Book Reviews and Notes
BOOKS OF WISDOM.*
Professor Genung, the author of “Hebrew Literature of Wisdom,” is well-known in other spheres. He is the author of several manuals of rhetoric that have been widely used in this country, and also of some essays in literary criticism. In addition, he has made a special study of Hebrew “Chochmah” literature, and has already published “The Epic of the Inner Life” on Job, and “The words of Koheleth” on Ecelesiastes.. The work at present under consideration is a further treatise in the same field. It summarizes the results of his two earlier books, and contains also new material on Proverbs in the Cannon, on Ecclesiastes, and the Wisdom of Solomon in Apocrypha, and on the parables of Jesus and the Epistle of St. James in the New Testament; all consideration of such Talmudic wisdom as the “Pirk& Aboth” is, however, omitted. Prof. Genung, in accordance with a decided modern tendency, approaches these books from a distinctively literary standpoint—literary, however, not in a sense of those, who study “art for art’s sake”—the purely ssthetic view; it is literary rather in the sense of those who regard literature as our most exact mirror and interpreter of life, and especially of conduct in life. In other words, Prof. Ge- nung’s book is a study of the larger moral issues as reflected in certain important portions of the Bible; it is a study of values in the Hebrew literature of wisdom.
It is held by many that the Sages or Wise Men were a distinct order in old Hebrew society, fulfilling a definite function as compared with the two other important official classes, the priests and the prophets. They may even have instituted a kind of university under the patronage of Solomon,
*John Franklin Genung: Hebrew Literature of Wisdom, PP. 409.—Houghton, Mifflin & Co. $2.00.
and taken fees like modern lawyers. The literature that represents them rings dis- tinetly with the note of the individual, a note that is stern]y suppressed in the legal and prophetical national literature that constitutes the mass of the Bible. Their function, as has been said, was definite. The priests enunciated the laws—a divine institution; the prophets thundered forth their visions—a divine inspiration. But the “Chochomim” were more humble: they were not divine, they were merely human. Whatever authority they possessed came from the universal validity of their insight into man’s heart. They were, in other words, empiricists, who through long ages of inductive experience formulated a code of conduct that in most respects was the same as that derived by lawgiver and prophet ostensibly from the mouth of God. Yet there was a difference; a difference arising naturally from the opposed origins. The law and the vision were exalted in tone—something for man’s higher moods; stern and uncompromising withal. But the words of the wise were popular in tone; words of the market-place and street; words of homely comparison and simple utterance that struck straight at a man’s heart every moment of the day. Every nation has this literature of proverbial wisdom, but it is among the Hebrews, as Dr. Abbott remarks in his book on the “Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews,” that it appeals to the most universal experience. The words of the Hebrew wise are current coin to-day among the nations of the earth.
Prof. Genung justly maintains that in this literature of wisdom reaching from the Proverbs to the Epistle of James, there is a well-marked evolution of ideals.. In the several chapters of his book he traces the course of this evolution, usually with truth of analysis and always with interest of presentation. According to the thesis laid down by him, the constant problem of the Hebrew literature of wisdom, is the prob-