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Nichtigkeiten in Geschäften, Entwürfen, Speculationen und Vergnügen, zugleich mit dem was einzig in ihm wahr, daurend, fortgehend, wechselnd, lohnend ist, reicher, eindringlicher, kürzer beschriebe, als dieses.

But I must retrace my steps. One of my four critics has yet to be briefly characterised— of Padua, best known as the author of a Hebrew commentary on Isaiah, but also a master in later Hebrew and Aramaic scholarship. As a youth of twenty-four he wrote a deeply felt and somewhat eccentrically ingenious treatise on Koheleth, which he kept by him till 1860, when it appeared in one of the annual volumes of essays and reviews called Ozar Nechmad. In it he maintains, with profound indignation at the unworthy post-Exile writer, that the Book of Ecclesiastes denies the immortality of the soul, and recommends a life of sensuous pleasure. The writer's name, however, was, he thinks, Koheleth, and his fraud in assuming the name of Solomon was detected by the wise men of his time, who struck out the assumed name and substituted Koheleth (leaving however the words 'son of David, king in Jerusalem,' as a record of the imposture). Later students, however, were unsuspicious enough to accept the work as Solomon's, and being unable to exclude a Solomonic writing from the Canon, they inserted three qualifying half-verses of an orthodox character, viz. 'and know that for all this God will bring thee into judgment' (xi. 6b]); 'and remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth' (xii. 1a]); 'and the spirit shall return to God who gave it' (xii. 8b[**? [Greek: beta]]). This latter view, which has the doubtful support of a Talmudic passage, appears to me, though from the nature of the case uncertain, and susceptible, as I think, of modification, yet in itself probable as restoring harmony to the book, and in accordance with the treatment of other Biblical texts by the Soferim (or students and editors of Scripture). Geiger may have fallen into infinite extravagances, but he has at any rate shown that the early Soferim modified many passages in the interests of orthodoxy and edification. If so, they did but(see Ginsburg, p. 98).]