final fruits. From the earliest recorded period Indian culture manifested a natural tendency to expand, which was intensified at various times by the comparatively low ebb of civilisation in the adjoining countries. One can readily conceive, therefore, the effects of the strenuous and persevering efforts of one of the most powerful Indian monarchs, Acoka Piyadassi,[152] king of Magadha, to propagate that aspect of his country’s civilisation which is indissolubly bound up with the doctrines of the Buddha.

Acoka, grandson of the great king Tshandragupta, was the first monarch who openly accepted the tenets and conscientiously practised the precepts of the profoundest religious teacher ever born of woman; and no more eloquent testimony could well be offered to the sincerity of the royal convert than the well-nigh miraculous self-restraint with which he forebore to cajole or coerce those of his subjects whom his arguments failed to convince. Satisfied with the progress of the new religion in his native place, he despatched his son, Mahindo, to introduce it into Ceylon; and so successful were the young prince’s missionary efforts that that island became and remains the chief seat of Buddhism to this day. Acoka next turned his attention to foreign countries, in which traders, travellers, emigrants and others had already sparsely sown the seeds of the new faith, and making political power and prestige subservient to zeal for truth and pity for suffering humanity, he induced his allies and their vassals to purchase his friendship by seconding his endeavours to inculcate the philosophic doctrines and engraft the humane practices of Buddhism on their respective subjects. The results he obtained are recorded in his famous inscriptions composed in various Indian dialects and engraven upon rocks all over the continent, from Cabul in the West to Orissa in the East; and among the monarchs whom he there enumerates as having co-operated with him in his apostolic labours, are Antiochus,[153] Turamaya,[154] Alexander, Magas[155] and Antigenes;[156] into whose hospitable dominions he despatched zealous Buddhist missionaries, empowered to found monasteries, to open dispensaries and hospitals, at his expense, and to preach the saving word to all who cared to hear.

The following literal translation of one of Acoka’s inscriptions[157] will help to convey an idea of the nature of his activity as the royal apostle of Buddhism, the Constantine of India: “All over the realms of the god-favoured king, Priyadarsin, and (the realms of those) who (are) his neighbours, such as the Codas, Pandyas, the Prince of the Satiyas,[158] the Prince of the Keralas, Tamraparni, the King of the Javanas, Antiochus, and (among the) others who (are) vassals of the said King Antiochus, everywhere the god-beloved, king, Priyadarsin, caused two kinds of hospitals to be erected: hospitals for men and likewise hospitals for animals.[159] Wherever there were no herbs beneficial to men or animals, he everywhere gave orders that they should be procured or planted. In like manner, where there were no health-giving roots and fruits, he everywhere commanded that they should be procured or planted. And on the highways he had trees put down and wells dug for the behoof of men and beasts.”[160]

History confirms Acoka’s testimony and declares him to have been no less successful in sowing the seeds of medicinal plants than those of the “saving doctrine.” Buddhism enrolled numerous converts and zealous apostles all over the civilised world, and in Ceylon, Egypt, Bactria, and Persia, the yellow flag floated aloft from the roofs of the monasteries of _Bhikshus_.[161] But its influence, in other ways equally powerful while considerably more subtle, has oftentimes escaped the vigilance of the historian. None of the great religions of ancient or modern times succeeded in escaping its contact, or failed to be improved by its spirit. In the second century B.C. there were flourishing Buddhist communities in inhospitable Bactria, where they maintained a firm footing for nearly a thousand years. A Greek,[162] who wrote about the year 80 B.C., and a Chinese pilgrim,[163] who passed through the land in the beginning of the seventh century A.D., allude to them as important elements of the population of the country in their respective ages, and the Buddhist monastery founded in Balkh, the capital of Bactria, in the second century B.C., was become a famous pilgrimage in the days of Hiuen Thsang. The Zoroastrian priests of Eran hated and feared the followers of the strange creed while silently adopting and unconsciously propagating many of its institutions. Several of the Eranian kings incurred the censure involved in the nickname of “idolaters” in consequence of the favour they extended to the preachers of Nirvana.[164] No religion of antiquity was less favourable to a life of passive contemplation than Zoroastrianism, which defined life as a continuous struggle, and considered virtue as a successful battle with the powers of darkness; and yet little by little Zoroastrian monasteries sprang up by the side of the Fire Temples, and offered a quiet refuge from the turmoil of the world to the pious worshippers of Ahura Mazda.[165]

So saturated were the Eranian populations with the spirit of Buddha–antagonistic though it was to their own–that the two great Eranian sects,[166] one of which bade fair to become a universal religion,[167] were little else than adaptations of the creed of the Buddha to the needs of a different time and people. Mani, for instance, prohibited marriage, which was one of the principal duties and holiest acts of a true servant of Ahura Mazda; forbade the killing of animals which, in the case of ants, serpents, gnats, &c., was enjoined by the priests of Zoroaster, and discouraged agriculture lest plants should be destroyed in the process. And the two classes of perfect and imperfect disciples in Mani’s community were copied from those of Buddhism, which divides all believers into two categories: those who sincerely and fervently seek to attain to Nirvana and are termed Bhikshus, and the Upasakas or laymen who, while holding on to life, practise such virtues as are compatible with this unholy desire.

