TEXT.

Eccles. xii. 12. And further, by these, my son, be admonished; of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

TARGUM.

Sanhedrin, the masters of the Halachas and Midrashim which were given through Moses the prophet; who alone fed the people

of the house of Israel in the wilderness with manna and delicacies.

And more than these, my son, take care to make many books of wisdom without an end, to study much the words of the law and to consider the weariness of the flesh.

It will be felt from the extracts thus brought together1 that the Targum is on the whole pleasanter reading than the Midrash. The traces of discordant interpretation are carefully effaced. All flows on smoothly as if there never had been and never could be any doubt as to what the writer of the original book had meant. Hard sayings are made easy. A spiritual, or at least an ethical, turn is given to words which seemed at first to suggest quite other than spiritual conclusions. The writer of the book, whose identity with Solomon is not questioned for a moment, is made to appear not only as a moral teacher but in the higher character of a prophet. The illustrations drawn from the history of Israel, the introduction of the name of Jehovah, the constant reference to the Shechinah and the Law, give the paraphrase a national and historical character not possessed by the original. The influence of the planets as determining men's characters and the events that fashion them is brought in as a theory of predestination easier to receive than that which ascribes all that happens to the direct and immediate action of the Divine Will. All is done, in one sense, to edification.

The misfortune is, however, that the edification is purchased at the cost of making the writer say just the opposite, in many cases, of what he actually did say. As Koheleth personates

1 I have to acknowledge my obligations for these extracts to the translation of the Targum appended to Dr Ginsburg's Koheleth,

Solomon, so the paraphrast personates Koheleth, and the confessions of the Debater, with their strange oscillations and contrasts, become a fairly continuous homily. In all such interpretations, and the Targum of Koheleth is but a sample of a widespread class which includes other than Jewish commentators, there is at once an inherent absence of truthfulness and a want of reverence. The man will not face facts, but seeks to hide them or gloss them over. He assumes that he is wiser than the writer whom he interprets, practically, i.e. he claims for himself a higher inspiration. He prefers the traditions of the school in which he has been brought up to the freshness of the Divine word as it welled forth out of the experience of a human heart.

With the eleventh century we enter on a fresh line of Jewish interpreters of the book. The old rabbinical succession had more or less died out, and the Jewish school of Europe began to be conspicuous for a closer and more grammatical exegesis of the sacred text. An interesting survey of the literature which thus grew up, so far as it bears on the interpretation of Ecclesiastes, will be found in the Introduction to Dr Ginsburg's Commentary. It is marked, as might be expected, by more thoroughness and more individual study, a truer endeavour to get at the real meaning of the book. Each man takes his place in the great army of Commentators and works on his own responsibility. To go through their labour would be an almost interminable task. It was worth while to give some account of the Midrash and the Targum because they represented certain dominant methods and lines of thought, but it does not fall within the scope of this volume to examine the works of all Jewish interpreters simply because they are Jewish, any more than of those that are Christian.

CHAPTER VII.

ECCLESIASTES AND ITS PATRISTIC INTERPRETERS.

It does not fall, as has been just said, within the plan of the present book, to give a review of the Commentaries on Ecclesiastes that have preceded it, so far as they represent only the opinions of individual writers. The case is, however, as before, altered when they represent a school of thought or a stage in the history of interpretation, and where accordingly the outcome of their labours illustrates more or less completely the worth of the method they adopted, the authority which may rightly be given to the dicta of the School.

It has been said (Ginsburg, p. 99), that Ecclesiastes is nowhere quoted in the New Testament, and as far as direct, formal quotations are concerned the assertion is strictly true. It was not strange that it should thus be passed over. The controversy already referred to (Ch. III.) between the schools of Hillel and Shammai as to its reception into the Canon, the doubts that hung over the drift of its teaching, would naturally throw it into the background of the studies of devout Israelites. It would not be taught in schools. It was not read in Synagogues. It was out of harmony with the glowing hopes of those who were looking for the Christ or were satisfied that they had found Him. Traces of its not being altogether unknown to the writers of the New Testament may, however, be found. When St Paul teaches why"the creation was made subject to vanity” (Rom. viii. 20), using the same Greek word as that employed by the LXX. translators, we may recognise a reference to the dominant burden of the book. When St James writes “What is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away" (James iv. 14) we may hear something like an echo of Eccles. vi. 12.

The earlier Christian writers followed in the same track and the only trace of the book in the Apostolic Fathers is the quotation of Eccles. xii. 13 ("Fear God and keep His command

ments") in the Shepherd of Hermas (Mand. vII.). Justin quotes the Wisdom of Solomon but not Ecclesiastes. Irenæus neither names nor quotes it. Clement of Alexandria, who makes no less than twenty-six quotations from the Wisdom of Solomon, quotes in one solitary passage (Strom. I. 13) from Eccles. i. 16— 18, vii. 13. In Origen, though the quotations from Wisdom are still far more numerous, we have more traces of a thoughtful study. The vanitas vanitatum is connected with Rom. viii. 20 as above (de Princ. 1. 7, c. Cels. 1. 7). He supposes Eccles. i. 6 to have given occasion to the contemptuous language in which Celsus had spoken of Christians as talking of “circles upon circles" (c. Cels. VI. 34, 35). In Eccles. i. 9 he finds a confirmation of his belief that there have been worlds before the present world and that there will be others after it (de Princ. III. 5, c. Cels. IV. 12). The "Spirit of the ruler" (Eccles. x. 4) is interpreted of the evil Spirit (de Princ. III. 2). In the words "the earth abideth for ever" (Eccles. i. 4) he finds an instance of the use of the word "eternity” with a secondary and limited connotation (Comm. in Rom. B. VI.). He gives a mystical interpretation of Eccles. iv. 2 as meaning that those who are crucified with Christ are better than those that are living to the flesh; of the "untimely birth" of Eccles. vi. 3 as meaning Christ whose human nature never developed, as that of other men develops, into sin (Hom. VII. in Num.), and cites Eccles vii. 20, with Rom. xi. 33 as a confession that the ways of God are past finding out (de Princ. IV. 2).

The passages now cited are enough to shew that it was probable that those who had studied in the school of Origen would not entirely neglect a book to which he had thus directed their attention. His treatment of them indicates that they were likely to seek an escape from its real or seeming difficulties in an allegorizing, or, to use the Jewish phrase, a Haggadistic interpretation. And this accordingly is what we find. The earliest systematic treatment of Ecclesiastes is found in the Metaphrasis or Paraphrase of Gregory Thaumaturgus, who had studied under the great Alexandrian teacher. Of all patristic commentaries it is the simplest and most natural. From first to last there

is no strained allegorism or mysticism, finding in the text quite another meaning than that which was in the mind of the writer. The scepticism of Eccles. iii. 20, 21 is freely rendered, "The other kind of creatures have all the same breath of life and men have nothing more...For it is uncertain regarding the souls of men, whether they shall fly upwards; and regarding the others which the unreasoning creatures possess whether they shall fall downwards." The Epicurean counsel of Eccles. ix. 7-9 is stated without reserve, but is represented as the error of "men of vanity," which the writer rejects. The final close of the writer's thought (Eccles. xii. 7) is given without exaggeration, "For men who be on the earth there is but one salvation, that their souls acknowledge and wing their way to Him by whom they have been made." Perhaps the most remarkable passage of the Commentary is the way in which the paraphrase of Eccles. xii. 1-6 represents the original as depicting the approach of a great storm filling men with terror, anticipating in this the interpretation which Dr Ginsburg and Mr Cox have worked out with an elaborate fulness:

"Moreover it is right that thou shouldest fear God, while thou art yet young, before thou givest thyself over to evil things, and before the great and terrible day of God cometh, when the sun shall no longer shine, neither the moon, nor the other stars, but when in that storm and commotion of all things, the powers above shall be moved, that is, the angels who guard the world; so that the mighty men shall cease, and the women shall cease their labours, and shall flee into the dark places of their dwellings, and shall have all the doors shut; and a woman shall be restrained from grinding by fear, and shall speak with the weakest voice, like the tiniest bird; and all impure women shall sink into the earth, and cities and their blood-stained governments shall wait for the vengeance that comes from above, while the most bitter and bloody of all times hangs over them like a blossoming almond, and continuous punishments impend over them like a multitude of flying locusts and the transgressors are cast out of the way like a black and despicable caper plant. And the good man shall depart with rejoicing to his own ever