shepherd over Cain the tiller of the soil, and indirectly expressed in the curse of labour; but agricultural villages with their periodic allotments of land, and towns or larger villages with their elders (zeqênîm), are the foremost figures in the practical life of Israel. So, when we turn to the Book of Job, the most Arab of Hebrew poems, we find that we have passed from the associations of the desert to those of the city, and that feelings of communal generosity have been largely lost in the transition to that settled life in which the higgling of the market (to use Adam Smith's phrase) must soon come to be based on individual self-interest. "When I leave the gate of the citadel (gereth) in the open space I set my seat; grey-beards rose and stood; princes stayed their words and placed their hands upon their mouths; the voices of the nobles ceased and their tongues clave to the roofs of their mouths." Here in the settled community, with its social grades dependent largely on the possession of wealth, its trading spirit and competitions in miniature, the bettering of the outcasts is not an act of Bedouin generosity, but the rise of upstarts whose early poverty may be cast in their teeth as a disgrace. "Now they of fewer days laugh against me, whose fathers I disdained to set with the dogs of my flock.—Ay, what use to me was the strength of their hands? Age lay dead upon them. Lean for want and hunger they were gnawing in the desert, yesternight in waste and ruin; they were cutters of orachs by the bushes, with the roots of juniper for food. They are driven from among us (shouts are raised against them as against the to settle in the horrid beds of torrents, caverns in the earth, and crags. They bray like hungry asses in the bushes, under nettles are they clanned[1]
- ↑ Yesuppâchu; this use of sâphach should be compared with shaphach, from which mishpâchah, the familiar Hebrew expression for "clan," is derived.
