opinion, both among the Jews and Christians, and occasioned a plentiful crop of legends. S. Augustine says, 'It is rightly believed that Christ released Adam from Hell when He preached to the spirits in prison.' This is stated as a past event by the author of Wisdom, as the Psalmist says, they pierced my hands,' referring to a future event."* It is difficult to say which is the more uncritical, the assumption that the sage was acquainted with a future event, doubtfully hinted at in one of the most disputable of the books of the New Testament, or the reference to one of the most puzzling passages, both as to sense and reading, in the Old. Or take this piece of illustration. In ch. xi. 23, we read: "Thou hast tormented them with their own abominations," i.e., "objects of idolatrous worship. . . All the plagues were directed against the idols of Egypt. Against all the gods (Oeoîs) of Egypt I will execute judgment' (Ex. xii. 12)." The editor has not noticed that the place he quotes refers only to the last plague, and that moreover "the gods" are only mentioned as a further specification, after "all the firstborn of Egypt, both man and beast." Mr. Deane's slender acquaintance with the Old Testament is, however, a fault which vitiates more his own exegesis and illustration than his grammatical criticism of the text. There is no reason to suppose that the author of the Book of Wisdom used the Scriptures in anything but their Greek dress; and Mr. Deane's grammatical knowledge of the Septuagint is considerable. Very valuable is also his thorough knowledge of the Greek of the rest of the Apocrypha. Philo he has studied, but not exhaustively; here his old preoccupation with the canonicity of the book is always disturbing his critical sobriety. Wherever Philo is cited (unless for a mere grammatical comparison) Mr. Deane's object is regularly to educe a distinction between the thought of that * Commentary on x. 1; p. 165. + Commentary, p. 178. philosopher and the author of the Book of Wisdom. A semi-inspired work cannot, in his view, draw, as Philo draws, from foreign sources. If a phrase of Plato's is adopted, it is in a different sense: "the author uses philosophical terms to express orthodox doctrine." It is a pity that a scholar of Mr. Deane's industry and capacity should have needlessly hampered himself in this commentary. He was under no obligation to defend the infallibility of the book, but, as it seems, from courtesy to an old Church tradition, he has felt himself bound to consider it as an expression of truth, imperfect because not proved to be inspired, but never actually false. It seems almost to imply a contempt for the intelligence of our readers to insist on the fact that the value of the Book of Wisdom does not gain by this treatment. The interest of the book is primarily that which belongs to a transitional period in the history of Jewish religion. Its retrospect to the Hebrew literature, which it knows only through a version, is subsidiary; not so its view as a development, under foreign influence, of Hebrew thought. In this relation no work has greater value, expressing as it does a phase of Alexandrian philosophy, soon to be absorbed into the Christianity of the Fourth Gospel, and partly into that of the Epistle to the Hebrews. How does Mr. Deane handle this, the most important question with reference to his book, the relation of the wisdom of Solomon to the older philosophy of Israel, to the philosophy of Greece, and to the philosophy of Christianity? We open his introduction with a sanguine expectation of an exhaustive study, for the first chapter comprises a "Sketch of the Progress of Greek Philosophy." Nor do we complain of its being professedly a compilation from George Henry Lewes and other authorities, including, oddly enough, Mosheim's translation of Cudworth's * Comm. on vii. 22, p. 150; cf. proleg. p. 10. "Intellectual System of the Universe." An intelligent 'summary of this sort we may expect to draw to a focus the various lines of thought that found their home in the heterogeneous schools of Alexandria. But Mr. Deane hardly attempts any application of the facts he adduces. He gives us merely an abstract, careful enough in itself, but irrelevant, because he does not attempt to trace the bearing of Greek philosophy, in its Alexandrian development, upon the book with which he is engaged. The next section on the "Jewish-Alexandrian Philosophy" is quite inadequate. The Book of Wisdom is just alluded to, as displaying Greek learning and "the writer's acquaintance with Western Philosophy," but only to show "that he was well acquainted" with certain opinions of the schools, while his statements are "grounded on the language of Scripture. Mr. Deane quickly gets to Philo -a full century and a-half, according to the editor's dates, later than the Book of Wisdom-and forthwith addresses himself to those who are anxious to be persuaded that Christianity has adopted nothing from pagan systems; and treats at length of Philo and his connection, or want of connection, with the New Testament. This is no doubt an interesting inquiry, but it is, as we have said, totally irrelevant, and has, moreover, been done far better, and in a calmer and more philosophic spirit, by Mr. Jowett in his invaluable dissertation on "St. Paul and Philo."