The Jewish religion, in certain of its phases, reveals in like manner unmistakable traces of the influence of the religion of the Buddha. To take but one instance, the Essenians in Judaea, near the Dead Sea and the Therapeutes in Egypt, practised continence, eschewed all bloody sacrifices, encouraged celibacy, and extreme abstemiousness in eating and drinking. They formed themselves into communities, and lived, after the manner of Buddhist Bhikshus, in monasteries. During the life of Jesus, the Essenians, who lived mostly in cloistered retirement on the shores of the Dead Sea, played no historic role; but after the destruction of Jerusalem, they embraced Christianity in a body, and originated the ascetic movement of the Ebionites, which did not finally subside until it had deposited the germs of monasticism in the Church of Christ.

Koheleth, who lived either in Jerusalem or in Alexandria–more probably in the latter city–about the year 205 B.C., had exceptional opportunities for becoming acquainted with the tenets and precepts of the religion of Buddha. He was evidently a man of an inquiring mind, with a pronounced taste for philosophical speculation; and the social and political conditions of his day were such that a person even of a very incurious disposition would be likely to be brought face to face with the sensational doctrine which was responsible for such amazing innovations as hospitals for men and for animals. Alexandria, the museum and library of which had already been founded, was one of the principal strongholds of non-Indian Buddhists. It is mentioned in the Milindapanho, a Pali work which deals with events that took place in the second century B.C.;[168] it is expressly included by Acoka in the list of cities into which he introduced a knowledge of the “path of duty,” and so devoted were its inhabitants to the creed of Sakhya Mouni,[169] that thirty years after Augustine had died at Hippo, thirty thousand Bhikshus set out from Alasadda[170] to annex new countries to the realm of truth.

Footnotes:

[140] _Cf._ the epilogue (xii. 9-14), for example, which is one of the most timid and shuffling apologies ever penned.

[141] i. 9.

[142] i. 14.

[143] Malachi iii. 14.

[144] Professor Cheyne remarks: “To me, Koheleth is not a theist in any vital sense in his philosophic meditations.”–“Job and Solomon,” p. 250.

[145] _Cf._ Proverbs xxx. 4.

[146] iii. 14, v. 2.

[147] Eccles. ix. 5.

[148] vii. 3, 4.

[149] The view of several of the most authoritative scholars–in which I entirely concur–is that Koheleth was written in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy V. (Epiphanes), who came to the throne as a boy under the guardianship of tutors and was alluded to in the verse: “Woe, land, to thee whose king is a child.”

[150] Some of them were foreigners resident in India who, after their conversion, preached the new doctrine to their fellow-countrymen. Thus, one of the earliest and most successful missionaries was a Greek, whose Indian name was Dharmarakshita.

[151] Plants, too, were included in their care and profited by their protection.

[152] Acoka is a Sanskrit word, which means “free from care;” and Piyadassi a dialectic form of the Sanskrit word Priyadarsin, which means lovable, amiable. It was applied as an epithet to King Acoka, who reigned from 259-222 B.C.

[153] Antiochus II., called Theos, who was poisoned by his divorced wife Laodike in 247 B.C. I am aware that some scholars identify the Antiochus here mentioned with Antiochus the Great. Although both views make equally for my contention, I fail to see how Acoka, who died in all probability in the year 222 B.C., could have carried on important negotiations with Antiochus the Great, who came to the throne of Syria two years later.

[154] Ptolemy of Egypt, probably Ptolemy Philadelphos, who founded the Museum and Library of Alexandria, and his successor Ptolemy Euergetes (247-221 B.C.).

[155] Magas, king of Cyrene.

[156] The identity of this monarch is uncertain.

[157] The second Edict of Girnar, Khalsi version.

[158] A South Indian people.

[159] Usually a dispensary was opened for the distribution of simples, and a hospital hard by for those who could not move about. The Buddhists were almost as anxious to relieve the physical pain and illness of animals as of human beings.

[160] _Cf._ Buehler, “Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft,” Band xxxvii. folg. p. 98.

