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 tampered with the text before the dislocation had taken place. From him proceed 'the protests against Koheleth's principles on the obedience due to the king in viii. 1, 5a] as well as the offensive expressions in xi. 5, xii. 4, 5, by which he sought to make the book ridiculous and contemptible.' Subsequently to him, and after the leaves had been thrown into confusion, another writer made 'well-meaning additions,' and so brought the book into nearly its present form; among these additions was the Epilogue. His aim was 'to brighten Koheleth's gloomy view of the world, partly by emphasising the doctrine of a present retribution, but still more by pointing to a future judgment in which inequalities should be rectified.' The third hand is that of the so-called pseudo-Solomonic interpolator. He must have gone to work after the Epilogist, for the latter simply knows Koheleth as a wise man skilled in proverbial composition. Bickell also claims to make transpositions on a small scale, and offers many emendations sometimes based on the Septuagint. 'Habent sua fata libelli.'

I have said that Bickell's explanation of the want of order in Ecclesiastes is a purely mechanical one. It is not on that account to be rejected. A German reviewer has mentioned a case within his own experience in which the double leaves of one of the fasciculi of an Oriental MS. had been disarranged in the binding, a circumstance which had led to various additions and alterations. It may indeed be urged as an objection that the Septuagint text differs in no very material respect from the Massoretic. But a work like Ecclesiastes had at first in all probability but a very slight circulation, so that an accident to a single MS. would naturally involve unusually serious consequences. Still from the possibility to the actuality of the 'accident' is a long step. Apart from other difficulties in the theory, the number and arbitrariness of the transpositions, additions, and alterations are reason enough to make one hesitate to accept it; and when we pass from the very plausible arrangement of the contents (Bickell, pp. 53, 54) to the translation of the text, it is often only