Words of Koheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem : translated anew, divided according to their logical cleavage, and accompanied with a study of their literary and spiritual values and a running commentary

Front matter

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Preface

IF a single word were sought, to denote the spirit in which this volume has been written, the writer would lay claim to the word constructive. As distinguished from the purely critical, which latter spirit so dominates our age, this may be figured in simple terms of position and direction. The critical spirit, taking a station outside the subject of — study, looks over into it with the eyes of a spectator, noting the results of a process in which it has not shared, and passing judgment by a standard of history or dogma or philology already made. Its direction, by the very fact of being critical, is essentially opposite to the creative surge and current of the author’s mind; it reduces his fervors to a residuum of reason; it imposes a dispassionate measure on what is to it a finished result ; its besetting tendency is to leave the work cold and obsolete, or analyzed out of life. The constructive spirit, on the other hand, quickened first to living sympathy, takes its place at the centre of the work itself, whence the radiating lines of thought and feeling stretch out in vital motion, seen through the author’s eyes and realized through his glowing viii PREFACE soul. Its endeavor thus is, virtually, to create his work anew on his own pattern ; its direction is one with his; it has at heart the same goal of truth. Such spirit by no means ignores or slights the - eritical ; rather, it takes the critical in, on its way, as an outfit of insight in which also the author himself is concerned, and in whose light the problems historic, dogmatic, philological, or whatever else, assume the proportions essentially their due. Thus its criticism has become a thing organic . and functional, a structural element of the tissue itself. |

The remark so often made of Biblical study nowadays, that it is time to quit tearing down and to begin constructing, applies with especial force to this Book of Ecclesiastes. Itself initially a work of reaction and stricture, its critical strain, its negative element, lies on the surface; so salient that popular sentiment draws its allusions and points its morals from it. “ As bitter in the mouth as a page torn from Ecclesiastes,” is the way a recent writer characterizes a certain modern book. At the old sage’s opening note of vanity and disillusion men, it would seem, have stopped short ; have been too shallow and heedless, perhaps, to go on to his solution. The very idea that there is anything positive and constructive about the book must needs, if asserted, accept a main bur-

PREFACE ix den of proof. And yet this constructive strain, this positive tonic uplift, is the controlling and surviving element. It resolves all the discords, makes the dark and turbid run eventually clear ; offsetting vanity by substance, the factitious by the intrinsic, agnosticism by a solid asset of certitude. The whole book, it is herein maintained, exists supremely for the sake of what is positive and affirmative in it, for the sake of the better structure it would build amid the ruins of a baffling world. It is in its large effect an uplifting power, not a disintegration. That this is a traverse of the prevailing popular notion, the author of the present volume is not unaware; with confidence, however, he would invite the candid attention of readers to his detailed presentation of it. To find whether this is so, and how far, may seem, perhaps, a complex matter, in view of Koheleth’s extremes and cross-currents; for the book is undeniably a repository of thoughts as stubborn and contradictory as the thoughts of Nature herself. And yet it is no mysterious thing, nor does it require special pleading, when once we are rightly launched on the central tide of his thought. It calls upon us merely to hear him out, giving due weight to all sides and colorings of his plea. It is, in fact, like all deeper problems of life, an affair of relation, balance, continuity, proporx PREFACE tion, or as may be more simply stated, an inquiry how the book’s various utterances hang together, and what supreme and grounded effect they work. In the light of an age which, almost beyond any - former one, is moving in the Koheleth vein, there is need to determine anew, and with unprejudging care, the old sage’s emphasis of things. . This is what the title-page means by its proposed study of literary and spiritual values. The problem on its concrete side is a purely literary one; literary in that broad and deep sense in which alone the full concept of literature can be understood. To fathom it we must go beyond the curiosa felicitas of words and figures, elegances and nuances. We must note how the book derives not alone from its author, but from its age, from its world, from the whole world beyond time and space on which its two millenniums of vitality have laid their power.

It is a large inquiry, as the interrogation of any literature that has centuries of life in it must be. It has also its smaller aspects, problems of connection and relation, workmanship and organic structure. Not all of these need be specified here. Some stress is laid, however, on one element on which more depends than would at first appear, the element of division. What grouping of Koheleth’s words is feasible, to answer to the large trend of

PREFACE xi the book and to the organic function of every part? There may be divisions that make for confusion; how many such there are in fact is one of the most striking disclosures of the study of works on Koheleth. On the other hand, that there may be a division making for unity and coherence is a natural corollary of treating the thought as in its large result homogeneous. For this reason it has been deemed an important matter, not unworthy of note on the title-page, that the book be divided according to its logical cleavage.