[161] The monks or real disciples of Buddha who endeavour to attain Nibbana or Nirvana. The bulk of the population contents itself with almsgiving and the practice of elementary morality, the reward for which will be a less unhappy existence after death; but not Nirvana, to which only the perfect can hope to attain.

[162] Alexander Polyhistor, quoted by Cyrillus (_contra Julianum_); _cf._ also Clemens Alexandrinus, _Stromata I._, p. 339.

[163] Hiuen Thsang.

[164] Their names and deeds are preserved in the Persian epic known as the Book of Kings (Firdoosi, Shah-Nameh, _cf_. 1033, v. 4, 1160, v. 2, &c.).

[165] Ormuzd. An instructive instance of the way in which foreign institutions become nationalised in Bactria is afforded by the Buddhist monastery in Balkh, which was at first known by its Indian name, _nava vihara_, a term that was gradually changed to _naubehar,_ which in Persian means “new spring.”

[166] Mani and Mazdak.

[167] The religion of Mani.

[168] Ed. Trenckner, p. 327.

[169] Buddha.

[170] Alexandria.

AGUR, THE AGNOSTIC

* * * * *

AGUR, SON OF YAKEH

Embedded in the collection of the Book of Proverbs[171] is an interesting fragment of the philosophy of a certain “Agur, son of Yakeh, the poet,” which for scathing criticism of the theology of his day and sweeping scepticism as to every form of revealed religion, is unmatched by the bitterest irony of Job and the most dogmatic agnosticism of Koheleth. Unfortunately it is no more than a mere fragment, the verses of which are thoughtfully separated from each other by strictures, protests, and refutations of the baldest and most orthodox kind. Indeed, it is in all probability precisely to the presence of the infallible antidote that we owe the preservation of the deadly poison; and if we may found a conjecture as to the character of the whole work on a comparison of the fragments with what we know generally of the sceptical schools of philosophy prevalent among the Jews of post-Exilian days, we shall feel disposed to hold the seven strophes preserved in our Bibles as that portion of the poem which the compiler considered to be the most innocent because the least startling and revolutionary.

To the thinking of the critics of former times the Proverbs displayed unmistakable traces of the unique and highly finished workmanship of the great and wise king Solomon. At the present day no serious student of the Bible, be he Christian or Rationalist, would raise his voice on behalf of this Jewish tradition which, running counter to well-established facts, is devoid even of the doubtful recommendation of moderate antiquity. A more accurate knowledge of history and a more thorough study of philology have long since made it manifest to all who can lay claim to either, that however weighty may have been Solomon’s titles to immortality, they included neither depth of philosophic thought nor finish of literary achievement. And an average supply of plain common-sense enables us to see that even had that extraordinary monarch been a profound thinker or a classic writer, he would hardly have treated future events as accomplished facts without being endowed with further gifts and marked by graver defects which would involve a curious combination of prophecy and folly.

The Proverbs themselves, when properly interrogated, tell a good deal of their own story; sacred and profane history supply the rest. In their present form they were collected and edited by the author of the first six verses of the first chapter, who drew his materials from different sources. The first and most important of these was the so-called “Praise of Wisdom” which, until a comparatively recent period, was erroneously held to be a rounded, homogeneous poem. Professor Bickell conclusively showed that it consists of ten different songs composed in the same metre as the Poem of Job, each chapter being coextensive with one song, except the first chapter, which contains two.[172] The fifth collection, containing the proverbs copied “by the men of Hezekiah,” is characterised by the strong national spirit of the writers. Most of the others make frequent mention of God, give a prominent place to religion, and adapt themselves for use as texts for sermons; these, on the contrary, never once mention His name, reflect religion as it was–viz., as only one of the many sides of national existence, and deal mainly with the concrete problems of the everyday life of the struggling people. The other sayings may be aptly described as the pious maxims of a sect; these as the thoughts of a nation. The seventh part of the Book of Proverbs contains the remarkable sayings of Agur,[173] which were quite as frequently misunderstood by the Jews of old as by Christians of more recent times, the former heightening the impiety of the author and the latter generously identifying him with the pious and fanatical writer to whose well-meant refutations and protests we owe the preservation of this interesting fragment of ancient Hebrew agnosticism.

Footnotes:

[171] The Book of Proverbs begins with ten songs on wisdom, which constitute the first part of the work. The second part is made up of distichs, each one of which, complete in itself, embodies a proverbial saying (x. i-xxii. 16). The third section is composed of the “sayings of the wise men,” which are enshrined in tetrastichs or strophes of four lines, among which we find an occasional interpolation by the editor, recognisable by the paternal tone, the words “My son,” and the substitution of distichs for tetrastichs. Then comes the appendix containing other proverbial dicta (chap. xxiv. 23-34. chap. vi. 9-19, chap. xxv. 2-10), followed by the proverbs “of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah copied out” (xxv. 11-xxvii. 22), and wound up with a little poem in praise of rural economy. Chaps. xxviii. and xxix. constitute another collection of proverbs of a more strictly religious character, and then come the sayings of Agur, written in strophes of six lines, the rules for a king and the praise of a good housewife.