+ It is like writing an introduction to St. Augustine's City of God which should contain a comparison of Plato's Republic and More's Utopia, without a mention of the Bishop of Hippo. The Book of Wisdom indeed stands in a double relation, and its direct descent is plainly traceable to that school of * Proleg., p. 10. The references in Note 7 to support the belief in the pre-existence of souls by Jeremiah and the younger Isaiah are eminently patristic. The Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Romans. Vol. I., pp. 363-417. Sages-if we may follow Jeremiah and the Book of Proverbs in giving a collective name to what was perhaps really so detached and indefinite-which flourished in Israel from the early days of the Hebrew monarchy. From the two, often conflicting, classes of Prophets and Prieststhe preachers whose allegiance was to the ever-expanding "spirit" of the religion, and the ministers of the traditionary "letter"-these Humanists, as they have been happily designated, held somewhat aloof. They busied themselves rather with the deeper problems of ethics that underlay the religion. Much of their teaching took the shape of wise saws and adages, such as form the bulk of the collections that make up the Book of Proverbs, and are plentifully distributed through the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. In the universal spirit of the sages of antiquity, it was their special pride to observe the phenomena of nature, the signs and prognostics of the outer world equally with the moral and social action of the world of man. Here, as in so much else, they claimed descent from the wise king who "spake three thousand fables, and his songs were a thousand and five," who "spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes." Thus, too, the writer of the Book of Wisdom says: He hath given me true knowledge of the things that are,To know the constitution of the world and the operation of the elements, The beginning, and the ending, and mean of time, The alterations of the solstices and the change of seasons, The cycles of years and the positions of stars, The natures of animals and the passions of wild beasts, This is probably the meaning of mashal here. In the English version it is indifferently rendered "proverb" and "parable." +1 Kings iv. 32 f. (in the Hebrew, v. 12 f.). The powers of spirits and the reasonings of men, But natural philosophy was but a part of the business of the Wise Men, whose aim was to pursue knowledge everywhere. Speculation on the nature of man and his relation to God matured, if it did not create, a new element in theology. The striving towards wisdom was felt to be due to the working in man of a divine energy, the wisdom of God. It is important for our understanding of the Book of Wisdom to see how far this process of discriminating the energy from the person of the deity had gone, before Hebrew thought came into contact with that of Greece. 66 Once the Israelite had felt the human breath, the sign of life, or speech, the power which distinguished him from the brutes, to be the fittest symbol of God's communication with man. 'It is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty, that giveth them understanding," says Elihu ;† even as "while the spirit of God is in my nostrils" is a synonym for remaining in life. The " spirit of God" gives skill to the craftsman § and nerve to the warrior, Othniel or Gideon or Jephthah. But it is on the prophets that it is poured out in peculiar measure, and to them chiefly is revealed the "word of God." Here the two symbolical expressions seem to run together, but there is always this difference, that the "spirit" is the revealing agency, the "word" the revelation itself. Both are in time overtaken and absorbed by the conception of "wisdom." We see Wisdom vii. 17-21. It is a great advantage to be able to arrange the parallelisms of the text-that most interesting note of the writer's Hebrew genius-according to a consensus of ancient authority. Mr. Deane prints the Greek in the orixo of the Codex Alexandrinus. + Job xxxii. 8. § Ex. xxxi. i. 3, xxxv. 31. Job xxvii. 3. Judges iii.10, vi. 34, xi. 29. |