(3) And, above all, it has been my aim to lift the reader to the height of the great argument of the Poem, to articulate the processes of thought veiled, or half veiled, by its proverbial forms, to trace out the infinite variety of fluctuating spiritual moods which pulse through and animate it. There is far more logic, as also far more of dramatic power, in the colloquies of the Book than we are apt to see in them, in the speeches of the Friends and the replies of Job. To bring out its logical connections, to expound the argument of the Poem, to follow it through all its windings to their several issues and to shew how they all contribute to its triumphant close, has been my main endeavour.

On the other hand while I am not conscious of having shirked a single difficulty, while I have tried to escape the censure which Young pronounced on those commentators who

"each dark passage shun,

And hold a farthing candle to the sun,"

I have not enumerated the readings, renderings, explanations of all who have gone before me, though I have considered most of them before arriving at my own conclusions. It is the vice of recent commentators, especially in Germany, that they comment on each other rather than on the Sacred Text, and so produce works too tedious for mortal patience to endure. Moreover, by piling up commentary on commentary, they are apt more and more to get off the perpendicular, to draw apart from and perilously lean over the real facts of human life and experience, till there is much danger that the whole structure will come toppling to the

ground. If, when we have them in our hands, any should ask us what we read, we should have to reply, with Hamlet, "Words, words, words!" and little but words. What we want in these busy and over-busy days are expositions in which each man will give us his own conclusions based on his own study of the Word, and not his refutation of the conclusions at which his predecessors or rivals have arrived. And if any credit be conceded me, I hope it will not be that I have compiled a catena of opinions, or shewn how great a variety of meanings may be extracted from a single passage by scholars who seek to raise their own reputation on the torn and tarnished reputations of the scholars who preceded them, or by proving that they too

can

"Torture one poor word ten thousand ways;"

but that I have tried to bring the words of Scripture straight to the facts of human experience, and sought to interpret the former by the latter. As a rule I have simply given my own reading and my own interpretation for which, however, I have often been indebted to the labours of others only when the passage was exceptionally difficult, or important, have I asked the reader to consider the best readings or interpretations which differ from my own, that he might have the means of judging and determining the question for himself.

I do not propose to open my exposition with a long and elaborate Introduction; valuable essays and dissertations on the Book are easily accessible, and may be found in the works of any of the commentators named on a previous page: but a few words

on the date and origin, the scene, and, above all, the problem of the Book are indispensable.

As to the Date and Origin of the Poem nothing can be safely inferred-though on this point some scholars lay great stress-from the Aramaan words which are frequently employed in it; and that, not simply because the Aramæisms occur chiefly in the speech of Elihu, and are appropriate in his mouth, since he himself was an Aramæan; nor simply because all Hebrew poetry, of whatever age, is more or less Aramaic but also and mainly because the presence of Aramæan words in any Scripture may indicate either its extreme antiquity or its comparatively modern date. For these Aramæisms — as "Rabbi" Duncan tersely puts the conclusion of all competent scholars are either "(1) late words borrowed from intercourse with the Syrians, or (2) early ones common to both dialects." Any argument, therefore, which is based on the use of these words cuts both ways.

Nor, I think, do the other arguments commonly adduced on this point carry much weight, with the exception of one, which is so weighty as to be conclusive. Both the pervading tone of the Book and its literary style point steadily and unmistakably to the age of Solomon as the period in which it, at least, assumed the form in which it has come down to us. That which first impresses a thoughtful reader of the Poem is the noble universality which Carlyle found in it, "as if it were not Hebrew." Although it is part of the Hebrew Bible, it is catholic in its tone and spirit. The persons who figure in it are not Jews; the scene

is laid beyond the borders of Palestine; the worship we see practised in it is that of the patriarchal age: it does not contain a single allusion to the Mosaic laws or customs, or to the characteristic belief of the Jews, or to the recorded events of their national history. Hence many have concluded that it was written in the patriarchal age; by Moses, perhaps, before he was called to be the redeemer and lawgiver of his people, or by some Temanite or Idumean poet, whose work was afterwards translated into the Hebrew tongue. But to this conclusion there is, I think, at least one fatal objection-the literary form of the Poem, the proverbial form, decisively marks it out as one of the Chokmah books, and forbids us to ascribe it to any age earlier than that of Solomon.

It is beyond dispute that in his age, and under the influence of his commanding genius, a new kind of literature-new in spirit, new in form-came into vogue; of which we have some noble samples in the Book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, many of the Psalms, and several of the Apocryphal Books. They are characterized by a catholic and universal spirit new in Hebrew literature, and might, one thinks, have been written by the sages and poets of almost any of the leading Oriental races. This non-Hebraic catholic tone, which differentiates them from the other Hebrew Scriptures, was doubtless but one out of many results of the enlarged commerce with the great heathen world which commenced in the reign of David. During his reign the Hebrew Commonwealth entered into new and wider relations-political, mercantile, literary—

with many of the nobler and more cultivated races of antiquity, which bore fruit in the reign of his son. In the court of Solomon there grew up, as Godet has pointed out, a school of wisdom, or of moral philosophy, which set itself to search more deeply into the knowledge of things human and divine. "Beneath the Israelite they tried to find the man; beneath the Mosaic system, that universal principle of the moral law of which it is an expression. Thus they reached to that idea of wisdom which is the common feature of the three books, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes; of the wisdom whose delight is not in the Jews only, but in the children of men." This endeavour to humanize Judaism, to spiritualize the precepts of Moses, "to reach that fundamental stratum of moral being in which the Jewish law and the human conscience find their unity," is the distinctive "note" of the Chokmah literature.

And if the spirit, the ruling moral tone, of this literature is novel and original, so also is the form which its noblest productions assumed, viz., the proverbial, or parabolic. To utter ethical wisdom in portable and picturesque sentences, the wise saying often being wrought out into a little parable or poem complete in itself, was the task in which the leading minds of the Solomonic era took delight. We have only to compare their peculiar mode of expression-its weighty sententiousness, its conscious elaboration of metaphor, its devotion to literary feats and dexterities, and, in singular combination with these, its thoughtful handling of the moral problems which tax and oppress the thoughts of men, with "the lyrical cry" of many of the Psalmists of Israel, in