[172] Prov. i. 7-19 and i. 20-33.

[173] Chap. xxx.

* * * * *

FORM AND CONTENTS OF THE SAYINGS OF AGUR

It is needless to discuss the condition and the contents of the entire Book of Proverbs, seeing that each one of its component parts has an independent, if somewhat obscure, history of its own. The final compiler and editor, to whom we are indebted for the collection in its present form, undoubtedly found the sweeping scepticism of the poet Agur and the pious protestations of his anonymous adversary, the thesis and the antithesis, inextricably interwoven in the section now known as the thirtieth chapter. He himself apparently identified the two antagonists–the scoffing doubter and the believing Jew; most modern theologians have cheerfully followed his example. The fact would seem to be that the orthodox member of the Jewish community, who thus emphatically objected to aggressive agnosticism, was a man who strictly observed the “Mosaic” Law, and sympathised with the people in their hatred of their heathen masters and their hopes of speedy deliverance by the Messiah; in a word, an individual of the party which later on played an important role in Palestine under the name of the Pharisees. Possessing a copy of Agur’s popular philosophical treatise, this zealous champion undertook to refute the theory before he had ascertained the drift of the sayings in which it was enshrined, or grasped their primary meaning. Thus, in one passage[174] he fancies that the taunts which Agur levelled against omniscient theologians who are well up in the history of everything that is done or left undone in heaven, while amazingly ignorant of the ascertainable facts of earthly science, are really aimed at God; and he seeks to parry the attack accordingly. His numerous and amusing errors are such as characterise the fanaticism that would refute a theory before hearing it unfolded, not those which accompany and betray pious imbecility. Hence it would be unfair to tax him with the utter incoherency of the prayer which our Bibles make him offer up, when warding off the supposed attack upon God: (8) “Feed me with food convenient for me, (9) Lest I be full and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor and steal, and take the name of my God _in vain_.” The mistake is the result of the erroneous punctuation of the Hebrew words,[175] which may be literally rendered into English as follows:

“Feed me with food suitable for me,
Lest I be sated and deny thee,
And say, Who is the Lord?
Or lest I be poor and yield to seduction, And sin against the name of my God.’

In the ensuing verse the controversialist, full of his own Pharisaic[176] views of politics, and fancying he detects in certain of Agur’s words,[177] an apology for the heathen rulers and contempt for the orthodox people of God, inveighs against the traitor who would denounce his fellow-subjects to their common master,[178] and holds him up to universal odium.

One or two other false constructions put upon Agur’s sayings by the champion of the “Law of Jahveh,” are likewise worthy of attention. In the second sentence, which can be traced back to the proverbial philosophy of the Hindoos, Agur, enumerating the four things that are never satisfied, lays special stress upon two which are, so to say, the beginning and end of all things, the alpha and omega of human philosophy–viz., the grave and the womb;[179] the latter the bait as well as the portal of life, the former the bugbear and the goal of all things living. The idea, no less than the form, is manifestly Indian. Birth and death constitute the axis of existence; the womb is the symbol of the allurement that tempts men to forget their sorrows, to keep the Juggernaut wheel revolving and to supply it with fresh victims to be mangled and crushed into the grave. The lure and the deterrent–love of sensuous pleasure and fear of dissolution–are as deceitful as all the other causes of pain and pleasure in this world of appearance. Schopenhauer puts it tersely thus: “As we are decoyed into life by the utterly illusory impulse to voluptuousness, even so are we held fast therein by the fear of death, which is certainly illusory in an equal degree. Both have their immediate source in the Will, which in itself is unconscious.”[180]

The only reward which life offers to those who crave it, is suffering and death. The desire of life–the Indian _tanha_ or thirst of existence–Agur represents in the form of the beautiful but terrible Ghoul of the desert who has two daughters: birth and death. By means of her fascinating charms she entices the wanderer to her arms, but instead of satiating his soul with the promised joys, she ruthlessly flings him to her two daughters who tear him to pieces and devour him on the spot. Desire is the source of life which in turn is the taproot of all evil and pain; insight into this truth–the knowledge or wisdom lauded by Job and prized by Koheleth–affords the only means of breaking the unholy spell, and escaping from the magic circle.

