Nichtigkeiten in Geschäften, Entwürfen, Speculationen und Vergnügen, zugleich mit dem was einzig in ihm wahr, daurend, fortgehend, wechselnd, lohnend ist, reicher, eindringlicher, kürzer beschriebe, als dieses.[1]
But I must retrace my steps. One of my four critics has
yet to be briefly characterised—S. D. Luzzatto of Padua, best
known as the author of a Hebrew commentary on Isaiah,
but also a master in later Hebrew and Aramaic scholarship.
As a youth of twenty-four he wrote a deeply felt and somewhat
eccentrically ingenious treatise on Koheleth, which he
kept by him till 1860, when it appeared in one of the annual
volumes of essays and reviews called Ozar Nechmad. In it
he maintains, with profound indignation at the unworthy
post-Exile writer, that the Book of Ecclesiastes denies the immortality
of the soul, and recommends a life of sensuous pleasure.
The writer's name, however, was, he thinks, Koheleth,
and his fraud in assuming the name of Solomon was detected
by the wise men of his time, who struck out the assumed
name and substituted Koheleth (leaving however the words
'son of David, king in Jerusalem,' as a record of the imposture).
Later students, however, were unsuspicious enough to
accept the work as Solomon's, and being unable to exclude a
Solomonic writing from the Canon, they inserted three qualifying
half-verses of an orthodox character, viz. 'and know
that for all this God will bring thee into judgment' (xi. 6b]);
'and remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth' (xii. 1a]);
'and the spirit shall return to God who gave it' (xii. 8b[**? [Greek: beta]]).
This latter view, which has the doubtful support of a Talmudic
passage,[2] appears to me, though from the nature of the case
uncertain, and susceptible, as I think, of modification, yet in
itself probable as restoring harmony to the book, and in accordance
with the treatment of other Biblical texts by the Soferim
(or students and editors of Scripture). Geiger may have
fallen into infinite extravagances, but he has at any rate
shown that the early Soferim modified many passages in the
interests of orthodoxy and edification.[3] If so, they did but(see Ginsburg, p. 98).]
