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 CHAPTER X.

DATE AND PLACE OF COMPOSITION.

Jewish tradition, while admitting a Hezekian or post-Hezekian redaction of the book, assigns the original authorship of Ecclesiastes to Solomon. The Song of Songs it regards as the monument of this king's early manhood, the Book of Proverbs of his middle age, and the semi-philosophical meditations before us as the work of his old age. The tradition was connected by the Aggada with the favourite legend of the discrowned Solomon, but is based upon the book itself, the passages due to the literary fiction of Solomon's authorship (which Bickell indeed attributes to an interpolator) having been misunderstood. Would that the author of the Lectures on the Jewish Church had given the weight of his name to the true explanation of these passages! The reticence of the lines devoted in the second volume of the Lectures to Ecclesiastes has led some critics to imagine that according to Dean Stanley, this book, like much of Proverbs, might possibly be the work of the 'wisest' of Israel's kings. Little had the author profited by Ewald if he really allowed such an absolute legend the smallest standing-ground among reasonable hypotheses! Whichever way we look, whether to the social picture, or to the language, or to the ideas of the book, its recent origin forces itself upon us. The social picture and the ideas need not detain us here. Either Solomon was transported in prophetic ecstasy to far distant times (the Targum on Koheleth frequently describes him as a prophet), or the writer is a child of the dawning modern age of Judaism. The former alternative is plainly impossible. Political servitude, and a generally depressed state of