This ingenious and profound philosophical image was wholly misunderstood by Agur’s orthodox adversary, who founds upon the deprecatory allusion to the womb a general accusation of lack of reverence for maternity and a specific charge of disrespect for Agur’s own mother.[181]

Agur’s third saying has been likewise sadly misconstrued by the ancient Pharisaic controversialist and by his faithful modern successors. He enumerates therein four things which to him seem wholly incomprehensible, the fourth and last being the darkest mystery of all: the flying of an eagle in the air, the movement of a serpent–which is devoid of special organs of locomotion–along a rock, the sailing of a ship on the ocean, and “the way of a man with a maid.”[182] It is very hard to believe what is nevertheless an undeniable fact, that the bulk of serious commentators classify these as the trackless things, whereby, strangely enough, they understand the last of the four in a moral instead of a metaphysical sense. The error is an old one: it was on the strength of this arbitrary and vulgar interpretation that Agur was accused by his Jewish antagonist of a criminal lack of filial piety towards his own father,[183] and threatened with condign punishment, to be inflicted by the eagles that fly so wonderfully in the air;[184] while another scribe, unaware that the mystery of generation could be chosen as the text for a treatise on metaphysics, and firmly convinced that the philosopher was condemning unhallowed relations between the sexes, penned a gloss to make things sufficiently clear which was afterwards removed from the margin to the text where it now figures as the twentieth verse.

In truth, Agur gives utterance to a natural sentiment of awe and wonder at the greatest and darkest of all mysteries whose roots lie buried in the depths of the two worlds we conceive of. What could be more awe-inspiring than the instantaneous metamorphosis of pure immaterial will into concrete flesh and blood, throbbing with life hastening to decay, the incarnation in the sphere of appearances of an act of the one being which is not an appearance only, but the denizen of the world of reality? Will is primary, real, enduring; intellect secondary, accidental, fleeting; the one, abiding for ever, is identical in all things; the latter varies in different beings, nay in the same individuals at various times, and perishes with the brain, of which it is a function. Will is devoid of intellect, as intellect is deprived of velleity. We know will through our inner consciousness which has to do exclusively with it and its manifold manifestations; all other things–the world of appearances–we know through what may be termed our outer consciousness.

Now in our self-consciousness we apprehend the fierce, blind, headstrong sexual impulse as the most powerful motion of concentrated will. The act is marked by the spontaneity, impetuosity, and lack of reflection which characterises the agent, will being by nature unenlightened and unconditioned. And yet that which in our inner consciousness is a blind, vehement impulse, appears in our outer consciousness in the form of the most complex living organism we know. Generation, then, is manifestly the point at which the real and the seeming intersect each other.

Birth and death–the inevitable lot of each and every one–would seem to affect the individual only, the race living on without change or decay. This, however, is but the appearance. In reality the individual and the race are one. The blind striving to live, the will that craves existence at all costs, is absolutely the same in both, as complete in the former as in the latter, and the perpetuity of the race is, so to say, but the symbol of the indestructibility of the individual–_i.e._, of will.

Now this all-important fact is exemplified quite as clearly by the phenomenon of generation as by the process of decay and death. In both we behold the opposition between the appearance and the essence of the being, between the world as it exists in our intellect as representation, and the world as it really is, as will. The act of generation is known to us through two different media: that of the inner consciousness which is taken up with our will and all its movements, and that of our outer consciousness which has to do with impressions received through the senses. Seen through the former medium, the act is the most complete and immediate satisfaction of the will–sensual lust; viewed in the light supplied by the outer consciousness, it appears as the woof of the most intricate texture, the basis of the most complex of living organisms. From this angle of vision, the result is a work of amazing skill, designed with the greatest ingenuity and forethought, and carried out with patient industry and scrupulous care; from that point of view it is the direct outcome of an act which is the negation of plan, forethought, skill, and ingenuity, a blind unreasoning impulse. This contrast or rather opposition between the seeming and the real, this new view of birth and death, this sudden flash of light athwart the impenetrable darkness, is what provokes the wonder of this scoffing sceptic.[185]

In the fourth saying, Agur mentions, among the persons whom the earth cannot endure, a low-bred fellow who is set to rule over others, and a fool when he acquires a competency and becomes independent. The anonymous Pharisee, who keeps a vigilant watch for doctrinal slips and political backslidings and frequently finds them where they are not, descries in the first of the four unbearable things a proof that Agur was a Sadducee and an aristocrat who would rather obey a monarch who is “every inch a king”–even though he be a heathen–than a native clodhopper who should climb up to the throne on the backs of a poor deluded people and grind them down in the sacred name of liberty and independence. Agur is therefore duly reprimanded and classed with the shameless oppressors of the multitude and the devourers of the substance of the poor,[186] as the Sadducees generally were by their Pharisaic opponents.

