author of the celebrated mediæval 'Romance of the Rose.'[1] 'What is Love?' asks the lover, and Reason answers, 'It is a mere sickness of the thought, a sport of the fancy. If thou scape at last from Love's snares, I hold it but a grace. Many a one has lost body and soul in his service' (comp. Eccles, vii. 26). And then he continues, 'There is a kind of love which lawful is and good, as noble as it is rare,—the friendship of men.' To quote Chaucer's translation,
And certeyn he is wel bigone
Among a thousand that findeth oon.
For ther may be no richesse
Ageyns frendshippe of worthynesse.
The allusion to Eccles. vii. 29 is obvious. Thus the same varieties of character recur in all ages. This point of view is very different from that of the Agadic writers who borrow from Eccles. vii. 26 a weapon against 'heresy' (mīnūth), a term which includes the Jewish Christian faith. All are agreed that the 'bitter woman' is heresy, and one of them declares that the closing words of the verse refer to 'the men of Capernaum' (see Matt. ix. 8). Delitzsch, Ein Tag in Kapernaum, 1886, p. 48; comp. Wünsche, Midraseh Koheleth, p. 110.
27. Pages 223-227.—Eccles. xi. 9-xii. 7. The key to the whole
passage is xi. 8. 'For, if a man lives many years, let him rejoice in
them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, that they shall
be many.' I cannot accept the ingenious conjecture of Dr. C. Taylor,
which might (see Chap. X.) have been supported by a reference to
Egypt, that xii. 3-5 are cited from an authorised book of dirges.
Not only these verses but xii. 1b-6 form a poem on the evils of
old age, the whole effect of which is lost without some prefix, such
as 'Rejoice in thy youth.' Döderlein supplies this prefix in xii. 6;
but this is not enough. If we hesitate, with Luzzatto, Geiger, and
Nöldeke to cancel xii. 1a as a later addition for purposes of edification,
we must, with Gritz and Bickell, read either (
Hebrew characters) or (Hebrew characters).
These two readings seem to have existed side by side, and to an
ingenious moralist this fact apparently suggested a new and edifying
reading (Hebrew characters). Hence Akabia ben Mahalallel,[2] one of the
earliest of the Jewish 'fathers,' and probably a contemporary of
Gamaliel I., advises considering these three points as a safeguard
against sin, 'Whence thou comest, whither thou goest, and before
whom thou wilt have to give an account.' 'Whence thou comest,'
