THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
Editor of "The Expositor."
THE BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES,
BY
SAMUEL COX, D.D.
WITH A NEW TRANSLATION.
BY
AUTHOR OF COMMENTARIES ON JOB, RUTH, ETC.
"Omnia vanitas, præter amare Deum, et illi soli servire."
—St. Augustine.
TORONTO:
WILLARD TRACT DEPOSITORY AND BIBLE DEPÔT,
Corner of Yonge and Temperance Streets.
1890.
The Lectures on which this book is founded
were delivered five-and-twenty years ago, and
were published in A.D. 1867. The Quest of the Chief Good. A Popular Commentary on
the book Ecclesiastes, with a New Translation. By Samuel
Cox. London: Arthur Miall.
In rewriting the book I have retained as much as
I could of its earlier form, lest the vivacity of a first
exposition of the Scripture should be lost. And,
indeed, the alterations I have had to make are but
Another and much more important result of these
subsequent studies has been that I can now speak
with a more assured confidence of the theme of
this Scripture, and of its handling by the Author.
None of the scholars who have recently commented
on the Book doubt that it is the quest of the chief
good which it sets forth; and though some of them
arrange and divide it differently, yet, on the whole
and in the main, they are agreed that this quest is
Few Scriptures of the Old Testament are so
familiar to the general reader as Ecclesiastes; and
that mainly, I think, because it addresses itself to
a problem which is "yours, mine, every man's."
Many more quotations from it have entered into
our current speech than have been taken from Job,
for example, although Job is both a much larger and
a much finer poem than this—"the finest poem,"
as a great living poet has said, "whether of the
modern or of the antique world." It is a Book
which can never lose its interest for men until the
last conflict in the long strife of doubt has led in
The Holme, Hastings,
October 1890.
Those who raise the question, "Is life worth living?" answer it by—living on; for no man lives simply to proclaim what a worthless and wretched creature he is. But for the most part the question is mooted in a merely academical and not very sincere spirit. And to the dainty and fastidious pessimist who goes about to imply his own superiority by declaring that the world which contents his fellows is not good enough for him, there still seems no better reply than the rough but rousing and wholesome rebuke which Epictetus gave to such as he some nineteen centuries ago, reminding them that there were many exits from the theatre of life, and advising them, if they disliked the "show", to retire from it by the nearest door of escape, and to make room for spectators of a more modest and grateful spirit.
Of the pessimists of his time he demands, "Was it
not God who brought you here? And as what did He
"But why," urges the pessimist, "did He bring me into the world on these hard terms?"
"Oh!" replies Epictetus, "if you don't like the terms, it is always in your power to leave them. He has no need of a discontented spectator. He will not miss you much, nor we either."
But if any man lift the question into a more sincere
and noble form by asking, "How may life be made
worth living, or best worth living?"—in other words,
"What is the true ideal, and what the chief good, of
man?"—he will find no nobler answer to it, and none
more convincingly and persuasively put, than that contained
in this Scripture, which modern pessimists are
apt to quote whenever they want to "approve" their
melancholy hypothesis "with a text." From Schopenhauer
downward, this Book is constantly cited by them
as if it confirmed the conclusion for which they contend,
When scholars and "philosophers" have fallen into
a mistake so radical and profound, it is not surprising
that the unlettered should have followed their leaders
into the ditch, and taken this Scripture to be the most
melancholy in the Sacred Canon, instead of one of the
most consolatory and inspiriting, for want of apprehending
its true aim. Beyond all doubt, there is a
prevailing ground-tone of sadness in the Book; for
through by far the larger part of its course it has to
deal with some of the saddest facts of human life—with
the errors which divert men from their true aim, and
It is to be feared that the popular misconception of
this singular and most instructive Scripture goes much
farther than this, and extends to questions much more
superficial than that of the temper or spirit it breathes.
If, for example, the average reader of the Bible were
asked, Who wrote this Scripture? when was it
written? to whom was it addressed? what is its
general scope and design? his answer, I suppose, would
be: "Solomon wrote this Book; of course, therefore,
it was written in his lifetime, and addressed to the
men over whom he ruled; and his design in writing
it was to reveal his own experience of life for their
instruction." And yet in all probability no one of
these answers is true, or anywhere near the truth.
According to the most competent judges, the Book
Ecclesiastes was not written by Solomon, nor for centuries
To scholars versed in the niceties of the Oriental
languages, the most convincing proof of the comparatively
modern date and authorship of the Book is to be
found in its words, and idioms, and style. The base
forms of Hebrew and the large intermixture of foreign
terms, phrases, and turns of speech which characterize
it—these, with the absence of the nobler rhythmic
forms of Hebrew poetry, are held to be a conclusive
demonstration that it was written during the Rabbinical
period, at a time long subsequent to the Augustan
age in which Solomon lived and wrote. The critics
and commentators whose names stand highest Rosenmüller, Ewald, Knobel, De Wette, Delitzsch, Ginsburg,
with many other competent judges, are agreed on this
point; and even those who in part differ from them differ only
in assigning the Book to a date still farther removed from the
time of Solomon. There are but few scholars who now contend
for the Solomonic authorship, and hardly any of these are, I
think, in the first rank.
But with all our deference for learning, we have so often seen the conclusions of the ripest scholars modified or reversed by their successors, and we all know "questions of words" to be capable of so many different interpretations, that probably we should still hold our judgment in suspense, were there no arguments against the traditional hypothesis such as plain men use and can understand. There are many such arguments, however, and arguments that seem to be of a conclusive force.
As, for instance, this: The whole social state
described in this Book is utterly unlike what we know
to have been the condition of the Hebrews during the
reign of Solomon, but exactly accords with the condition
of the captive Israelites, who, at the disruption of the
Hebrew monarchies, were carried away into Babylonia.
Nothing would be more difficult than to accept this
as a picture of the social and political features of the
Hebrew commonwealth during the reign of Solomon,
or even during those later years of his reign in which
his rule grew hard and despotic. Nothing can well be
more incredible than that this should be intended as
a picture of his reign, save that it should be a picture
drawn by his own hand! To suppose Solomon the
author of this Scripture is to suppose that the wisest
of kings and of men was base enough to pen a
deliberate and malignant libel on himself, his time, and
his realm! On the other hand, the description, dark
and lurid as it is, exactly accords with all we know of
the terrible condition of the Jews who wept in captivity
by the waters of Babylon under the later Persian rule,
or were ground under the heels of the Persian satraps
after their return to the land of their fathers. In all
probability, therefore, as our most competent authorities
are agreed, the Book is a poem rather than a
chronicle, written by an unknown Hebrew author, The fourth century B.C. is, I think, its most probable date.
In his recent exposition of Ecclesiastes, the Dean of Wells
attempts to bring the date down to about B.C. 240. But his
arguments are so curious and fanciful, and his conclusion is
based so largely on conjecture, and on dubious similarities of
phrase in the language of the Hebrew Preacher, and of some of
the later philosophers of Greece, that I suspect very little weight
will be attached to his gallant attempt to breathe new life into
the moribund hypothesis of the ingenious Mr. Tyler. Delitzsch,
for example, a high and recognized authority, declares that there
is "not a trace of Greek influence" in this Scripture, though
Dr. Plumptre finds so many. But though neither his hypothesis
nor his confessedly conjectural biography of the unknown author
carries the force of "sober criticism," there is much in his Commentary
which will be found very helpful.
Nor is this inference, drawn from the style and general contents of the Book, unsupported by verses in it which at first sight seem altogether opposed to such an inference. All the special and direct indications of authorship are to be found either in the first or in the last chapter.
The very first verse runs, "The words of the
Preacher, son of David, King in Jerusalem." Now,
David had only one son who was King in Jerusalem,
viz. Solomon; the verse, therefore, seems to fix the
authorship on Solomon beyond dispute. Nevertheless,
the conclusion is untenable. For (1) in his known Plumptre writes the word Koheleth, and Perowne Quoheleth.
Which of the three initial letters should be used is of little consequence,
and hence I retain the form in most common use.
Ecclesiastes is simply its Greek equivalent.
In the Epilogue (xii. 9-12) the Author of the Book
lifts the dramatic mask from his face, and permits us
to see who he really is; a mask, let me add, somewhat
carelessly worn, since we see nothing of it in the last
ten chapters of the Book. Although he has written in
a feigned name, and, without asserting it, has so
moulded his phrases, at least in the earlier chapters
of his work, as to suggest to his readers that he is, if
not Solomon himself, at least Solomon's mouthpiece,
attributing the garnered results of his experience to
one greater than himself, that they may carry the
more weight—just as Browning speaks in the name
of Rabbi Ben Ezra, for instance, or Fra Lippo Lippi, See the commentary on these verses for a fuller exposition
of his real claims and position.
So that all the phrases in the Book which are indicative
of its authorship confirm the inference drawn from its
style and its historical contents; viz. that it was not
written by Solomon, nor in his reign, but by an unknown
sage of a long-subsequent period, who, by a dramatic
impersonation of the characteristic experiences of the
son of David, or rather of his own experiences blended
with the Solomonic traditions and poured into their
But perhaps the most convincing argument in favour
of this conclusion is that, when once we think of it, we
cannot possibly accept the Solomon set before us in
Ecclesiastes as the Solomon depicted in the historical
books of Scripture. Solomon the son of David, with
all his wisdom, played the fool. The foremost man
and Hebrew of his time, he gave his heart to "strange
women," and to gods whose ritual was not only
idolatrous, but cruel, dark, impure. In his pursuit
of science, unless the whole East belie him, he ran
into secret magical arts, incantations, divinations, an
occult intercourse with the powers of ill. In all ways
he departed from the God who had enriched him with
the choicest gifts, and sank, through luxury, extravagance,
and excess, first into a premature old age, Solomon could not have been more than sixty years of age
when he died, yet it was not till he was "old" that his wives
"turned away his heart from the Lord his God" (
is the Solomon of history. But the Solomon of Ecclesiastes is a sage who represents himself as conducting a series of moral experiments for the good of mankind, in order that, with all the weight of manifold experience, he may teach men what is that good and right way which alone leads to peace. However hardly we may think of the Wise King who was guilty of so many follies, we can scarcely think of him as such a fool that he did not know his sins to be sins, or as such a knave that he deliberately endeavoured to palm them off on other ages, not as transgressions of the Divine Law, but as a series of delicate philosophic experiments which he was good enough to conduct for the benefit of the race.
On the whole, then, we conclude that in this Book
Solomon is taken as the Hebrew type of wisdom, the
wisdom which is based on large and varied experience;
and that this experience is here dramatized, in so far
as the writer could conceive it, for the instruction of
a race which from first to last, from the fable of
Jotham to the parables of our Lord, were accustomed
to receive instruction in fictitious and dramatic forms.
Its author was not Solomon, but one of "the wise"
whose name can no longer be recovered; it was written,
not in the time of Solomon, i.e. about 1000 B.C., but
some five or six centuries later: and it was addressed
not to the wealthy and peaceful citizens whose king held "It may be regarded as beyond doubt that it was written
under the Persian domination" (Delitzsch).
Doubtless many of the prevailing misapprehensions
of the meaning, authorship, and animating spirit of the
Book are due, in some measure, to the singular form
into which it is thrown. It belongs to what is known
as the Chokma, i.e. the Gnomic school, as opposed to
the Lyrical school of Hebrew poetry. The Jewish,
like Oriental literature in general, early assumed this
form, which seems to have a natural affinity with the
Eastern mind. Grave men, who made a study of life or
who devoted themselves to a life of study, were likely
to be sententious, to compress much thought into few
words, especially in the ages in which writing was a
somewhat rare accomplishment, or in which, as in the
Hebrew schools, instruction was given by a living
voice. No doubt they began with coining sage or
witty aphorisms, generally lit up with a happy metaphor,
each of which was complete in itself. Such sayings,
as memorable and portable, no less than as striking
for beauty and "matterful" for meditation, would
commend themselves to an age in which books were
This development has not as yet, I think, attracted
the attention it deserves; at least I have nowhere met
with any formal recognition of it. Yet, undoubtedly,
while at first the Hebrew sages were content to
compress much wit or wisdom into the small compass
of a gnome, which they polished like a gem, leaving
each to shine by its own lustre and to make its own
unaided impression, there rose in process of time men
who saw new and great capacities in this ancient
literary form, and set themselves to string their gems
together, to arrange their own or other men's proverbs
so aptly and artistically that they enhanced each other's
beauty, while at the same time they compelled them The nearest analogy in English literature to this triumphant
use of the proverb of which I can think is Pope's use of the
couplet—in every way a much lesser feat, however; while its
burlesque or caricature may be found in Tupper's Proverbial
Philosophy. In the Book of Proverbs, for instance, he would find, in
addition to the incomparable personification of Wisdom to which
I have already referred, many examples of the proverb proper,
many detached sayings whose underlying thought is illustrated
by a stroke of imagination; such as that (chap. xxv. 11) in which
the enhanced beauty of an appropriate word when spoken at the
opportune moment is compared with the golden fruit of the
orange when set in its frame of silver blooms (Expositions, vol.
iv.). He would also find some of those small picturesque
descriptions produced by an artistic sequence of proverbs—the
same theme being sometimes worked over by different artists, in
different ages, one and the same moral being enforced by
wholly different designs; as, for instance, where Solomon (chap.
vi. 6-11) enforces the duty of a forethoughtful industry by a
picture of the ant and her prudent ways; while an unknown sage
of a later date (chap. xxiv. 30-34) appends precisely the same
moral, expressed in the same words, to his graphic picture of
the Sluggard's garden (The Expositor, Second Series, vol. vi.).
Moreover, if he turn to chapter xxx. he will see how this form
of art, which once soared so high, was capable of sinking into a
kind of puerile conundrum—with its three too wonderful things,
and its four little things which yet are wise—while its moral tone
remained pure and high. And, finally, in the exposition of the
Epilogue to Ecclesiastes he will find how, after sinking so low,
it rose once more, in the hands of the later rabbis, into many
beautiful forms of fable, and exhortation, and parable.
It is to this school that the Preacher belongs, as he
himself informs us in the Epilogue to his fine Poem.
He set himself, he says, "to compose, to collect, and to
arrange many proverbs" (xii. 9), rejecting any that were
not "words of truth," preferring, as was natural in a
time so dark, such as were "words of comfort" (xii. 10),
and seeking his sayings both from the sages who stood
by the old ways and those who looked for the new
(xii. 11). And, of course, the arranging of his awkward
In fine, if I were to gather up into a few sentences
the impression which "much study" of this Scripture
has left on my mind as to the manner in which the
author worked upon it, I should say: that Coheleth, a
man of much of Solomon's original "largeness of heart"
and a great lover of wisdom, set himself to collect
the scattered sayings of the sages who were before
him. He took the traditional story of Solomon as the
ground and framework of his poem, at least at the
outset, though he seems to have soon laid it aside, and
endeavoured so to assort and arrange the proverbs he
had collected that each would lead up to the next; while
each group of them would describe some of the ways in
which men commonly pursued the chief good, ways in
most of which Solomon was at least reputed to have
travelled far. Finding gaps which could not be well
filled up from his large and various collection, he
bridged them over with proverbs of his own composing,
till he had got a sufficient account of each of the main
adventures of that Quest. And, then, he put adventure
In all this I have said nothing, it is true, of that
"inspiration of the Almighty" which alone gives man
understanding of spiritual things. But why should
not "He who worketh all," and has deigned to use
every form of literary art by which men teach their
fellows, move and inspire a lover of wisdom to collect
and arrange the sayings of the Wise, if by these he
could carry truth and comfort to those who were in sore
need of both? And where, save from heaven and from
Him who rules in heaven, could Coheleth have learned
the great secret—the secret of a retributive life beyond
the grave? Even the best and wisest of the Hebrews
saw that life only "as through a glass, darkly;" and
even their fitful and imperfect conception of it seems
always to have been—as in the case of David, Job,
Isaiah—an immediate gift from God, and a gift so large
that even their hands of faith could hardly grasp it.
No one need doubt the inspiration of a Scripture which
affirms, not only that God is always with us, passing
a present and effective judgment on all we do, but also
that, when this life is over, He will bring every deed
and every secret thing into judgment, whether it be
good or whether it be bad. That was not an everyday
thought with the Jewish mind. We find it only in
men who were moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the
As for the design of the Book, no one now doubts that
it sets before us the search for the summum bonum, the
quest of the Chief Good. Its main immediate intention
was to deliver the exiled Jews from the misleading
ethical theories and habits into which they had fallen,
from the sensualism and the scepticism occasioned by
their imperfect conception of the Divine ways, by showing
them that the true good of life is not to be secured by
philosophy, by the pursuit of pleasure, by devotion to
traffic or public affairs, by amassing wealth; but that it
results from a temperate and thankful enjoyment of the
gifts of the Divine bounty, and a cheerful endurance of
toil and calamity, combined with a sincere service
of God and a steadfast faith in that future life in which
all wrongs will be righted and all the problems which
now task and afflict us will receive a triumphant solution.
Availing himself of the historical and traditional records
of Solomon's life, he depicts, under that disguise, the
moral experiments which he has conducted; depicts
himself as having put the claims of wisdom, mirth,
business, wealth, to a searching test, and found them
incompetent to satisfy the cravings of the soul; as
attaining no rest nor peace until he had learned a simple
enjoyment of simple pleasures, a patient constancy under
The contents of the Poem are, or may be, distributed into a Prologue, Four Acts or Sections, and an Epilogue.
In the Prologue (chap. i., vv. 1-11), Coheleth states the Problem to be solved.
In the First Section (chap. i., ver. 12—chap. ii., ver. 26), he depicts the endeavour to solve it by seeking the Chief Good in Wisdom and in Pleasure.
In the Second Section (chap. iii., ver. 1—chap. v., ver. 20), the Quest is pursued in Traffic and Political Life.
In the Third Section (chap. vi., ver. 1—chap. viii., ver. 15), the Quest is carried into Wealth and the Golden Mean.
In the Fourth Section (chap. viii., ver. 16—chap. xii., ver. 7), the Quest is achieved, and the Chief Good found to consist in a tranquil and cheerful enjoyment of the present, combined with a cordial faith in the future, life.
And in the Epilogue (chap. xii., vv. 8-14) he summarises and emphatically repeats this solution of the Problem.
It was very natural that the Problem here discussed
should fill a large space in Hebrew thought and
Nor, indeed, is this problem without interest for us;
for we as persistently misinterpret the New Testament
as the Hebrews did the Old. We read that "whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap;" we read
that "the meek shall inherit the earth;" we read that
for every act of service done to Christ we shall receive
"a hundredfold now, in this present time;" and we are
very prompt with the gross, careless interpretation
which makes such passages mean that if we are good
we shall have the good things of this life, while its evil
things shall be reserved for the evil. Indeed, we are
trained—or, perhaps I should say, until recently we
were trained—in this interpretation from our earliest
years. Our very spelling-books are full of it, and are
framed on the model of "Johnny was a good boy, and
or we say with the Preacher,—
And it is well for us if, like the Hebrew poet, we can resist this cruel temptation, and hold fast the integrity of our faith; if we can rest in the assurance that, after all and when all is done, "the little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked;" that God has something better than wealth and lucky haps for the good, and merciful correctives of a more sovereign potency than penury and mishaps for the wicked. If we have this faith, our study of Ecclesiastes can hardly fail to deepen and confirm it; if we are not so happy as to have it, Coheleth will give us sound reasons for embracing it.
If we may now assume the Book Ecclesiastes to
have been written, not in the time of Solomon, but
during, or soon after, the Babylonian Captivity, our
next duty is to learn what we can of the social, political,
and religious conditions of the two races among whom
the Jews were thrown when they were carried away
from the land of their fathers. That they learned
much, as well as suffered much, while they sat by the
Happily, a brief sketch of it, such as is well within
any man's reach, will suffice to show how, from their
contact with the Babylonian and Persian races, the
Jews received literary and religious impulses which go
far to account for the marvellous changes which swept
over them, and enable us to read the Preacher intelligently,
and see how his social and political For this sketch I am largely indebted to Rawlinson's Five
Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, and his commentary
on Herodotus.
About a hundred and twenty years after the destruction
of the kingdom of Israel by Shalmaneser, King of
Assyria (B.C. 719), the kingdom of Judah fell before
Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon (B.C. 598-596).
The city, palace, and temple of Jerusalem were levelled
in a common ruin; the nobles, priests, merchants, and
skilled artisans, all the pith and manhood of Judah,
were carried away captive; only a few of the most
abject of the people were left to mourn and starve
amid the ravaged fields. Nothing could present a more
striking contrast to their native land than the region
to which the Jews were deported. Instead of a small
picturesque mountain-country, with its little cities set
on hills or on the brink of precipitous ravines, they
entered on a vast plain, fertile beyond all precedent
indeed, and abounding in streams, but with nothing
to break the monotony of level flats save the high
walls and lofty towers of one enormous city. For
Babylonia proper was simply an immense plain, lying
between the Arabian Desert and the Tigris, and of an
extent somewhat under that of Ireland. But though
In this country and city (for "Babylon" stands for
both in the Bible), so unlike the sunny cliffs and
scattered villages of their native home, the Jews, who,
like all hill-races, cherished a passionate affection for
the land of their fathers, spent many bitter years.
On the broad featureless plain they pined for "the
mountains" of Judea (
But who were the people, and what were the social and political conditions of the people, among whom the Hebrew captives lived? The two leading races with whom they were brought in contact were the Babylonians—an offshoot from the ancient Chaldean stock—and the Persians. The history of the Captivity divides itself into two main periods, therefore, the Persian and the Babylonian, at each of which we must glance.
