perhaps meaning Wisdom of the Everlasting Helper) to attest the divine mercies and faithfulness in all generations. This is in two verses, evidently ancient, which a later hand, apparently, has pointed with a specification of the covenant with David. After the "Selah" which ends these four verses come fourteen verses of sermonising upon them, in which nearly all of the points made by Job"s "comforters" are put in a nutsh.e.l.l. The sons of G.o.d who presented themselves, Satan among them, in his council (Job i. 6) appear here also (Ps. lx.x.xix. 6):
"Who among the sons of the G.o.ds is like unto Jahveh, A G.o.d very terrible in the council of the holy ones."
After the mighty things that "Jah" had done to his enemies have been affirmed an Elohist takes up the burden and a "vision" like that of Eliphaz (Job iv. 13) is appealed to:
"Then thou spakest in vision to thy holy ones."
The vision"s revelation (Job v. 17) "Happy is the man whom G.o.d correcteth" is also in this psalm (32, 33): "Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes, but my mercy will I not utterly take from him." And Eliphaz"s a.s.surance "thy seed will be great" (v. 25) corresponds with that in our psalm (verse 36), "His seed shall endure forever."
When the psalmist of the vision has pictured, as if in dissolving views, the military renown of David, G.o.d"s "servant," and his "horn,"
pointing to Solomon, G.o.d"s "first-born," the transgressions of the latter are intimated (30-33), but the seer continues to utter the divine promises:
"My covenant will I not break, Nor alter the thing that has gone out of my lips.
One thing have I sworn by my holiness; I will not lie unto David: His seed shall endure forever, And his throne as the sun before me; As the moon which is established forever: Faithful is the witness in the sky. Selah."
Then breaks out the indignant accuser:
"But thou HAST cast off and rejected!
Thou hast been wroth with thine "anointed"; Thou hast broken the covenant with thy "servant,"
Thou hast profaned his crown to the very dust; Thou hast broken down all his defences; Thou hast brought his strongholds to ruin!
All the wayfarers that pa.s.s by despoil him; He is become a reproach to his neighbors.
Thou hast exalted the right-hand of his adversaries, Thou hast made all his enemies to rejoice.
Yea, thou turnest back the edge of his sword, And hast not enabled him to stand in battle.
Thou hast made his brightness to cease, And hurled his throne down to the ground.
The days of his youth thou hast shortened: Thou hast covered him with shame! Selah."
A sarcastic "Selah," or "so it is!"--if Eben Ezra"s definition of Selah be correct.
Then follow four verses by a more timid plaintiff, who, almost in the words of Job (e.g., x. 20), reminds Jahveh of the shortness of life, and the impossibility of any return from the grave, and asks how long he intends to wait before fulfilling his promises. He also supplies Koheleth with a text by the pessimistic exclamation, "For what vanity hast thou created all the children of men"!
After this writer has sounded his "Selah," another rather more bitterly reminds Jahveh, in three verses, that not only his chosen people are in disgrace, but his own enemies are triumphant.
(These two are much like the writer of Psalms xliv. 9-26, who almost repeats the points made by the above three remonstrants, and asks Jahveh, "Why sleepest thou?")
Finally a Jahvist doxology, fainter than any appended to the other four books, completes this strange eighty-ninth psalm:
"Praised be Jahveh for evermore!
Amen, and Amen!"
Great is Diana of the Ephesians! Or is this the half-sardonic submission of Job under the whirlwind-answer, which extorted from him no tribute except a virtual admission that when the ethical debate became a question of which could wield the loudest whirlwinds, he surrendered!
In Job"s case the only recantation is that of Jahveh himself, who admits (xlii. 7) that Job had all along spoken the right thing about him (Jahveh). The epilogue is a complete denial of Jahvist theology.
Job"s small voice of scepticism which followed the whirlwind was never silenced. The fragment of Agur (Proverbs x.x.x. 1-4) appears to have been written as the alternative reply of Job to Jahveh. Job had said, "I am vile, I will lay my hand upon my mouth, I have uttered that I understand not." Agur adds ironically, "I am more stupid than other men, in me is no human understanding nor yet the wisdom to comprehend the science of sacred things." Then quoting Jahveh"s boast about distributing the wind (Job x.x.xviii. 24), about his "sons shouting for joy" (Ibid. 7), and giving the sea its garment of cloud (Ibid. 9), Agur, the "Hebrew Voltaire," as Professor Dillon aptly styles him, asks:
"Who has ascended into heaven and come down again?