The sentence that follows, enumerating the things “which are little upon the earth,[187] is not from the pen of our philosopher, but a harmless passage inserted subsequently as a _pendant_ to the four things which “are comely in going.” The main considerations that point to this conclusion and warrant us in ascribing the verses to a different author are these: all the other “numerical sayings” which are admittedly the work of Agur, contain first of all the number three and in the parallel verse four,[188] whereas this sentence speaks of four only. Again, all Agur’s proverbs are in the form of strophes of six lines each; but this passage consists of five distichs. Lastly, it is a manifest digression, leads nowhither, and, what is still more important, has no point, as all Agur’s sayings have.[189]

The final sentence of this interesting fragment needs no elaborate explanation: it contains the pith of Agur’s practical philosophy in the form of an exhortation to renounce honour, glory, the esteem of men, &c., if we possess legitimate claims to such, and still more if we have none; the acquisition of peace and quiet is cheap at the price of obscurity; freedom from care and worry and from the evils they bring in their train, being of infinitely greater value than the chance and even the certainty of so-called “positive” enjoyments.

Footnotes:

[174] Prov. xxx. 4.

[175] The Hebrew text consists of vowelless words. The correct vowels must be ascertained before the meaning of a word or sentence can be definitely established. The vowel points of our Hebrew Bibles are not older than the seventh century A.D., and are frequently erroneous. In the present case the word stealing does not occur in the text, but only the being stolen–viz., seduction, temptation.

[176] I employ the word in its natural, not in its conventional, sense.

[177] Prov. xxx. 21, 22.

[178] _Ibid_ xxx. 10.

[179] The word “barren” added in our Bibles (Hebrew _’oczer_, “barrenness”) is not only excluded by the metre, but is also wanting in the Septuagint version–conclusive proofs that it is a later interpolation.

[180] _Cf_. Schopenhauer, “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” herausg. v. E. Grisebach, ii. p. 585. Grisebach’s is the only correct edition of Schopenhauer’s works.

[181] Prov. xxx. 11.

[182] _Ib_. xxx. 18, 19.

[183] _Ib_. xxx. 11.

[184] _Ib_. xxx. 17.

[185] _Cf_. Schopenhauer, “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” vol. ii. p. 583 fol.; also vol. i. pp. 424-426; and Bickell, “Wiener Zeitschrift fuer Kunde des Morgenlandes,” 1891.

[186] Prov. xxx. 19.

[187] _Ib_. xxx. 24-28.

[188] For example, Prov. xxx. 15:

“There are three things that are never satisfied, Yea, four things say not, ‘It is enough!'”

[189] _Cf_. Bickell, “Wiener Zeitschrift fuer Kunde des Morgenlandes,” 1891.

* * * * *

DATE OF COMPOSITION

The sayings of Agur cannot possibly be assigned to a date later than the close of third century B.C. The ground for this statement is contained in the circumstance that Jesus Sirach found the Book of Proverbs in existence, with all its component parts and in its present shape, about the year 200 B.C. He mentions a collection of proverbial sayings when alluding to Solomon and his proverbs. Jesus Sirach’s canon–if we can apply this technical term to the series of scriptures in vogue in his day–comprised the books contained in our Bibles from Genesis to Kings, further Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezechiel, the twelve Minor Prophets, Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. Moreover, it is no longer open to doubt that the arrangement of the various parts of the Book of Proverbs which he read was identical with that of ours. For the last part of this Book contains an alphabetical poem in praise of a good housewife,[190] and Jesus Sirach concluded his own work with a similar poem upon wisdom, in which he imitated this alphabetical order. It is obvious, therefore, that Proverbs in their present form could not have been compiled later than the date of Jesus Sirach’s work (about 200 B.C.). This conclusion is borne out by the circumstance that the final editor of Proverbs in his introduction,[191] mentions the Words of the Wise, which occur in chapters xxii. 17-xxiv., and “their dark sayings,” or riddles, by which he obviously means the sentences of Agur. For Proverbs and for Agur’s fragment, therefore, the latest date is the beginning of the second century B.C. Chapter xxx., in which, on the one hand, Agur develops very advanced philosophical views, some of them of Indian origin, and, on the other, his anonymous antagonist breathes the narrow, fanatic spirit so thoroughly characteristic of the later “Mosaic” Law, is among the very latest portions of Proverbs. For it is in the highest degree probable that the sayings of Agur are of a much later date even than the promulgation of the Priests’ Code;[192] and the circumstance that the anonymous stickler for strict orthodoxy already begins to accentuate the political and religious opposition between the two great parties known as Pharisees and Sadducees, as well as other grounds of a different order, disposes me to assign the fragment of Agur to the third century B.C. This conclusion would be borne out by the influence upon Agur’s scepticism of comparatively recent foreign speculation. Some of his sayings have an unmistakable Indian ring about them. A few are even directly traceable to the philosophical sentences of the Hindoos. The enumeration of the four insatiable things, for instance, is but a slight modification of the Indian proverb in the Hitopadeca which runs: “Fire is not satiated with fuel; nor the sea with streams; nor death with all beings; nor a fair-eyed woman with men.”[193] Still more striking and suggestive is the correspondence between the desire of life, personified in Agur’s fragment by the beautiful Ghoul, and the thirst of existence denoted by the Buddha and his countrymen as _tanha_–the root of all evil and suffering. “Through thirst for existence (_tanha_),” the Buddha is reported to have said to his disciples, “arises a craving for life; through this, being; through being, birth; through birth are produced age and death, care and misery, suffering, wretchedness and despair. Such is the origin of the world…. By means of the total annihilation of this thirst for existence (_tanha_) the destruction of the craving for life is compassed; through the destruction of the craving for life, the uprooting of being is effected; through the uprooting of being, the annihilation of birth is brought about; by means of the annihilation of birth the abolition of age and death, of care and misery, of suffering, wretchedness and despair is accomplished. In this wise takes place the annihilation of this sum of suffering.”[194] The same doctrine is laid down by the last accredited of the Buddha’s disciples, Sariputto: “What, brethren, is the source of suffering?” he is reported to have said. “It is that desire (_tanha_) which leads from new birth to new birth, which is accompanied by joy and passion, which delights now here, now there; it is the sexual instinct, the impulse towards existence, the craving for development. That, brethren, is what is termed the source of suffering.”[195]

