the Hebrew but not in this Sanskrit quaternion, are given in a quatrain of a Vedic hymn to Varuna—
The path of ships across the sea,
The soaring eagle's flight he knows.[1]
The second appendix (xxxi. 1-9) consists of a single group of sayings, described as 'the words of Lemuel, a king, the prophecy [better the proverb, reading māshāl] with which his mother instructed him.' Possibly, as Ewald suggests, Lemuel (or rather, Lemoel, as the word is pointed in ver. 4) is an imaginary name, descriptive of the character of an ideal monarch ('God's own;' comp. Lael, Num. iii. 24). It is not necessary to suppose that the poet himself lived under a native king; he may, like the author of Koheleth, have thrown himself back in imagination to Israel's golden prime. His own period was late, judging from the unclassical Hebrew (notice the Aramaisms in vv. 2, 3, and the strange expressions in vv. 5, 8). The form of the heading suggests that these 'words of Lemuel' formed part of the same collection as the 'words of Agur;' and there is at least nothing in the contents to forbid this view. The warnings of this queen-mother[2] (whose relation to Lemuel reminds us of that of Bathsheba to Solomon) are very homely and practical; one is against sensuality, another against drunkenness; upon which follows an admonition to defend the cause of the poor. Even if there were no native king at the time, the advice would be appropriate for all members of the upper class of society.
The third appendix (xxxi. 10-31) contains the praise of the virtuous woman. In style it is quite unlike the two preceding sections; it must come therefore from another source. It is an alphabetic poem; each distich begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This, combined with the position of the work at the close of the various collections of proverbs, of itself suggests a date not far removed on the one side or the other from the Exile period, when Hebrew literature became undoubtedly more artificial and technical. From