Instead of Nebuchadnezzar Jeremiah and Ezekiel use the
form Nebuchadrezzar, which is nearer to the original Nabu-Kuduri-utzur,
i.e. "Nebo is the protector against misfortune."
And, indeed, the people of Babylon were much more There is a curious allusion to these enamelled bricks, and
the admiration the Jews conceived for them, in
But a larger, and probably the largest, class of the people must have busied themselves with the toils of agriculture; the broad Chaldean plain being famous, from the time of the Patriarchs to the present day, for an amazing and almost incredible fertility. Wheat, barley, millet, and sesame, all flourished with astonishing luxuriance, the ground commonly yielding a hundredfold, two hundredfold, and even ampler rewards for the toil of the husbandman.
With these abundant sources of wealth at their
command, the people naturally grew luxurious and
dissolute. "The daughter of the Chaldeans," says
Isaiah (xlvii. 1-8), "is tender and delicate," given to
pleasures, apt to live carelessly; her young men, says
Ezekiel (xxiii. 15), are dandies, "exceeding in dyed attire,"
painting their faces, and wearing earrings. Chastity,
in our modern sense of the term, was unknown. See Herodotus, book i., chap. 199; Strabo, xvi., p. 1058; and
the Book of Baruch, vi. 43.
Of the horrible licence and cruelty of the worship
of Bel, Merodach, and Nebo, which did much to foster
the fierce and cruel temper of the people, it is not
necessary, it is hardly possible, to speak. Roughly
taken, it was the service of the great forces of Nature
by a wanton indulgence of the worst passions of man.
It is enough to know that in Babylon idolatry took
forms which made all forms of idolatry henceforth
intolerable to the Jews; that now, once for all, they
renounced that worship of strange gods to which they
and their fathers had always hitherto been prone.
This of itself was an immense advance, a great gain.
Nor was it their only gain; for if by contact with the
idolatrous Babylonians the Jews were driven back on
their own Law and Scripture, their intercourse with
a people of so active an intellect and a learning so deep
Nor is it less obvious that in the social and political conditions of the Babylonians we have a key to many of the allusions to public life contained in Ecclesiastes. The great empire, indeed, presents precisely those elements which, in degenerate times and under feebler despots, must inevitably develop into the disorder, and misery, and crime which Coheleth depicts.
2. The Persian Period.—The conquest of Babylon
by the Persians, led by the heroic Cyrus, is, thanks to
Daniel, one of the most familiar incidents of ancient
history, so familiar that I need not recount it. By
this conquest Cyrus—"the Shepherd, the Messiah, of
the Lord," as Isaiah (xliv. 28; xlv. 1) terms him—became
the undisputed master of well-nigh the whole
known world of the time. Nor does he seem to have
been unworthy of his extraordinary position. Of all
ancient Oriental monarchs, out of the Hebrew pale, he
bears the highest repute. Even the Greek authors,
for the most part, represent him as energetic and
patient, magnanimous and modest, and of a religious
mind. Æschylus calls him "kindly" or "generous."
Xenophon selected him as a model prince for all races.
Plutarch says that "in wisdom, and virtue, and greatness
of soul he appears to have been in advance of all
Cyrus was sixty years of age when he took Babylon
(B.C. 539), and died ten years after his conquest. He
was succeeded by men utterly unlike himself, so unlike
that the Persian nobles revolted from them, and placed
Darius Hystaspes, the heir of an ancient dynasty, on
the throne. As Cyrus was the soldier of the Persians,
so Darius was their statesman. He it was who founded
the "satrapial" form of administration; i.e. instead of
governing the various provinces of his empire through
But we must turn from the despots and their adventures to form some slight acquaintance with the people, the Persian people who, by the conquest of Cyrus, became the ruling class in the empire, always remembering, however, that the Babylonians must have remained by myriads both in the capital and in the provinces, and would continue to exert their influence on Hebrew thought and activity.
In all moral and religious qualities the Persians were
far in advance of the Chaldeans, though they were
probably behind them in many civilized arts and crafts.
They were famous for their truthfulness and valour.
The Greeks Herodotus, ix. 62. Æschyl., Pers., 94.
Despising trade and commerce as menial and degrading,
the ruling caste of a vast empire, with a monopoly
of office and boundless means of wealth at their command,
accustomed to lord it over subject races, of a
high spirit and a faith comparatively pure, their very
prosperity was their ruin, as it has been that of many
a great nation. In their earlier times, they were noted
for their sobriety and temperance. Content with simple
diet, their only drink was water from the pure mountain
streams; their garb was plain, their habits homely and
hardy. But their temperance soon gave place to an
immoderate luxury. "There is no nation which so readily adopts foreign customs
as the Persians.... As soon as they hear of any luxury they
instantly make it their own.... Each of them has several
wives, and a still larger number of concubines."—(Herodotus
book i., chap. 135).
With the growth of luxury on the part of the nobles
and the people, the fear of the despot, at whose mercy
all their acquisitions stood, grew more intense, more
harassing, more degrading. Xerxes and his successors
were utterly reckless in their exercise of the absolute
power conceded to them, and delegated it to favourites
as reckless as themselves. No noble however eminent,
no servant of the State however faithful or distinguished,
could be sure that he might not at any moment incur a
displeasure which would strip him of all he possessed,
even if it did not also condemn him to a cruel and
lingering death. Out of mere sport and wantonness, to
relieve the tedium of a weary hour, the despot might
slay him with his own hand. For the crime, or assumed
crime, of one person a whole family, or class, or race
might be cut off unheard. Of the lengths to which this
cruelty and caprice might go we have a sufficient
example in the Book of Esther. The Ahasuerus of
that singular narrative was, there can hardly be any
doubt, the Xerxes of secular history—the very names,
unlike as they sound, are the same name differently
pronounced by two different races. Their common root is the Sanscrit Kshatra, a king; in the
Persepolitan inscriptions this word appears as Ksérshé, and
from this both the Hebrew Achashuerash (Ahasuerus) and the
Greek Xerxes would easily be formed.
The Book Ecclesiastes was written certainly not
before the reign of Xerxes (B.C. 486-465), and probably
many years after it, a period in which, bad as
were the conditions of his time, the times grew ever
"The political condition of the people which this Book
presupposes is that in which they are placed under satraps"
(Delitzsch). It would be possible to collect from the Psalms of this date
materials for a description of the wrongs and miseries inflicted
on the Jews, and of their keen sense of them, quite as graphic
and intense as that of the Preacher. Here are a few phrases
hastily culled from them. The oppressors of Israel are described
as being "clothed with cruelty as with a garment," as
"returning evil for good, and hatred for good-will."
Most of the "imprecatory" Psalms belong to this period; and
the terrible wrongs of the Captivity, though they may not justify,
in large measure explain and excuse, that desire for vengeance
which has given so much offence to some of our modern critics.
If even Shakespeare, Sonnets, LXVI.
if, "tired with all these," he cried for "restful death," we can hardly wonder that the Preacher, who had fallen on times so evil that, compared with his, Shakespeare's were good, should prefer death to life.
But there is another side to this sad story of the
Captivity, another and a nobler side. If the Jews
suffered much from Persian misrule, they learned much
and gained much from the Persian faith. In its earlier
form the religious creed whose documents Zoroaster
In its inception the Persian creed and practice were
a revolt against the sensuous and sensual worship of
the great forces of Nature into which most Eastern
religions, often pure enough, in their primitive forms,
had degenerated, and, in especial, from the base forms
into which the Hindus had degraded that primitive faith
which is still to be recovered from the Rig-Veda. It
acknowledged persons, real spiritual intelligences, in
place of mere natural powers; and it drew moral distinctions
between them, dividing these ruling intelligences
into good and bad, pure and impure, benignant and
malevolent,—an immense advance on the mere admiration
of whatever was strong. Nay, in some sense, the
Persian faith affirmed monotheism against polytheism;
for it asserted that one Great Intelligence ruled over
all other intelligences, and through them over the
universe. This Supreme Intelligence, which the Persians
To win the favour of the God of heaven it was
requisite to cultivate the virtues of purity, truthfulness,
industry, and a pious sense of the Divine presence;
and these virtues must spring from the heart, and
cover thought as well as word and deed. His worship
consisted in the frequent offering of prayer, praise,
and thanksgiving; in the reiteration of certain sacred
hymns; in the occasional sacrifice of animals which,
after being presented before Ormazd, furnished forth Haug's Essays, pp. 162-3, quoted by Rawlinson.
In this course of well-doing the faithful were animated
and confirmed by a devout belief in the immortality
of the soul and a conscious future existence. They
were taught that at death the souls of men, both good
and bad, travelled along an appointed path to a narrow
bridge which led to Paradise; over this bridge only
pious souls could pass, the wicked falling from it into
an awful gulf in which they received the due reward of This helpful angel is by no means peculiar to the Persian
faith. All the imaginative races of antiquity conceived of a
being more divine than man, though originally not equal to the
gods, who guided the departed soul on its lonely journey through
the dark interspaces of death. Theut conducted the released
spirit of the Egyptian to the judgment-seat. Hermes performed
the same kind office for the Greeks, Mercury for the Romans.
Yama was the nekropompos of the Hindus, and the Persians
retained the legend. The Rig-Veda represents him as the first
man who passed through death to immortality, and as therefore
the best guide of other men. Nor is it doubted that the Persians
derived their belief in a future life from the primitive Hindu
creed. If their faith was, as I have said, a revolt from the degenerate
forms of Hindu worship, it was also a return to its more
ancient forms, as religious reformations are apt to be. The fathers
of the Aryan stock had an unwavering assurance of a future life.
In his Essay on the Funeral Rites of the Brahmans, Max Müller
cites a sort of liturgy with which the ancient Hindu used to bid farewell
to his deceased friend while the body lay on the funeral pyre,
which is, surely, very noble and pathetic: "Depart thou, depart
thou by the ancient paths, to the place whither our fathers have
departed. Meet with the ancient ones (the Pitrs); meet with
the Lord of Death; obtain thy desires in heaven. Throw off
thine imperfections; go to thy home. Become united with a
body; clothe thyself in a shining form. Go ye; depart ye;
hasten ye from hence" (Rig-Veda x. 14).
To which, as choral responses, might be added, "Let him
depart to those for whom flow the rivers of nectar. Let him
depart to those who through meditation have obtained the
victory, who by fixing their thoughts on the unseen have gone
to heaven.... Let him depart to the mighty in battle, to the
heroes who have laid down their lives for others, to those who
have bestowed their goods on the poor" (Rig-Veda x. 154).
As the body was consumed on the pyre the friends of the
dead chanted a hymn in which, after having bidden his body
return to the various elements from which it sprang, they prayed,
"As for his unborn part, do Thou, Lord (Agni), quicken it with
Thy heat; let Thy flame and Thy brightness kindle it: convey it
to the world of the righteous."
It was from this pure and lofty source that the Persians drew
their faith in the better life to be.
Max Müller also quotes as the prayer of a dying Hindu woman,
"Place me, O Pure One, in that everlasting and unchanging
world where light and glory are found. Make me immortal in
the world in which joys, delights, and happiness abide, where
the desires are obtained" (Atharda Veda xii. 3, 17).
Cremation itself bore witness to the Hindu faith in immortality,
since they held that "the fire which set free the spiritual element
from the superincumbent clay, completed the third or heavenly
birth," the second birth having been achieved when men set
themselves to a faithful discharge of their religious duties.
This wonderfully pure creed was, however, in process
of time, corrupted in many ways. First of all, "the sad
antithesis of human life," the conflict between light and
darkness, good and evil—the standing puzzle of the
world—led the votaries of Ormazd to dualism. Ormazd
loved and created only the good. The evil in man, and
in the world, must be the work of an enemy. This
Another corrupting influence had its origin in a too
literal interpretation of the names given to the Divine
Being, or the qualities ascribed to Him, by the founders
of the faith. Ormazd, for example, had been described
as "true, lucid, shining, the originator of all the best
things, of the spirit in nature and of the growth in
nature, of the luminaries and of the self-shining brightness
which is in the luminaries." From these epithets and
ascriptions there sprang in later days the worship of
the sun, then of fire, as a type of God—a worship still
maintained by the disciples of Zoroaster, the Ghebers
and the Parsees. And from this point onward the old
sad story repeats itself; once more we have to trace
a pure and lofty primitive faith along the grades through
which it declines to the low, base level of a sensuous
idolatry. The Magians, always the bitter enemies of
Zoroastrianism, held that the four elements—fire, air,
Nevertheless, we must remember that, even at their
worst, the Persians preserved the sacred records of
their earlier faith, and that their best men steadily
refused to accept the base additions to it which the
Magians proposed. Corrupt as in many respects many
of them became, the conquest of Babylon was the
death-blow to the sensual idol-worship which had
reigned for twenty centuries on the Chaldean plain; it
never wholly recovered from it, though it survived
it for a time. From that date it declined to its
fall: "Bel bowed down; Nebo stooped; Merodach
was broken in pieces" (
Now this, as we shall see, is the very moral of the Book Ecclesiastes, the triumphant climax to which it mounts. The endeavour of Coheleth is to show how evil and good were blended in the human lot, evil so largely preponderating in the lot of many of the good as to make life a curse unless it were sustained by hope; to give hope by assuring the Hebrew captives that "God takes cognizance of all things," and "will bring every work to judgment," good or bad; and to urge on them, as the conclusion of his Quest, and as the whole duty of man, to prepare for that supreme audit by fearing God and keeping his commandments. This was the light he was commissioned to carry into their great darkness; and if the lamp and the oil were of God, it is hardly too much to say that the spark which kindled the lamp was taken from the Persian fire, since that too was of God. Or, to vary the figure, and make it more accurate, we may say that the truths of the future life lay hidden in the Hebrew Scriptures, and that it was by the light of the Persian doctrine of the future that the Jews, stimulated by the mental culture and activity acquired in Babylon, discovered them in the Word.
Chap. I., vv. 1-11.
1 The words of the Preacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem. Just as we speak of this "sublunary world," so "under the
sun" is the characteristic designation of the earth throughout
this Book.
2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher;
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,
3 Since man hath no profit from all his labour
Which he laboureth under the sun!
4 One generation passeth, and another generation cometh;
While the earth abideth for ever.
5 The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down;
And panteth toward the place at which it will rise again.
6 The wind goeth toward the south, and veereth to the north;
And the wind returneth on its course.
7 All the streams run into the sea, yet the sea is not full;
To the place whence the streams came, thither they return again.
8 All things are weary with toil. Man cannot utter it.
The eye can never be satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear with hearing.
9 What hath been will be,
And that which is done is that which will be done;
And there is no new thing under the sun.
10 If there be anything of which it is said, "Behold, this is new!"
It hath been long ago, in the ages that were before us.
11 There is no remembrance of those who have been;
Nor will there be any remembrance of men who are to come
Among those that will live after them.
Chap. I., v. 12, to Chap. II., v. 26.
12 I, the Preacher, was King over Israel, in Jerusalem:
13 And I applied my heart to survey and search by wisdom
Into all that is done under heaven:
This sore task hath God given to the children of men,
To exercise themselves therewith.
Ver. 13. To survey and search into, etc. The verbs indicate the broad extent which his researches covered, and the depth to which they penetrated.
14 I have considered all the works that are done under the sun,
Ver. 14. Vexation of spirit. Literally, "striving after the wind." But the time-honoured phrase, "vexation of spirit," sufficiently expresses the writer's meaning; and it seems better to retain it than, with the Revised Version, to introduce the Hebrew metaphor, which has a somewhat novel and foreign sound.
15 That which is crooked cannot be set straight,
And that which is lacking cannot be made up.
16 Therefore I spake to my heart, saying,
Lo, I have acquired greater wisdom
Than all who were before me in Jerusalem,
My heart having seen much wisdom and knowledge;
17 For I had given my heart to find knowledge and wisdom.
I perceive that even this is vexation of spirit;
Ver. 17. To find knowledge and wisdom. Both the Authorized and Revised Versions render "to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly." The latter clause, however, violates both the sense and the grammatical construction. The word translated "to know" is not an infinitive, but a noun, and should be rendered "knowledge;" the word translated "folly" means "prudence," and the word translated "madness" hardly means more than "folly." The text, too, seems corrupt. The sense of the passage is against it, I think, as it now stands; for the design of the Preacher is simply to show the insufficiency of wisdom and knowledge, not to prove folly foolish. On the whole, therefore, it seems better to follow the high authority which arranges the text as it is here rendered. The Hebraist will find the question fully discussed in Ginsburg.
18 For in much wisdom is much sadness,
And to multiply knowledge is to multiply sorrow.
1 Then I said to my heart,
Go to, now let me prove thee with mirth,
And thou shalt see pleasure:
And, lo, this too is vanity!
And to pleasure, What canst thou do?
3 I thought in my heart to cheer my body with pleasure,
While my spirit guided it wisely,
And to lay hold on folly,
Till I should see what it is good for the sons of men to do under heaven,
Through the brief day of their life.
4 I gave myself to great works;
I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards;
5 I made me gardens and parks,
And I planted in them all manner of fruit-trees;
6 I made me tanks of water,
From which to water the groves:
7 I bought me men-servants and maid-servants,
And had servants born in my house.
I had also many herds of oxen and sheep,
More than all who were before me in Jerusalem:
8 I heaped up silver and gold,
And the treasures of kings and of kingdoms:
And took delight in many fair concubines:
9 So that I surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem,
My wisdom abiding with me;
10 And nothing that my eyes desired did I withhold from them,
I did not keep back my heart from any pleasure;
For my heart took joy in all my toil,
And this was my portion therefrom.
11 But when I turned to look on all the works which my hands had wrought,
And at the labour which it cost me to accomplish them,
Behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit,
And there was no profit under the sun.
12 Then I turned to compare wisdom with madness and folly—
And what can he do that cometh after the king
Whom they made king long ago?—
13 And I saw that wisdom excelleth folly
As far as light excelleth darkness:
14 The wise man's eyes are in his head,
While the fool walketh blindly.
15 Therefore I spake with my heart:
"A fate like that of the fool will befall me, even me;
To what end, then, am I wiser?"
And I said to my heart:
"This too is vanity,
16 For there is no more remembrance of the wise man than of the fool;
For both will be forgotten,
As in time past so also in days to come:
And, alas, the wise man dieth even as the fool!"
17 So life became hateful to me, for a sore burden was upon me,
Even the labour which I wrought under the sun;
Since all is vanity and vexation of spirit:
18 Yea, I hated all the gain which I had gained under the sun,
Because I must leave it to the man who shall come after me,
19 And who can tell whether he will be a wise man or a fool?
Yet shall he have power over all my gain
Which I have wisely gained under the sun:
This too is vanity.
20 Then I turned and gave my heart up to despair
21 For here is a man who hath laboured wisely, and prudently, and dexterously,
And he must leave it as a portion to one who hath not laboured therein:
This also is vanity and a great evil;
22 For man hath nothing of all his heavy labour,
And the vexation of his heart under the sun,
23 Since his task grieveth and vexeth him all his days,
And even at night his heart hath no rest:
This too is vanity.
24 There is nothing better for a man than to eat and to drink,
And to let his soul take pleasure in his labour.
But even this, I saw, cometh from God;
25 For who can eat,
And who enjoy himself, apart from Him?
26 For to the man who is good before Him,
He giveth wisdom and knowledge and joy;
But to the sinner He giveth the task to gather and to heap up,
That he may leave it to him who is good before God:
This also is vanity and vexation of spirit.
Chap. III., v. 1, to Chap. V., v. 20.
1 There is a time for all things,
And a season for every undertaking under heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up plants;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast stones, and a time to gather up stones;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to be silent, and a time to speak;
A time for war, and a time for peace:
9 He who laboureth hath therefore no profit from his labours.
10 I have considered the task which God hath given to the sons of men,
To exercise themselves withal:
11 He hath made everything beautiful in its season;
He hath also put eternity into their heart;
Only they understand not the work of God from beginning to end.
12 I found that there was no good for them but to rejoice,
And to do themselves good all their life;
13 But also that, if a man eat and drink,
And take pleasure in all his labour,
It is a gift of God.
14 I found too that whatever God hath ordained continueth for ever;
Nothing can be added to it,
And nothing taken from it:
And God hath so ordered it that men may fear before Him.
15 That which is hath been,
And that which is to be was long ago;
For God recalleth the past.
16 Moreover, I saw under the sun
That there was iniquity in the place of justice,
And in the place of equity there was iniquity.
17 I said to mine heart:
"God will judge the righteous and the wicked,
For there is a time for everything and for every deed with Him."
18 Yet I said to my heart of the children of men:
"God hath sifted them,
To show that they, even they, are but as beasts.
19 For a mere chance is man, and the beast a mere chance,
And they are both subject to the same chance;
As is the death of the one, so is the death of the other;
And both have the same spirit:
And the man hath no advantage over the beast,
For both are vanity:
20 Both go to the same place;
Both sprang from dust, and both turn into dust:
21 And who knoweth whether the spirit of man goeth upward,
Ver. 21. The question is here, as so often in Hebrew, the strongest form of negative. As in ver. 19 the Preacher affirms of man and beast that "both have the same spirit," and, in ver. 20, that "both go to the same place," so, in this verse, he emphatically denies that there is any difference in their destination at death.
22 Wherefore I saw that there is nothing better for man
Than to rejoice in his labours;
For this is his portion:
And who shall give him to see what will be after him?
