inference mentioned just now commends itself to me as sound; but I admit that the saying on prophecy in Prov. xxix. 18 (already quoted) is isolated, and that the tone of the religious proverbs falls far short of enthusiasm. This is probably all that M. Renan means in a too French sentence of his work on Ecclesiastes. Religion, according to the wise men, was a necessary element in a worthy character, was even (I should say) the principal element, but the religion of these practical moralists has nothing of that delighted abandon which we find in the more distinctly religious Scriptures. 'Happy the man who dreadeth continually,' says one characteristic proverb (xxviii. 14; contrast the 'not caring' of the 'fool' in xiv. 16). Later on, a more devout moralist writes that 'the fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom' (i. 7), and though 'fear' need not exclude 'love' yet there is nothing here to suggest their combination. The proverb of the Egyptian prince Ptahhotep,[1] 'To obey is to love God; not to obey is to hate God,' has no parallel, at any rate in the early anthologies; much less does the great saying in Ps. lxxiii. 25 strike a note congenial to any of the Hebrew sages. And yet it remains true that the wise men happily supplemented the more spiritual teaching of psalmists and prophets.
There is still another important point on which both prophets and 'wise men' were agreed. Whatever their inward religion may have been, they (like the Egyptian moralists) were outwardly utilitarians; i.e., they invite men to practise righteousness, not because righteousness is the secret of blessedness, but because of its outward rewards both for the man himself and for his posterity (Prov. xi. 21, xx. 7; comp. Jer. xxxii. 18). The form in which the doctrine of proportionate retribution is expressed in xi. 4 would have been completely acceptable to the prophets, whose conception of the 'day of Jehovah' (i.e., not the last great dies ira but any providential crisis in the world's history) is adopted in it,—
Wealth is of no profit in the day of wrath,
but righteousness delivers from death.
Proverbs expressing this idea in various forms abound in the
- ↑ Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, p. 91.
