which was earliest written, confutes itself on all sides; on the contrary, the views of Bleek in his Introduction to the Old Testament, thrown out in a sketchy manner and as if by a diviner, surprisingly agree with our own results, which have been laboriously reached and are here amply established. The advanced type of instruction in the introduction, chap. 1-9, appears among other things in this, that we there find the allegory, which up to this place occurs in Old Testament literature only in scattered little pictures built up into independent poetic forms, particularly in chap. 9, where without any contradiction אושׁת כּסילוּת a simple woman, Pro 5:13 is an allegorical person. The technical language of the Chokma has extended itself on many sides and been refined (we mention these synonyms: חכמה, דּעת, בּינה, ערמה, מזמּה, מוּסר, תּוּשׁיּה); and the seven pillars in the house of wisdom, even though it be inadmissible to think of them as the seven liberal arts, yet point to a division into seven parts of which the poet was conscious to himself. The common address, בּני [my son], which is not the address of the father to the son, but of the teacher to the scholar, countenances the supposition that there were at that time בּני חכמים, i.e., scholars of the wise men, just as there were “sons of the prophets” (נּבאים), and probably also schools of wisdom. “And when it is described how wisdom spake aloud to the people in all the streets of Jerusalem, in the high places of the city and in every favourable place, does not one feel that such sublime descriptions could not be possible unless at that time wisdom were regarded by the people as one of the first powers, and the wise men truly displayed a great public activity?” We must answer this question of Ewald's in the affirmative.
Bruch, in his Weisheitslehre der Hebraer, 1851, was the first to call special attention to the Chokma or humanism as a peculiar intellectual tendency in Israel; but he is mistaken in placing it in an indifferent and even hostile relation to the national law and the national cultus, which he compares to the relation of Christian philosophy to orthodox theology. Oehler, in his Grundzüge der alttestamentl. Weisheit, which treats more especially of the doctrinal teachings of the Book of Job, judges more correctly; cf. also his comprehensive article, Pädagogik des A. T. in Schmid's Pädagogischer Encyclopädie, pp. 653-695 (partic. 677-683). 5. The Alexandrian Translation of the Book of Proverbs
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