- an edifying view of the old man's final result which every one
must desire to be true if only it be consistent with the rest of the book. I fear that this is not the case. Elsewhere in the book sensuous pleasure in moderation is praised without any reference to God, and in the immediate neighbourhood of this verse the motive given for rejoicing is not the thought of God, but that of the many days of darkness (i.e. of Sheól) which are coming. Besides, the exhortation 'Remember thy Creator' does not perfectly suit the close of the verse, or indeed of the section. What is the natural inference from the fact that at an advanced age life becomes physically a burden? Surely this—that man should enjoy life while his powers are fresh. Cannot an old man 'remember' his Creator? (To 'remember' is to think upon; it is not a synonym for conversion.) The text therefore is almost certainly incorrect.
Has an editor, then, tampered with the text of the opening words of the exhortation? May we, for instance, follow Grätz and read, for bōr'éka 'thy Creator,' bōr'ka 'thy fountain' (lit. thy cistern), taking this as a metaphorical expression for 'thy wife' or 'thy wedlock' (as in Prov. v. 15-18)? The objection certain to be raised is that the text when thus corrected brings the book to a lame and impotent conclusion. It may be true, as Bishop Temple has said, that chastity and monotheism are the chief legacies which the Jewish Church has bequeathed to mankind.[1] There is nothing in an exhortation to prize a pure married life unworthy of a high-minded Jewish teacher. But in this connection it is certainly to a Western reader strange, and one is sorely tempted to suppose a displacement of the words, and, following Bickell, to make the distich—
And remember thy fountain
in the flower of thine age—
the conclusion of the stanzas beginning at xi. 9. This, it is true, involves (1) the excision of the words 'for youth and the prime of life are vanity,' and (2) an alteration of the
- ↑ Essays and Reviews (1869), pp. 15-17.