1 Then I turned to consider once more
All the oppressions that are done under the sun:
I beheld the tears of the oppressed,
And they had no comforter;
And their oppressors were violent,
Yet had they no comforter:
2 And I accounted the dead who died long ago
Happier than the living who are still alive;
3 While happier than either is he who hath not been born,
Who hath not seen the evil which is done under the sun.
4 Then too I saw that all this toil,
And all this dexterity in toil,
Spring from man's rivalry with his neighbour:
This also is vanity and vexation of spirit.
5 The sluggard foldeth his hands,
Yet he eateth his meat:
6 Better a handful of quiet
Than two handsful of labour with vexation of spirit.
7 And again I turned, and saw a vanity under the sun:
8 Here is a man who hath no one with him,
Not even a son or a brother;
And yet there is no end of all his labour,
Neither are his eyes satisfied with riches:
For whom, then, doth he labour and deny his soul any of his wealth?
This too is vanity and an evil work.
9 Two are better than one,
Because they have a good reward for their labour:
10 For if one fall, the other will lift up his fellow;
But woe to the lonely one who falleth
And hath no fellow to lift him up!
But he that is alone, how can he be warm?
12 And if an enemy assail the one, two will withstand him.
And a threefold cord is not easily broken.
13 Happier is a poor and wise youth
Than an old and foolish king
Who even yet has not learned to take warning;
14 For he goeth forth from the prison to the throne,
Although he was born a poor man in the kingdom.
15 I see all the living who walk under the sun
Flocking to the youth who stood up in his stead;
16 There is no end to the multitude of the people over whom he ruleth:
Nevertheless those who live after him will not rejoice in him;
For even this is vanity and vexation of spirit.
1 Keep thy foot when thou goest to the House of God;
For it is better to obey than to offer the sacrifice of fools,
Who know not when they do evil.
2 Do not hurry on thy mouth,
And do not force thy heart to utter words before God;
Therefore let thy words be few.
3 For as a dream cometh through much occupation,
So foolish talk through many words.
4 When thou vowest a vow unto God,
Defer not to pay it;
For he is a fool whose will is not steadfast.
Pay that which thou hast vowed.
5 Better that thou shouldest not vow
Than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.
6 Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin,
And say not before the Angel, "It was an error:"
For why should God be angry at thine idle talk
And destroy the work of thy hands?
Ver. 6. Before the Angel. That is, before the Angel who, as the Hebrews thought, presided over the altar of worship, and who was present even when only two or three met for the study of the Law: to study the Law being in itself an act of worship.
7 For in many words, as in many dreams, there is vanity:
But fear thou God.
8 If thou seest the oppression of the poor,
And the perversion of justice in the State,
For superior watcheth superior,
And superiors again watch over them:
9 And the advantage for the people is, that it extendeth to all,
For even the king is servant to the field.
Ver. 9. Some commentators prefer another possible reading of this difficult verse: But the profit of a land is every way a king devoted to the field, i.e. a lover and promoter of good husbandry. This reading, however, does not, I think, harmonise so well with the context as that given above.
10 He that loveth silver is never satisfied with silver,
Nor he that clingeth to riches with what they yield:
This too is vanity;
11 For when riches increase they increase that consume them:
What advantage then hath the owner thereof,
Save the looking thereupon with his eyes?
12 Sweet is the sleep of the husbandman,
Whether he eat little or much;
While abundance suffereth not the rich to sleep.
13 There is a great evil which I have seen under the sun—
Riches hoarded up by the rich
To the hurt of the owner thereof:
14 For the riches perish in some unlucky adventure,
15 As he cometh forth from the womb of his mother,
Even as he cometh naked,
So also he returneth again,
And taketh nothing from his labour
Which he may carry away in his hand.
16 This also is a great evil,
That just as he came so he must go.
For what profit hath he who laboureth for the wind?
17 Yet all his days he eateth in darkness,
And is much perturbed, and hath vexation and grief.
18 Behold, that which I have said holds good,—
That it is well for man to eat and to drink
And to enjoy the good of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the sun,
Through the brief day of his life which God hath given him:
For this is his portion.
19 And I have also said,
That a man to whom God hath given riches and wealth,
If He hath also enabled him to eat thereof,
This is a gift of God:
20 He doth not fret because the days of his life are not many,
For God hath sanctioned the joy of his heart.
Chaps. VI., ver. 1, to VIII., ver. 15.
1 There is another evil which I have seen under the sun,
And it weigheth heavily upon men:
2 Here is a man to whom God hath given riches and wealth and abundance,
So that his soul lacketh nothing of all that it desireth;
And God hath not given him the power to enjoy it,
But a stranger enjoyeth it:
This is vanity and a great evil.
3 Though one beget a hundred children,
And live many years,
Yea, however many the days of his years,
Yet if his soul be not satisfied with good,
Even though the grave did not wait for him,
Better is an abortion than he:
And its memory is shrouded in darkness;
5 It doth not even see and know the sun:
It hath more rest than he.
6 And if he live twice a thousand years and see no good:—
Do not both go to the same place?
7 All the labour of this man is for his mouth;
Therefore his soul cannot be satisfied:
8 For what advantage hath the wise man over the fool,
Or what the poor man over the stately magnate?
Ver. 8. The magnate. Literally, "he who knoweth to walk before the living;" some "great person," some man of eminent station, who is much in the eye of the public.
9 It is better, indeed, to enjoy the good we have
Than to crave a good beyond our reach:
Yet even this is vanity and vexation of spirit.
Ver. 9. To enjoy the good we have, etc. Literally, "Better is that which is seen by the eyes (the present good) than that which is pursued by the soul (the distant and uncertain good)."
10 That which hath been was long since ordained;
And it is very certain that even the greatest is but a man,
And cannot contend with Him who is mightier than he.
11 Moreover there are many things which increase vanity:
What advantage then hath man?
12 And who knoweth what is good for man in life,
The brief day of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow?
And who can tell what shall be after him under the sun?
1 A good name is better than good nard,
And the day of death better than the day of one's birth:
2 It is better to go to the house of mourning
Than to the house of feasting,
Because this is the end of every man,
And the living should lay it to heart:
Ver. 2. "Because this is the end;" i.e. the death bewailed in the house of mourning.
3 Better is serious thought than wanton mirth,
For by a sad countenance the heart is bettered:
4 The heart of the wise therefore is in the house of mourning,
But in the house of mirth is the heart of fools.
Than to listen to the song of fools;
6 For the laughter of fools is like the crackling of thorns under a pot:
This also is vanity.
Ver. 6. The laughter of fools, etc. There is a play on words in the original which cannot be reproduced in English. Dean Plumptre, following the lead of Delitzsch, proposes as the nearest equivalents, "As crackling nettles under kettles," or "As crackling stubble makes the pot bubble."
7 Wrong-doing maketh the wise man mad,
As a bribe corrupteth the heart.
8 The end of a reproof is better than its beginning,
And patience is better than pride;
9 Therefore hurry not on thy spirit to be angry:
For anger is nursed in the bosom of fools.
10 Say not, "How is it that former days were better than these?"
For that is not the part of wisdom.
11 Wisdom is as good as wealth,
And hath an advantage over it for those who lead an active life:
Ver. 11. Those who lead an active life. Literally, "those who see the sun," i.e. those who are much in the sun, who lead a busy active life, are much occupied with traffic or public affairs.
And wealth is a shelter;
But the advantage of wisdom is
That it fortifieth the heart of them that have it.
Ver. 12. Fortifieth the heart; i.e. quickens life, a new life, a life which keeps the heart tranquil and serene under all chances and changes.
13 Consider moreover the work of God,
Since no man can straighten that which He hath made crooked.
14 In the day of prosperity be thou content;
And in the day of adversity
Consider that God hath made this as well as that,
In order that man should not be able to foresee that which is to come.
Ver. 14.: In the day of prosperity, etc. Literally, "in the day of good be in good." It may be rendered "in the good day be of good cheer." This as well as that; i.e. adversity as well as prosperity. God sends both in order that, not foreseeing what will come to pass, we may live in a constant and humble dependence on Him.
15 In my fleeting days I have seen
Both the righteous die in his righteousness,
And the wicked live long in his wickedness:
16 Be not too righteous therefore,
Nor make thyself too wise lest thou be abandoned;
17 Be not very wicked, nor yet very foolish,
18 It is better that thou shouldest lay hold of this
And also not let go of that;
For whoso feareth God will take hold on both.
Ver. 18. This ... and that. This refers to the folly and wickedness of ver. 17, and that to the wisdom and righteousness of ver. 16. Take hold on both. Literally, "go along with both."
19 This wisdom alone is greater strength to the wise
Than an army to a beleaguered city;
Ver. 19. This wisdom: viz. the moderate common-sense view of life which has just been described. Than an army, etc. Literally, "Than ten (i.e. many) mighty men in a city."
20 For there is not a righteous man on earth
Who doeth good and sinneth not.
21 Moreover seek not to know all that is said of thee,
Lest thou hear thy servant speak evil of thee;
Ver. 21. Seek not to know, etc. Literally, "Give not thy heart (even if thy ears) to all words that are uttered."
22 For thou knowest in thine heart
That thou also hast many times spoken evil of others.
23 All this wisdom have I tried;
I desired a higher wisdom, but it was far from me;
24 That which was far off remaineth far off,
And deep remaineth deep:
Who can find it out?
25 Then I and my heart turned to know this wisdom
And diligently examine it—
To discover the cause of wickedness, vice,
And that folly which is madness:
26 And I found woman more bitter than death;
She is a net;
Her heart is a snare, and her hands are chains:
Whoso is good before God shall escape her,
But the sinner shall be taken by her.
27 Behold, what I have found, saith the Preacher—
Taking things one by one to reach the result—
28 I have found one man among a thousand,
But in all that number a woman have I not found:
29 Lo, this only have I found,
That God made man upright,
But that they seek out many devices.
1 Who is like the wise man?
And who like him that understandeth the interpretation of this saying?
The wisdom of this man maketh his face bright,
And his rude features are refined.
Ver. 1. This saying: i.e. that which follows. And his rude features, etc. Culture lends an air of refinement to the face, carriage, manners.
And the rather because of the oath of fealty:
8?
Ver. 2. The oath of fealty. Literally, "the oath by God." The Babylonian and Persian despots exacted an oath of loyalty from conquered races. Each had to swear by the god he worshipped.
3 Do not throw off thine allegiance,
Nor resent an evil word,
For he can do whatsoever he please;
Ver. 3. Do not throw off, etc. Literally, "Do not hurry from his presence, or even stand up because of an evil word." To stand up in the divan of an Eastern despot is a sign of resentment; to rush from it a sign of disloyalty and rebellion.
4 For the word of a king is mighty;
And who shall say to him, "What doest thou?"
5 Whoso keepeth his commandment will know no evil.
Moreover the heart of the wise man foreseeth a time of retribution—
6 For there is a time of retribution for all things—
When the tyranny of man is heavy upon him:
7 Because he knoweth not what will be,
And because no one can tell him when it will be.
Ver. 7. Because he knoweth not; i.e. the tyrant does not know. The sense seems to be: Retribution is all the more certain because, in his infatuation, the despot does not foresee the disastrous results of his tyranny, and because no one can tell him when or how they will disclose themselves.
8 No man is ruler over his own spirit,
To retain the spirit,
And there is no furlough in this war,
And no craft will save the wicked.
9 All this have I seen,
Having applied my heart to all that is done under the sun.
Ver. 9.: All this have I seen; i.e. all this retribution on tyrants and the consequent deliverance of the oppressed.
10 But there is a time when a man ruleth over men to their hurt.
Thus I have seen wicked men buried,
And come again;
And those who did right depart from the place of the holy,
And be forgotten in the city:
This also is vanity.
Ver. 10.: But the Preacher has also seen times when retributive justice did not overtake the oppressors, when they came again in the persons of children as wicked and tyrannical as themselves.
11 Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed forthwith,
The heart of the sons of men is set in them to do evil.
Ver. 11.: Because sentence, etc. "God does not always pay on Saturdays," says an old Italian proverb.
12 Though a sinner do evil a hundred years,
And groweth old therein,
Who truly fear before Him;
13 And it shall not be well with the wicked,
But, like a shadow, he shall not prolong his days,
Because he doth not fear before God.
14 Nevertheless, this vanity doth happen on the earth,
That there are righteous men who have a wage like that of the wicked,
And there are wicked men who have a wage like that of the righteous:
This too, I said, is vanity.
15 And I commended mirth,
Because there is nothing better for man under the sun
Than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry;
For this will go with him to his work
Through the days of his life,
Which God giveth him under the sun.
Ver. 15.: "And this will go with him:" viz. this clear enjoying temper, than which, as yet, the Preacher has found "nothing better."
Chap. VIII., ver. 16, to Chap. XII., ver. 7.
16 As then I applied my heart to acquire wisdom,
And to see the work which is done under the sun—
And such a one seeth no sleep with his eyes by day or by night:
17 I saw that man cannot find out all the work of God
Which is done under the sun;
Though man labour to discover it,
He cannot find it out;
And though the wise may say he understandeth it
Ver. 17.: To illustrate this verse Dean Plumptre happily quotes Hooker's noble and familiar words: "Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to make mention of His name, yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him, and our safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach."
1 For all this have I taken to heart and explored,
That the righteous, and the wise, and their labours are in the hand of God:
They know not whether they shall meet love or hatred;
All lies before them.
All are treated alike;
Ver. 1.: They know not whether they shall meet love or hatred may mean that even the wisest cannot tell whether they shall meet (1) the love or the enmity of God, as shown in adverse or favourable providences; or (2) the things which they love or hate; or (3) the love or the hatred of their fellows. The last of the three seems the most likely.
All lies before them; i.e. all possible chances, changes, events. Only God can determine or foresee what is coming to meet them.
2 The same fate befalleth to the righteous and to the wicked,
To the good and pure and to the impure,
To him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not;
As with the good so is it with the sinner,
With him that sweareth as with him who feareth an oath.
3 This is the greatest evil of all that is done under the sun,
And that, although the heart of the sons of men is full of evil,
And madness is in their hearts through life,
Yet, after it, they go to the dead;
Ver. 3.: The words of this verse do not, as they stand, seem to carry on the logical sequence of thought. The Preacher's complaint is that even the wise and the good are not exempted from the common fate, not that the foolish and reckless are exposed to it. The text may be corrupt; but Ginsburg is content with it. A good reading of it, however, is still wanting.
4 For who is exempted?
To all the living there is hope,
For a living dog is better than a dead lion;
5 For the living know that they shall die,
But the dead know not anything;
And there is no more any compensation to them,
For the very memory of them is gone:
6 Their love, too, no less than their hatred and rivalry, hath perished;
And there is no part for them in ought that is done under the sun.
7 Go, then, eat thy bread with gladness,
And drink thy wine with a merry heart,
Since God hath accepted thy works:
8 Let thy garments be always white;
Let no perfume be lacking to thy head:
All the days of thy life
Which He giveth thee under the sun,
All thy fleeting days:
For this is thy portion in life,
And in the labour which thou labourest under the sun.
Ver. 9.: "Enjoy thyself with any woman." The word here rendered "woman" does not mean "wife." And as the Hebrew Preacher is here speaking under the mask of the lover of pleasure, this immoral maxim is at least consistent with the part he plays. More than one good critic, however, read "a wife" for "any woman."
10 Whatsoever thine hand findeth to do,
Do it whilst thou art able;
For there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in Hades,
Whither thou goest.
11 Then I turned and saw under the sun,
That the race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong;
Nor yet bread to the wise,
Nor riches to the intelligent,
Nor favour to the learned;
12 But time and chance happen to all,
And that man doth not even know his time:
Like fish taken in a fatal net,
So are the sons of men entrapped in the time of their calamity,
When it falleth suddenly upon them.
13 This wisdom also have I seen under the sun,
And it seemed great to me—
14 There was a little city,
And few men in it,
And a great king came against it and besieged it,
And threw up a military causeway against it:
15 Now there was found in it a poor wise man,
And he saved that city by his wisdom;
Yet no one remembered this same poor man.
16 Therefore say I,
Though wisdom is better than strength,
Yet the wisdom of the poor is despised,
And his words are not listened to:
17 Though the quiet words of the wise have much advantage
Over the vociferations of a fool of fools,
And wisdom is better than weapons of war,
Yet one fool destroyeth much good:
1 As a dead fly maketh sweet ointment to stink,
So a little folly overpowereth (much) wisdom and honour.
But the mind of the fool to his left;
3 For so soon as the fool setteth his foot in the street
He betrayeth his lack of understanding;
Yet he saith of every one (he meeteth), "He is a fool!"
Ver. 3.: Setteth his foot in the street. Literally, "walketh in the road." The sentence seems to be a proverb used to denote the extreme stupidity of the fool who, the very moment he leaves his house, is bewildered, cannot even find his way from one familiar spot to another, and sees his own folly in every face he meets.
4 If the anger of thy ruler be kindled against thee,
Resent it not:
Patience will avert a graver wrong.
Ver. 4.: Resent it not. Literally, "Quit not thy place."—See note on chapter viii., ver. 3.
5 There is an evil which I have seen under the sun,
An outrage which only a ruler can commit:
6 A great fool is lifted to high place,
While the noble sit degraded:
7 I have seen servants upon horses,
And masters walking like servants on the ground.
Ver. 7.: To ride upon a horse is still a mark of distinction in many Eastern States. In Turkish cities, till of late, no Christian was permitted to ride any nobler beast than an ass or a mule: so neither were the Jews, in the Middle Ages, in any Christian city.
And whoso breaketh down a wall a serpent shall bite him;
9 He who pulleth down stones shall be hurt therewith;
And whoso cleaveth logs shall be cut.
10 If the axe be blunt, and he do not whet the edge,
He must put on more strength;
But wisdom should teach him to sharpen it.
Ver. 10.: Ginsburg renders this difficult and much-disputed passage thus: "If the axe be blunt, and he do not sharpen it beforehand, he shall only increase the army; the advantage of repairing hath wisdom," and explains it as meaning: "If any insulted subject lift a blunt axe against the trunk of despotism, he will only make the tyrant increase his army, and thereby augment his own sufferings; but it is the prerogative of wisdom to repair the mischief which such precipitate folly occasions." I have offered what seems a simpler explanation in the comment on this passage, and have tried to give a simpler, yet not less accurate, rendering in the text. But there are almost as many readings of this difficult verse as there are critics; and it is impossible to do more than make a hesitating choice among them.
11 If the serpent bite because it is not charmed,
There is no advantage to the charmer.
Ver. 11.: The charmer. Literally, "the master of the tongue." The allusion of the phrase is of course to the subtle cantillations by which the charmer drew, or was thought to draw, serpents from their "lurk," and to render them harmless.
12 The words of the wise man's mouth win him grace;
But the lips of a fool swallow him up,
And end in malignant madness.
14 The fool is full of words,
Though no man knoweth what shall be,
Either here or hereafter:
And who can tell him?
15 The work of a fool wearieth him,
For he cannot even find his way to the city.
Ver. 15.: He cannot even find his way to the city; a proverbial saying. It denotes the fool who has not wit enough even to keep a high road, to walk in the beaten path which leads to a capital city. The thought was evidently familiar to Jewish literature; for Isaiah (xxxv. 8) speaks of the way of holiness as a highway in which "wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err."
16 Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child,
And thy princes feast in the morning!
17 Happy art thou, O land, when thy king is noble,
And thy princes eat at due hours,
For strength and not for revelry!
18 Through slothful hands the roof falleth in,
And through lazy hands the house lets in the rain.
Vers. 18, 19.: And money pays for all; i.e. the money of the people. The slothful prodigal rulers, under whose mal-administration the whole fabric of the State was fast falling into decay, extorted the means for their profligate revelry from their toil-worn and oppressed subjects. It is significant of the caution induced by the extreme tyranny of the time, that the whole description of its political condition is conveyed in proverbs more enigmatical than usual, and capable of being interpreted in more senses than one.
19 They turn bread, and wine, which cheereth life, into revelry;
And money has to pay for all.
Nor a prince even in thy bed-chamber,
Lest the bird of the air carry the report,
And the winged tribes tell the story.
1 Cast thy bread upon the waters,
For in time thou mayest find the good of it;
2 Give a portion to seven, and even to eight,
For thou knowest not what calamity may come upon the earth.
3 When the clouds are full of rain,
They empty it upon the earth;
And when the tree falleth, toward south or north,
In the place where the tree falleth there will it lie.
4 Whoso watcheth the wind shall not sow,
And he who observeth the clouds shall not reap;
5 As thou knowest the course of the wind
As little as that of the embryo in the womb of the pregnant,
So thou knowest not the work of God,
6 Sow, then, thy seed in the morning,
And slack not thy hand in the evening,
Since thou knowest not which shall prosper, this or that,
Or whether both shall prove good:
7 And the light shall be sweet to thee,
And it shall be pleasant to thine eyes to behold the sun:
8 For even if a man should live many years,
He ought to rejoice in them all,
And to remember that there will be many dark days;
Yea, that all that cometh is vanity.
9 Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,
And let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth;
And pursue the ways of thine heart,
And that which thine eyes desire;
And know that for all these
God will bring thee into judgment:
10 Banish, therefore, care from thy mind,
And put away sadness from thy flesh,
For youth and manhood are vanity.
And remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth,
Before the evil days come,
"I have no pleasure in them;"
2 Before the sun groweth dark,
And the light, and the moon, and the stars;
And the clouds return after the rain:
3 When the keepers of the house shall quake,
And the men of power crouch down;
When the grinding-maids shall stop because so few are left,
And the women who look out of the lattices shall be shrouded in darkness,
And the door shall be closed on the street:
Ver. 3.: The women who look out of the lattices; i.e. the luxurious ladies of the harem looking through their windows to see what is going on outside. Compare
Judges v. 28 ;2 Samuel vi. 16 ; and2 Kings ix. 30 .
4 When the sound of the mills shall cease,
And the swallow fly shrieking to and fro,
And all the song-birds drop silently into their nests.
Ver. 4.: The swallow, etc. Literally, "the bird shall arise for a noise," i.e. the bird which flies abroad and makes a noise at the approach of a tempest: viz. the swallow. All the songbirds. Literally, "all the daughters of song," a Hebraism for birds.
5 There shall be terror at that which cometh from the height,
The almond also shall be rejected,
And the locust be loathed,
And the caper-berry provoke no appetite;
Because man goeth to his long home,
And the mourners pace up and down the street;—
Ver. 5.: From the height, i.e. from heaven. The locust be loathed. It is commonly assumed that the locust was only eaten by the poor; but Aristotle (Hist. Anim., v. 30) names them as a delicacy, and Ginsburg affirms that they are still considered so by the cultivated and well-to-do Arabs. His long home. Literally, "his eternal home," the domus æterna of the early Christian tombs.
6 Before the silver cord snappeth asunder,
And the golden bowl escapeth;
Before the pitcher be shattered at the fountain,
And the wheel is broken at the well;
7 And the body is cast into the earth from which it came,
And the spirit returneth to God who gave it.
Chap. XII., vv. 8-14.
8 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,
All is vanity!
9 And not only was the Preacher a wise man;
He also taught the people wisdom,
And compared, collected, and arranged many proverbs.
10 The Preacher sought out words of comfort,
And wrote down in uprightness words of truth.
11 The words of the Wise are like goads,
And those of the Masters of the Assemblies like spikes driven home,
Given out by the same Shepherd.
12 And of what is more than these, my son, beware;
For of making of many books there is no end,
And much study is a weariness to the flesh.
That God taketh cognisance of all things:
Fear Him, therefore, and keep his commandments,
For this it behoveth every man to do,
Ver. 13.: God taketh cognisance of all things. Literally, "Everything is noted" or "heard," i.e. by God the Judge. Ginsburg conjectures, not without reason, as I think, that the Sacred Name was omitted from this clause of the verse simply because the Author wished to reserve it for the more emphatic clause which follows it. Many good scholars, however, read the clause as meaning simply, "The conclusion of the matter, when all has been heard," i.e. which even the Sages can adduce.
14 Since God will bring every deed to the judgment
Appointed for every secret thing,
Whether it be good or whether it be bad.
Chap. I., vv. 1-11.
Dean Perowne, in The Expositor, First Series, vol. ix.
In accordance with the rules of his art, the dramatic
Preacher brings himself on the stage of his poem, permits
us to hear his most penetrating and characteristic
utterances, confesses his own most secret and inward
experiences, and thus enables us to conceive and to
judge him. He is true to his artistic canons from the
outset. His prologue, unlike that of the Book of Job,
is cast in the dramatic form. Instead of giving us a
clear statement of the moral problem he is about to
discuss, he opens with the characteristic utterances of
the man who, wearied with many futile endeavours,
gathers up his remaining strength to recount the
experiments he has tried and the conclusion he has
reached. Like Browning, one of the most dramatic
of modern poets, he plunges abruptly into his theme,
and speaks to us from the first through "feigned lips."
Just as in reading the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,
or the Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician, or a
score other of Browning's Poems, we have first to Compare Horace (Od. iv. 7, 9): Pulvis et umbra sumus.
It is the old contrast—old as literature, old as man—between
the ordered steadfastness of nature and
the disorder and brevity of human life. The Preacher
gazes on the universe above and around him. The
ancient earth is firm and strong beneath his feet. The
sun runs his race with joy, sinks exhausted into its
ocean bed, but rises on the morrow, like a giant
refreshed with old wine, to renew its course. The
variable and inconstant wind, which bloweth where it
listeth, blows from the same quarters, runs through
the very circuit which was its haunt in the time of the
This painful contrast between the ordered stability
of nature and the changeful and profitless disorder
of human life is emphasized by a detailed reference
to the large natural forces which rule the world, and
which abide unchanged, although to us they seem
the very types of change. The figure of ver. 5 is,
of course, that of the racer. The sun rises every
morning to run its course, pursues it through the day,
"pants," as one well-nigh breathless, toward its goal,
But it is vain to talk of these or other instances
of the weary yet restless activity of the universe;
"man cannot utter it." For, besides these elemental
illustrations, the world is crowded with illustrations
of incessant change, which yet move within narrow
bounds and do nothing to relieve its sameliness.
So numerous are they, so innumerable, that the
curious eye and inquisitive ear of man would be
worn out before they had completed the tale of them:
and if eye and ear could never be satisfied with
hearing and seeing, how much less the slower tongue
with speaking (ver. 8)? All through the universe
what hath been still is and will be; what was done
is done still and always will be done; the sun still
running the same race, the winds still blowing from
the same points, the streams still flowing between
the same banks and returning by the same channels.
If any man suppose that he has discovered new
phenomena, any natural fact which has not been
repeating itself from the beginning, it is only because
he is ignorant of that which has been from of old So Marcus Aurelius (Meditt., xi. 1): "They that come after
us will see nothing new; and they who went before saw nothing
more than we have seen."
Yet this is not the only, not the inevitable, mood of
the mind as it ponders that great contrast. We have
learned to look upon it with other, perhaps with wider,
eyes. We say, How grand, how soothing, how hopeful
is the spectacle of nature's uniformity! How it lifts
us above the fluctuations of inward thought, and
gladdens us with a sense of stability and repose! As
we see the ancient inviolable laws working out into
But if we did not know the Ruler of the universe to
be our God and Father; if our thoughts had still to
"jump the life to come" or to leap at it with a mere
guess; if we had to cross the gulf of death on no more
solid bridge than a Peradventure; if, in short, our life
were infinitely more troubled and uncertain than it is,
and the true good of life and its bright sustaining hope
were still to seek, how would it be with us then?
Then, like the Preacher, we might feel the steadfastness
and uniformity of nature as an affront to our vanity
and weakness. In place of drinking in hope and composure
from the fair visage and unbroken order of the
universe, we might deem its face to be darkened with
a frown or its eye to be glancing on us with bitter irony.
Instead of finding in its inevitable order and permanence
a hopeful prophecy of our recovery into an unbroken
order and an enduring peace, we might passionately
demand why, on an abiding earth and under an unchanging
This, indeed, has been the impassioned protest and
outcry of every age. Literature is full of it. The
contrast between the tranquil unchanging sky, with its
myriads of pure lustrous stars, which are always there
and always in a happy concert, and the frailty of man
rushing blindly through his brief and perturbed course
has lent its ground-tones to the poetry of every race.
We meet it everywhere. It is the oldest of old songs.
In all the many languages of the divided earth we hear
how the generations of men pass swifty and stormfully
across its bosom, "searching the serene heavens with
the inquest of their beseeching looks," but winning no
response; asking always, and always in vain, "Why
are we thus? why are we thus? frail as the moth, and
of few days like the flower?" It is this contrast
between the serenity and the stability of nature and the
frailty and turbulence of man which afflicts Coheleth
and drives him to conclusions of despair. Here is
man, "so noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, in
apprehension so like a god," longing with an ardent
intensity for the peace which results from the equipoise
Solomon, moreover,—and Solomon in his premature
old age, sated and weary, is the mask under which the
Preacher conceals his natural face,—had had a large
experience of life, had tried its ambitions, its lusts, its
pursuits and pleasures; he had tested every promise
of good which it held forth, and found them all illusory;
he had drunk of every stream, and found no pure living
water with which he could slake his thirst. And men
such as he, sated but not satisfied, jaded with voluptuous
delights and without the peace of faith, commonly look
out on the world with haggard eyes. They feed their
All things depend on the heart we bring to them. This very contrast between Nature and Man has no despair in it, breeds no dispeace or anger in the heart at leisure from itself and at peace with God. Tennyson, for instance, makes a merry musical brook sing to us on this very theme.
It is the very plaint of the Preacher set to sweet music.
He murmurs, "One generation passeth, and another
Yet we do not feel that the Song of the Brook should feed any mood of grief and despair. The tune that it sings to the sleeping woods all night is "a cheerful tune." By some subtle process we are made to share us bright, tender hilarity, though we too are of the men that come and go. Into what a fume would the Hebrew Preacher have been thrown had any little "babbling brook" dared to sing this saucy song to him. He would have felt it as an insult, and have assumed that the merry, innocent creature was "crowing" over the swiftly passing generations of men. But, for the Christian Poet, the Brook sings a song whose blithe dulcet strain attunes the heart to the quiet harmonies of peace and good-will.
Again I say all depends on the heart we turn to nature. It was because his heart was heavy with the memory of many sins and many failures, because too the lofty Christian hopes were beyond his reach, that this "son of David" grew mournful and bitter in her presence.
This, then, is the mood in which the Preacher commences
his quest of the Chief Good. He is driven to
Chap. I., Ver. 12, to Chap. II., Ver. 26.
1. And, as was natural in so wise a man, he turns first to Wisdom. He gives himself diligently to inquire into all the actions and toils of men. He will ascertain whether a larger acquaintance with their conditions, a deeper insight into the facts, a more just and complete estimate of their lot, will remove the depression which weighs upon his heart. He devotes himself earnestly to this Quest, and acquires a "greater wisdom than all who were before him."
And whether we consider the nature of the case or
the conditions of the time in which this Book was
written, we shall not be surprised at the mournful
conclusion to which he comes. For the time was full
of cruel oppressions and wrongs. Life was insecure.
To acquire property was to court extortion. The
Hebrews, and even the conquering race which ruled
them, were slaves to the caprice of satraps and
magistrates whose days were wasted in revelry and in
And, apart from the special wrongs and oppressions
of the time, it is inevitable that the thoughtful student
of men and manners should become a sadder as he
becomes a wiser man. To multiply knowledge, at
least of this kind, is to multiply sorrow. We need not
be cynics and leave our tub only to reflect on the
dishonesty of our neighbours, we need only go through
the world with open and observant eyes in order to
learn that "in much wisdom is much sadness." Recall
the wisest of modern times, those who have had the
most intimate acquaintance with man and men, Goethe
and Carlyle for example; are they not all touched with
a profound sadness? Père Lacordaire has a fine passage on this theme. "Weak
and little minds find here below a nourishment which suffices
for their intellect and satisfies their love. They do not discover
the emptiness of visible things because they are incapable of
sounding them to the bottom. But a soul which God has drawn
nearer to the Infinite very soon feels the narrow limits within
which it is pent; it experiences moments of inexpressible sadness,
the cause of which for a long time remains a mystery; it
even seems as though some strange concurrence of events must
have chanced in order thus to disturb its life; and all the while
the trouble comes from a higher source. In reading the lives of
the Saints, we find that nearly all of them have felt that sweet
melancholy of which the ancients said that there was no genius
without it. In fact, melancholy is inseparable from every mind
that looks below the surface and every heart that feels profoundly.
Not that we should take complacency in it, for it is a malady that
enervates when we do not shake it off; and it has but two
remedies—Death or God." Elsewhere, still quite in the spirit of
the Preacher, he says: "Every day I feel more and more that
all is vanity. I cannot leave my heart in this heap of mud."
Nay, if we look out on the world of to-day, can we
say that even the majority of men are wise and pure?
Alas, if we think to find the true Good in a wide and
varied knowledge of the conditions of men, their hopes
and fears, their struggles and successes, their loves
and hates, their rights and wrongs, their pleasures and
2. But if we cannot reach the object of our Quest
in Wisdom, we may, perchance, find it in Pleasure.
This experiment also the Preacher has
tried, tried on the largest scale and
under the most auspicious conditions.
Wisdom failing to satisfy the large desires of his soul,
or even to lift it from its depression, he turns to
mirth. So Goethe's Faust, after having failed to solve the insoluble
problems of life by study and research, "plunges deep in
pleasure," that he "may thus still the burning thirst of passionate
desire."
Not content with this general verdict, however, he "One such pleasaunce as this there was at Etam, Solomon's
Belvedere, as Josephus informs us (Antiq., VIII. 7, 3). Thither
it was the custom of the king, he says, to resort when he made
his morning excursions from the city, clad in a white garment,
and driving his chariot, surrounded by his body-guard of young
men in the flower of their age, clad in Tyrian purple, and with
gold dust strewed upon their hair, so that their whole head
sparkled when the sun shone upon it, and mounted upon horses
from the royal stables, famed for their beauty and fleetness."—Dr.
Perowne, The Expositor, First Series, vol. x. In speaking of the Persian revenue, Rawlinson says that
besides a definite money payment, "a payment, the nature and
amount of which were also fixed, had to be made in kind, each
province being required to furnish that commodity, or those commodities,
for which it was most celebrated,"—as, for example,
grain, sheep, cattle, mules, fine breeds of horses, beautiful slaves.
The Five Great Monarchies, vol. iv., chap. vii., p. 421.
Alas, all was not well, though he took much pains to
make and think it well. Even his choice delights soon
palled upon his taste, and brought on conclusions of
disgust. Even in his lordly pleasure-house he was
haunted by the grim, menacing spectres which troubled
him before it was built. In the harem, in the paradise
he had planted, under the groves, beside the fountains,
at the sumptuous banquet,—a bursting bubble, a falling
leaf, an empty wine cup, a passing blush, sufficed to
bring back the thought of the brevity and the emptiness
of life. When he had run the full career of pleasure,
and turned to contemplate his delights and the labour
they had cost him, he found that these also were vanity
Is not his sad verdict as true as it is sad? We
have not his wealth of resources. Nevertheless there
may have been a time when our hearts were as intent
on pleasure as was his. We may have pursued whatever
sensuous, intellectual, or aesthetic excitements
were open to us with a growing eagerness till we have
lived in a whirl of craving and stimulating desire and
indulgence, in which the claims of duty have been
neglected and the rebukes of conscience unheeded.
And if we have passed through this experience, if we
have been carried for a time into this giddying round,
have we not come out of it jaded, exhausted, despising
ourselves for our folly, disgusted with what once
seemed the very top and crown of delight? Do we
not mourn, our after life through, over energies wasted
and opportunities lost? Are we not sadder, if wiser,
men for our brief frenzy? As we return to the sober
duties and simple joys of life, do not we say to Mirth,
"Thou art mad!" and to Pleasure, "What canst thou
do for us?" Yes, our verdict is that of the Preacher,
"Lo, this too is vanity!" Non enim hilaritate, nec
lascivia, nec visu, aut joco, comite levitatis, sed sæpe etiam
tristes firmitate, et constantia sunt beati. Cicero, De Fin., Lib. II., Cap. 20.
It is characteristic of the philosophic temper of our
Author, I think, that, after pronouncing Wisdom and
Mirth vanities in which the true Good is
not to be found, he does not at once
proceed to try a new experiment, but
pauses to compare these two "vanities," and to
reason out his preference of one over the other. His
vanity is wisdom. For it is only in one respect that
he puts mirth and wisdom on an equality, viz. that
they neither of them are, or lead up to, the supreme
Good. In all other respects he affirms wisdom to be
as much better than pleasure as light is better than
darkness, as much better as it is to have eyes that see
the light than to be blind and walk in a constant gloom
(vv. 12-14). It is because wisdom is a light and
enables men to see that he accords it his preference.
It is by the light of wisdom that he has learned the
vanity of mirth, nay, the insufficiency of wisdom itself.
But for that light he might still be pursuing pleasures
which could not satisfy, or laboriously acquiring a
knowledge which would only deepen his sadness.
Wisdom had opened his eyes to see that he must seek
the Good which gives rest and peace in other regions.
He no longer goes on his Quest in utter blindness, with
all the world before him where to choose, but with no
indication of the course he should, or should not, take.
He has already learned that two large provinces of
Therefore wisdom is better than mirth. Nevertheless
it is not best, nor can it remove the dejections
of a thoughtful heart. Somewhere there is, there
must be, that which is better still. For wisdom
cannot explain to him why the same fate should befall
both the sage and the fool (ver. 15), nor can it abate
the anger that burns within him against an injustice
so obvious and flagrant. Wisdom cannot even explain
why, even if the sage must die no less than the fool,
both must be forgotten wellnigh as soon as they are
gone (vv. 16, 17); nor can it soften the hatred of life
and its labours which this lesser yet patent injustice
has kindled in his heart. Nay, wisdom, for all so
brightly as it shines, throws no light on an injustice
which, if of lower degree, frets and perplexes his mind,—why
a man who has laboured prudently and dexterously
and has acquired great gains should, when he
dies, leave all to one who has not laboured therein,
without even the poor consolation of knowing whether
he will be a wise man or an idiot (vv. 19-21). In
short, the whole skein of life is in a dismal tangle which
wisdom itself, dearly as he loves it, cannot unravel;
and the tangle is that man has no fair "profit" from
his labours, "since his task grieveth and vexeth him
And yet, good things are surely good, and there is
a wise and gracious enjoyment of earthly delights.
It is right that a man should eat and
drink, and take a natural pleasure in
his toils and gains. Who, indeed, has a stronger
claim than the labourer himself to eat and enjoy the
fruit of his labours? Still, even this natural enjoyment
is the gift of God; apart from his blessing
the heaviest toils will produce but a scanty harvest,
and the faculty of enjoying that harvest may be
lacking. It is lacking to the sinner; his task is to
heap up gains which the good will inherit. But he
that is good before God will have the gains of the
sinner added to his own, with wisdom to enjoy both. This affirmation, so surprising at first sight, is also made by
Job (chap. xxvii., vv. 15, 16), "This is the doom of the wicked
man from God.... Though he heap up silver like dust, and
gather robes as mire, that which he hath gathered shall the
righteous wear, and the innocent shall divide his silver."
Thus the First Act of the Drama closes with a negative. The moral problem is as far from being solved as at the outset. All we have learned is that one or two avenues along which we urge the Quest will not lead us to the end we seek. As yet the Preacher has only the ad interim conclusion to offer us, that both Wisdom and Mirth are good, though neither, nor both combined, is the supreme Good; that we are therefore to acquire wisdom and knowledge, and to blend pleasure with our toils; that we are to believe pleasure and wisdom to be the gifts of God, to believe also that they are bestowed, not in caprice, but according to a law which deals out good to the good and evil to the evil. We shall have other opportunities of weighing and appraising his counsel—it is often repeated—and of seeing how it works into and forms part of Coheleth's final solution of the painful riddle of the earth, the baffling mystery of life.
Chap. III., Ver. 1, to Chap. V., Ver. 20.
The time of birth, for instance, and the time of
death, are ordained by a Power over which men
have no control; they begin to be, and they cease to
Of what use, then, was it for men to "kick against
the goads," to attempt to modify immutable ordinances?
"Whatever God hath ordained continueth
for ever; nothing can be added to it, and nothing
can be taken from it" (ver. 14). Nay, why should
we care to alter or modify the social order? Everything
is beautiful and appropriate in its season, from
birth to death, from war to peace (ver. 11). If we cannot
find the satisfying Good in the events and affairs
But not only are our endeavours to find the "good"
of our labours thwarted by the gracious,
inflexible laws of the just God; they are
often baffled by the injustice of ungracious
men. In the days of Coheleth, Iniquity
sat in the seat of justice, wresting all rules of equity to
Thus, after rising in the first fifteen verses of this Third Chapter, to an almost Christian height of patience, and resignation, and holy trust in the providence of God, Coheleth is smitten by the injustice and oppressions of man into the depths of a pessimistic materialism.
But now a new question arises. The Preacher's
survey of human life has shaken his faith even in the
conclusion which he has announced from the first, viz.,
that there is nothing better for a man than a quiet
content, a busy cheerfulness, a tranquil enjoyment of
the fruit of his toils. This at least he has supposed to
be possible: but is it? All the activities, industries, Xerxes, in his invasion of Greece, conceived the wish "to
look upon all his host." A throne was erected for him on a hill
near Abydos, sitting on which he looked down and saw the
Hellespont covered with his ships, and the vast plain swarming
with his troops. As he looked, he wept; and when his uncle
Artabanus asked him the cause of his tears, he replied: "There
came upon me a sudden pity when I thought of the shortness of
man's life, and considered that of all this host, so numerous as it
is, not one will be alive when a hundred years are gone by."
This is one of the most striking and best known incidents in the
life of the Persian despot; but the rejoinder of Artabanus, though
in a far higher strain, is less generally known. I quote it here
as an illustration of the Preacher's mood. Said Artabanus: "And
yet there are sadder things in life than that. Short as our time
is, there is no man, whether it be here among this multitude or
elsewhere, who is so happy as not to have felt the wish—I will
not say once, but full many a time—that he were dead rather
than alive. Calamities fall on us, sicknesses vex and harass us,
and make life, short though it be, to appear long. So death,
through the wretchedness of our life, is a most sweet refuge to
our race."—Herodotus, Book VII., c. 46. So in Sophocles (Oed. Col., 1225) we read—I quote from Dean
Plumptre's translation:
This stinging sense of the miserable estate of his
race has, however, diverted the Preacher from the conduct
of the main argument he had in
hand: to that he now returns (ver. 4).
