Note 234 — Terminal Essay.

There are three distinct Lokmans who are carefully confounded in Sale (Koran chapt. xxxi.) and in Smith’s Dict. of Biography etc. art. Æsopus. The first or eldest Lokman, entitled Al-Hakím (the Sage) and the hero of the Koranic chapter which bears his name, was son of Bá’úrá of the Children of Azar, sister’s son to Job or son of Job’s maternal aunt; he witnessed David’s miracles of mail-making and when the tribe of ’Ád was destroyed, he became King of the country. The second, also called the Sage, was a slave, an Abyssinian negro, sold to the Israelites during the reign of David or Solomon, synchronous with the Persian Kay Káús and Kay Khusrau, also Pythagoras the Greek(!). His physique is alluded to in the saying, “Thou resemblest Lokman (in black ugliness) but not in wisdom” (Ibn Khallikan i. 145). This negro or negroid, after a godly and edifying life, left a volume of “Amsál,” proverbs and exempla (not fables or apologues); and Easterns still say, “One should not pretend to teach Lokmán”—in Persian, “Hikmat ba Lokman ámokhtan.” Three of his apothegms dwell in the public memory: “The heart and the tongue are the best and worst parts of the human body.” “I learned wisdom from the blind who make sure of things by touching them” (as did St. Thomas); and, when he ate the colocynth offered by his owner, “I have received from thee so many a sweet that ’twould be surprising if I refused this one bitter.” He was buried (says the Tárikh Muntakhab) at Ramlah in Judæa, with the seventy Prophets stoned in one day by the Jews. The youngest Lokman “of the vultures” was a prince of the tribe of Ad who lived 3,500 years, the age of seven vultures (Tabari). He could dig a well with his nails; hence the saying, “Stronger than Lokman” (A. P. i. 701); and he loved the arrow-game, hence “More gambling than Lokman” (ibid. ii. 938). “More voracious than Lokman” (ibid. i. 134) alludes to his eating one camel for breakfast and another for supper. His wife Barákish also appears in proverb, e.g. “Camel us and camel thyself” (ibid. i. 295) i.e. give us camel flesh to eat, said when her son by a former husband brought her a fine joint which she and her husband relished. Also, “Barákish hath sinned against her kin” (ibid. ii. 89). More of this in Chenery’s Al-Hariri p. 422; but the three Lokmans are there reduced to two.