Footnotes:

[190] Prov. xxxi. 10-31.

[191] Prov. i. 6.

[192] 444 B.C.

[193] _Cf_. Hitopadeca, book ii. fable vi.; ed. Max Mueller, vol. ii. p. 38.

[194] Samyuttaka-Nikayo, vol. ii. chap. xliv. p. 12; _cf_. Neumann “Buddhistiche Anthologie,” Leiden, 1892, pp. 161-162.

[195] Majjhima-Nikayo; _cf_. Neumann, _op. sit.,_ p.25.

* * * * *

AGUR’S PHILOSOPHY

Of the three Hebrew thinkers of the Old Testament who ventured to sift and weigh the evidence on which the religious beliefs of their contemporaries were based, Agur was probably the most daring and dangerous. He appealed directly to the people, and set up a simple standard of criticism which could be effectively employed by all. Hence, no doubt, the paucity of the fragments of his writings which have come down to us and the consequent difficulty of constructing therewith a complete and coherent system of philosophy. To what extent he assented to the theories and approved the practices which constitute the positive elements of the Buddha’s religion, is open to discussion; but that he was a confirmed sceptic as regards the fundamental doctrines of Jewish theology, and that his speculations received their impulse and direction from Indian philosophy, are facts which can no longer be called in question.

To the theologians of his day he shows no mercy; for their dogmas of retribution, Messianism, &c., he evinces no respect; nay, he denies all divine revelation and strips the deity itself of every vestige of an attribute. Proud of their precise and exhaustive knowledge of the mysteries of God’s nature, the doctors of the Jewish community had drawn up comprehensive formulas for all His methods of dealing with mankind, and anathematised those who ventured to cast doubts upon their accuracy.

“Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For every why they had a wherefore,”

the unanswerable tone of which lay necessarily and exclusively in the implicit and tenacious faith of the hearer. Now, faith may be governed by conditions widely different from those that regulate scientific knowledge, but if its object be something that lies beyond the ken of the human intellect it must be based either upon a supernatural intuition accorded to the individual or upon a divine revelation vouchsafed to all. In the former case it cannot be embodied in a religious dogma; in the latter it cannot–or should not–be accepted without thorough discussion and due verification of the alleged historical fact of the divine message.

This is the gist of Agur’s reasoning against the allwise theologians of the Jewish Church.

These sapient specialists, whose intellects were nurtured upon the highest and most abstruse speculations and who could readily account for all the movements of the Deity with a wealth of detail surpassing that of a French police _dossier_, were utterly and notoriously ignorant of the rudimentary laws of science which every inquisitive mind might learn and every educated man could verify. Now, as truth is one, Agur reasoned, how comes it that the persons who thus lay claim to a thorough knowledge of the more difficult, are absolutely ignorant of the more simple? Whence, in a word, did they obtain their perfect acquaintance with the mysteries of the divine nature and the mechanism of the universe, the elementary laws of which are yet unknown to them? Surely not from any source accessible to all; for Agur, possessing equally favourable opportunities for observation and quite as keen an interest in the subject, not only failed to make any similar discoveries, but even to find any confirmation of theirs. For this he sarcastically accounts by admitting that he must be considerably more stupid than the common run of mankind, in fact, that he is wholly devoid of human understanding–a confession which he evidently expects every reasonable man to repeat after him to those who assert that crass ignorance of fundamental facts is an aid to the highest kind of knowledge.