And now he argues: You cannot hope
get good fruit from a bad root. But
the several industries in which you are
tempted to seek "the chief good and market of your
time" have a most base and evil origin; they "spring
from man's jealous rivalry with his neighbour." Every
man tries to outdo and to outsell his neighbours; to
secure a larger business, to surround himself with a
more profuse luxury, or to amass an ampler hoard of
gold. This business life of yours is utterly selfish,
and therefore utterly base. You are not content with a
So intense and selfish was this rivalry, increase of appetite growing by what it fed upon, so keen grew the desire to amass, that the Preacher paints a portrait, for which no doubt many a Hebrew might have sat, of a man—nay, rather, of a miser—who, though solitary and kinless, with not even a son or a brother to inherit his wealth, nevertheless hoards up riches to the close of his life; there is no end to his labours; he never can be rich enough to allow himself any enjoyment of his gains (vv. 7, 8).
Now a jealous rivalry culminating in mere avarice,—that surely is not the wisest or noblest spirit of which those are capable who devote themselves to affairs. Even "the idols of the market" may have a purer cult. Business, like Wisdom or Mirth, may neither be, nor contain, the supreme Good: still, like them, it is not in itself and of necessity an evil. There must be a better mode of devotion to it than this selfish and greedy one; and such a mode Coheleth, before he pursues his argument to a close, pauses to point out. As if anticipating a modern theory which grows in favour with the wiser sort of mercantile men, he suggests that co-operation—of course I use the word in its etymological rather than in its technical sense—should be substituted for competition. "Two are better than one," he argues; "union is better than isolation; conjoint labour brings the larger reward" (ver. 9). To bring his suggestion home to the business bosom of men, he uses five illustrations, four of which have a strong Oriental colouring.
The first is that of two pedestrians (ver. 10); if one
should fall—and such an accident, owing to the bad
roads and long cumbrous robes common in the East,
was by no means infrequent—the other is ready to
set him on his feet; while, if he is alone, the least
that can befall him is that his robe will be trampled
But in the fifth and most elaborate illustration (vv.
13, 14), we are once more carried back to the East.
The slightest acquaintance with Oriental history will
teach us how uncertain is the tenure of royal power;
how often it has happened that a prisoner has been led
from a dungeon to a throne, and a prince suddenly
deposed and reduced to impotence and penury. Coheleth
supposes such a case. On the one hand, we
have a king old, but not venerable, since, long as he
has lived, he has not "even yet learned to accept
admonition;" he has led a solitary, selfish, suspicious
life, secluded himself in his harem, surrounded himself
with a troop of flattering courtiers and slaves. On the
other hand, we have the poor but wise young man,
"the affable youth," who has lived with all sorts and
conditions of men, acquainted himself with their habits
and wants and desires, and conciliated their regard.
His growing popularity alarms the old despot and his
minions. He is cast into prison. His wrongs and sufferings
endear him to the wronged and suffering people.
By these graphic illustrations Coheleth sets forth the superiority of the sociable over the solitary and selfish temper, of union over isolation, of the neighbourly goodwill which leads men to combine for common ends over the jealous rivalry which prompts them to take advantage of each other, and to labour each for himself alone.
But even as he urges this better, happier temper on
men occupied with business and public affairs, even
as he contemplates its brightest illustration in the
youthful prisoner whose winning and sociable qualities
have lifted him to a throne, the old mood of melancholy
comes back on him; there is the familiar
pathetic break in his voice as he concludes (ver. 16),
that even this wise youth, who wins all hearts for a
time, will soon be forgotten; that "even this," for all
A profound gloom rests on the second act of this Drama. It has already taught us that we are helpless in the grip of laws which we had no voice in making; that we often lie at the mercy of men whose mercy is but a caprice; that in our origin and end, in body and spirit, in faculty and prospect, in our lives and pleasures, we are no better than the beasts which perish: that the avocations into which we plunge, and amid which we seek to forget our sad estate, spring from our jealousy the one of the other, and tend to a lonely miserliness without use or charm. The Preacher's familiar conclusion—"Be tranquil, be content, enjoy as much as you can"—has grown doubtful to him. He has seen the brightest promise come to nought. In a new and profounder sense, "all is vanity and vexation of spirit."
But, though passing through a great darkness, he
sees, and reflects, some little light. Even when facts
seem to contradict it, he holds fast to the conclusion
that wisdom is better than folly, and kindness better
than selfishness, and to do good even though you lose
by it better than to do evil and gain by it. His faith
wavers only for a moment; it never wholly loosens
its hold. And, in the fifth chapter, the light grows,
The men of affairs are led from the vocations of the
Market and the intrigues of the Divan into the House
of God. Our first glance at the worshippers
is not hopeful or inspiriting.
For here are men who offer sacrifices
in lieu of obedience; and here are men
whose prayers are a voluble repetition of
phrases which run far in advance of their
limping thoughts and desires: and there are men quick
to make vows in moments of peril, but slow to redeem
them when the peril is past. At first the House of
God looks very like a House of Merchandise, in which
brokers and traders drive a traffic as dishonest as any
that disgraces the Exchange. But while the merchants
and politicians stand criticising the conduct of the
worshippers, the Preacher turns upon them and shows
them that they are the worshippers whom they criticise;
that he has held up a glass in which they see themselves
as others see them; that it is they who vow and
But what comfort for them is there in that? How
should it help them, to be beguiled into condemning
themselves? Truly there would not be much comfort
in it did not the compassionate Preacher forthwith disclose
the secret of this dishonest worship, and give
them counsels of amendment. He discloses the secret in
two verses (vv. 3 and 7), which have much perplexed
the readers of this Book. He there explains that just
as a mind harassed by much occupation and the many
cares it breeds cannot rest even at nights, but busies
itself in framing wild disturbing dreams, so also is it
with the foolish worshipper who, for want of thought
and reverence, pours out before God a multitude of
unsifted and unconsidered wishes in a multitude of
words. In effect he says to them: "You men of affairs
often get little help or comfort from the worship of
God because you come to it with preoccupied hearts,
just as a man gets little comfort from his bed because
his brain, jaded and yet excited by many cares, will
not suffer him to rest. Hence it is that you promise
more than you perform, and utter prayers more devout
than any honest expression of your desires would
Not content with this, however, the Preacher goes on to show how, when they returned from the House of God to the common round of life, and were once more exposed to its miseries and distractions, there were certain comfortable and sustaining thoughts on which they might stay their spirits. To the worship of the Sanctuary he would have them add a strengthening trust in the Providence of God. That Providence was expressed, as in other ordinances, so also in these two:—
First; whatever oppressions and perversions of
justice and equity there were in the land (ver. 8), still
the judges and satraps who oppressed them were not
supreme; there was an official hierarchy in which
superior watched over superior, and if justice were
not to be had of the one, it might be had of another
who was above him; if it were not to be had of any,
no, not even of the king himself, there was this
reassuring conviction that, in the last resort, even the
king was "the servant of the field" (ver. 9), i.e., was
dependent on the wealth and produce of the land, and
could not, therefore, be unjust with impunity, or push
his oppressions too far lest he should decrease his
revenue or depopulate his realm. This was "the
advantage" the people had; and if it were in itself but
a slight advantage to this man or that, clearly it was
The second fact, or class of facts, in which they
might recognise the gracious care of God was this,—That
the unjust judges and wealthy rapacious "lords"
who oppressed them had very much less satisfaction
in their fraudulent gains than they might suppose.
God had so made men that injustice and selfishness
defeated their own ends, and those who lived for
wealth, and would do evil to acquire it, made but a
poor bargain after all. "He that loveth silver is
never satisfied with silver, nor he that clings to wealth
with what it yields" (ver. 10). "When riches increase,
they increase that consume them"—dependents,
parasites, slaves, flock around the man who rises to
wealth and place. He cannot eat and drink more, or
enjoy more, than when he was a man simply well-to-do
in the world; the only advantage he has is that
he sees others consume what he has acquired at so
great a cost (ver. 11). Ginsburg quotes a capital illustration of this verse from the
dialogue of Pheraulas and Sacian (Xenophon, Cyrop., viii. 3);
"Do you think, Sacian, that I live with more pleasure the more
I possess?... By having this abundance I gain merely this,
that I have to guard more, to distribute to others, and have
the trouble of taking care of more; for a great many attendants
now demand of me their food, their drink, and their clothes.
Whosoever, therefore, is greatly pleased with the possession of
riches will, be assured, feel much annoyed at the expenditure of
them." Compare
For himself Coheleth has a very decided opinion on this point. He is quite sure that his first conclusion is sound, though for a moment he had questioned its soundness, and that a quiet, cheerful, and obedient heart is greater riches than the wealthiest estate. With all the emphasis of renewed and now immovable conviction he declares,
Behold, that which I have said holds good; it is
II. In commenting on Sections II. and III. of this Book I found
that both the exposition of the sacred text and the application of
its lessons to the details of modern life would gain in force by
being handled separately. The second part of each of these
chapters consists mainly, therefore, of an exhortation based on
the previous exposition, the marginal notes indicating the
passages of Holy Writ on which these exhortations are based.
Now in dealing with this broad and momentous province
of human life the Preacher exhibits the candour
and the temperance which marked his treatment of
Wisdom and Mirth. Just as he would not suffer us to
think of Wisdom as in itself an evil, nor of Pleasure
as an evil, so neither will he allow us to think of
Business as essentially and of necessity an evil. This,
like those, may be abused to our hurt; but none the
less they may all be used, and were meant to be used,
Throughout this second section of the Book, his subject is excessive devotion to Business, and the correctives to it which his experience enables him to suggest.
1. His handling of the subject is very thorough and
complete. Men of business might do worse than get
the lessons he here teaches by heart. According to
him, their excessive devotion to affairs springs from a
"jealous rivalry"; it tends to form in them a grasping
Coheleth's description is so true and pertinent, it hits so many of our modern faults and sins, that I am obliged to cite my authority for every paragraph lest I should be suspected of putting a private and personal interpretation on these ancient words.
(a) Let us glance once more at the several symptoms
we have already heard him discuss, and consider whether
or not they accord with the results of our
own observation and experience. Is it
true, then—or, rather, is it not true—that
our devotion to business is becoming
excessive and exhausting, and that this
devotion springs mainly from our jealous rivalry and
competition with each other? If, some two or three
and twenty centuries ago, the Jews were bent every
man on outdoing and outselling his neighbour; if his
main ambition was to amass greater wealth or to secure
a larger business than his competitors, or to make a
handsomer show before the world; if in the urgent
(b) Nor, in the face of facts patent to the most cursory
observer, can we deny that this eager and excessive
devotion to the successful conduct of
business tends to produce a grasping,
covetous temper which, however much it
has gained, is for ever seeking more. It is not only
(c) The "speculation" in the eye of business men is
not commonly of a philosophic cast, and therefore we
do not look to find them arguing themselves
into the materialism which infected
the Hebrew Preacher as he contemplated
them and their blind devotion to their
idol. They are far, perhaps very far, from thinking
that in body and spirit, in origin and end, man is no
better than the beast, a creature of the same accident
and subject to "the same chance." But though they
do not reason out a conclusion so sombre and depressing,
do they not practically acquiesce in it? If it is
far from their thoughts, do they not live in its close
neighbourhood? Their mind, like the dyer's hand, is
subdued to that it works in. Accustomed to think
mainly of material interests, their character is materialised.
They are disposed to weigh all things—truth,
righteousness, the motives and aims of nobler
(d) But now if, like Coheleth, we follow these men
to the Temple, what is the scene that meets our eye?
In the English Temple, I fear, that which
would first strike an unaccustomed observer
would be the fact that very few
men of business are there. They are "conspicuous
by their absence," or, at best, noted for an only occasional
attendance. The Hebrew Temple was crowded
with men; in the English Temple it is the other sex
which predominates. But glance at the men who are
there? Do you detect no signs of weariness and
perfunctoriness? Do you hear no vows which will
never be paid, and which they do not intend to pay even
when they make them? no prayers which go beyond
any honest and candid expression of their desires?
Do you not feel and know that many of them are
making an unwilling sacrifice to the decencies and the
proprieties, instead of worshipping God the Spirit in
spirit and nerving themselves for the difficulties of
obedience to the Divine law? Listen: they are saying,
"Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we bless Thee
for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of
What is it that makes their worship formal and insincere? It is the very cause which, as the Preacher tells us, produced the like evil effect upon the Jews. They come into the Temple with pre-occupied hearts. Their thoughts are distracted by the cares of life even as they bend in worship. And hence even the most sacred words turn to "idle talk" on their lips, as remote from the true feeling of the moment as "the multitude of dreams" which haunt the night; they utter fervent prayers without any due sense of their meaning, or any hearty wish to have them granted.
(e) Now surely a life so thick with perils, so beset
The sound sleep of humble contented labour is denied
Is the picture overdrawn? Is not the description as true to modern experience as to that of "the antique world"? Shakespeare, who is our great English authority on the facts of human experience, thought it quite as true. His Merchant of Venice has argosies on every sea; and two of his friends, hearing him confess that sadness makes such a want-wit of him that he has much ado to know himself, tell him that his "mind is tossing on the ocean" with his ships. They proceed to discuss the natural effects of having so many enterprises on hand. One says—
And the other adds—
"Abundance suffereth not the rich to sleep;" the
thought that his "riches may perish in some unlucky
adventure" rings a perpetual alarum in his ears: "all
his days he eateth in darkness, and is much perturbed,
and hath vexation and grief." These are the words
of the Hebrew Preacher: are not our own great poet's
Of course Coheleth does not mean to imply that
every man of business degenerates into a miserly
sceptic, whose worship is a formulated hypocrisy and
whose life is haunted with saddening apprehensions of
misfortune. No doubt there were then, as there are
now, many men of business who were wise enough to
"take pleasure in all their labours," to cast their burden
of care on Him in whose care stand both to-morrow
and to-day; men to whom worship was a calming and
strengthening communion with the Father of their
spirits, and who advanced, through toil, to worthy or
even noble ends. He means simply that these are the
perils to which all men of business are exposed, and
into which they fall so soon as their devotion to its
affairs grows excessive. "Make business, and success
in business, your chief good, your ruling aim, and you
will come to think of your neighbours as selfish rivals;
you will begin to look askance on the lofty spiritual
2. But what checks, what correctives, what remedies, would the Preacher have us apply to the diseased tendencies of the time? How shall men of business save themselves from being absorbed in its interests and affairs?
(a) Well, the very sense of the danger to which they
are exposed—a danger so insidious, so profound, so
fatal—should surely induce caution and a
wary self-control. The symptoms of the
disease are described that we may judge
whether or not we are infected by it; its
dreadful issues that, if infected, we may
study a cure. The man who loves
riches is placed before us that we may learn what he
is really like—that he is not the careless happy being
we often assume him to be. We see him decline
on the low bare levels of covetousness and materialism,
hypocrisy and fear; and, as we look, the
Preacher turns upon us with, "There, that is the slave
of Mammon in his habit as he lives. Do you care
This is one help to a wise content with our lot; but he has many more at our service, and notably this,—that an undue devotion to the toils of business is contrary to the will, the design, the providence of God. God, he argues, has fixed a time for every undertaking under heaven, and has made each of them beautiful in its season, but only then. By his wise kindly ordinances He has sought to divert us from an injurious excess in toil. Our sowing and our reaping, our time of rest and our time for work, the time to save and the time to spend, the time to gain and the time to lose,—all these, with all the fluctuating feelings they excite in us: in short, our whole life, from the cradle to the grave, is under, or should be under, law to Him. It is only when we violate his gracious ordinances,—working when we should be at rest, waking when we should sleep, saving when we should spend, weeping over losses which are real gains, or laughing over gains which will prove to be losses—that we run into excess, and break up the peaceful order and tranquil flow of the life which He designed for us.
Because we will not be obsequious to the ordinances
Nay, going to the very root of the matter and
expounding its whole philosophy, the Preacher teaches
us that wealth, however great and greatly
used, cannot satisfy men, since God has
"put eternity into their hearts" as well as
time: and how should all the kingdoms
of a world that must soon pass content
those who are to live for ever? M. de Lamennais—the founder of the most religious school
of thinkers in modern France, from whom such men as Count
Montalembert, Père Lacordaire, and Maurice Guérin, drew their
earliest inspiration—asks, "Do you know what it is that makes
man the most suffering of all creatures?" and replies, "It is that
he has one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite, and that
he is torn asunder, not by four horses, as in the horrible old times,
but between two worlds."
and we might as well think to build a stable habitation on the waves which break upon the pebbled shore as to find an enduring good in the sequent minutes which carry us down the stream of time. It is only because we do not understand this "work of God" in putting eternity into our hearts and therefore making it impossible for us to be content with anything less than an eternal good; it is because, plunged in the flesh and its cares and delights, we forget the grandeur of our nature, and are tempted to sell our immortal birthright for a mess of pottage which, however much we enjoy it to-day, will leave us hungry to-morrow: it is only, I say, because we fail to understand this work of God "from beginning to end," that we ever delude ourselves with the hope of finding in ought the earth yields a good in which we can rest.
(b) A noble philosophy this, and pregnant with practical counsels of great value. For if, as we close our study of this Section of the Book, we ask, "What good advice does the Preacher offer that we can take and act upon?" we shall find that he gives us at least three serviceable maxims.
To all men of business conscious of their special dangers and anxious to avoid them, he says, first: Replace the competition which springs from your jealous and selfish rivalry, with the co-operation which is born of sympathy and breeds goodwill. "Two are better than one. Union is better than isolation. Conjoint labour has the greater reward." Instead of seeking to take advantage of your neighbours, try to help them. Instead of standing alone, associate with your fellows. Instead of aiming at purely selfish ends, pursue your ends in common. Indeed the wise Hebrew Preacher anticipates the golden rule to a remarkable extent, and, in effect, bids us love our neighbour as ourself, look on his things as well as our own, and do to all men as we would that they should do to us.
His second maxim is: Replace the formality of your
worship with a reverent and steadfast
sincerity. Keep your foot when you go
to the House of God. Put obedience
Horace, Ep. 6, Lib. I:
"Virtutem verba putant, ut
Lucum ligna."
Do not come into the Temple with a pre-occupied spirit, a spirit distracted with thoughts that travel different ways. Realise the presence of the Great King, and speak to Him with the reverence due to a King. Keep the vows you have made in his House after you have left it. Seek and serve Him with all your hearts, and ye shall find rest to your souls.
And his last maxim is: Replace your grasping self-sufficiency
with a constant trust in the fatherly providence
of God. If you see oppression or
suffer wrong, if your schemes are thwarted
and your enterprises fail, you need not
therefore lose the quiet repose and settled peace which
spring from a sense of duty discharged and the undisturbed
possession of the main good of life. God
is over all, and rules all the undertakings of man,
giving each its season and place, and causing all to
work together for the good of the loving and trustful
Trust in Him, and you shall find that
as they strike on the great horologe of Time, are set to a growing music by the hand of God; a music which rises and falls as we listen, but which nevertheless swells through all its saddest cadences and dying falls toward that harmonious close, that "undisturbed concent," in which all discords will be drowned.
Chaps. VI., VII., and VIII., vv. 1-15.
His discussion of the first of these questions, although very matterful, is comparatively brief; in part, perhaps, because in the previous Section he has already dwelt on many of the drawbacks which accompany wealth; and still more, probably, because, while there are but few men in any age to whom great wealth is possible, there would be unusually few in the company of poor men for whose instruction he wrote. Brief and simple as the discussion is, however, we shall misapprehend it unless we bear in mind that Coheleth is arguing, not against wealth, but against mistaking wealth for the Chief Good.
Let us observe, then, that throughout this sixth
Chapter the Preacher is dealing with the lover of riches,
not with the rich man; that he is speaking,
not against wealth, but against mistaking
wealth for the Chief Good. The
man who trusts in riches is placed before
us; and, that we may see him at his best,
he has the riches in which he trusts. God has given
him "his good things," given him them to the full.
He lacks nothing that he desireth—nothing at least
that wealth can command. Yet, because he does not
accept his abundance as the gift of God, and hold the
Giver better than the gift, he cannot enjoy it. But
how do we know that he has suffered his riches to take
From this plain practical argument Coheleth passes
to an argument of more philosophic reach. "All the
labour of this man is for his mouth:"
that is to say, his wealth, with all that
it commands, appeals only to sense and
appetite; it feeds "the lust of the eye, or the lust of
the flesh, or the pride of life," and therefore "his soul
cannot be satisfied therewith" (ver. 7). That craves
a higher nutriment, a more enduring good. God has
put eternity into it: and how can that which is
immortal be contented with the lucky haps and comfortable
conditions of time? Unless some immortal
provision be made for the immortal spirit, it will pine,
and protest, and crave, till all power of happily enjoying
outward good be lost. Nay, if the spirit in man be
craving and unfed, whatever his outward conditions,
or his faculty for enjoying them, he cannot be at rest.
The wise man may be able to extract from the gains
of time a pleasure denied to the fool; and the poor
Look once more at your means and possessions.
Multiply them as you will. Still there are many
reasons why if you seek your chief good
in them, they should prove vanity and
breed vexation of spirit. One is, that
beyond a certain point you can neither
use nor enjoy them. They add to your pomp. They
enable you to fill a larger place in the world's eye.
They swell and magnify the vain show in which you
Another reason is, that it is hard, so hard as to be impossible, for you to know "what it is good" for you to have. That on which you have set your heart may prove to be an evil rather than a good when at last you get it. The fair fruit, so pleasant and desirable to the eye that, to posses it, you were content to labour and deny yourself for years, may turn to an apple of Sodom in your mouth, and yield you, in place of sweet pulp and juice, only the bitter ashes of disappointment.
