form the linguistic instrument which they required. Less important, but not to be ignored, are the Aramaic elements. Even Dr. Adam Clarke, untrained scholar as he was, pronounced that the attempts which had as yet been made to overthrow the evidence, were 'often trifling and generally ineffectual.'[1] The Aramaisms of Koheleth are irreconcileable with a pre-Exile date; they can only be paralleled and explained from the Aramaic portions of the books of Ezra and Daniel. That they are comparatively few, only proves that the force of the Aramaising movement has abated, and that the Hebrew language, at any rate in the hands of some of its chief cultivators, is passing into a new phase (the Mishnic). The judgment of Ewald, as already expressed in 1837, appears to me on the whole satisfactory: 'One might easily imagine Koheleth to be the very latest book in the Old Testament. A premature conclusion, since Aramaic influence extended very gradually and secretly, so that one writer might easily be more Aramaic in the colouring of his style than another. But though not [even if not] the latest, it cannot have been written till long after Aramaic had begun powerfully to influence Hebrew, and therefore not before the last century of the Persian rule.'[2]
For the sake of my argument, it is hardly necessary to
refer to the words of non-Semitic origin, which are (as most
critics rightly hold) but two in number; 1 (
Hebrew characters) (ii. 5, plur.) undoubtedly
a Hebraised Persian word, on which I lay no stress
here, because it occurs, not only in Neh. ii. 8, but also in Cant.
iv. 13, where many critics deny that it militates against a
pre-Exile date, and 2 (Hebrew characters) (viii. 11), which occurs in the
Aramaic parts of Ezra and Daniel, and also in Esth. i. 20,
and while used in the Targums and in Syriac, did not become
naturalised in Talmudic. This word, too, is commonly
regarded as Hebraised Persian, but, following Zirkel, the
eminent Jewish scholar Heinrich Grätz declares it to be the
Hebraised form of a Greek word. Is this possible or probable?
Are there any genuine Græcisms of language, and
