A SERIES OF WORKS FROM THE SACRED SCRIPTURES PRESENTED Bible. C. T ECCLESIASTES E AND THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND notes BY RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A. (CAMB.), PH.D. (PENN.) PROFESSOR OF LITERATURE IN ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1896, By MACMILLAN AND CO. Set up and electrotyped March, 1896. Reprinted October, INTRODUCTION I THE present number of the Modern Reader's Bible unites in a single volume the biblical Ecclesiastes and the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon. It is essential that the two works should be studied together. While they have their respective places in the development of Wisdom literature, yet from the two works previously introduced they stand separated by a gulf as wide as that between primitive and modern thought. Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, with all their force and beauty, belong to Hebrew literature; the writings now to be considered form a part of that world literature which is independent of time and nation. In their thought the two works are contrasted to the extent of being antagonistic. But this antagonism is itself a unity; we have here Semitic religious tradition and speculative Greek thought struggling together over the supreme human problems of immortality and Divine providence. No literary styles could be more unlike than those of Ecclesiastes and Wisdom. The one carries to an extreme the indefinite suggestiveness of Hebrew; in the |