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ECCLESIASTES XII. 1-7.

WHILE examining of late the periphrases and metaphors used in Icelandic poetry, which they call "kennings," I found, among illustrations from other poetry, many curious "kennings" in the Bible. And some undoubtedly there are in this passage of Ecclesiastes, nay, as it appears to me, more than the common interpretation supposes. The writer, after saying, "Serve God while thou art young, before old age comes, when pleasures fail; serve Him while yet all is bright, while suffering is not constantly recurring like perpetual bad weather," begins a more particular description of old age,-how limbs and senses fail. And this description is marked by some very curious metaphorical substitutes for the plain names of the parts or senses of the body.

"In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble." The keepers of the house are, as all agree, "the arms or hands."

"And the strong men shall bow themselves."

The strong men are "the legs."

"And the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened."

"Teeth" and "eyes" are of course meant.

Now, before going on to the next verse, be it observed that this way of describing parts of the body by figures receives much illustration from Icelandic poetry; such "kennings " (as northern grammarians call them) are common. Here are some. The tongue is the steelyard of song, also the plane of the voice; the mouth, the temple of words; eye, moon of the brows; brows, crags of the eyelids; ears, mouths of listening, tents of listening-door; hair, harvest of skull, sward of the head. Sometimes these expressions were meant to be hard and enigmatical; perhaps some of Solomon's phrases were meant to be obscure. For to wrap up wisdom in riddles was an Eastern practice (Prov. i. 6).

Knowing then what kind of language we may expect,

return we to our text.

"And the doors shall be shut in the street."

I find in one old commentary, "the street doors shall be shut upon thee as now retired to thine own house without care of others' visits or business." But it is unlikely that the writer would go back thus suddenly to plain and literal language (returning, as he certainly does afterwards, to figures). The doors must surely be the doors of some other avenue of sense. Almost beyond a doubt they are the doors of hearing. Deafness, as an evil of old age, would hardly have been omitted. Doors is a likely metaphor for any inlet of sense. The Psalmist speaks of "the door of my lips." And Sophocles does in effect describe ears as doors when blind Edipus is made to say (O.T. 1386): “Had I been able to dam the stream of hearing through my ears, I had not spared so to shut off my wretched body by deafness as well as blindness." Again, Icelandic poetry illustrates this metaphor. To listen in Icelandic is hlera, and hleri is a door or shutter."

And if in this verse of Ecclesiastes doors be "ears," then "when the sound of the grinding is low" expresses that sounds are low and indistinct to an old man. Grinding, as a very common sound in the East, might be put as an example. This seems better than to go back to the teeth, and explain (as one does): "Thy slow feeding shall make thee unfit for other men's tables." The next words of our passage are

“And he shall rise up at the voice of a bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low."

The common explanation is, "The old men shall be startled at a bird's voice." To me this seems very doubtful. It would be more natural, after speaking of failure of eyes and ears, to go on to failure of voice. And might not this be found in the words, "The old man's voice shall rise

to be as the voice of a chirping bird," i.e., thin, weak, quavering. The word for bird here (zippor) means a small, twittering bird. Homer compares his talking greybeards to "cicadas uttering their thin, piping voice."

says of the old man :

"His big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound."

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If we thus explain these words, then it would seem more consistent to take the daughters of music as "the musical tones of the voice," not (as most interpret) "singing women." Of course daughters of music" could mean "singing women," and we all remember that old Barzillai describes himself as not able now to hear "the voice of singing men or singing women." But that the latter part of this verse 4 refers to the failure and weakness of voice and musical tone appears to me more probable.

Verse 5, "They shall be afraid of that which is high, and terrors shall be in the way."

The old fear to mount or climb; they travel with labour and nervous dread: this much is plain. Then follow again curious metaphors.

"The almond tree shall blossom."

Most commentators agree that the blossoming almond. tree is a figure for a hoary head.

"And the grasshopper shall be a burden."

