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with Pro 3:14.), repetitions, notwithstanding the oneness of their authorship. But if two collections of proverbs are in so many various ways different in their character, as 10:1-22:16 and chap. 25-29, then the previous probability rises almost to a certainty by such repetitions. From the form, for the most part anomalous, in which the Hezekiah-collection presents the proverbs and portions of proverbs which are found also in the first collection, and from their being otherwise independent, we further conclude that “the men of Hezekiah” did not borrow from the first collection, but formed it from other sources. But since one does not understand why “the men of Hezekiah” should have omitted so great a number of genuine Solomonic proverbs which remain, after deducting the proportionally few that have been repeated (for this omission is not to be explained by saying that they selected those that were appropriate and wholesome for their time), we are further justified in the conclusion that the other collection was known to them as one current in their time. Their object was, indeed, not to supplement this older collection; they rather regarded their undertaking as a similar people's book, which they wished to place side by side with that collection without making it superfluous. The difference of the selection in the two collections has its whole directing occasion in the difference of the intention. The first collection begins (Pro 10:1) with the proverb -
A wise son maketh glad his father,
And a foolish son is the grief of his mother; the second (Pro 25:2) with the proverb -
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,
And the glory of kings to search out a matter.
The one collection is a book for youth, to whom it is dedicated in the extended introduction, Prov 1:7-9:18; the second is a people's book suited to the time of Hezekiah (“Solomon's Wisdom in Hezekiah's days,” as Stier has named it), and therefore it takes its start not, like the first, from the duties of the child, but from those of the king. If in the two collections everything does not stand in conscious relation to these different objects, yet the collectors at least have, from the commencement to the close (cf. Pro 22:15 with Pro 29:26), these objects before their eyes.
As to the time at which the first collection was made, the above considerations also afford us some materials for forming a judgment. Several pairs of proverbs which it contains present to us