Of the massive constructive idea which has gradually emerged to clearer view in the study of this volume, which has revealed Koheleth’s mighty hold on the very citadel of manhood, and imparted to every step of the study as it were a sense of consecration, there is no need here to speak. It is best disclosed not by assertion, but by the momentum of Koheleth’s thought; and if in some adequate degree candid readers may come to realize it, in its true scope and power, the writer desires to reckon it all to the account of that archetypal Volume from whose pages new light is continually breaking.

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS, April 19, 1904.

Contents

I

Worps or KoHELETH: STUDY OF THEIR LITERARY AND SPIRITUAL VALUES

CuapteR I.— The Book, and its World . ‘ Pages 1-38 I. Its perennial fit audience - : ¥ ‘ 1 II. Its essentially scientific attitude ‘ , P 6 III. The world of which it makes assessment , 16

II Worps or KoHELETH: TRANSLATION AND RUNNING CoMMENTARY

The Outline . ; : ‘ é ; : 209

The Structural Idea . ; < ‘ F «(m2 Prorem: The Fact, and the Question . : : 213 Tue First Survey: An Induction of Life . ° - 220 Tue Seconp Survey: Times and Seasons . ° ; 243 THE Turrp SuRvEY: Ina Crooked World . . . 257 Tut FourtH Survey: Fate, and the Intrinsic Man . 278

Tue Firru Survey: Availsof Wisdom. . . . 298 Tue Sixra Survey: Wisdom Encountering Time and Chance . ; ; ; ‘ 2 . : ‘ : 324

Tae SEVENTH SuRVEY: Rejoice, and Remember . . 845 ErimoGcut: The Nail Fastened ‘ a eee ORT

I

STUDY OF THEIR LITERARY AND SPIRITUAL VALUES

“The vast, profound thought that brings with it nothing but sadness is energy burning its wings in the darkness to throw light on the walls of its prison; but the timidest thought of hope, or of cheerful acceptance of inevitable law, in itself already is action in search of a foothold wherefrom to take flight into life.”

Maurice Maeterlinck.

“To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.” — Robert Lowis Stevenson.

STUDY INTRODUCTORY TO THE WORDS OF KOHELETH

Chapter I The Book, And Its World I

HEN, in the intolerant old Puritan days, some other-minded soul had the courage,

to “ k out i ting,” or effrontery, to “ speak out in meeting, all Ha the instant wave of sympathetic response otf a new conviction from back seats and galleries, braving ny the frown from the pulpit, betokened

that though one man alone had taken the risk of giving his conviction utterance, in the reactive conviction itself, as it had mutely gathered head and bided its time, he was not alone. He was aspokesman. From that moment, and for that hitherto silent class, his words, whether he would have them so or not, were the initial point, if not of a party, at least of a tide of sentiment. Souls that before had been torpid and unresponsive, prisoned as it were in an uncongenial order of things, now thrilled to the unwonted note, as if the signal had been given for the doors to be opened. It was as when in a chaos of foreign voices men catch the sound of their native language, and rise to heed and follow. Among the works of Hebrew scripture, this Book of Ecclesiastes, or as from the outset we had better 1 ert he vod the sian te ee ri te, speaking Speaking out in meeting. It reads like ies an irruption into sorfle too self-complacent or too dogmatic age ; there is about it, too, the same note of audacity and independence, the note, so to say, of a soul unconformed. Further, it has had the same touchstone effect ; a source of more or less disturbance to many, while it has drawn out into response its own congenial following. On the one hand, it has in every age encountered the bewhomhe Wilderment, not to say suspicion, of the has mysti- orthodox and devout; who have been at disturbed. Joss to account for the presence of such a book in the sacred canon, and disposed to apologize for it now that it is there. The reason for this is not far to seek. The book is not in the conventional religious vein. Its insistent charge of vanity,

1 So, without attempting to translate the name, I deem it better to designate the unknown author. The word Ecclesiastes, the Greck translation of Koheleth, entitles what is of all seripture books the least ecclesiastical; and its English equivalent, The Preacher, denotes one who of all Hebrew writers is the least clerical.

directed as this is to all points of the compass, and its resolute agnosticism concerning futurity, could not but be a discord in the general chorus of psalm and prophecy and godly counsel on which the religious spirit thrives; it exhales an atmosphere in which all that supports the heart on the heavenly minded side suffers a touch of frost and disillusionment.