Who can gather the wind in his fists?
Who can bind the seas in a garment?
Who can grasp all the ends of the earth?
Such an one I would question about G.o.d: "What is his name?
And what the name of his sons, if thou knowest?""
The stupid Jahvist commentator who follows Agur (Proverbs x.x.x. 5-14) and in the same chapter interpolates 17 and 20, has the indirect value of rendering it probable that there were a great many "Agurites" (a "bad generation" he calls them) and that they were rather aristocratic and distrustful of the ma.s.ses. This commentator, who cannot understand the Agur fragments, also shows us, side by side with the brilliant genius, lines revealing the mentally pauperised condition into which Jahvism must have fallen when such a writer was its champion.
It is tolerably certain that such fragments as those of Agur imply a literary atmosphere, a cultured philosophic const.i.tuency, and a long precedent evolution of rationalism. Such peaks are not solitary, but rise from mountain ranges. Professor Dillon, whose admirable volume merits study, finds Buddhistic influence in Agur"s fragments. [9]
But I cannot find in them any trace of the recluse or of the mystic; he does not appear to be even an "agnostic," for when he says "I have worried myself about G.o.d and succeeded not," the vein is too satirical for a mind interested in theistic speculations. He is a man of the world,--more of a Goethe than a Voltaire; he regards Jahveh as a phantasm, is well domesticated in his planet, and does not moralise on the facts of nature in the Oriental any more than in the Pharisaic way. He appears to be a true Solomonic philosopher and naturalist. I cannot agree to Professor Dillon"s omission of the "Four Cunning Ones"
(Proverbs x.x.x. 24-28), because they are not of the same metrical form as the others, and lead "nowhither." The lines
"The ants are a people not strong, Yet they provide their meat in the summer,"
no doubt led to the famous parable of Proverbs vi. 6-11, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard." Being there imbedded in an otherwise commonplace editorial chapter, they may have been derived from some commentator on Agur.
Agur apparently represents the Solomonic thinkers brought with the rest of the people under the trials that made Israel the Job of nations. They are such as those who led astonished Jeremiah to ask "what kind of wisdom is in them?" (Jeremiah viii.) They "do not recognise Jahveh"s judgments"; in "shame, dismay, captivity, they have rejected Jahveh"s word." The exquisite humor of Agur shows that these philosophers did not lose their serenity. Agur sees man pa.s.sing his life between two insatiable daughters of the ghoul, "the Grave and the Womb,"--Birth and Death,--and amid the inevitable evils of life he will be wise to refrain from rage and lay his hand upon his lips.
But silence was just what the Jahvist omniscients could not attain to. Notwithstanding Jahveh"s confession that Job was right in his position, and the orthodox wrong in their theory that all evil is providential, the "comforters" rise again in the commentator who begins (Proverbs x.x.x. 5):
"Every word of G.o.d is perfected.
He is a shield to them that trust in Him,"
and proceeds in verse 14 with his inanities. And these have prevailed ever since. Even Jesus, when he took up the burden of Wisdom, and rebuked the Jahvist superst.i.tion that those on whom a tower fell were subjects of a judgment, must have his stupid corrector to add, "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." This simpleton"s superst.i.tion has taken the place of the great successor of Solomon, and to-day, amid all the learning of Christendom, is proclaiming that the Father is "permitting" all the Satans,--war, disease, earthquake, famine,--to harry his children just to test them or to chasten them. Why should omnipotence create a race requiring worse than inquisitorial tortures for its discipline? In all the literature of Christendom there is not one honest attempt to deal with the evils and agonies of nature; and at this moment we find theists apotheosizing the "Unknowable from which all things proceed," without any appreciation of the fact that in the remote past Jahvism sought the same refuge, and that it was proved by Job a refuge of fallacies. In an awakening moral and humane sentiment Job stands in this latter day upon the earth, and again steadily repeats his demand why one should respect an Unknowable from whom all things,--all horrors and agonies,--proceed.
Ethically we are required to do no evil that good may come; theologically, to worship a deity who is doing just that all the time. This is no doubt a convenient doctrine for the Christian nations that wish to preserve their own property and peace at home, while acting as banditti in remote continents and islands. All such atrocities are enacted and adopted as part of the providential plan of spreading the Gospel, latterly "civilisation"; but it is very certain that there can be no such thing as national civilisation until evil is recognised as evil, good as good,--the one to be abhorred, the other loved,--and no deity respected whose government would wrong a worm.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE BOOK OF PROVERBS AND THE AVESTA.