And a third reason is, that the more you acquire the more you must dispose of when you are called away from this life: and who can tell what shall be after him? How are you so to dispose of your gains as to be sure that they will do good and not harm, and carry comfort to the hearts of those whom you love, and not breed envy, alienation, and strife?
These are the Preacher's arguments against an undue
love of riches, against making them so dear a good that
There be many that say, "Who will show us any
gold?" mistaking gold for their god or good. For
though there can be few in any age to
whom great wealth is possible, there are
many who crave it and believe that to
have it is to possess the supreme felicity.
It is not only the rich who "trust in riches." As a
rule, perhaps, they trust in them less than the poor,
since they have tried them, and know pretty exactly
both how much, and how little, they can do. It is
those who have not tried them, and to whom poverty
brings many undeniable hardships, who are most sorely
tempted to trust in them as the sovereign remedy for
the ills of life. So that the counsels of the sixth
chapter may have a wider scope than we sometimes
Now the endeavour to secure a competence may be,
not lawful only, but most laudable; since God means
us to make the best of the capacities He has given us
and the opportunities He sends us. Nevertheless, we
may pursue this right end from a wrong motive, in
a wrong spirit. Both spirit and motive are wrong if
we pursue our competence as if it were a good so great
that we can know no content unless we attain it. For
what is it that animates such a pursuit save distrust
in the providence of God? Left in his hands, we do
not feel that we should be safe; whereas if we had our
fortune in our own hands, and were secured against
chances and changes by a few comfortable securities,
we should feel safe enough. This feeling is, surely,
Because the feeling is both general and strong, the
Hebrew Preacher addresses himself to it at some
length. His object now is to place
before us a man who does not aim at
great affluence, but, guided by prudence
and common sense, makes it his ruling
aim to stand well with his neighbours
and to lay by a moderate provision for future wants.
The Preacher opens the discussion by stating the
maxims or rules of conduct by which such an one
would be apt to guide himself. One of his first aims
would be to secure "a good name," since that would
prepossess men in his favour, and open before him
many avenues which would otherwise be closed. "There are three crowns; of the law, the priesthood, and
the kingship: but the crown of a good name is greater than them
all."—Talmud.
But how would he go about to acquire his good
name? Again the answer carries us back to the East.
Nothing is more striking to a Western traveller than
the dignified gravity of the superior Oriental races.
In public they rarely smile, almost never laugh, and
hardly ever express surprise. Cool, courteous, self-possessed,
they bear good news or bad, prosperous or
adverse fortune, with a proud equanimity. This equal
mind, expressing itself in a grave dignified bearing,
is, with them, well-nigh indispensable to success in
public life. And, therefore, our friend in quest of a
good name betakes himself to the house of mourning
rather than to the house of feasting; he holds that
serious thought on the end of all men is better than the
wanton foolish mirth which crackles like thorns under
a kettle, making a great sputter, but soon going out;
and would rather have his heart bettered by the reproof
of the wise than listen to the song of fools over the
wine-cup (vv. 2-6). Knowing that he cannot be
much with fools without sharing their folly, fearing
that they may lead him into those excesses in which
the wisest mind is infatuated and the kindest heart
hardened and corrupted (ver. 7), he elects rather to
But if any ask, "Why has he renounced the pursuit of that wealth on which many are bent who are less capable of using it than he?" the answer comes that he has discovered Wisdom to be as good as Wealth, and even better. Not only is Wisdom as secure a defence against the ills of life as Wealth, but it has this great advantage—that "it fortifies or vivifies the heart," while wealth often burdens and enfeebles it. Wisdom quickens and braces the spirit for any fortune, gives it new life or new strength, inspires an inward serenity which does not lie at the mercy of outward accidents (vv. 11, 12). It teaches a man to regard all the conditions of life as ordained and shaped by God, and weans him from the vain endeavour, on which many exhaust their strength, to straighten that which God has made crooked, that which crosses and thwarts his inclinations (ver. 13); once let him see that the thing is crooked, and was meant to be crooked, and he will accept and adapt himself to it, instead of wearying himself in futile attempts to make, or to think, it straight.
And there is one very good reason why God should
permit many crooks in our lot, very good reason therefore
why a wise man should look on them with an So in the hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus, as rendered by the
Dean of Wells:
So far, I think, we shall follow and assent to this
theory of human life; our sympathies will go with the
man who seeks to acquire a good name,
to grow wise, to stand in the Golden
Mean. But when he proceeds to apply
his theory, to deduce practical rules from
it, we can only give him a qualified assent, nay,
must often altogether withhold our assent. The main
But the very first moral he infers from this conclusion
is open to the most serious objection. He
has seen both the righteous die in his
righteousness without receiving any reward
from it, and the wicked live long
in his wickedness to enjoy his ill-gotten
gains. And from these two mysterious facts, which
much exercised many of the Prophets and Psalmists of
Israel, he infers that a prudent man will neither be very
righteous, since he will gain nothing by it, and may
lose the friendship of those who are content with the
current morality; nor very wicked, since, though he
may lose little by this so long as he lives, he will very
surely hasten his death (vv. 16, 17). It is the part
of prudence to lay hold on both; to permit a temperate
indulgence both in virtue and in vice, carrying
neither to excess (ver. 18)—a doctrine still very dear
to the mere man of the world. In this temperance
there lies a strength greater than that of an army in
a beleaguered city; for no righteous man is wholly
righteous (vv. 19, 20): to aim at so lofty and ideal
will be to attempt "to wind ourselves too high for
mortal man below the sky;" we shall only fail if we
The second rule which this temperate Monitor infers
from his general theory is, That we are not to be overmuch
troubled by what people say about
us. Servants are adduced as an illustration,
partly, no doubt, because they are
commonly acquainted with their masters'
faults, and partly because they do sometimes speak
about them, and even exaggerate them. "Let them
speak," is his counsel, "and don't be too curious to
know what they say; you may be sure that they will
say pretty much what you often say of your neighbours
or superiors; if they depreciate you, you depreciate
others, and you can hardly expect a more generous
treatment than you accord." Now if this moral stood
alone, it would be both shrewd and wholesome. But
Here, indeed, our prudent Monitor drops a hint that
he himself is not content with a theory which leads to
such results. He has tried this "wisdom," but he is
not satisfied with it. He desired a higher wisdom,
suspecting that there must be a nobler theory of life
than this; but it was too far away for him to reach,
too deep for him to fathom. After all his researches
that which was far off remained far off, deep remained
deep: he could not attain the higher wisdom he sought
It is said of an English satirist that when any friend
confessed himself in trouble and asked his advice, his
first question was, "Who is she?"—taking
it for granted that a woman must
be at the bottom of the mischief. And
the Hebrew cynic appears to have been of his mind.
He cannot but see that the best of men sin sometimes,
that even the most temperate are hurried into excesses
which their prudence condemns. And when he turns
to discover what it is that bewitches them, he finds no
other solution of the mystery than—Woman. Sweet
and pleasant as she seems, she is "more bitter than
death," her heart is a snare, her hands are chains. He
whom God loves will escape from her net after brief
captivity; only the fool and the sinner are held fast in
it (vv. 25, 26). Nor is this a hasty conclusion. Our
Hebrew cynic has deliberately gone out, with the
lantern of his wisdom in his hand, to search for an
honest man and an honest woman. He has been
scrupulously careful in his search, "taking things," i.e.
indications of character, "one by one;" but though he
has found one honest man in a thousand, he has never
lit on an honest and good woman (vv. 27, 28). Was
not the fault in the eyes of the seeker rather than in the Not, however, that the sentiment was confined to the East.
The Greek poets have many such sayings as, "A woman is a
burden full of ills;" and, "Where women are, all evils there are
found."
The fourth and last rule inferred from this prudent
moderate view of life is, That we are to submit with
hopeful resignation to the wrongs which
spring from human tyranny and injustice.
Unclouded by gusts of passion, the wise
temperate Oriental carries a "bright
countenance" to the king's divan. Though the king
should rate him with "evil words," he will remember
his "oath of fealty," and not rise up in resentment,
still less rush out in open revolt. He knows that
the word of a king is potent; that it will be of no use
to show a hot mutinous temper; that by a meek endurance
of wrath he may allay or avert it. He knows,
too, that obedience and submission are not likely to
provoke insult and contumely; and that if now and
Nevertheless he has also seen times in which retribution
did not overtake oppressors; times even when,
in the person of children as wicked and tyrannical as
themselves, they "came again" to renew their injustice,
and to blot out the memory of the righteous from
the earth (ver. 10). And such times have no more
disastrous result than this, that they undermine faith
This is by no means a noble or lofty view of human
life; the line of conduct it prescribes is often as
immoral as it is ignoble; and we may
feel some natural surprise at hearing
counsels so base from the lips of the
inspired Hebrew Preacher. But we ought
to know him, and his method of instruction,
well enough by this time to be sure
that he is at least as sensible of their
baseness as we can be; that he is here speaking to us,
not in his own person, but dramatically, and from the
lips of the man who, that he may secure a good name
II.—If, as Milton sings,
we are surely much indebted to the Hebrew Preacher. He does not "sit on a hill apart" discussing fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute, or any lofty abstruse theme. He walks with us, in the common round, to the daily task, and talks to us of that which lies before and around us in our daily life. Nor does he speak as one raised high above the folly and weakness by which we are constantly betrayed. He has trodden the very paths we tread. He shares our craving and has pursued our quest after "that which is good." He has been misled by the illusions by which we are beguiled. And his aim is to save us from fruitless researches and defeated hopes by placing his experience at our command. He speaks, therefore, to our real need, and speaks with a cordial sympathy which renders his counsel very welcome.
We are so made that we can find no rest until we
"Ah, no," replies the kindly Preacher who has
himself known this despairing mood and surmounted
it; "no, all is not vanity. There is a chief Good, a
satisfying Good, although you have not found it yet;
and you have not found it because you have not looked
for it where alone it can be found. Once take the
right path, follow the right clue, and you will find a
Good which will make all else good to you, a Good
which will lend a new sweetness to your wisdom and
your mirth, your labour and your gain." But men are
very slow to believe that they have wasted their time
and strength, that they have wholly mistaken their
path; they are reluctant to believe that a little more
of that of which they have already acquired so much,
and which they have always held to be best, will not
yield them the satisfaction they seek. And therefore
the wise Preacher, instead of telling us at once where
the true Good is to be found, takes much pains to
convince us that it is not to be found where we have
been wont to seek it. He places before us a man of
the largest wisdom, whose pleasures were exquisitely
varied and combined, a man whose devotion to affairs
was the most perfect and successful, a man of imperial
nature and wealth, and whose heart had glowed with
We have already considered his argument as it bore on the men of his own time; we have now to make its application to our own age. As his custom is, the Preacher does not develop his argument in open logical sequence; he does not write a moral essay, but paints us a dramatic picture.
He depicts a man who trusts in riches, who honestly
believes that wealth is the chief Good, or, at lowest,
the way to it. This man has laboured diligently
and dexterously to acquire affluence,
and he has acquired it. Like the
rich man of the Parable, he has much goods, and barns
that grow fuller as they grow bigger. "God has given
He has reached his aim, then, acquired what he holds to be good. Can he not be content with it? No; for though he bids his soul make merry and be glad, it obstinately refuses to obey. It is darkened with perplexities, haunted by vague longings, fretted and stung with perpetual care. Now that he has his riches, he goes in dread lest he should lose them; he is unable to decide how he may best employ them, or how to dispose of them when he must leave them behind him. God has given them to him; but he is not at all sure that God will show an equal wisdom in giving them to some one else when he is gone. And so the poor rich man sits steeped in wealth up to his chin—up to his chin, but not up to his lips, for he has no "power to enjoy" it. Burdened with jealous care, he grudges that others should share what he cannot enjoy, grudges above all that, when he is dead, another should possess what has been of so little comfort to him. "If thou art rich," says Shakespeare,
But our rich man is not only like an ass; he is even more stupid: for the ass would not have his back bent even with golden ingots if he could help it, and is only too thankful when the burden is lifted from his back; while the rich man not only will plod on beneath his heavy load, but, in his dread of being unladen at his journey's end, imposes on himself a burden heavier than all his ingots, and will bear that as well as his gold. He creeps along beneath his double load, and brays quite pitifully if you so much as put out a hand to ease him.
It is not of much use, perhaps, to argue with one so
besotted; but lest we should slip into his degraded
estate, the Preacher points out for our instruction
the source of his disquiet, and
shows why it is impossible in the very
nature of things that he should know content.
Among other sources of disquiet he notes these
three. (1) That "there are many things which increase
vanity:" that is to say, many of the acquisitions of the
rich man only augment his outward pomp and state.
Beyond a certain point he cannot possibly enjoy the
good things he possesses; he cannot, for instance, live
in all his costly mansions at once, nor eat and drink all
the sumptuous fare set on his table, nor carry his
whole wardrobe on his back. He is hampered with
superfluities which breed care, but yield him no comfort.
Is not that a true picture, a picture true to life?
Bulwer Lytton tells us how one of our wealthiest peers
once complained to him that he was never so happy
and well-served as when he was a bachelor in chambers;
that his splendid mansion was a dreary solitude to
him, and the long train of domestics his masters rather
But the Hebrew Preacher is not content to paint a
picture of the Rich Man and his perplexities—a picture
as true to the life now as it was then.
He also points out how it is that the lover
of riches came to be the man he is, and
why he can never lay hold on the supreme
Good. "All the labour of this man is for
his mouth," for the senses and whatever
gratifies sense; and therefore, however prosperous he
may be, "yet his soul cannot be satisfied." For the
soul is not fed by that which feeds the senses. God
has "put eternity" into it. It craves an eternal sustenance.
2. But now, to come closer home, to draw nearer
to that prime wisdom which consists in knowing that
which lies before us in our daily life, let
us glance at the Man who aims to stand
in the Golden Mean; the man who does
not aspire to heap up a great fortune,
but is anxious to secure a modest competence. He is
more on our own level; for our trust in riches is, for
the most part, qualified by other trusts. If we believe
in Gold, we also believe in Wisdom and in Mirth;
if we labour to provide for the future, we also wish
to use and enjoy the present. We think it well that
Suppose a young man to start in life with this
theory, this plan, this aim, distinctly before him:—he is
to be ruled by prudence and plain common
sense: he will try to stand well with the
world, and to make a moderate provision
for future wants. This aim will beget a
certain temperance of thought and action.
He will permit himself no extravagances—no wandering
out of bounds, and perhaps no enthusiasms, for he wants
to establish "a good name," a good reputation, which
shall go before him like "a sweet perfume" and dispose
men's hearts toward him. And, therefore, he carries
a sober face, frequents the company of older, wiser men,
is grateful for any hints their experience may furnish,
and takes even their "reproof" with a good grace. He
walks in the beaten paths, knowing the world to be impatient
of novelties. The wanton mirth and crackling
laughter of fools in the house of feasting are not for
him. He is not to be seduced from the plain prudent
course which he has marked out for himself whether
by inward provocation or outward allurements. If he
is a young lawyer, he will write no poetry, attorneys
holding literary men in suspicion. If he is a young
doctor, homœopathy, hydropathy, and all new-fangled
In all this there may be no conscious insincerity, and
not much perhaps that calls for censure. For all young
men are not wise with the highest wisdom, nor original,
nor brave with the courage which follows Truth in
scorn of consequence. And our young man may not
be dowered with the love of loves, the hate of hates,
the scorn of scorns. He may be of a nature essentially
prudent and commonplace, or training and habit
may have superinduced a second nature. To him a
But here we light on his first grave peril; for he will
carry his temperance into his religion, and he may
subordinate even that to his desire to get
on. Looking on men in their religious
aspect, he sees that they are divided into
two classes, the righteous and the wicked.
As he considers them, he concludes that on the whole
the righteous have the best of it, that godliness is real
gain. But he soon discovers that this
first rough conclusion needs to be carefully
qualified. For, as he studies men
more closely, he perceives that at times
the righteous die in their righteousness without being
Conscience being silenced, Prudence steps in. And Prudence says, "People will talk. They will take note of your slips, and tattle about them. Unless you are very very careful, you will damage your reputation; and if you do that, how can you hope to get on?" Now as the man is specially devoted to Prudence, and has found her kind mistress and useful monitress in one, he is at first a little staggered to find her taking part against him. But he soon recovers himself, and replies: "Dear Prudence, you know as well as I do that people don't like a man to be better than themselves. Of course they will talk if they catch me tripping; but I don't mean to do more than trip, and a man who trips gains ground in recovering himself, and goes all the faster for a while. Besides we all trip; some fall even. And I talk of my neighbours just as they talk of me; and we all like each other the better for being birds of one feather."
At this Prudence smiles and stops her mouth. But being very willing to assist so quick-witted a disciple, she presently returns and says: "Are you not rather a long while in securing your little Competence? Is there no short cut to it? Why not take a wife with a small fortune of her own, or with connexions who could help you on?" Now the man, not being a bad man, but one who would fain be good so far as he knows goodness, is somewhat taken aback by such a suggestion as this. He thinks Prudence must be growing very worldly and mercenary. He says within himself, "Surely love should be sacred! A man should not prostitute that in order to get on! If I marry a woman simply or mainly for her money, what worse degradation can I inflict on her or on myself? how shall I be better than those old Hebrews and Orientals who held women to be only a toy or a convenience? To do that, would be to make a snare and a net of her indeed, to degrade her from her true place and function, and possibly would lead me to think of her as even worse than I had made her." Nevertheless, his heart being very much set on securing a Competence, and an accident of the sort which he calls "providences" putting a foolish woman with a pocketful of money in his way, he takes both the counsel of Prudence and a wife to match.
The world, we may be sure, thinks none the worse of him for that. Once more he has proved himself a man whose eye is stedfastly bent on "the main chance," and who knows how to seize occasions as they rise. But he, who has thus profaned the inner sanctuary of his own soul, is not likely to be sensitive to the large claims of public duty. If he sees oppression, if the tyranny of a man or a class mounts to a height which calls for rebuke and opposition, he is not likely to sacrifice comfort and risk either property or popularity that he may assail iniquity in her strong places. It is not such men as he who, when the times are out of joint, feel that they are born to set them right. Prudence is still his guide, and Prudence says, "Let things alone; they will right themselves in time. The social laws will avenge themselves on the head of the oppressor, and deliver the oppressed. You can do little to hasten their action. Why, to gain so little, should you risk so much?" And the man is content to sit still with folded hands when every hand that can strike a blow for right is wanted in the strife, and can even quote texts of Scripture to prove that in "quietness, and confidence" in the action of Divine Laws, is the true strength.
Now I make my appeal to those who daily enter the
world of business—is not this the tone of that world?
The Preacher speaks as to wise men, to men of some experience of the world. Judge you what he says.
Chap. VIII., Ver. 16, to Chap. XII., Ver. 7.
1. The Preacher commences this Section by carefully
defining his position and equipment as he starts
on his final course. As yet he carries no
lamp of Revelation in his hand, although
he will not venture beyond a certain
point without it. For the present he will
trust to Reason and Experience, and mark the conclusions
to which these conduct when unaided by any
direct light from Heaven. His first conclusion is that
Wisdom, which of all temporal goods still stands foremost
with him, is incapable of yielding a true content.
Much as it can do for man, it cannot solve the moral
problems which task and afflict his heart, the problems
which he must solve before he can be at peace. He
may be so bent on solving these by Wisdom as to see
"no sleep with his eyes by day or night;" he may
rely on Wisdom with a confidence so genuine as to
suppose at times that by its help he has "found out all
the work of God"—really solved all the mysteries of
the Divine Providence; but nevertheless "he has not
found it out;" the illusion will soon pass, and the unsolved
mysteries reappear dark and sombre as of old
(chap. viii., vv. 16, 17). And the proof that he has
failed is, first, that he is as incompetent to foresee the
Imagine, then, a Jew brought to the bitter pass which
Coheleth has described. He has acquainted himself
with Wisdom, native and foreign; and
wisdom has led him to conclusions of
virtue. Nor is he of those who love
virtue as they love music—without practising it.
Believing that a righteous and religious carriage of
himself will ensure happiness and equip him to
encounter the problems of life, he has striven to be
good and pure, to offer his sacrifices and pay his vows.
But he has found that, despite his best endeavours, his
life is not tranquil, that the very calamities which overtake
the wicked overtake him, that that wise carriage
of himself by which he thought to win love has provoked
hatred, that death remains a frowning and
inhospitable mystery. He hates death, and has no
great love for the life which has brought him only
labour and disappointment. Where is he likely to
turn next? Wisdom having failed him, to what will
he apply? At what conclusion will he arrive? Will
Thus the Preacher describes the Man of Pleasure,
and the maxims by which he rules his life. How true
the description is I need not tarry to prove; 'tis a point
every man can judge for himself. Judge also whether
the warning which the Preacher subjoins be not equally
true to experience (vv. 11, 12). For, after having
depicted, or personated, the Man who trusts in Wisdom,
and the Man who devotes himself to Pleasure, he proceeds
to show that even the Man who blends mirth
with study, whose wisdom preserves him from the
disgusts of satiety and vulgar lust, is nevertheless—to
say nothing of the Chief Good—very far from having
reached a certain good. Then, at least, "the race was
not (always) to the swift, nor the battle to the strong;
neither was bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent,
nor favour to the learned." Those who had the
fairest chances had not always the happiest success;
nor did those who bent themselves most strongly to
their ends always reach their ends. Those who were
wanton as birds, or heedless as fish, were often taken
in the snare of calamity or swept up by the net of
misfortune. At any moment a killing frost might
blight all the growths of Wisdom and destroy all
the sweet fruits of Pleasure: and if they had only
So far, then, Coheleth has been occupied in retracing
the argument of the first Section of the Book. Now
he returns upon the second and third
Sections: he deals with the man who
plunges into public affairs, who turns his
wisdom to practical account, and seeks
to attain a competence, if not a fortune.
