It was necessary that Koheleth should be answered, but who was competent for this? A fable had been invented of a Solomonic serpent who had tempted Eve to taste the fruit of knowledge which, when the man shared it, brought a curse on the earth, but the canonical prophets do not appear to have heard of it, and at any rate it was too late in the day to meet fact with fable. Nor had Jahveh’s whirlwind-answer to Job proved effectual. However, some sort of answer did come, and significantly enough it had to come from Koheleth’s own quarter, the Wisdom school. Pure Jahvism had not brains enough for the task.

The apocryphal book “Ecclesiasticus” is the antidote to Ecclesiastes. (These are the Christian names given to the two books.) This book, bearing the simple title “Wisdom,” compiled and partly written by Jesus Ben Sira early in the second century B. C., is as a whole much more than an offset to Koheleth. It is a great though unintentional literary monument to Solomon, and it is the book of reconciliation, or so intended, between Solomonism and Jahvism,—or, as we should now say, between philosophy and theology.

The newly discovered original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus xxxix. 15, xlix. 11, published by the Clarendon Press in 1897, enables us to read correctly for the first time the portraiture of Solomon in xlvii., with the assistance of Wace and other scholars:

In the last sentence I have inserted in crochets an alternative reading of Fritzsche for the three words that follow. (Rehoboam’s Ammonite mother was Naamah.)

It will be noticed that early in the second century B. C. there remained no trace of the anathemas on Solomon for his foreign or his idolatrous wives. He is now simply accused of being too fond of women,—a charge not known to the canonical books.

The verse 18 attests the correctness of the view taken of the forty-fifth Psalm in chapter III., written before this Clarendon Press volume appeared. It thus becomes certain that the Psalm was recognised as written in Solomon’s time, and that it was he who was there addressed as “God” (“the glorious name”).

The mention of this fact in “Wisdom,” and the enthusiasm pervading every sentence of the tribute to Solomon, despite his alleged sensuality, supply conclusive evidence that the cult of Solomon had for more than eight centuries been continuous, that it was at length prevailing, and that it had become necessary for a broad wing of Jahvism to include the Solomonic worldly wisdom and ethics.

Jesus Ben Sira states that he found a book written by his learned grandfather, whose name was also Jesus, who had studied many works of “our fathers,” and added to them writings of his own. The anonymous preface states that Sira, son of the first Jesus, left it to his son, and that “this Jesus did imitate Solomon.”

It is not said that Sira contributed anything to this composite work, yet there appear to be three minds in it. There is a fine and free philosophy which savors of the earliest traditions of the Solomonic School; there is an exceptionally morose Jahvism; and there is also mysticism, an attempt to rationalise and soften the Jahvism, and to solemnise the philosophy, so as to blend them in a kind of harmonious religion. I cannot help feeling that Sira or some friend of his must have inserted the Jahvism between the grandfather and the grandson.

However this may be, it is evident that Jesus Ben Sira was too reverent to seriously alter anything in the volume before him, for the contrast is startling between the hard Jahvism and the philosophy of life. Their inclusion in one work is like the union of oil and vinegar. The Jahvism is curiously bald: fear Jahveh, keep his commandments, pay your tithes, say your prayers, be severe with your children (especially daughters), never play with them, guard your wife vigilantly, flog your servants. The philosophy is quite incongruous with this formalism and rigidity, most of the maxims being elaborated with care, and only proverbs in form. Some of them are almost Shakespearian in artistic expression:

About the rendering of xli. 15 there is some doubt, and I give this conjecture:

In the Bible which belonged to the historian Gibbon, loaned by the late General Meredith Read to the Gibbon exhibition in London, I observed a pencil mark around these sentences in “Wisdom”:

To Jesus Ben Sira we may, I believe, ascribe the following:

This has an interesting correspondence with the beautiful rapture of the Persian SÂdi:

To Jesus Ben Sira may be safely ascribed the passages that bear witness to the pressure of problems which, though old, appear in new forms under Hellenic influences. They grow urgent and threaten the foundations of Jahvism. It was no longer sufficient to say that Jahveh rewarded virtue and piety, and punished vice and impiety in this world. Job had demanded the evidence for this, and the centuries had brought none. Job was awarded some recompense in this world, but that happy experience did not attend other virtuous sufferers.

The doctrine of one writer in “Wisdom” is simply predestination. Paul’s potter-and-clay similitude is anticipated, and the Parsi dualism curiously adapted to Jahvist monotheism: “Good is set against evil, life against death, the godly against the sinner and the sinner against the godly: look through all the works of the Most High and there are two and two, one against another.” But the liberal son of Sira is more optimist: “All things are double, one against another, but he hath made nothing imperfect: one thing establisheth the good of another.” Freedom of the will is asserted: “Say not, he hath caused me to err, for he hath no need of the evildoer. He made man from the beginning and left him in the hand of his (own) counsel.... He hath set fire and water before thee, stretch forth thy hand to whichever thou wilt. Before man is the living and the not-living, and whichever he liketh shall be given him.”

But the doctrine of human free agency is pregnant with polemics; it has so been in Christian history, as is proved by the Pelagian, Arminian, Jesuit, and Wesleyan movements. There are indications in Ben Sira’s work that the foundations of Jahvism were threatened by a moral scepticism. His own celebration of the Fathers was enough to bring into dreary contrast the tragedies of his own time and glories of the Past, when “Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and fig-tree, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, all the days of Solomon.” What shelter now in the divine fig-tree, which could bear nothing but legendary or predictive leaves? The curse on the barren tree was near at hand when Jesus Ben Sira uttered his pathetic complaint, veiled in prayer: