Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/903

Rh P R O P E O 879 convocation of the estates in 1787 the two upper houses refused to bear their share of taxation, and in 1789, in the states-general of the kingdom, Mirabeau with his col leagues renounced the freedom and independence of the province. The division of Provence into departments in 1790 finally obliterated all traces of the ancient con stitution, but the people still preserve in the soft tones of their langue d oc an undying reminder of their former independence. (ff. B. B.) PROVERBS, BOOK OF. The title of the book of Pro verbs is &quot;The Proverbs of Solomon &quot; (n^t? ^D, mishle shelomoh, or more shortly mishle, for which Origen gives the feminine form misloth, Euseb., H. E., vi. 25). The title in the LXX. is a literal rendering of the Hebrew, Hapoi/jiLaL SaAw/toWos. In early times the book was frequently referred to both among Jews and Christians under the name of &quot; Wisdom &quot; or &quot; The Wisdom that com prises all Virtues &quot; (17 Trai/aperos cro&amp;lt;ia, Clem. Rom., ch. 57). This name, however, was employed somewhat indis criminately, for not only Proverbs but also Ecclesiastes and the apocryphal books Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom were also designated by it, and sometimes apparently the whole third division of the canon (Lightfoot, Epp. of S. Clement, p. 164s.). The book of Proverbs as it now lies before us consists of a number of distinct parts. 1. We have, chap. i. 1-7 (or i. 1-6 as some think), a general heading and preface, giving the title of the book and the purposes to be served by its contents : &quot;The Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel. To know wisdom and instruction ... to give subtlety to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion ... to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their dark sayings.&quot; This is followed by the fundamental maxim of the Wisdom, &quot; The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.&quot; The question to what parts of the book this preface extends is not easy to settle. 2. This general preface is followed by a lengthy pas sage, i. 8-ix. 18, which consists, not of detached proverbs, though a number of such proverbs are scattered through it, but of connected discourses in praise of wisdom and the benefits which she confers on those who embrace her. The speaker is one of the wise, or a type of them, who ad dresses his youthful pupil or friend as &quot;my son,&quot; though at several points wisdom herself is introduced speaking, displaying her graces, offering herself to men, narrating her history, and magnifying the delights which they who follow her enjoy, as well as painting in dark colours the evils from which she preserves them. Attempts have been made to divide the passage into distinct sections, but without much success. Ewald counts three general divisions, Bertheau seven, Hooykaas eleven, and Delitzsch fifteen. The passage is in the main homogeneous, though containing at more places than one elements which at first sight might appear foreign (e.g., vi. 1 sq.), and on the whole at least is the composition of a single author. Several of its characteristics, such as the style, and par ticularly the personification of wisdom in chap. viii. and else where, one of the most remarkable and beautiful things in Hebrew literature, indicate that the passage belongs to an advanced stage of the Hebrew wisdom. 3. Then follows the largest section in the book, x. 1- xxii. 10, with a new heading, &quot; The Proverbs of Solomon.&quot; This division consists of a number of verses three hundred and seventy-four, it is said each of which contains a single proverb or maxim in two lines, the only exception being xix. 7, which has three lines, but this is probably due to one member of a second verse having fallen out. The kind of poetical parallelism most common in these verses is the antithetic, of the type &quot;A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother&quot; (x. 1). This typeof parallelism prevails almost exclusivelyin x.-xv., after which other types are more commonly introduced. The proverbs in this collection are of a very miscellaneous character, and are thrown together without any classifica tion or regard to subject, though occasionally a few verses are found to follow one another having reference to a common topic. 4. After this comes a small collection consisting of two parts which have been put together, xxii. 17-xxiv. 22 and xxiv. 23-34. The author of the first collection informs his son or disciple that what he addresses to him is &quot; words of the wise &quot; (xxii. 17) ; and the second small code is inscribed &quot; These also are by the wise &quot; (xxiv. 23). The proverbs in this collection sometimes make one verse, sometimes two or three, and even occasionally run out to a short proverbial discourse. 5. Then follows an important collection, xxv.-xxix., with the inscription, &quot; These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied out &quot; (xxv. 1). The expression &quot;copied out&quot; (LXX. eeypai/wro), lit. &quot; transferred &quot; or removed from one place to another, implies that the men of Hezekiah made use of written sources in forming their collection. The notice is of great historical interest. Hezekiah, besides being a wise and reforming king, had probably literary tastes ; he has the reputation of having been a poet himself (Isa. xxxviii.) ; and his &quot; men &quot; were no doubt scholars and scribes about his court, who shared in his tastes and pursuits, and under his direction used their opportunities to rescue from oblivion the precious remains of the most ancient wisdom by transferring them from the small collections in which they lay hidden into a single and authorized code (cf. 2 Kings xviii. 37). It may perhaps be considered some corroboration of the genuine historical character of the inscription that the collection begins with a number of proverbs relating to kings. The maxims in this code, particularly in xxv.-xxvii., approach much nearer to what we should imagine the early popular proverb to have been than many of those in the other large collection ; they are simple, usually contain a comparison, and have none of the abstractness which characterizes many of the maxims in x.-xxii. This may be regarded as a guarantee of their great antiquity. 6. Two small pieces then follow, evidently related to one another, xxx. and xxxi. 1-9, the former with the inscription, &quot;The words of Agur, the son of Jakeh,&quot; and the other with the heading, &quot; The words of King Lemuel.&quot; The inscriptions to these two pieces are very obscure. In the former the A. V. can hardly be correct. More probably by a different division of words we should read &quot; The words of Agur the son of Jakeh of Massa. The man said, I have wearied myself, O God, I have wearied myself, O God, and am consumed ; for I am more brutish than any man,&quot; &c. The words are those of one who has striven to comprehend God and found the task above him (Ps. Ixxiii. 22). Possibly the above rendering re quires a slight correction in the text, already made in the Veneto-Greek version, which renders &quot;Jakeh the Massaite&quot; (Gen. xxiv. 14?). Similarly the heading in xxxi. should probably read &quot; The words of Lemuel king of Massa, wherewith his mother instructed him.&quot; It is uncertain whether the names Agur and Lemuel be real or fictitious. 7. Finally the book is closed by an alphabetical poem, xxxi. 10-31, in praise of the virtuous (that is, the active, capable) woman. The contents of these several sections are very various and not easy to classify. The proverbialists occupy them selves with life in all its aspects. Sometimes they simply