He lingers over this stage of his argument, probably
because the Jews, then as always, even in exile and
under the most cruel oppression, were a remarkably
energetic, practical, money-getting race, with a singular
faculty of dealing with political issues or handling the
market; and, as he slowly pursues it, he drops many
hints of the social and political conditions of the time.
Two features of it he takes much to heart: first, that
wisdom, even of the most practical and sagacious sort,
did not win its fair recognition and reward—a very
natural complaint in so wise a man; and, secondly,
that his people were under tyrants so gross, self-indulgent,
indolent, and unstatesman-like as the Persians
He opens with an anecdote in proof of the slight
regard in which the most valuable and remunerative
sagacity was held. He tells us of a poor man—and
I have sometimes thought that this poor man may have
been the Author himself; for the military leaders of
the Jews, though among the most expert strategists
of that era, were often very learned and studious men—who
lived in a little city, with only a few inhabitants.
A great king came up against the city, besieged it,
threw up the lofty military causeway, as high as the
walls, from which it was the fashion of the time to
deliver the assault. By his Archimedian wit the poor
man hit on a stratagem which saved the city; but
though his service was so signal, and the city so little
that the "few men in it" must have seen him every
day, "yet no one remembered that same poor man,"
or lent a hand to lift him from his poverty. Wise
as he was, his wisdom did not bring him bread, nor
riches, nor favour (vv. 13-15). Therefore, concludes the
Preacher, wisdom, great gift though it is, and better, as
in this instance, than "an army to a beleaguered city"
(chap, vii., ver. 19), is not of itself sufficient to secure
success. A poor man's wisdom—as many an inventor
has found—is despised even by those who profit by it.
Although his counsel, in the day of extremity, is infinitely
Yet a fool quite as foolish and malignant as this,
quite as indecent even in outward behaviour, may be
lifted to high place, and has ere now sat on an imperial
throne. To cite only one instance out of many—other instances may
be found in the Introduction—let the reader recall the Emperor
Caligula, and refer, for example, to his reception of the Alexandrian
Jews, as recorded by Philo, Legat ad Caium, cc. 44, 45;
or by Merivale, in his History of the Romans, chap. xlvii., pp.
47-50; or by Milman, in his History of the Jews, Book xii., pp.
141-45. He will then know, to quote the phrase of Apollonius
of Tyana, what "the kind of beast called a tyrant" is or may be.
The first of these maxims is, "He who diggeth a pit shall fall into it" (ver. 8). And the allusion is, of course, to an Eastern mode of trapping wild beasts and game. The huntsman dug a pit, covered it with twigs and sods, and strewed the surface with bait; but as he dug many such pits, and some of them were long without a tenant, he might at any inadvertent moment fall into one of them himself. The proverb is capable of at least two interpretations. It may mean that the foolish despot, plotting the ruin of his wise servant, might in his anger go too far; and, betraying his intention, provoke a retaliative anger before which he himself would fall. Or it may mean that, should the wise servant seek to undermine the throne of the despot, he might be taken in his treachery and bring on himself the whole weight of the tyrant's wrath.
The second maxim is, "Whoso breaketh down a wall,
a serpent shall bite him" (ver. 8); and here, of course,
The next adage runs (ver. 10), "If the axe be blunt,
and he do not whet the edge, he must put on more
strength, but wisdom should teach him to sharpen it,"
and is, perhaps, the most difficult passage in the Book.
The Hebrew is read in a different way by almost every
translator. As I read it, it means, in general, that it
is not well to work with blunt tools when by a little
labour and delay you may whet them to a keener edge.
Read thus, the political rule implied in it is, "Do not
attempt any great enterprise, any revolution or reform,
till you have a well-considered scheme to go upon, and
suitable instruments to carry it out with." But the
special political import of it may be, "Your strength
is nothing to that of the tyrant; do not therefore lift
a blunt axe against the trunk of despotism: wait till
you have put a sharp edge upon it." Or, the tyrant
And on this hint, on this casual mention of his name,
the Preacher—who all this while, remember, is personating
the sagacious man of the world, bent on rising
to wealth, power, distinction—once more "comes
What Coheleth means by the king being "a child" is best
explained by
But if this were the condition of the time, if to rise in public life involved so many mean crafts and submissions, so many deadly imminent risks from spies and from fools clad in a little brief authority, how could any man hope to find the Chief Good in it? Wisdom did not always win promotion; virtue was inimical to success. The anger of an incapable idiot, or the whisper of an envious rival, or the caprice of a merciless despot, might at any moment undo the work of years, and expose the most upright and sagacious of men to the worst extremities of misfortune. There was no tranquillity, no freedom, no security, no dignity in such a life as this. Till this were resigned and some nobler, loftier aim found, there was no chance of reaching that great satisfying Good which lifts man above all accidents, and fixes him in a happy security from which no blow of Circumstance can dislodge him.
What that Good is, and where it may be found, the
Preacher now proceeds to show. But, as his manner
And, at the very outset, we learn that this happy
person is of a noble, unselfish, generous temper. Unlike
the man who simply wants to get on and make a
fortune, he grudges no man his gains; he looks on his
neighbours' interests as well as his own, and does
good even to the evil and the unthankful. One of the most elaborate proverbs in the Talmud is on
Charity:—"Iron breaks the stone, fire melts iron, water extinguishes
fire, the clouds drink up the water, a storm drives away
the clouds, man withstands the storm, fear unmans man, wine
dispels fear, sleep drives away wine, and death sweeps all away—even
sleep. But Solomon the Wise says, Charity saves from
death." And there is hardly a finer passage in Shakespeare's
Sonnets than that (CXVI.) in which he sings the disinterestedness
of Love, and its superiority to all change:
And, again, the task is not so thankless as it sometimes
seems; for though many of our kind deeds may quicken
no kindness in "him that takes," yet some of them
will; and the more we help and succour the more
likely are we to light upon at least a few who, when
our need comes, will succour and console us. Even
the most hardened have a certain tenderness for those
who help them, if only the help meet a real need, and
be given with grace. And, therefore, we may be very
sure that if we give a portion of our bread to seven
and even to eight, especially if they know that we
But is not this, after all, only a refined selfishness?
If we give because we do not know how soon we may
need a gift, and in order that we may by-and-bye
"find the good of it," do not even the heathen and the
publicans the same? Well, not many of them, I think.
I have not observed that it is their habit to cast their
bread on thankless waters. If they forbode calamity
and loss, they provide against them, not by giving,
but by hoarding; and even they themselves would
hardly accept as a model of charity a man who buttoned
up his pocket against every appeal, lest he should
be yielding to a selfish motive, or be suspected of it.
The refined selfishness of showing kindness and doing
good even to the evil and the unthankful because we
hope to find the good of it is by no means too common
yet; we need not go in dread of it. Nor is it an
altogether unworthy motive. St. Paul urges us to help
a fallen brother on the express ground that we may
need similar help some day (
The first characteristic, then, of the man who is
likely to achieve the Quest of the Chief Good is the
Charity which prompts him to be gracious, and to show
kindness, and to do good, even to the thankless and
ungracious. And his second characteristic is the stedfast
Industry which turns all seasons to account. The
man of affairs, who wants to rise, waits on occasion;
he is on the watch to avail himself of the moods and
caprices of men and bend them to his interest. But he
who has learned to value things at their true worth,
and whose heart is fixed on the acquisition of the
highest good, does not want to get on so much as to
do his duty under all the variable conditions of life.
Just as he will not withhold his hand from giving, lest
some of the recipients of his charity should prove unworthy,
so also he will not withdraw his hand from the
labour appointed him, because this or that endeavour
may be unproductive, or lest it should be thwarted by
the ordinances of Heaven. He knows that the laws of
This man, then, has learned one or two of the profoundest
secrets of Wisdom, plain as they look. He
has learned that, giving, we gain; and, spending,
thrive. He has also learned that a man's true care is
himself; that all that pertains to the body, to the issues
of labour, to the chances of fortune, is external to himself;
that whatever form these may take, he may learn
from them, and profit by them, and be content in them:
that his true business in the world is to cultivate a
strong and dutiful character which shall prepare him
for any world or any fate; and that so long as he can
do this, his main duty will be done, his ruling object
attained. Totum in co est, ut tibi imperes. Cicero, Tusc., lib. II., cap. 22.
Is not this true wisdom? is it not an abiding good?
Pleasures may bloom and fade. Speculations may
shift and change. Riches may come and go—what
else have they wings for? The body may sicken or
strengthen. The favour of men may be conferred and
withdrawn. There is no stability in these; and if we
are dependent on them, we shall be variable and
But is all our life to be taken up in meeting the claims of Duty and of Charity? Are we never to relax into mirth, never to look forward to a time in which reward will be more exactly adjusted to service? Yes, we are to do both this and that. It is very true that he who makes it his ruling aim to do the present duty, and to leave the future with God, will have a happy because a useful life. He that walks this path of duty
The path may often be steep and difficult; it may be
overhung with threatening rocks and strewn with
"stones of offence;" but he who pursues it, still
Nevertheless, if his life is to be full and complete, he
must be able to pluck whatever bright flowers of joy
spring beside his path, to find "laughing waters" in
the crags he climbs, and to rejoice not only in "the
glossy purples" of the armed and stubborn thistle, but
in the delicate beauty of the ferns, the pure grace of
the cyclamens, and the sweet breath of the fragrant
grasses and flowers which haunt those severe heights.
If he is to be a Man, rather than a Stoic or an Anchorite,
he must add to his sense of duty a keen delight in all
beauty, all grace, all innocent and noble pleasure. For
the sake of others, too, as well as for his own sake, he
must carry with him "the merry heart which doeth
good like a medicine," since, lacking that, he will neither
do all the good he might, nor himself become perfect
and complete. And it is proof, I think, of the good
divinity, no less than of the broad humanity, of the
Preacher that he lays much stress on this point. He
not only bids us enjoy life, but gives us cogent reasons
for enjoying it. "Even," he says, "if a man should
live many years, he ought to enjoy them all." But
why? "Because there will be many dark days," days
But, soft; is not our man of men becoming a mere
man of pleasure? No; for he recognises the claims
of Duty and of Charity. These keep his
pleasures sweet and wholesome, prevent
them from usurping the whole man, and
landing him in the satiety and weariness
of dissipation. But lest even these safeguards
should prove insufficient, he has also this: he
knows that "God will bring him into judgment;" that
Nay, we know, from the Psalms composed during the
Captivity, that the judgment of God was an incentive
to hope and joy; that, instead of fearing it, the pious
Jews looked forward to it with rapture and exultation.
What, for example, can be more riant and joyful than
the concluding strophe of
or than the third strophe of
It is impossible to read these verses, and such verses
as these, without feeling that the Jews of the Captivity
anticipated the Divine Judgment, not with fear and
If we remembered this, we should not so readily agree with the Preachers and Commentators who assume Coheleth to be speaking ironically in this verse, and as though he would defy his readers to enjoy their pleasures with the thought of God and his judgment of them in their minds. We should rather understand that he was making life more cheerful to them; that he was removing the blight of despair which had fallen on it; that he was kindling in their dreary prospect a light which would shine even into their darkened present with gracious and healing rays. All wrongs would be easier to bear, all duties would be faced with better heart, all alleviating pleasures would grow more welcome, if once they were fully persuaded that there was a life beyond death, a life in which the good would be "comforted" and the evil "tormented." It is on the express ground that there is a Judgment that the Preacher, in the last verse of this chapter, bids them banish "care" and "sadness," or, as the words perhaps mean, "moroseness" and "trouble;" though he also adds another reason which no longer afflicts him much, viz., that "youth and manhood are vanity," soon gone, never to be recalled, and never enjoyed if the brief occasion is suffered to pass.
But is the thought of Judgment to be no check on
our pleasures? Well, it is certainly used here as an
incentive to pleasure, to cheerfulness. We are to
be happy because we are to stand at the bar of God,
because in the Judgment He will adjust and compensate
all the wrongs and afflictions of time. But it is
But he has a safeguard of even a more sovereign
potency than this. For he not only looks forward to a
future judgment, he is conscious of a present and constant
judgment. God is with him wherever he goes.
From "the days of his youth" he has "remembered his
Creator" (chap. xii., ver. 1). He has remembered Him,
and given to the poor and needy. He has remembered
Him and, doing all things as to Him, duty has grown
light. He has remembered Him, and his pleasures
have grown the sweeter because they were gifts from
Heaven, and because he has taken them, in a thankful
spirit, for a temperate enjoyment. Of all safeguards to
a life of virtue, this is the noblest and the best. We
can afford, indeed, to part with none of them, for we
Dum vivimus vivamus.—Doddridge.
Finally, the Preacher enforces this early and habitual
reference of the soul to the Divine Presence and Will
by a brief allusion to the impotence and weariness of a
While "the dew of youth" is still fresh upon us we are to "remember our Creator" and his constant judgment of us lest, forgetting Him, we should waste our powers in sensual excess; lest temperate mirth should degenerate into an extravagant and wanton devotion to pleasure; lest the lust of mere physical enjoyment should outlive the power to enjoy, and, groaning under the penalties our unbridled indulgence has provoked, we should find "days of evil" rise on us in long succession, and draw out into "years" of fruitless desire, self-disgust, and despair (ver. 1). "Before the evil days come," and that they may not come; before "the years arrive of which we shall say, I have no pleasure in them," and that they may not arrive, we are to bethink us of the Pure and Awful Presence in which we daily stand. God is with us that we may not sin; with us in youth, that "the angel of his Presence" may save us from the sins to which youth is prone; with us, to save us from "the noted slips of youth and liberty," that our closing years may have the cheerful serenity of a happy old age.
To this admonition drawn from the miseries of godless
age, the Preacher appends a description of the
terrors of approaching death (vv. 2-5),—a description It may be worth while to specify some of the gross and
absurd conjectures, some also of the strange differences, into
which what may be called the medical reading of this passage
has betrayed its advocates. Ginsburg has a marvellous collection
of them in his "notes" to these verses. I select and combine
only a few of them. The darkening of the light, the sun, the
moon, and the stars (ver. 2) is taken by one great authority (the
Talmud) to mean the darkening of the forehead, the nose, the soul,
and the teeth; by another (the Chaldee Paraphrast), the obscuring
of the face, the eyes, the cheeks, and the apples of the eyes; by
a third (Dr. Smith, in his "Portraiture of Old Age"), for the decay
of all the mental faculties. That "the clouds return after the
rain" signifies, according to Ibn Ezra, the constant dimness of the
eyes; according to Le Clerc, a bad influenza, accompanied with
unceasing snuffling. "The keepers of the house" (ver. 3) are
the ribs and the loins (Talmud), the knees (Chaldee), and the
hands and arms (Ibn Ezra). "The men of power" are the
thighs (Talmud) and the arms (Chaldee). "The grinding maids"
are the teeth, and "the ladies who look out of the lattices" are the
eyes, by general consent. "The door closed on the street" is
the pores of the skin (Dr. Smith), the lips (Ibn Ezra), and the eyes
(Henstenberg). That "the noise of the mills ceases" or "grows
faint" (ver. 4) means that the mastication of food becomes imperfect
(Dr. Smith), that the appetite fails (Chaldee), that the voice
grows feeble (Grotius). That "the songbirds descend to their
nests" signifies that music and songs are a bore to the aged man
(Talmud), that he is no longer able to sing (Chaldee), that his
ears are heavy (Grotius). The allusion to "the almond" (ver. 5)
denotes that the haunch-bone shall come out from leanness (Talmud),
or (Reynolds) it denotes the hoary hair which comes quickly
on a man just as the almond-tree thrusts out her blossoms before
any other tree; while at least half-a-dozen scholars and physicians
take it as pointing to membrum genitale or glans virilis.
That "the locust becomes a burden" means that the ankles
swell (Chaldee), gout in the feet (Jerome), a projecting stomach
(Le Clerc), the dry shrivelled frame of an old man (Dr. Smith).
Almost all modern commentators take the reference to "the
caper-berry" as marking the fact that condiments lose their
power to provoke appetite with the aged, while many of the
ancients took it as marking the failure of sexual desire. The
"silver cord" and "golden bowl" of ver. 6 are the tongue and
the skull (Chaldee), backbone and brain (Dr. Smith), urine and
bladder (Gasper Sanctius); while the "bucket" is either the gall
or the right ventricle of the heart, and "the wheel" that draws
the water stands for the air-inspiring lungs.
Now of course it would not be just to condemn any interpretation
simply because it is weighted with absurdities and contradictions
such as these, though it surely requires a very strong
reading to carry them. But when an interpretation is so obviously
forced and fanciful, when it is so remarkably ingenious
and leaves to ingenuity so wide and lawless a scope, we shall do
well to hesitate before accepting it. And if another interpretation
be offered us, as in the text, which gives a literal rendering
to every phrase instead of a figurative one, which bases itself on
the common household facts of Eastern experience instead of on
the technicalities of Western science, which instead of being so
indeterminate and fanciful as at times to be self-contradictory
and grotesque, is coherent and impressive, we really have no
alternative before us. We cannot but choose the one and reject
the other.
As we passed along we should find small rows of
houses and shops, broken here and there by a wide
stretch of blank wall, behind which were the mansions,
harems, courtyards of its wealthier inhabitants. Round
and within the low narrow gates which gave access to
these mansions, we should see armed men lounging
whose duty it is to guard the premises against robbers This locust (châgâb) is one of the four kinds which the Law
of Moses marked out as fit for human food. To this day several
kinds of locust are held to be an agreeable and nutritious diet.
There are many ways of preparing them for the table. They
may be pounded with flour and water, and made into cakes.
They may be smoked, boiled, roasted, stewed, and fried in butter.
They may be salted with salt; and thus treated are eaten by the
Arabs as a great delicacy. Or they may be dried in the sun, and
then steeped in wine: baskets of them, prepared in this way, are
to be commonly seen in Eastern markets. Dr. Kitto, who often
ate them, says that they taste like shrimps; Dr. Shaw says that
they are quite as good as our freshwater crayfish. The caper-plant grows abundantly in Asia, as it does also
in Africa and Southern Europe. It commonly springs in the
crevices of walls, on heaps of ruins, or on barren wastes, and
forms a diffuse many-branched shrub. Its flowers are large and
showy: the four petals are white, but the long numerous stamens
have their filaments tinged with purple, and terminate in yellow
anthers. As the ovary ripens it droops and forms a pear-shaped
berry, which holds in its pulp many small seeds. Almost every
part of the shrub has been used as a condiment by the ancients.
The stalk and seed were salted, or preserved in vinegar or wine.
Its buds are still held to be an agreeable sauce—we eat them
with boiled mutton. And the berries possess irritant properties
which win them high esteem among the Orientals as a provocative
to appetite. The fruit of the almond-tree is still reckoned one of the
most delicate and delicious fruits in the East. We may fancy
that we are acquainted with it, that we know "almonds" at least
as well as we know "raisins." But, I believe, that the almond
we eat is only the kernel of the stone in the true almond; the
fruit itself is of the same order with apricots, peaches, plums.
Now suppose the day on which we rambled through
the city had been boisterous and lowering; that heavy
rain had fallen, obscuring all the lights of heaven; and
as the evening drew on, the thick clouds, instead
of dispersing, had "returned after the rain," so that
setting sun and rising moon, and the growing light of
stars, were all blotted from view (ver. 2). The tempest,
long in gathering, breaks on the city; the lightnings
flash through the darkness, making it more hideous;
the thunder crashes and rolls above the roofs; the
tearing rain beats at all lattices and floods all roads. Sir Henry Rawlinson says: "At the present day, among the
bons vivants of Persia, it is usual to sit down for hours before
dinner, drinking wine, and eating dried fruits, such as filberts,
almonds, pistachio-nuts, melon-seeds, etc. A party, indeed, often
sits down at seven o'clock, and the dinner is not brought in till
eleven. The dessert dishes, intermingled as they are with highly
seasoned delicacies, are supposed to have the effect of stimulating
the appetite."—Notes to Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. i., p. 274.
Such and so terrible is the tempest that at times
sweeps over an Eastern city. It should be borne in mind that the comparative rarity of
thunderstorms in Syria and the adjacent lands makes them much
more dreadful to the inhabitants of those countries. Throughout
the Old Testament, and especially in the Psalms, we find many
traces of the dread which such storms inspired—a dread almost
unaccountable to our accustomed nerves.
Death itself, as Coheleth proceeds to remind us
(ver. 6), cannot be escaped. Some day the cord will
break and the lamp fall; some day the jar or pitcher
must be broken, and the wheel, shattered, fall into the
well. Death is the common event. It befalls not only
the sinful and injurious, but also the useful and the
good. Our life may have been like a "golden" lamp
This, then, according to the Hebrew Preacher, is the ideal man, the man who achieves the Quest of the Chief Good:—Charitable, dutiful, cheerful, he prepares for death by a useful and happy life, for future judgment by a constant reference to the present judgment, for meeting God hereafter by walking with Him here.
Chap. XII., Vers. 8-14.