It always seemed to me unlikely that this could mean, in a Hebrew writer, "the old man will find even a grasshopper too heavy to carry." Who would think of carrying a grasshopper? Surely it is again a metaphor, and means, "The once nimble leaper shall be a burden to himself, shall move heavily." One Hebrew word for grasshopper (not exactly that used here, but one akin to it, as Gesenius thinks) means "a leaper." So indeed does our own English word. And one may add that the verb "shall be a burden" is in

the reflexive conjugation (Hithpael) in the Hebrew. The phrase may again be illustrated by the Icelandic adjective bungfærr, "heavy to move or carry," a word often applied to old men in the Sagas, e.g. "Egil now grew old, and in his old age became heavy in movement and dull both in hearing and sight; he became also stiff in the legs."

In the next expression of verse 5, between "desire" and the "caperberry" (R.V.), I do not presume to decide. After all, they express the same idea, the failure of appetite or of its stimulant. One would rather expect another metaphor after the blossoms of the almond-tree.

Verse 6, "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern."

The general purport of this is, "Remember God before the end of life comes." The breaking off or end of life seems put into metaphors. Some explain: "Life and its powers and uses end, as does all use, when the cord is loosed, the bowl, pitcher or wheel broken." Some take the several phrases to mean parts of the human body: "the spinal marrow, the heart, the tubes and arteries about it.” Can any confirmation be found elsewhere of these special meanings? If the phrases could be shown to be "kennings" for parts of the human body, it would harmonize with much of what has gone before, and would strengthen the argument for those expressions being "kennings" which I have argued to be so.

Be it understood that I do not presume to change in any material point the translation of R.V., only to suggest a rather different explanation, by which the whole passage seems to me to be more consistent and homogeneous. It may be that some of my suggestions are not new, but they are not in any books to which I have present access. W. C. GREEN.

ON THE GOD-MAN.

I. THE INCARNATION AND THE TRINITY.

AUGUSTINE,' who, in this matter, is followed by the Mystics of the Middle Ages and by Luther himself, found the eternal fact of the Trinity in the conception of love. Hutton has remarked that Plato, when he proclaimed that God was essentially good, was on the verge of the doctrine of necessary distinctions in the Godhead. He came short of making the discovery, because he meant by goodness only benevolence. An apparently slight, but really for him impassable, step. As a matter of fact, it is Christianity that has revealed the Trinity of God; for it declares that God is love, "not of condescension towards inferiors, but of mutual affection for equals." God from eternity must have lived a life of companionship.

In the New Testament one of the co-equal Persons in God is called Son; and as Scripture is our only source of knowledge as to the name, we may presume it intends to teach us what conception that name conveys. In the Epistle to the Hebrews Sonship is said to involve two

1 De Trin., ix. 12 ad fin.: "Est quaedam imago Trinitatis, ipsa mens et notitia ejus, quod est proles ejus et de se ipsa verbum ejus, et amor tertius, et haec tria unum atque una substantia."

2 See the Deutsche Theologie: "God is not absolutely simple [as Origen said, on John i. 21, ỏ Oeòs év éoti kaì à πλoûv], but conscious free love in Himself." 3 Hutton, Theological Essays, p. 231, 2nd ed., 1877 : Love was actual in Him as well as potential." He attributes to this thought his conversion from Unitarianism. For a luminous discussion of the various views held of the conception of God cf. Prof. Iverach, Is God Knowable, ch. x.

4 Rep., II. 379 : ἀγαθὸς ὅ γε θεὸς τῷ ὄντι καὶ λεκτέον οὕτως, and Tim. 29 E: λέγωμεν δή, δι' ἥντινα αἰτίαν γένεσιν καὶ τὸ πᾶν τόδε ὁ ξυνιστὰς ξυνέστησεν. ἀγαθὸς ἦν, ἀγαθῷ δὲ οὐδεὶς περὶ οὐδενὸς οὐδέποτε ἐγγίγνεται φθόνος· τούτου δ' ἐκτὸς ὢν πάντα ὅ τι μάλιστα γενέσθαι ἐβουλήθη παραπλήσια ἑαυτῷ, κ.τ.λ.

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