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The supplements to the Hezekiah-collection, chap. 30f., are of so peculiar a form, that it will occur to no one (leaving out of view such expressions as דּעת קדשׁים, knowledge of the Holy, Pro 30:3, cf. Pro 9:10) to ascribe them to one of the authors of the preceding proverbs. We content ourselves here with a reference to Mühlau's work, De Proverbiorum quae dicuntur Aguri et Lemuelis origine atque indole, 1869, where the Aramaic-Arabic colouring of this in all probability foreign section is closely investigated.
Having thus abundantly proved that the two groups of proverbs bearing the inscription משׁלי שׁלמה are, as to their primary stock, truly old-Solomonic, though not without an admixture of imitations; that, on the contrary, the introduction, Prov 1:7-9:18, as well as the דברי חכמים, Pro 22:17-24 and 30f., are not at all old-Solomonic, but belong to the editor of the older Book of Proverbs, which reaches down to Pro 24:22, so that thus the present book of the poetry of Solomon contains united with it the poems of the older editor, and besides of other poets, partly unknown Israelites, and partly two foreigners particularly named, Agur and Lemuel; we now turn our attention to the Doctrinal Contents of the work, and ask whether a manifoldness in the type of instruction is noticeable in it, and whether there is perceptible in this manifoldness a progressive development. It may be possible that the Proverbs of Solomon, the Words of the Wise, and the Proverbial poetry of the editor, as they represent three eras, so also represent three different stages in the development of proverbial poetry. However, the Words of the Wise Pro 22:17-24 are so internally related to the Proverbs of Solomon, that even the sharpest eye will discover in them not more than the evening twilight of the vanishing Solomonic Mashal. There thus remain on the one side only the Proverbs of Solomon with their echo in the Words of the Wise, on the other the Proverbial Poems of the editor; and these present themselves as monuments of two sharply defined epochs in the progressive development of the Mashal.
The common fundamental character of the book in all its parts is rightly defined when we call it a Book of Wisdom. Indeed, with the Church Fathers not only the Book of Sirach and the Solomonic Apocrypha, but also this Book of Proverbs bears this title, which seems also to have been in use among the Jews, since Melito of Sardes adds to the title “Proverbs of Solomon,” ἡ καὶ Σοφὶα; since, moreover, Eusebius (H.E. iv. 22) affirms, that not only Hegesippus