And Jehovah turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends" (xlii, 10). After the struggle to light and humble reconcilement comes intercession, with Job himself, as Eliphaz had blindly promised (cf. xxii, 26-30) and as Elihu had self-confidently offered (cf. xxxiii, 5-7), acting as advocate and daysman. One thinks of another captivity, a literal fact of Hebrew history, a captivity eventually turned to restoration, wherein an unnamed personage who was esteemed "stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted" (Isa. liii, 3, 4; cf. Jer. xxii, 28), yet bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." It yields an untold wealth of significance to meditate on these two captivities together, with their personal avails, as told in the Second Isaiah and the Book of Job; they belong alike to the supreme disciplines and disclosures of human life.

III. THE Five MegilloTH

Immediately succeeding the Book of Job in this literary section of the Hebrew canon are five short Scripture books which by Hebrew readers came to be known as "the five Megilloth" (lit. "the five rolls"), for which term we might fitly substitute "the five little classics," such being the popular estimate in which they were held. These, in the most usual Hebrew order, are: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. The fact that they are grouped by themselves, with a distinctive name for the collection, gives them a place of their own in the make-up of Biblical literature; their individual meanings also as classics of special value call for their due of consideration.

I

Uses and Estimates of the Group. Some notion of the peculiar distinction accorded to these Megilloth may be gathered from the fact that the reading of them was associated with the observance of the recurring festival seasons in

Jerusalem. Whether this was by public appointment or by a spontaneous social arrangement is not clear; the latter In Jewish seems more likely. Nor is it immediately plain, Social Life except in the case of Lamentations and Esther, what connection was felt between the sentiment of the books and that of the feasts. One thinks most naturally of them as read not for stiff edification, as a didactic exercise, but for recreation, as a sweetener of reunion and genial intercourse. To such use they are well adapted. They may be regarded as their age's vehicle of popular entertainment and instruction, analogous to the drama of Shakespeare's time and the novel of our own. Thus it came about in the finished organization of the Jewish commonwealth, with its social and religious customs, that the Song of Songs was regularly read at the Feast of Passover, Ruth at the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, Ecclesiastes at the Feast of Tabernacles, Esther at the Feast of Purim, and Lamentations on the Ninth of Ab, the fast day observed in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem.

Of these five occasions four are festival seasons, only one, the one marked by the central book of the group, being a fast day. The general connotation of them was not legal nor prophetic, not austere at all but care-free and joyous; times when, as it were, the mind and mood of the people could let itself go. Its sense of freedom and well-being is fitly indicated in Nehemiah's advice to the people when on the birthday of Judaism they were minded to take their law weeping: "Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy unto our Lord; neither be ye grieved; for the joy of Jehovah is your strength" (Neh. viii, 10; cf. also Esth. ix, 19, 22). Freedom, deliverance, confidence, -such was the unspoken language of these festival occasions, a sentiment that the one memorial of the nation's dispersion did not avail to impair.

It is not without significance that these Megilloth, or little classics, should have come to be associated, as by a natural In Literary affinity, with the unprescribed observances of the Appreciation feasts. They too, in a sense not so true of other Scripture, are literary works in which the free Hebrew mind has let itself go. Written neither in criticism nor in propaganda, they have not the fear of orthodoxy nor the awe of mystic revelation before their eyes. They represent the thoughts and sentiments in which the popular mind can take pleasure or find itself reflected, without reference to the big monitions of priest or prophet. Perhaps that is why

three of these books, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, did not attain to a confirmed status in the canon until late and after much hesitation of estimate. They were, in a word, literary works that gave free rein to the sincerest thought and feeling, letting the question of official sanction take care of itself. If the canon was eventually liberal enough to include them, so much the more hospitable and tolerant the canon.

Nor should we fail to note here the variety and the artistic quality observable in these works. All the leading Hebrew types of literary workmanship -- song, idyl, elegy, mashal, plotted story -are in turn represented, each by what may be called a cabinet masterpiece, a specimen of finished literature in its kind. This fact does not look fortuitous. It is as if the Hebrew literature, proudly conscious of itself, were minded to come out from its ancient seclusion and measure itself by the standards of the world.1 It was in a ripened and highly cultured period that this final section of the Old Testament was made up, a period wherein the most influential literature in the world was its rival. We do well to give this fact its due among the Hebrew men of letters in whose care were the uniquely educated people of a book.

1 Cf. p. 431, above,

II

Traits of the Individual Books. The choice and finished literary form observable in these Megilloth connotes something quite other than pride of verbal or structural artistry. It is in its finely wrought way a reflection of the soul within. One may apply to it Spenser's words,

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take;

For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

True as this is of all well-meant literature, we seem to recognize it more as in form and phrase the piece is more carefully molded. It is dealing with a finer, more penetrative thrust of truth. This, I think, can be said of the works now under consideration. One discerns in each of them not so much a great mass or landmark of Biblical disclosure as a kind of cabinet piece, something clarifying, corrective, some view that makes for the true balance and perspective of things. There is about them a certain intimacy of spiritual relation, a tribute not only to the new and cogent but to the wholesome and familiar. Hence the value accorded to them in the observances of the festival seasons.

Two of the five Megilloth, the Song of Songs and the Book of Ruth, have been in part discussed in the preceding chapters. They must needs come up again, however, in their canonical order, for the sake of their respective contributions to the treasury of Hebrew classics.

1. In "The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's" a notable departure is made from the lines of thought and Song of sentiment conventionally deemed Scriptural, Songs: Can- whether to the help or hurt of sacred values has been a much-vexed question. It is the only Scripture book that deals with the human passion of love, the love of the sexes for each other, that pervasive theme without which modern romance could hardly exist,

tata of the

Awakening

of Love

yet which religious asceticism and sanctimony have viewed askance as if it were a thing to be apologized for. As such it sounds at first reading like a literary interloper. The tone of the book is so richly Oriental and sensuous that both it and the Bible which sponsors it are placed as it were on trial, it for its frank disregard of the ascetic and prudish, the Bible for its warm hospitality to diverse works. Such has always been the book's equivocal fortune, which scholars have tried to adjust by giving it allegorical and esoteric meanings both Jewish and Christian. With these we need not concern ourselves here, at least until we have seen what simpler suggestion lies in the rich imagery and description of the poem. We may find, indeed, that the Bible, with its liberality of inclusion makes room therein for what is at once the most primal and the most sacred relation in life.

NOTE. The Song of Songs as the supposed chef d'œuvre of the Solomonic school of lyric poetry, and its relative purity of sentiment as compared with that of other Oriental literature, is spoken of on page 88, above. This early introduction of the poem does not imply an early date of composition or Solomonic authorship; these depend upon quite other considerations.

Type and

The tissue of the book, as the title intimates, is superlatively lyric, the loftiest reach of Hebrew song. It is the Its Literary lyric mood, with its singleness and intensity of emotional states, that is throughout the controlShaping ling element. All along, however, a quasidramatic element supervenes, a suggestion of scene and personation, which tempts the reader to search for a coördinated plot but with elusive results. To make a built drama of it, or even something analogous to an Elizabethan masque, calls for too much artifice of interpretation; it does not justify itself against the next expositor. The Hebrew genius, at its freest in the impassioned lyric, was lame and clumsy in the dramatic; the Book of Job has to some extent evinced that. We can, however, call the book before us a lyric cycle.