Page:Job and Solomon (1887).djvu/225

 the notes seemed to be in the narrative and even autobiographic style), and were received with much favour by the students of 'wisdom,' more, I should think, owing to the intrinsic interest of the book than to the literary fiction of Solomonic authorship. If this hypothesis be correct, we need not be surprised either at the author's inconsistencies in opinion, or at the general roughness of his style. The book may not even be all one man's work. Luther has already brought Ecclesiastes into connection with the Talmud. Now the proverbial sayings which interrupt our thinker's self-questionings on 'vanity of vanities' are like the Haggadic passages which gush forth like fountains in the weary waste of hair-*splitting Talmudic dialectics. No one has ever maintained the unity of the Talmud, and no one should be thought unreasonable for doubting the absolute freedom of Ecclesiastes from interpolations.

The third and last excuse which I have to offer is that the meditations of Koheleth partake of the nature of an experiment. He may indeed (as I have remarked) be a member of a school of writers, but his strikingly original manner compels us to regard him as a master rather than a disciple. No such purely reflective work had, so far as we know, as yet been produced in Hebrew literature. Similar moral difficulties to those which preoccupied our author had no doubt occurred to some of the prophets and poets, but they had not been sounded to their depths. Even in the Book of Job the reflective spirit has very imperfect scope. The speeches soon pass into a lyric strain, and Jehovah Himself closes the discussion by imposing silence. But the author of Ecclesiastes was a thinker, not a lyrist, and was compelled to form his own vehicle of thought. He 'sought,' indeed, 'to find out pleasant words' (xii. 10), but had to strain the powers of an unpliant language to the uttermost, to coin (presumably) new words, and apply old ones in fresh senses, till he might well have complained (to apply Lucretius) 'propter