Solomon And Solomonic Literature Part 7

Solomon--Say not "I will retaliate evil";

Jahvist--Wait for Jahveh and he will save thee.

Also in xxv. 21-2:

Solomon--If he that hateth thee be hungry, give him bread to eat, If he be athirst give him water to drink.

Jahvist--For thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head, And Jahveh shall reward thee.

A similar mean and vindictive spirit is shown in xxiv. 18, following a magnanimous proverb; but in verse 29, probably more ancient than 18, we find the unqualified rebuke of retaliation:

Say not "As he hath done to me, so will I do to him, I will render to the man according to his work."

It was this generosity that Buddha exercised, [16] and Jesus; and it was left to Paul to recover the Jahvist modifications of Solomon's wisdom in order to adulterate for hard Romans the humane spirit of Jesus (Romans xii. 19, 20). The Solomonic sentences are normally so magnanimous as to throw suspicion on any clause tainted with smallness or vulgarity. The pervading spirit is, "The benevolent heart shall be enriched, and he who watereth shall himself be watered."

There is one proverb (xiv. 32) which suggests a belief in immortality, or possibly in the Angel of Death:

By his evil deeds the evil man is thrust downward, But the virtuous man hath confidence in his death.

According to the Avesta every man is born with an invisible noose around his neck. When a good man dies the noose falls, and he pa.s.ses to a beautiful region where he is met by a maid, to whom he says, "Who art thou, who art the fairest I have ever seen?" She answers, "O thou of good thoughts, good words, good deeds, I am thy actions." The evil man meets a leprous hag, embodiment of his actions, who by his noose drags him down through the evil-thought h.e.l.l, the evil-word h.e.l.l, the evil-deed h.e.l.l, to the region of "Endless Darkness" (Yast xxii.). This darkness may be metaphorically spoken of in Proverbs xx. 20:

He that curseth his father and mother, His lamp shall be put out in the blackest darkness.

But generally the allusions to death in the Solomonic proverbs do not seem to allude to physical death. In x. 2 "virtue delivereth from death" is in ant.i.thesis to the unprofitableness of evil treasures, and in 16:

The reward of a virtuous man is life; The gain of the wicked is sin.

Here "life" and "sin" are in opposition. Other sentences to be compared are:

The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, To avoid the snares of death. (xiii. 14, cf. the Jahvist xiv. 27.) Understanding is a fountain of life to those who possess it, But the snare of fools is Folly. (xvi. 22.) He that hateth reproof shall die. (xv. 10.) The way of life is upward to the wise, So as to turn away from the grave (sheol) beneath. (xv. 24.) Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And they who love it shall eat its fruit. (xviii. 21.)

(In the last clause "it" probably refers to "life," unless the p.r.o.noun be cancelled altogether.)

The getting of treasures by a tongue of falsehood Is getting a fleeting vapour, delusions of death. (xxi. 6.) In the way of virtue is life, But the way of the by-path leadeth to death. (xii. 28.) The man who wandereth from the way of instruction Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms. (xxi. 16.)

The two proverbs last quoted may be usefully compared with the ancient Prologue (viii. ix.) already referred to in this chapter, as they are there reproduced pictorially in Wisdom and Dame Folly sitting at their respective doors. Wisdom offers long life and happiness:

But he who wandereth from me doeth violence to his own life, All who hate me love death. (viii. 36.)

Dame Folly tries to turn into her by-path those who are "proceeding straight in their course" (ix. 15), but her victim--

He knoweth not her phantoms are there, That her guests are in the underworld. (ix. 18.)

The same Hebrew word Rephaim (phantoms or shades) is used here and in xxi. 16.