On the other hand, and by no means a reassuring fact, Koheleth’s heartiest following has been gained from the back seats and galleries. He has delighted that remnant of me fas unclassed thinkers and deniers, already a suspected element, who too frankly love him for the enemies he has made. One never hears of the skeptics rejecting this book. It seems rather to warm and nourish them. Renan, the chief poshom he turist of the skeptical school, gives fair expression to this equivocal reception of it, in his remark that it is the only really charming book ever written by a Jew. What so charms him the whole tone of his own work helps us to divine. He reads into it something of his own elvish, ironical spirit.! Most things Hebrew present themselves to him as things to disparage and satirize, from a point of view, or rather an animus, essentially alien. This book, from whatever cause, awakens in him a re-

1A partial illustration of this is quoted on page 296 below.

sponsive chord. And for spirits that consort with his, spirits with some indictment against the universe, or with eyes mainly for its seamy and turbid side, the book has always had an extraordinary attraction; it seems to draw into its orbit the unreconstructed, the minority element, the odd natures, everywhere.

It would be exceeding our warrant, of course, to judge Koheleth merely by the company he keeps. a That pessimists, deists, epicureans, agrotase? -—«snnostics, or whatever unholy set has found merely by, is vein to their liking, should be taken clientage; as his unit of measure, is of the same logic as would reduce David to the dimensions of the motley crew that gathered round him at the cave of Adullam. His book has already suffered much, no book in the world more, from just this type of estimate: expositors, for the most part apologists instead of sympathizers, taking the too convenient way of labeling it with the name of some school and putting it into a pigeonhole, classified rather than read and heeded. This takes us, however, only a little way, and that way misleading, because it leaves out all that is vital. To name Koheleth’s fit audience is by no means to penetrate his secret.

Yet, on the other hand, not to recognize some equivalence of involution and evolution, not to take due account of that peculiar strain which endears the book to the off side, would be to miss what is most distinctive in it. Here is an utterance that strikes, so to say, the funda- etkratod a mental note of those dubious classes/to whom the religious world has given hard names ; that propounds and perhaps solves the problem of life in their idiom. Whatever it is to the saintly and orthodox, to them it is clearly of tonic and upbuilding influence. It gives them voice and vision, allows for their data, makes their cause heard. _ Unless, as holding them utterly perverse, we deny them the right to exist, we are bound to consider their and Koheleth’s common point of view, and see what there is to legitimate their attitude and temperament in the spacious House of Life. It is a question, after all, not of names and labels, but of truth. Koheleth has drawn these strange com- _ rades, nay, in some of our moods he draws us all, into his orbit; the world of every temperament has its Koheleth hours, when with all the unction of conviction it cries, ‘‘ All vanity — what profit? ”’

May there not be, then, some point deeper down where these dark elements and the more

The deeper hopeful and courageous ones meet and _ point of convergence are true? That there is such a blending- and reconcilement.

point, that Koheleth opens the way to it by contributing as it were a needed minority report, assuming toward life and the world an attitude which, though supremely sane and sound, the conventional religious consciousness has been slow to understand, — this, I believe, justly sums up his significance for the centuries. Through his eyes men hitherto conversant with the devotional or theological approach are made to see, with delight or dismay according to bent, a distinctly new coloring and proportion of things.

II

What, then, is this attitude of Koheleth’s, — which in one utterance can with the pessimist reduce the whole human career to dust and

His attitude ° . : identified ~—_-vanity, with the agnostic refuse to see withthe immortal light beyond, yet with epicurean good cheer bid man eat and drink ASE rejoice in his portion ; which, with all its sense of disillusion, yet steadily counsels the sanity of wisdom, the sagacity of righteousness, the readiness for judgment, the fear of God? A balance-sheet of life this, which eliminates many deeply cherished things, yet when all is reckoned is made to foot up even; a pathway at first sight strange and devious, which yet reaches the same heights of duty and vision. Is this, then, as critics nowadays are trying to make out, a doctored-up attitude, the composite resultant of a discord of authorships and moods ; — or have we here one consistent body of thought, one homogeneous portrayal in which, the key once found, life active and reflective takes on tone and depth and soundness, making “ one music as before, but vaster ” ?

To this latter alternative, it may as well be said here, the present study is unqualifiedly committed. There is no adequate or even fhe xina respectable reason, in my conviction, for Str} 4. assigning the book before us either to enable. more than one author or to more than one fundamental impression of life.! In its pervading spirit, in its literary value, in its essential lesson, the Book of Koheleth is an organic unit. So much of our case may be given away at this stage. If the critics are judging otherwise, it is because they are on a wrong, or rather a superficial tack. For

1 This needs to be said here, perhaps, not by way of controversy as if it were a forensic affair, but because critics of name and note nowadays are going off in tame docility, like so many sheep, after opinions made in Germany, which assert — to use Professor Siegfried’s words —that “it is impossible that the Book of Koheleth, as it lies before us, could have been the product of one mind.’’ My answer to this, conducted steadily through the divisions and notes of the appended commentary, is like Webster’s answer to Choate in the famous case of the twin car-wheels: “There they are,” he exclaimed; “look at ’em! ” There the book is; look at it, fairly and realizingly ; that is all that is necessary. Look also at the fuller account of Professor Siegfried’s exposition, and at the estimate of some later English ones, pages 162-167 below.

this, by way of data, must be premised: we do not get at the real Koheleth by burying our noses in a Hebrew grammar, or by running his thought into moulds left over from scholastic philosophy. We do not reach his limit, much as we are undeniably aided, even by burrowing into the history and ideas of his day. He so strikes out from his age into the timeless and boundless, that to get his large measure we must enlarge our world. We must look at his thought in the setting of a universe and an eternity; just as men to-day are learning to look at things in cosmic terms, in terms of stellar spaces, and world energies, and vast tides of evolutionary life. As soon as we project his conception of being against the background of that roomier universe which is coming into the vision of our latest century, we find, with a feeling hardly short of amazement, that he must have shaped his thought, whether with full consciousness or not, to much the same setting.

To premise this is to make for Koheleth a Largeness of Claim so large that we must lay a deep ye claim _ ground for it. And first by beginning confessed. at his essential attitude to things.

Whatever contradiction of moods or views it may contain, the book reveals one unitary trait as a constant spiritual quantity. It is keyed throughout to the note of sturdy honesty. Koheleth, looking forth with intense sympathy on a puzzling world, reports not what he desires to find in order to make life easy, but what must

y His ground be owned in order to make life forth- wear Las right and true. He trusts not to what he can read into the world as the logic of some dogma or system, but only to what he draws owt of the world as tested fact. Moving thus in the domain of the actual and verifiable, he stakes out for man a way of living calculated for this concrete existence under the sun, — or perhaps we should say, for an existence intrinsic and timeless, — rather than for some state of being yet future or some theorized environment elsewhere. For such a man, to confess vanity of that which yields no essential result is merely a phase of honesty ; and equally so is his agnosticism toward that which in present limitation of being cannot be apprehended, and for which present life has no occasion. His quest is for the view of things in dry light, without haze or mirage from subjective vapors within.

Here, surely, is an attitude to which our modern age is no longer a stranger, whatever the times may have been once. For this is jy vttiea nothing less, nothing other, than what With the we call the scientific spirit : that straight- °°" seeing, judicial, matter-of-fact disposition which, as distinguished from the bent dogmatic, or speculative, or devoutly credulous, craves its due rights alike in a well-equipped world and a well-furnished individual manhood. Such an attitude finds its own comradeship. Others may tolerate Koheleth, or try to reconcile themselves to some disturbing strain in his argument; it is the men of scientific sense and temper, by whatever good or bad name they are called, who move congenially and without friction in his vein.

We know how reluctant has been the welcome accorded by the ages to this scientific spirit. It BEGET" og out fearlealy upon the word and long mis- Fe) y upon € wor. an understood; daring to search and question. Its refusal to make its judgment blind, its propensity to weigh and verify, holding all questions of life open and not assuming beyond the data, has been inveterately misjudged as the outflow of a wicked heart; to tenderly pious minds it has seemed like a disposition to pick at the universe in order to find pretexts for evil. Hence all the opprobrious names that from age to age have been thrown at it. Hence the fatuous idea, so headstrong and bitter, that a warfare was necessary, or even possible, between science and religion.

It looks now, though, as if to make up for its long repression and eclipse this hardy spirit were taking an overwhelming reprisal. The stone that the builders rejected is becoming the head of the corner. The supreme intellectual movement

of our age is moulding, as by a cosmic any onaing fiat, the ideals of all provinces of think- — ea ing, the religious equally with the rest. Here is how a recent writer, calling it “the central current in the literature of our time,” defines its attributes: 1 “ If I am to find in one word the chief bond between these minds, with their different ways of work, I should name the great business of our time, science — yes, science! But it is not the crude transference of physical images or theories to matters of life and character that is meant. The spirit of science is seen in the region of art by a particular temper, by openness of vision, by the determination to exhibit reality and to hope for just so much as may be expected, by the bold use of such hypotheses as can be brought to book, and by the steady temper that has

““* power to fright The spirits of the shady night.’ ”’

A far ery this from the thought and temper of men, even of thinking men, a century ago, to say nothing of the earlier repressive days from the Puritan times backward.

The religious thinking, equally with the rest,

I said, is shaping itself to a scientific model; and this has given it a tolerant as well as a fact-craving Howithas Spirit. We are coming to realize that viuins-? even toward the sacredest outlooks not ‘hinking. all minds can move in mystical vein, not all can stifle questioning before the absoluteness of oracle or dogma. If these temperaments are necessary to salvation, then salvation is not a universally available boon. For there have always been some who, in seeing and thinking for themselves, must give ‘reason the right of way, and trust only to verifiable fact, and run the risks of honest doubt. Only so can their souls move in freedom and joy. Until in some hospitable scheme of the universe these can find welcome and citizenship, they must remain in their back seats and galleries, an inert element, awaiting the voice that shall speak out for them. And now, thanks to the revolutionizing scientific movement, their day of welcome, one may even say their day of dominance, is well upon us. Their claim and sentiment, gathering silent head, have at length so changed the molecular structure of things, that now the scientific temperament, the scientific attack and measure, no longer stigmatized as infidelity, is legitimating itself as a sane and by no means irreverent attitude to life.

As a true exponent of this scientific spirit,

Koheleth is for all the centuries the pioneer, the pathfinder. The traits just attributed to our age accurately describe him. That “deter- 6, sic sotmination to exhibit reality and to hope sntific spirtt for just so much as may be expected” é Pioneer. is what the new strain of his thought, so reactive and bold, yet issuing in so much that is sound and wise, reduces to. The verdict that he pronounces on life human and cosmic is the verdict of a scientifically poised mind which has probed the world of his time, gauged its resources to their bound, and sternly held himself to such conclusions as are amenable to verification. If his verdict turns out to be authentic, then it is demonstrated that scientific judgment has place, alongside of prayer and doctrine, in a sacred canon; that the scientific mind, resolutely ignoring supernatural or transcendental assumptions, may yet win to a real vision of the truth of things.

Here, however, we are brought up against the crucial question which has caused all this doubt over Koheleth. Jf his verdict on life and the world is true, — all depends on ii thease that. It does not look like the priestly asmadeby or prophetic verdict ; seems in fact to traverse it. Does his pronouncement on life, then, justify his attitude? That scientific attack of his, that note of first-hand observation and inductive caution, is all very well; we like to see it applied to microbes and extinct saurians. But if in the end he has observed the erroneous thing, if in the lack of some rectifying spiritual sense he has been color-blind, seeing only vanity where there is substance, only an ever-returning wheel of being where there is progress, only a blankness of future outlook where there is vision, — why, then his science is at fault, it has not saved him. Perhaps in making such sweeping assertions he has fallen on a problem too large for a natural or biological sense to tackle. If so, not Koheleth alone, the findings of the scientific temper and procedure, as embodied in this their pathfinder, are on trial. Can a man, with the common sense and caution, reporting on life according to what his eyes see and his unmortgaged judgment weighs, be trusted to report true? Such is the momentous question at issue.

To answer it in Koheleth’s case, we must interrogate his world, the broad world of manhood life BOE sh ie it lay spread out before him. We world, and have to consider what data of his day what data . Sei 8's hehad for and land, what coloring and limiting his verdict. 1 i & conceptions of things, were available

for his induction. It has indeed always been the

same world, with the same manhood powers stored up in it. But men’s vision of things has had to grow, as they explored their manhood in steps and stages. A revelation of larger reaches of being presupposes eyes to see and spiritual impulse to appropriate. Until these inner capacities are grown, a world of sublime realities, all around the soul and perhaps all the while acting upon it unseen, may be virtually non-existent. And so elements of life which in our riper day are luminous and full of motive may once have lain in twilight gloom.

This last-named fact we need here to premise on account of the historic advance that has been made between Koheleth’s time and our own. Since he looked out upon the vening lis-

ing Neg 2 tory compels world, a great clarifying and emancipa- us to elim!- tion of the human spirit, so great as to have revolutionized the cosmic consciousness and created a new era, has been revealed to the world. A later thinker asserts that in this great event there was brought to light nothing less than life absolute and rounded, with the first clear , ,,, ane vision of immortality. To all this, which + 1° of course we must here eliminate, we must reckon Koheleth’s relation. He lacked something which we have. By the broad evidence of history his verdict fell in an unfinal dispensation, a twilight period, wherein certain cardinal data of manhood life, and perhaps the supreme key to it all, had not yet become a power in the world’s mind and motive. If, then, some of his judgments are som. bre, ors if on some problems to us very vital he must only say we cannot know, we may but have reason, on testing his words, for admiring his honesty all the more; for his world, with its range and limitations as interpreted in the cosmic consciousness (for this is what his pioneer utterance of the scientific spirit connotes), his verdict of things may turn out to be unescapably true.