Читать книгу Studies in Life from Jewish Proverbs - W. A. L. Elmslie - Страница 9

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The abnormal aptitude of the Jews for proverb-making and their love of concrete expression are ultimately due to the conditions of early centuries. Of these two features it will be convenient to consider the second first.

The land of Palestine, home of the Jews from about 1200 B.C., lies between an ocean of water and an ocean of sand: on the west its coasts are washed, but not threatened, by the Mediterranean Sea; on the east and on the south it has to wage incessant warfare against the indrifting sands. The country is an oasis snatched from the great deserts and kept from their insidious grasp only by the toil and ingenuity of man. Behind Palestine looms Arabia, and beneath the Jew is the Arab. Throughout the last five thousand years the population of Palestine (excepting the Philistines on the coast) has been formed by layer after layer of Arabian immigrants, who have invaded the fertile lands, sometimes by the rush of sudden conquest, but also by steady, peaceful infiltration. Despite much intermarriage with the earlier Canaanites there was always a passionate strain of the desert in Jewish blood, and throughout its whole history in Palestine Israel had to live in uneasy proximity to its kinsfolk, the wild nomads who roamed the deserts to the east and south. Consequently the ultimate back-ground of the Old Testament writings is not Palestine but Arabia, a land which sets a deep and lasting impress on its children. A life wild yet monotonous in the extreme, rigid in its limitations but unbridled in its licence within those limitations: such is the rule imposed by the vast wilderness on the men who have to wander its blazing solitudes. Arabia produces four paradoxes in the intellect and characters of its nomadic tribes.[24] First, “the combination of strong sensual grossness with equally strong tempers of reverence and worship.” Second, “a marvellous capacity for endurance and resignation broken by fits of ferocity: the ragged patience bred by famine. We see it survive in the long-suffering, mingled with outbursts of implacable wrath, which characterises so many Psalms. These are due to long periods of moral famine, the famine of justice.” Third, ingenuity of mind and swift perception, but without that power or inclination for abstruse or sustained argument which the Western world has inherited from the Greeks. Fourth, a subjective attitude to the phenomena of nature and history, combined with an admirable realism in describing these phenomena.

For thousands of years before Israel entered Canaan and became a nation its ancestors were nomads of Arabia. It would be strange indeed if the great desert which so subtly and irresistibly sets its spell upon the human spirit had left no trace on Jewish proverbs. Yet the trace is not evident in points of detail. Most of the sayings we shall study in this volume represent the thoughts of certain post-exilic Jews. Where then does the mark of the desert linger? First in the peculiar concreteness of the proverbs. All proverbs tend to concrete expression, but in this respect the Jewish ones are only equalled by those of the Arabs themselves; and this quality is shown not only in the early but also in the later sayings. Let us illustrate the point before suggesting its ultimate cause. The Jew said, “Two dogs killed a lion,”[25] where we say, “Union is strength.” We say, “Familiarity breeds contempt”; they said, “The pauper hungers without noticing it.”[26] Our tendency is to consider riches and poverty, but they talked of the rich man and the poor. The most remarkable example of this tendency is the conception that gives unity to the Book of Proverbs, namely the idea of Wisdom. Here, if anywhere, one would expect the abstract to be maintained. But the individualising instinct has conquered, and in the loftiest passages of Proverbs we shall find Wisdom praised, not as an idea, but as a person, represented as a woman of transcendent beauty and nobility. Such abnormally concrete thinking may have its disadvantages, but at least it will have one satisfactory quality—humanism. Men who thought not in generalisations but in particular instances, who saw not classes but individuals, could not help being great humanists. If now we ask whence the Jewish mind received this tendency, our thoughts will have to travel back till we discern a group of black hair-cloth tents out in the Arabian Wilderness. In the tents are men who have learnt to pass safely across the deserts and are at home in them as a seaman on the seas; wild men and strong and confident, yet never careless, knowing that they can relax vigilance only at the risk of life. For these wastes are not empty but treacherous; apparently harmless, in reality full of peril. Security in the desert depends on acute and untiring observation. No amount of abstruse reasoning, no ability in speculative thought, will save life and property there, if the first sign of a lurking foe is passed unnoticed in the trying and deceitful light. Every faculty must be trained to the swift perception of concrete facts, faint signs of movement, the behaviour of men and beasts. The great sun in heaven may be trusted to rise and set: why speculate on the mystery? While we are lost in thought the sons of Ishmael may fall upon us. “The leisure of the desert is vast, but it is the leisure of the sentinel. … To the nomad on his bare, war-swept soil few things happen, but everything that happens is ominous.”

Keen observation, then, more than any other quality, is required by Arabia from its children. But observation is the quintessence of the art of proverb-making, provided it be combined with practice in the expression of one’s thoughts. As for practice in talk, one might readily suppose that the solitudes would have made their peoples tongue-tied. In point of fact the contrary is true, and the skill of the Jews in the devising of proverbs, no less than their love of concrete expression, goes back to habits engendered by this desert existence. Arabian life provided not only long leisure for reflection but also opportunity for social intercourse in the small tribal groups; so that the nomads came to have a passion for story-telling and for all manner of sententious talk, witness the customs of the Bedouin to this day and the immense collections of Arabian proverbs. Hour after hour, with Eastern tirelessness, the tribesmen, gathered at the tent of their sheikh, would listen approvingly to the eloquence bred of large experience and shrewd judgment. Here is the scene painted in the words of Doughty’s Arabia Deserta: “These Orientals study little else [than the art of conversation and narrative], as they sit all day idle in their male societies; they learn in this school of infinite human observation to speak to the heart of one another. His tales [referring to a Moorish rogue, Mohammed Aly], seasoned with saws which are the wisdom of the unlearned, we heard for more than two months; they were never-ending. He told them so lively to the eye that they could not be bettered, and part were of his own motley experience.” The Israelites carried this habit with them from Arabia into their settled homes in Canaan. Here is a similar scene in the hall of a modern Palestinian village-sheikh: “We were seated on mats, spread with little squares of rich carpet round three sides of a hollow place in the floor, where a fire of charcoal burned, surrounded by parrot-beaked coffee pots. This was the hearth of hospitality, whose fire is never suffered to go out; near it stood the great stone mortar in which a black slave was crushing coffee-beans. The coffee, deliciously flavoured with some cunning herb or other, was passed round. But the conversation which followed was the memorable part of that entertainment. In the shadow at the back the young men who had been admitted sat in silence. The old men, elders of the village community, sat in a row on stone benches right and left of the door. The sheikh made many apologies for not having called on us at the tents—he had thought we were merchantmen going to buy silk at Damascus. Then followed endless over-valuation of each other, and flattery concerning our respective parents and relations. … The elders sat silently leaning upon their staves, except now and then, when one of them would slowly rise and expatiate upon something the sheikh had said—perhaps about camels or the grain crop—beginning his interruption almost literally in the words of Job’s friends: “Hearken unto me, I also will show mine opinion. I will answer also for my part, I also will show mine opinion. For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.”[27] So has it been in Palestine time out of mind, and it is in settings of this description that we must imagine the art of proverb-making developing in Israel.

Such, then, is the significance of these features which we have been considering—the numerical proverbs, parallels with sayings of other nations, the love of the Jews for proverbs with their consequent skill in making them, and their remarkable penchant for concrete expression. Otherwise, antiquity has left few traces in the Jewish proverbs. That, however, is but natural, since proverb-making was a living art among the people. New maxims kept coming into use, and they crowded out of memory the favourites of byegone generations. Doubtless a few of the sayings in the Book of Proverbs are ancient, though just how old we cannot tell. For example, P. 2720, Sheol and Abaddon are never filled, and the eyes of man are never sated may be co-æval with the fear of death and the passion of greed. Cheyne discovers a relic of “that old nomadic love of craft and subtlety” in the saying (Pr. 223), A shrewd man sees misfortune coming and conceals himself, whereas simpletons pass on and suffer for it; but his interpretation of the verse seems somewhat forced. The following, however, in matter and perhaps in form also may be nearly as ancient as the settled occupation of the land:

Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers set up. (Pr. 2228).

Nothing could well be easier than the removal of those landmarks—insignificant heaps of stone, set at the end of a wide furrow. But from earliest times the East has counted them adequate guardians of the fields, and from generation to generation, by consent of all decent-minded men, they have stood inviolate. Other nations, as well as Israel, called them sacred. Greece, and Rome too, gave them a god for their protection, Hermes of the Boundary, beside whose shrine of heaped-up stones travellers would stay to rest, and, rested, lay an offering of flowers or fruit before the kindly deity:

“I, who inherit the tossing mountain-forests of steep Cyllene stand here guarding the pleasant playing-fields, Hermes, to whom boys often offer marjoram and hyacinths and fresh garlands of violet.”[28]

Even the thief and murderer, we are told, would hesitate before the wickedness of moving these simple, immemorial heaps of stone: such was their sanctity. What unutterable contempt for the laws of God and man is therefore revealed in the multiple witness of the Old Testament[29] against the rich and powerful in Israel, that they scrupled not to remove the landmarks of their poorer brethren? Thieves and murderers would have kept their hands clean from such pollution:

Remove not the landmark of the widow, Into the field of the orphan enter not; For mighty is their Avenger, He will plead their cause against thee (Pr. 2310, 11).