All of these references to death and the underworld (sheol), except perhaps xiv. 32, refer to the living death, moral and spiritual, which is of such vast and fundamental significance in Zoroastrian religion. In this religion the evil power is "all death." The universe is divided by and into "the living and the not living." [17] "When these two Spirits came together they made first Life and Death,"--words sometimes used as synonymous with the "Good and the Evil Mind." Ahura Mazda representing all the forces that work for health and life, Angromainyu (Ahriman) all that work for disease and destruction, have ranged with them all animals and plants, on one side or the other, in this great conflict. The life of an Ahrimanian creature is "incarnate death." (Darmesteter's Introduction to the Vendidad, v. 11.) His destructiveness is equally against virtue, wisdom, peace, health, happiness, life, and all of these, not merely physical dissolution, are included in his Avestan t.i.tle, "The Fiend who is all death." He is the Abaddon of Revelation ix. 11, also he "that had the power of death" in Hebrews ii. 14, and probably came into both of these from Proverbs xxvii. 20:

Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, And the eyes of man are never satisfied.

Dr. Inman (Ancient Faiths, i., p. 180) connects Abaddon with "Abadan (cuneiform), the lost one, the sun in winter, or darkness," which conforms with the Avestan Ahriman, who is emphatically a winter-demon, his h.e.l.l being in the north (cf. Jeremiah i. 14 and elsewhere), and is the natural adversary of the Fire-wors.h.i.+pper.

Among the Zoroastrians there were not only Towers of Silence (Dakhma) for the literally dead, but also for the confinement of those tainted by carrying corpses, or by any contact with the death-fiend's empire, such as being struck with temporary death. "The unclean," says Darmesteter, "are confined in a particular place, apart from all clean persons and objects, the Armest-gah, which may be described, therefore, as the Dakhma for the living." Here then are the dead-alive guests of Dame Folly (Proverbs ix. 15), who opposes Wisdom, as Ahriman created Akem-Mano (evil thought) to oppose Vohu-Mano (good thought), and here is the a.s.sembly that might give the Solomonic proverb its metaphor:

The man who wandereth from the way of instruction Shall rest in the congregation of the phantoms (or shades, Rephaim).

The Zoroastrian books from which I have been quoting contain pa.s.sages of very unequal date, but it is the opinion of Avestan scholars that most of them are from very ancient sources, pre-Solomonic, and there is no chronological difficulty in supposing that such inst.i.tutions as the Armest-gah, for the separation of the unclean, should not have been well known in ancient Jerusalem before the corresponding levitical laws concerning the unclean and the leprous existed.

The Book of Proverbs was also a growth, and although, as has been stated, there is reason to regard as later additions most of the proverbs containing the word Jahveh, as they are inconsistent with the general ethical tenor of the book, there are several in which that name is evidently out of place. Even in the editorial Prologue we can hardly recognize orthodox Jahvism in the conception of a being, Wisdom, not created by Jahveh yet giving him delight and some kind of a.s.sistance at the creation; and nowhere else in the Old Testament do we find such an idea as that of xx. 27, "The spirit of a man is Jahveh's lamp," or in xix. 17:

He who is kind to the poor lendeth to Jahveh, And his good deed shall be recompensed to him.

But in the Zoroastrian religion men and women render a.s.sistance and encouragement to the G.o.ds, and we find the chief deity, Ahura Mazda, saying to Zoroaster concerning the Fravas.h.i.+s, or souls, of holy men and women: "Do thou proclaim, O pure Zoroaster, the vigor and strength, the glory, the help and the joy, that are in the Fravas.h.i.+s of the faithful ... do thou tell how they came to help me, how they bring a.s.sistance unto me.... Through their brightness and glory, O Zoroaster, I maintain that sky there above." Favardin Yast, 1, 2.) As Frederick the Great said, "a king is the chief of subjects,"

so with Zoroaster Ahura Mazda is the chief of the faithful; or, as Luther said, "G.o.d is strong, but he likes to be helped."

The similitude in Proverbs xx. 27 is especially important in our inquiry:

The spirit of man is the lamp of Jahveh, Searching all the chambers of the body.

The word for "spirit" here is Nishma, which occurs in but one other instance in the Bible, namely, in Job xxvi. 4. Job asks: