career of fruitful activity. Lastly, there is nothing in the phraseology either of the Hebrew or of the Septuagint to suggest an acquaintance with Epicureanism.
A stronger case can be made for the influence of Stoicism. The undoubted Oriental affinities of this system and its moral and theological spirit would, as Mr. Tyler observes, naturally commend it to a Jewish writer. We know that, at a somewhat later day, Stoicism exercised a strong fascination on some of the noblest Jewish minds. Philo,[1] the Book of Wisdom, and the so-called Fourth Book of Maccabees, have undeniable allusions to it; and more or less probable vestiges of Stoicism have been found in the oldest Jewish Sibyl[2] (about B.C. 140) and in the Targum of Onkelos.[3] But how does the case stand with Koheleth? First of all, are there any traces of Stoic terminology? That terminology varied no doubt within certain limits, and could not be accurately reproduced in Hebrew. Still even under the contorted forms of expression to which a Hebrew-writing Stoic or semi-Stoic might be driven we could hardly fail to recognise the familiar Stoic expressions, [Greek: heimarmenê, pronoia, phantasia, phusis, phronêsis, aretê]. The Septuagint version ought to help us here. But among the twenty words almost or entirely peculiar to the Greek of Ecclesiastes, the only two technical philosophic terms are [Greek: sophia] and [Greek: gnôsis].
Next, can we detect references to distinctive Stoic doctrines? Mr. Tyler lays great stress in his reply on the Catalogue of Times and Seasons (iii. 1-8), which he regards as an expansion of the Stoic [Greek: homologoumenôs zên] But the idea that there is an appointed order of things, and that every action has its place in it, is much more a corollary of the doctrine of Destiny than of the doctrine of Duty. The essence of the latter doctrine is that men were meant to conform and ought to conform to the Universal Order, acquiesc-*
- ↑ Philo alludes, e.g., to the Stoic doctrine of revolutions (which some have found in Koheleth) and remarks that the Stoics think of God as of a boy who builds up sandhills, and then throws them down again.
- ↑ Hilgenfeld, Jüdische Apokalyptik, p. 51, &c.
- ↑ See Deut. viii. 18, and especially Gen. ii. 7 (Neubürger in Grätz's Monatsschrift, 1873, p. 566).