As the main ethical, literary, and historical interest of the
whole Book is gathered up into this brief Epilogue, I offer no
apology for the comparative length of my treatment of it.
Coheleth commences (ver. 8) by once more striking
the keynote to which all his work is set: "Vanity of
vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity!" We are
not, however, to take these words as announcing his
deliberate verdict on the sum of human endeavours and
affairs; for he has now discovered the true abiding
Good which underlies all the vanities of earth and
time. His repetition of this familiar phrase is simply
Having thus reminded us of the several stages of
his Quest, and of the verdict which he had been compelled
to pronounce at the close of each but the last,
Coheleth proceeds (ver. 9) to set forth his qualifications
for undertaking this sore task: "Not only was the
Preacher a wise man, he also taught the people wisdom,
and composed, collected, and arranged many proverbs"
or parables, the proverb being a condensed parable and
the parable an expanded proverb. His claims are that
he is a sage, and a public teacher, who has both made
many proverbs of his own, collected the wise sayings of
other sages, and has so arranged them as to convey
a connected and definite teaching to his disciples; and
his motive in setting forth these claims is, no doubt,
Now during the Captivity there was a singular outbreak
of literary activity in the Hebrew race. Even
yet this crisis in their history is little studied and
understood; but we shall only follow the Preacher's
meaning through vv. 9-12 as we read them in the light
of this striking event. That a change of the most
radical and extraordinary kind passed upon the Hebrews
of this period, that they were by some means drawn
to a study of their Sacred Writings much more
thorough and intense than any which went before it,
we know; but of the causes of this change we are not
so well informed. In the Introduction, however, I have tried to give what is
known of the history of this period. Roughly speaking, I believe
the Jews owed their literary advance mainly to contact with the
inquisitive and learned Babylonians, and their religious advance
mainly to the sorrows of the Captivity and their contact with the
pure faith of the primitive Persians. Emmanuel Deutsch, whose premature death is still lamented
by many as an irreparable loss. The passage will be found in
his celebrated article on The Talmud in The Quarterly of
October 1867. "The Quest of the Chief Good" was published
at the close of that year. And at this point in it, while Deutsch
was still alive, but before I knew him personally, I gently complained
of the loss he had unwittingly inflicted on me. I had
for ten years been collecting the gnomic sayings of the Talmud
from any quarter open to one to whom the Talmud itself was a
sealed book, and had indeed printed some two score of them in
the Christian Spectator for 1866. And here came one who "out
of his profuse wealth carelessly flung down most of my special
treasures." Only half-a-dozen of the sayings I had collected
now had any stamp of novelty on them to the thousands who
had revelled in the wit and learning of that famous article in
The Quarterly. And of these I ventured to call special attention
to four which seemed to me of special value and beauty; viz.,
those on the four kinds of students, on new and old flasks, on
not serving God for the sake of reward, and on doing God's will
as if it were our will: they will all be found in this Section.
But if I lost something, I also gained much by the appearance
of that article, as those who read what follows will discover,
although it only came into my hands as I was correcting the
proofs of the final pages in my Book.
The more we think of this change, the more the
wonder grows. Good kings and inspired prophets had
desired to see the nation devoted to the Word of the
Lord, had spent their lives in vain endeavours to recall
the thought and affection of their race to the Sacred
Records in which the will of God was revealed. But
what they failed to do was done when the inspiration
of the Almighty was withdrawn and the voice of
Prophecy had grown mute. In their Captivity, under
the strange wrongs and miseries of their exile, the
Jews remembered God their Maker, Giver of songs in
the night. They betook themselves to the study of the
Sacred Oracles. They began to acquaint themselves
with all wisdom that they might define and illustrate
whatever was obscure in the Scriptures of their fathers.
They commenced that elaborate systematic commentary
of which many noble fragments are still extant.
They drew new truths from the old letter, or from the
collocation of scattered passages,—as, for instance, the
In such an age the words of a professed and acknowledged
Sage would carry great weight. If, besides
being "a wise man," he was a recognised "teacher," a
man whose wisdom was stamped by public and official
approval, whatever fell from his lips would command
public attention: for these teachers, or rabbis, were the
real rulers of the time, and not the pharisees or the
priests, or even the politicians. They might be, they
often were, "tent-makers, sandal-makers, weavers, carpenters,
tanners, bakers, cooks"; for it is among their
highest claims to our respect that these learned rabbis
reverenced labour, however menial or toilsome, that
they held mere scholarship and piety of little worth
unless conjoined with regular and healthy physical
exertion. But, however toilsome their lives or humble
their circumstances, these wise men were "masters of
the law." It was their special function to interpret the
Law of Moses—which, remember, was the law of the
Such a rabbi was Coheleth. He was of "the
Wise"; he was a "master of the law." And, in addition
to these claims, he was also a teacher and an author
who, besides "composing," had "collected and arranged
many proverbs." Than this latter he could hardly
have any higher claim to the regard, and even to the
affection, of the Hebrew public. The passionate fondness
of Oriental races for proverbs, fables, stories
of any kind, is well known. And the Jews for whom
Coheleth wrote took, as was natural at such a time, an
extraordinary delight, extraordinary even for the East,
From this description of the motives which had
What did these Masters teach? Everything almost—at
least everything then known. It is true that
their main function was to interpret and enforce the
law of Moses; but this function demanded all science
for its adequate fulfilment. Take a simple illustration.
The Law said, "Thou shalt not kill." Here, if ever,
is a plain and simple statute, with no ambiguities, no
qualifications, capable neither of misconstruction nor
evasion. Anybody may remember it, and know what
it means. May they? I am not so sure of that. The
Law says I am not to kill. What, not in self-defence!
not to save honour from outrage! not in a patriotic
war! not to save my homestead from the freebooter
or my house from the midnight thief! not when my
kinsman is slain before my eyes and in my defence!
Many similar cases might be mooted, and were mooted,
by the Jews. The Master had to consider such cases
as these, to study the recorded and traditional verdicts
of previous judges, the glosses and comments of other
Masters; he had to lay down rules and to apply rules
to particular and exceptional cases, just as our English
Judges have to define the Common Law or to interpret
a Parliamentary Statute. The growing wants of
the Commonwealth, the increasing complexity of the
relations of life as the people of Israel came into
Even in the application of known and definite laws
there was need for care, and science, and thought.
"The Mosaic code," says Deutsch, "has injunctions
about the Sabbatical journey; the distance had to be
measured and calculated, and mathematics were called
into play. Seeds, plants, and animals had to be studied
in connection with many precepts regarding them, and
natural history had to be appealed to. Then there
were the purely hygienic paragraphs, which necessitated
for their precision a knowledge of all the medical
science of the time. The seasons and the feast-days
were regulated by the phases of the moon; and astronomy,
The proofs that this varied knowledge was acquired and patiently applied to the study of the Law by these "masters in Israel" are still with us in many learned sayings and essays of that period; and in all these the conservative element or temper is sufficiently prominent. Their leading aim was, obviously, to honour the law of Moses; to preserve its spirit even in the new rules or codes which the changed circumstances of the time imperatively required; to fix their stakes and pitch their tents in the old fields of thought. So obvious is this aim, even in the familiar pages of the New Testament, that I need not illustrate it.
But, on the other hand, the signs of progress are no
Sometimes, as I have said, the progressive Sage and
the conservative Master would be united in the same
person; for there are those, though there are not too
many of them, who can "stand on the old ways" and
yet "look for the new." But, often, no doubt, the two
would be divided and opposed, then as now. For in
thought, as in politics, there are always two great
parties; the one, looking back with affectionate reverence
and regret on the past, and set to "keep invention in a
noted weed;" the other, looking forward with eager
hope and desire to the future, and attached to "new-found
methods and to compounds strange;" the one,
bent on conserving as much as possible of the large
heritage which our fathers have bequeathed us; the
other, bent on leaving a larger and less encumbered
inheritance to those that shall be after them. The
danger of the conservative thinker is that he may hold
the debts on the estate as part of the estate, that he may
set himself against all liquidations, all better methods
of management, against improvement in every form.
The danger of the progressive thinker is that, in his
generous ambition to improve and enlarge the estate,
he may break violently from the past, and cast away
many heirlooms and hoarded treasures that would add
It is to be observed, however, that our accomplished
Sage limits the field of mental activity on either hand
(ver. 12). His children, his disciples—"my son" was
the rabbi's customary term for his pupils, as "rabbi,"
i.e. "my father," was the title by which the pupil addressed
his master—are to beware both of the "many
books" of the making of which there was even
then "no end," and of that over-addiction to study
Nor is the caution against "many books," at which
some critics have taken grave offence, the illiberal
sentiment it has often been pronounced. For, no
doubt, Coheleth, like other wise Hebrews, was fully
prepared to study whatever science would throw light
on the Divine Law, or teach men how to live. Mathematics,
astronomy, natural history, medicine, casuistry,
the ethical and religious systems of the East and the
West,—some knowledge of all these various branches
of learning was necessary, as has been shown, to
those who had to interpret and administer the statutes
of the Mosaic code, and to supplement them with rules
appropriate to the new conditions of the time. In these
If the sentiment which dictated this course was in
part a mistaken sentiment, it sprang from a noble
motive. For no ordinance could be more self-denying
to a learned and literary class than one which forbade
them to put on record the results of their researches,
the conclusions of their wisdom, and thus to win name
and fame and use in after generations. But was their
course, after all, one which calls for censure? Has
the world ever produced a literature so noble, so pure,
so lofty and heroic in its animating spirit, as that of
the Hebrew historians and poets? "The world is
forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best
things," says Matthew Arnold in his Preface to his
selection of Wordsworth's poems, and proceeds to
define the best things as those works of the great
masters of song which have won the approval "of the
whole group of civilised nations." But even those
whom the civilised world has acclaimed as its highest
and best have confessed that in the Bible, viewed
simply as literature, their noblest work is far excelled:
and what sane man will deny that "Faust," for example,
would cut a sorry figure if compared with "Job," which
our own greatest living poet has pronounced "the finest
poem whether of ancient or of modern times," or Wordsworth
himself if placed side by side with Isaiah? Who
If any of us still suspect the Preacher's words of
illiberality, and say, "There was no need to oppose the
one Book to the many, and to depreciate these in order
to magnify that," we have only to consider the historical
So far the Epilogue may seem a mere digression, not
without interest and value indeed, but having no vital
connection with the main theme of the Poem. It tells
us that the Preacher was a sage, a recognised official
teacher, the master of an assembly, a doctor of laws,
an author who had expended much labour on many
proverbs, a conservative shepherd pitching his tent
on familiar fields of thought, a progressive herdsman
goading men on to new pastures—not Solomon therefore,
by the way, for who would have described him
in such terms as these? If we are glad to know so
much of him, we cannot but ask, What has all this to
do with the quest of the Chief Good? It has this to
do with it. Coheleth has achieved the quest; he has
solved his problem, and has given us his solution
of it. He is about to repeat that solution. To give
emphasis and force to the repetition, that he may carry
his readers more fully with him, he dwells on his
claims to their respect, their confidence, their affection.
He is all that they most admire; he carries the very
authority to which they most willingly defer. If they
And what is the conclusion which he is at such pains to enforce? "The conclusion of the matter is this; that God taketh cognizance of all things: fear Him, therefore, and keep his commandments, for this it behoveth every man to do; since God will bring every deed to the judgment appointed for every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be bad" (vv. 13, 14).
Now that this "conclusion" is simply a repetition, in
part expanded and in part condensed, of that with which
the Preacher closes the previous Section, is obvious.
There he incites men to a life of virtue with two leading
motives: first, by the fact of the present constant
judgment of God; and, secondly, by the prospect of a
future, a more searching and decisive, judgment. Here
If we compare these two summaries, there seems at
first rather difference than resemblance between them:
the one appears, if more indefinite, much more comprehensive,
than the other. Yet there is one point of
resemblance which soon strikes us. For we know by
this time that on the Preacher's lips "Fear God" does
not mean "Be afraid of God;" that it indicates and
demands just that reverent sense of the Divine Presence,
that strong inward conviction of the constant judgment
He passes on all our ways and motives and thoughts,
which Coheleth has already affirmed to be a prime
safeguard of virtue. It is the phrase "and keep his
commandments" that sounds so much larger than
Yes and No. It is not as having this large perfect
ideal distinctly before his mind that he utters the
injunction, although in the course of this Book he has
glanced at every element of it; nor even as having so
much of it in his mind as is expressed in the law that
came by Moses, although that too includes precepts for
the physical and the political as well as for the moral
Do we thus limit and degrade the moral ideal, or
represent him as degrading and limiting it? By no
means: for to love our neighbour, to discharge the
present duty whatever rain may fall and whatever
storm may blow, to carry a bright hopeful spirit
through all our toils and charities; to do this in the
fear of God, as in his Presence, because He is judging
and will judge us—this, surely, includes all that is
What advantage, then, is there in saying, "Be kind,
be dutiful, be cheerful," over saying, "Obey the laws of
God"? There is this great practical advantage that,
while in the last resort the one rule of life is as comprehensive
as the other, and just as difficult, it is more
definite, more portable, and does not sound so difficult.
It is the very advantage which our Lord's memorable
summary, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself," has over the
Law and the Prophets. Bid a man keep the whole
Mosaic code as interpreted by the prophets of a thousand
years, and you set him a task so heavy, so hopeless,
that he may well decline it; only to understand the
In nothing, indeed, does the wisdom of the Hebrew
sages show its superiority over that of the other sages
of antiquity more decisively than in its adaptation to
the practical needs of men busied in the common affairs
of life, and with no learning and no leisure for the
study of large intricate problems. It comes straight
down into the beaten ways of men. If you read Confucius,
for example, and still more if you read Plato, you
cannot fail to be struck with their immense grasp of
thought, or their profound learning, or even their moral
enthusiasm; as you read, you will often meet with wise
rules of life expressed in beautiful forms. And yet your
main feeling will be that they give you, and men like you,
if at least you be of the common build, as most of us
are, little help; that unless you had their rare endowments,
or could give yourself largely and long to the This partial anticipation of the Golden Rule will be found
in the Confucian Analects, book xv., chap. xxiii. "Tsze-kung
asked, saying, 'Is there one word which may serve as a rule
of practice for all one's life?' The Master said, 'Is not reciprocity
such a word? What you do not want done to yourself,
do not do to others.'" The same rule is given in another form
in book v., chap. i of the Analects. The other phrases
put into the sage's mouth are quoted from Dr. Legge's translation
of this work.
All—yet even this is much; even for this we shall
need the pressure of constant and weighty motives:
for it is not only occasional acts which are required of
us, but settled tempers and habits of goodwill, industry,
and cheerfulness; and to love all men, to rejoice
alway, to do our duty in all weathers and all moods,
is very hard work to our feeble, selfish, and easily-dejected
natures. Does the Preacher supply us with
such motives as we need? He offers us two motives;
one in the present judgment, another in the future
judgment of God. "God is with you," he says, "taking
cognizance of all you do; and you will soon be with
God, to give Him an account of every secret and every
deed." But that is an appeal to fear—is it not? It is,
rather, an appeal to love and hope. He has no thought
of frightening us into obedience—for the obedience of
fear is not worth having, is not obedience in the true
sense; but he is trying to win and allure us to obedience.
For whatever terrors God's judgment or the
This, to some of us, may be a novel view whether
of the present or of the future judgment of God. For
the most part, I fear, we speak of the Divine judgments
as terrible and well-nigh unendurable. We would
escape them even here, if we could; but, above all, we
dread them when we shall stand before the bar at
which the secrets of all hearts will be disclosed. Now
we need not, and we must not, lose ought of the awe
and reverence for Him who is our God and Father
which, so far from impairing, deepens our love. But
we need to remember that fear is base, that it is the
enemy of love; that so long as we anticipate the
Divine judgments only or mainly with dread, we are
far from the love which gives value and charm to
"But the future judgment—that is so dreadful!"
Is it? God knows us as we are already: is it so very
much worse that we should know ourselves, and that
our neighbours should know us? If among our
"secrets" there be many things evil, are there not at
least some that are good? Do we not find ourselves
perpetually thwarted or hindered in our endeavours to
give form and scope to our purest emotions, our
tenderest sympathies, our loftiest resolves? Do we not
perpetually complain that, when we would do good,
even if evil is not present to overcome the good, it is
present to mar it, to make our goodness poor, scanty,
ungraceful? Well, these obstructed purposes and intentions
and resolves, all the good in us that has been
frustrated or deformed, or limited, by our social conditions, Maurice de Guérin in his Journal.
To have got out of "the corrupted currents" of which audacious and strong injustice so often avails itself to our hurt; to be quit of all the shuffling equivocations by which we often pervert the true character of our actions, and persuade ourselves that we are other and better than we are; to be compelled to look our faults straight and fairly in the face; to have all the latent goodness of our natures developed, and their fettered and obstructed virtue liberated from every bond; to see our every "secret" good as well as bad, and our every "deed" good as well as bad, exposed in their true colours: is there no hope, no comfort for us, in such a prospect as this? It is a prospect full of comfort, full of hope, if at least we have any real trust in the grace and goodness of God; and if, through his grace, we have set ourselves to do our duty, to love our neighbour, and to bear the changes and burdens of life with a patient cheerful heart.
This feeling is justified by the issue. Now that the Preacher has completed his circle of thought, we can see that it is well for a man to rejoice and take pleasure in his labours, that God did mean him to work for the enjoyment of his heart, that there is a mirth purer and more enduring than that which springs from knowledge, or from the gratification of the senses, or from success in affairs, or from the possession of much goods,—a mirth for this life which expands and deepens into an everlasting joy. Throughout his Quest he has held fast to the conviction that "it is a comely fashion to be glad," though he could allege no better reason for his conviction than the transitoriness of life and the impossibility of reaching any higher good. Before he could justify this conviction, he must achieve his Quest. It is only when he has learned to regard our life—
that his plaintive minors pass into the frank, jocund tones appropriate to a sincere and well-grounded mirth. Now he can cease to "trouble heaven with his bootless cries" on the indiscrimination of death and the vanity of life. He can now say to his soul,
for he has discovered that no morrow can any more
injure him, no sorrow rob him of his true joy. God is
with him, observing all the postures and moods of his
soul, and adapting all his circumstances to the correction
of what is evil in him or the cultivation of what is
good. There is no dark impassable gulf between this
world and the next; life does not cease at death, but
grows more intense and full; death is but a second
birth into a second and better life, a life of ampler and
happier conditions, and yet a life which is the continuation
and consummation of that we now live in the
flesh. All that he has to do, therefore, is to "fear
God and keep his commandments," leaving the issues
of his labour in the Hands which bend all things to a
final goal of good. What though the clouds drop rain
and can take "fortune's buffets and rewards with equal
thanks." His cheerful content does not lie at the mercy
of accident; the winds and waves of vicissitude cannot
prevail against it: for it has two broad and solid
foundations; one on earth, and the other in heaven.
On the one hand, it springs from a faithful discharge of
personal duty and the neighbourly charity which hopeth
all things and endureth all things; on the other hand,
it springs from the conviction that God takes note of
Now, too, without fear or favour, without any prejudice
for or against his conclusion because we find it
in Holy Writ, we may ask ourselves, Has the Preacher
satisfactorily solved the problem which he took in hand?
has he really achieved his Quest and attained the Chief
Good? One thing is quite clear; he has not lost
himself in speculations foreign to our experience and
That the Preacher should have attacked this common problem, and should have handled it with the practical good sense which characterises his Poem, is a point, and a large point, in his favour.
Nor is the conclusion at which he arrives, in its
substance, peculiar to him, or even to the Scriptures.
He says: The perfect man, the ideal man, is he who
addresses himself to the present duty untroubled by
adverse clouds and currents, who so loves his neighbour
that he can do good even to the evil and the unthankful,
and who carries a brave cheerful temper to the
unrewarded toils and sacrifices of his life, because God
is with him, taking note of all he does, and because
there is a future life for which this course of duty,
This, then, is the Hebrew solution of "the common
problem." It is also the Christian solution. For when
"the Fellow of the Lord of hosts," instead of "clutching
at his equality with God," humbled Himself and took
on Him the form of a servant, the very ideal of perfect
manhood became incarnate in this "man from heaven."
Does the Hebrew Preacher, backed by the consentient
voices of the great sages of Antiquity, demand that the
ideal man, moved thereto by his sense of a constant
Divine Presence and the hope of God's future judgment,
should cast the bread of his charity on the thankless
waters of neighbourly ingratitude, give himself with all
diligence to the discharge of duty whatever clouds may
darken his sky, whatever unkindly wind may nip his
harvest, and maintain a calm and cheerful temper in
all weathers, and through all the changing scenes and
Nor did the Lord Jesus help us in our quest of the Chief Good only by becoming a Pattern of all virtue and excellence. The work of his Redemption is a still more sovereign help. By the sacrifice of the Cross He took away the sins which had rendered the pursuit of excellence a wellnigh hopeless task. By the impartation of his Spirit, no less than by the inspiration of his Example, He seeks to win us to the love of our neighbour, to fidelity in the discharge of our daily duty, and to that cheerful and constant trust in the providence of God by which we are redeemed from the bondage of care and fear. He, the Immanuel, by taking our flesh and dwelling among us, has proved that "God is with us," that He will in very deed dwell with men upon the earth. He, the Victor over death, by his resurrection from the grave, has proved the truth of a future life and a future judgment with arguments of a force and quality unknown to our Hebrew fathers.
So that now as of old, now even more demonstrably
than of old, the conclusion of the whole matter is that
vi vii viii ix 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335