caused sword-handles to be made from his bones. The book altogether contains many examples to which concrete instances in the Persian history correspond, from which they might be abstracted, in which strict harmony on all sides with historical fact is not to be required, since it did not concern the author. The event recorded Ecc 4:13. refers to Cyrus rising to the supremacy of world-ruler (after dispossessing the old Median King Astyages), who left[1] nothing but misery to posterity. Such a rich man as is described in Ecc 6:2, who had to leave all his treasures to a stranger, was Croesus, to whom Solon, as Ecc 7:8 (cf. Herod. i. 32, 86), said that no one ought to be praised before his end. A case analogous at least to Ecc 9:14-16, was the deliverance of Athens by the counsel of Themistocles (Justin, ii. 12), who finally, driven from Athens, was compelled to seek the protection of the Persian king, and ended his life in despair.[2]
If we were not confined, for the history of the Persian kingdom and its provinces, from Artaxerxes I to the appearance of Alexander of Macedon, to only a few and scanty sources of information (we know no Jewish events of this period, except the desecration of the temple by Bagoses, described by Josephus, Antt. xi. 7), we might probably be better able to understand many of the historical references of the Book of Koheleth. We should then be able to say to whom the author refers by the expression, “Woe to thy land when thy king is a child,” Ecc 10:16; for Artaxerxes I, who, although only as yet a boy at the time of the murder of his father Xerxes (Justin, iii. 1), soon thereafter appeared manly enough, cannot be thought of. We should then, perhaps, be also in possession of the historical key to Ecc 8:10; for with the reference to the deportation of many thousands of Jewish prisoners (Josephus, c. Ap. i. 22) - which, according to Syncellus and Orosius, must have occurred under Artaxerxes III, Ochus - the interpretation of that passage does not accord.[3]
We should then also, perhaps, know to what political arrangement the
- ↑ According to Nicolaus of Damascus (Müller's Fragm. hist. Graec. III 398), Cyrus was the child of poor parents; by “prison-house” (Ecc 4:14), reference is made to his confinement in Persia, where access to him was prevented by guards (Herod. i. 123). Justin, i. 5: “A letter could not be openly brought to him, since the guards appointed by the king kept possession of all approaches to him.”
- ↑ Vid., Spiegel's Erânische Alterthumskunde, II pp. 409, 413. Bernstein suggests the deliverance of Potidea (Herod. viii. 128) or Tripolis (Diodor. xvi. 41); but neither of these cities owed its deliverance to the counsel of a wise man. Burger (Comm. in Ecclesiasten, 1864) thinks, with greater probability, of Themistocles, who was celebrated among the Persians (Thucyd. i. 138), which Ewald also finds most suitable, provided the author had a definite fact before his eye.
- ↑ Vid., Bernstein's Quaestiones Kohelethanae, p. 66.
