Note 49 — FOURTH SECTION.

It may be worth while to specify some of the gross and absurd conjectures, some also of the strange differences, into which what may be called the medical reading of this passage has betrayed its advocates. Ginsburg has a marvellous collection of them in his "notes" to these verses. I select and combine only a few of them. The darkening of the light, the sun, the moon, and the stars (ver. 2) is taken by one great authority (the Talmud) to mean the darkening of the forehead, the nose, the soul, and the teeth; by another (the Chaldee Paraphrast), the obscuring of the face, the eyes, the cheeks, and the apples of the eyes; by a third (Dr. Smith, in his "Portraiture of Old Age"), for the decay of all the mental faculties. That "the clouds return after the rain" signifies, according to Ibn Ezra, the constant dimness of the eyes; according to Le Clerc, a bad influenza, accompanied with unceasing snuffling. "The keepers of the house" (ver. 3) are the ribs and the loins (Talmud), the knees (Chaldee), and the hands and arms (Ibn Ezra). "The men of power" are the thighs (Talmud) and the arms (Chaldee). "The grinding maids" are the teeth, and "the ladies who look out of the lattices" are the eyes, by general consent. "The door closed on the street" is the pores of the skin (Dr. Smith), the lips (Ibn Ezra), and the eyes (Henstenberg). That "the noise of the mills ceases" or "grows faint" (ver. 4) means that the mastication of food becomes imperfect (Dr. Smith), that the appetite fails (Chaldee), that the voice grows feeble (Grotius). That "the songbirds descend to their nests" signifies that music and songs are a bore to the aged man (Talmud), that he is no longer able to sing (Chaldee), that his ears are heavy (Grotius). The allusion to "the almond" (ver. 5) denotes that the haunch-bone shall come out from leanness (Talmud), or (Reynolds) it denotes the hoary hair which comes quickly on a man just as the almond-tree thrusts out her blossoms before any other tree; while at least half-a-dozen scholars and physicians take it as pointing to membrum genitale or glans virilis. That "the locust becomes a burden" means that the ankles swell (Chaldee), gout in the feet (Jerome), a projecting stomach (Le Clerc), the dry shrivelled frame of an old man (Dr. Smith). Almost all modern commentators take the reference to "the caper-berry" as marking the fact that condiments lose their power to provoke appetite with the aged, while many of the ancients took it as marking the failure of sexual desire. The "silver cord" and "golden bowl" of ver. 6 are the tongue and the skull (Chaldee), backbone and brain (Dr. Smith), urine and bladder (Gasper Sanctius); while the "bucket" is either the gall or the right ventricle of the heart, and "the wheel" that draws the water stands for the air-inspiring lungs.

Now of course it would not be just to condemn any interpretation simply because it is weighted with absurdities and contradictions such as these, though it surely requires a very strong reading to carry them. But when an interpretation is so obviously forced and fanciful, when it is so remarkably ingenious and leaves to ingenuity so wide and lawless a scope, we shall do well to hesitate before accepting it. And if another interpretation be offered us, as in the text, which gives a literal rendering to every phrase instead of a figurative one, which bases itself on the common household facts of Eastern experience instead of on the technicalities of Western science, which instead of being so indeterminate and fanciful as at times to be self-contradictory and grotesque, is coherent and impressive, we really have no alternative before us. We cannot but choose the one and reject the other.