“I have worried myself about God, and succeeded not, For I am more stupid than other men,
And in me there is no human understanding: Neither have I learned wisdom,
So that I might comprehend the science of sacred things.”

Still he is a very docile disciple, and, having failed to make any discoveries of his own, would gladly accept those of a qualified master–of one who endeavours to know before setting out to teach and who prefaces his account of the wonders of the unseen world by pointing out the bridge over which he passed thither, from this. But does such a genuine teacher exist?

“Who has ascended into heaven and come down again? Who can gather the wind in his fists?
Who can bind the waters in a garment? Who can grasp all the ends of the earth? Such an one would I question about God: ‘What is his name? And what the name of his sons, if thou knowest it?'”

And if even specialists do not fulfil these conditions, are we not forced to conclude that their so-called knowledge is a fraud and its subject-matter unknowable?

Agur’s views of right conduct–if we may judge by the general tenour of his fragmentary sayings and by the principle embodied in his sixth and last sentence, in which he rejects as a motive for action “a high hope for a low heaven”–are marked by the essential characteristics of true morality. An action performed for the sake of any recompense, human or divine, transitory or eternal, is egotistic by its nature, and therefore not moral; and the difference between the man who, in his unregenerate days, cut his neighbours’ throats in order to enjoy their property, and after his conversion gave all his goods to feed the poor, in order to enjoy eternal happiness in heaven, is more interesting to the legislator than to the moralist. But, were it otherwise, Agur holds that, even from a purely practical point of view, all the honours and rewards which mankind can bestow upon their greatest benefactor would be too dearly purchased by a ruffled temper; in other words, mere freedom from positive pain is a greater boon than the highest pleasure purchased at the price of a little suffering.

Agur’s politics gave as much offence to the priests as his theology. Like most original thinkers, he is a believer in the aristocracy of talent, and he makes no secret of his preference of a hereditary nobility to those upstarts from the ranks of the people who possess no intellectual gifts to recommend them. For the former have at least training and heredity to guide them, whereas the latter are devoid even of these recommendations. These views furnished the grounds for the charge of Sadduceeism preferred against him by his adversary.

To what extent Indian thought, and in particular the metaphysics and ethics of Buddhism, influenced Agur’s religious speculations, it is impossible to do more than conjecture. Personally I am disposed to think that he was well acquainted and indeed thoroughly imbued with the teachings of the Indian reformer. In the third century B.C., as already pointed out, the spread of the new religion through Bactria, Persia, Egypt, and Asia Minor was rapid. Moreover, the turn taken by the speculations of cultured Hebrews of that epoch was precisely such as we should expect to find, if it stood to Buddhistic preaching in the relation of effect to cause. The scepticism of the philosophers of the Old Testament, not excepting that of Agur who may aptly be termed the Hebrew Voltaire, was not wholly destructive. Its sweeping negations in the spheres of metaphysics and theology were amply compensated for–if one can speak of compensation in such a connection–by the positive, humane, and wise maxims it lays down in the domain of ethics. And the cornerstone of the morality of all three–Job, Koheleth, and Agur–would seem to be virtually identical with that formulated in the Indian aphorism:

“Alone the doer doth the deed; alone he tastes the fruit it brings; Alone he wanders through life’s maze; alone redeems himself from being.”

Buddhistic influence in the case of Agur, therefore, is all the more probable that it admirably dovetails with all the circumstances of time and place known to us, even on the supposition, which I am myself inclined to favour, that Agur lived and wrote in Palestine. This probability is greatly enhanced by the striking affinity between the Buddhist conception of revealed religions, of professional priests and of practical wisdom, and that enshrined in the few verses of Agur which we possess. It is raised to a degree akin to certainty by the actual occurrence of Indian images, similes, and even concrete aphorisms in the short fragment of seven strophes preserved to us in the Book of Proverbs.

* * * * *

THE POEM OF JOB

TRANSLATION OF THE RESTORED TEXT

* * * * *

PROLOGUE

CHAP. I. A.V.]

1 _There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil._

2 _And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters._

3 _His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east._

4 _And his sons went and feasted_ in their _houses, every one his day; and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with them._

5 _And it was so, when the days of_ their _feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings_ according _to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually._

6 _Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them._