The part. חלך is also here not so much the expression of the fut. instans (iturus est), like Ecc 9:10, as of the present (Venet.: ἄπεισι); cf. Gen 15:2, where also these two possible renderings stand in question. “Everlasting house” is the name for the grave of the dead, according to Diodorus Sic. i. 51, also among the Egyptians, and on old Lat. monuments also the expression domus aeterna is found (vid., Knobel); the comfortless designation, which corresponds[1] to the as yet darkened idea of Hades, remained with the Jews in spite of the hope of the resurrection they had meanwhile received; cf. Tob. 3:6; Sanhedrin 19a, “the churchyard of Huṣal;” “to be a churchyard” (beth 'olam); “at the door of the churchyard” (beth 'olam), Vajikra rabba, c. 12. Cf. Assyr. bit 'idii = עד בּית of the under-world (Bab.-Assyr. Epic, “Höllenfahrt der Istar,” i. 4).
The clause following means that mourners already go about the streets (cf. סבב, Sol 3:3, and Pil. Sol 3:2; Psa 59:7) expecting the death of the dying. We would say: the undertaker tarries in the neighbourhood of the house to be at hand, and to offer his services. For hassophdim are here, as Knobel, Winz., and others rightly explain, the mourners, saphdanin (sophdanin), hired for the purpose of playing the mourning music (with the horn שיפורא, Moëd katan 27b, or flute, חלילים, at the least with two, Kethuboth 46b; cf. Lat. siticines) and of singing the lament for the dead, qui conducti plorant in funere (Horace, Poet. 433), along with whom were mourning women, מקוננות (Lat. praeficae) (cf. Buxtorf's Lex. Talm. col. 1524 s.), - a custom which existed from remote antiquity, according to 2Sa 3:31; Jer 34:5. The Talm. contains several such lamentations for the dead, as e.g., that of a “mourner” (ההוא ספדנא) for R. Abina: “The palms wave their heads for the palm-like just man,” etc.; and of the famed “mourner” Bar-Kippuk on the same occasion: “If the fire falls upon the cedar, what shall the hyssop of the walls do?” etc. (Moëd katan 25b)[2] - many of the ספנים were accordingly elegiac poets. This section of Ecc 12:5 does not refer to the funeral itself, for the procession of the mourners about the bier ought in that case to have been more distinctly expressed; and that they walked about in the streets before the funeral (Isa 15:3) was not a custom, so far as we know. They formed a component part of the procession following the bier to the grave in Judea, as Shabbath 153a remarks with
- ↑ The Syr. renders beth 'olam by domus laboris sui, which is perhaps to be understood after Job 3:17.
- ↑ Given in full in Wiss. Kunst Judenth. p. 230ff. Regarding the lament for the dead among the Haurans, vid., Wetzstein's treatise on the Syrian Threshing-Table in Bastian's Zeitsch. für Ethnologie, 1873.
