CHAPTER IV.
THE SECOND COLLECTION AND ITS APPENDICES.
The next proverbial anthology (xxv.-xxix.) like its chief predecessor
is described in the heading as 'Proverbs of Solomon.'[1]
The social state however presupposed in many of them is so
different from that of the Solomonic age that we may at once
reject the theory of the wise king's authorship. Another
name with which in xxv. 1 the work is connected is that of
Hezekiah, who has been suggestively called 'the Pisistratus
of Judah.' The comparison halts, no doubt; for Pisistratus
and his 'companions' meant to collect the whole of the
Homeric poems, whereas completeness can hardly have been
the object of those 'friends (or counsellors) of Hezekiah'
who 'collected'[2] the 'Proverbs of Solomon' in xxv. 2-xxix.
27; at least, we know that there was much proverbial wisdom
in circulation which had as good or as bad a claim to be called
'Solomonic' as the sayings which they have admitted into
their anthology. It may indeed well be doubted whether the
compilers had any thought of collecting the relics (now already), followed by the Peshitto and the
Targum: Aquila, [Greek: metêran]. The Greek, curiously enough, inserts an epithet for the
proverbs, viz. [Greek: ai hadiakritoi], i.e. either impossible to distinguish, miscellaneous (so
Sophocles, Lexicon), or better, difficult to interpret. Symmachus has [Greek: adiakritos]
for bōhū, Gen. i. 2. The Peshitto and Targum render the Greek of our passage
by 'deep proverbs,' i.e. enigmatical ones (so too Aquila and Theodotion in the
Syro-hexapla).]
- ↑ 'These also' suggests that what follows is a last gleaning of Solomonic proverbs. And in fact xxv. 24, xxvi. 13, 15, 22, xxvii. 12, 13, 21a, seem to be taken from the 'Solomonic' collection. Hitzig however rejects this view. Why did not the collectors combine all the Solomonic proverbs they could find in one work? So he supposes this new collection to have been made 'aus dem Volksmunde,' and remarks that a commission would be specially appropriate for this task. To me this seems an anachronism. The proverbs of the Hezekian collection are moreover as artistic as those of the first 'Solomonic.'
- ↑ So virtually the Septuagint ([Greek: hexegrôpsanto
