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 CHAPTER IV.

THE SECOND COLLECTION AND ITS APPENDICES.

The next proverbial anthology (xxv.-xxix.) like its chief predecessor is described in the heading as 'Proverbs of Solomon.' The social state however presupposed in many of them is so different from that of the Solomonic age that we may at once reject the theory of the wise king's authorship. Another name with which in xxv. 1 the work is connected is that of Hezekiah, who has been suggestively called 'the Pisistratus of Judah.' The comparison halts, no doubt; for Pisistratus and his 'companions' meant to collect the whole of the Homeric poems, whereas completeness can hardly have been the object of those 'friends (or counsellors) of Hezekiah' who 'collected' the 'Proverbs of Solomon' in xxv. 2-xxix. 27; at least, we know that there was much proverbial wisdom in circulation which had as good or as bad a claim to be called 'Solomonic' as the sayings which they have admitted into their anthology. It may indeed well be doubted whether the compilers had any thought of collecting the relics (now already), followed by the Peshitto and the Targum: Aquila, [Greek: metêran]. The Greek, curiously enough, inserts an epithet for the proverbs, viz. [Greek: ai hadiakritoi], i.e. either impossible to distinguish, miscellaneous (so Sophocles, Lexicon), or better, difficult to interpret. Symmachus has [Greek: adiakritos] for bōhū, Gen. i. 2. The Peshitto and Targum render the Greek of our passage by 'deep proverbs,' i.e. enigmatical ones (so too Aquila and Theodotion in the Syro-hexapla).]