write. Or, to take another case, David's captain Joab was by no means what we would call an educated man, but yet he knew how to read and write, as is shown clearly enough in the incident of the all too famous Uriah letter (2 Sam. xi. 14). The same is true in the time of Isaiah, as indicated in the passage, speaking of the condition of Assyria after the divine judgment, "And the remnant of the glory of Assyria shall be small, that a little child might record it" (x. 19), that is, make a list, an inventory of it. And the fact that judicial procedure at the time of this great prophet was documentary, as is the case in the Orient at the present day, is proved by the circumstance that Isaiah characterises unjust judges as "writers that write perverseness" (x. 1). At a peculiarly important crisis of his prophetic activity he is required to take a tablet before witnesses, on which he is to write "with human pencil," that is, in the common cursive hand, the mysterious words "The spoil speedeth, the prey hasteth." And along with this, the oldest monument of Hebrew writing known to us, the Mesa stone of Dibon, erected by a contemporary of the prophet Elijah, exhibits so distinctly and perfectly the characteristics of cursive script as to demonstrate the existence in Israel of a long-practiced art of writing. But the Old Testament nowhere gives the slightest hint of public schools or of professional teachers. The attempt has been made to find in a very obscure passage of Isaiah, xxviii. 9-13, an allusion to instruction in reading of written characters imparted by a teacher: the defiant and conceited princes of Jerusalem are not willing to be treated like schoolboys by Isaiah, as we would express the idea, but Isaiah has nothing to say of a public school and of methodical instruction in the reading of manuscript imparted there. Hence we must assume, since the art of writing was widely cultivated, that writing, reading, and reckoning were taught in ancient Israel at home and by the father alone, that no school interposed its disturbing and hostile influence between the child and its parental house: nevertheless they thrived excellently without it, and it is easy to imagine how such a close association of children and parents, to whom the parental house was everything, must needs bring to family life a warmth and to the feeling of solidarity a per manence, of which we people of modern times have as yet no notion, for the dominant tendency of our time is to reduce the sphere of home and family bit by bit and to make of man nothing but a mere figure in the census reports and the tax rolls. And now I must give answers to two questions which have perhaps been busying the attention of my readers, and especially the ladies, for some time: What of the mother and what of the daughters? Hitherto only son and father have been spoken of. What position in the education of the children and what influence upon it did Israel ascribe to the mother? And what did they think of the education of girls? First of all we must frankly admit that the mother appears in only a single, and that a very obscure, passage as consciously participating in the education of the children. In the Proverbs of Solomon, there is to be found near the end of the book a little collection of sayings, xxxi. 1-9, with the special heading: The Words of Lemuel, the King of Massa, Which his Mother Taught him. Otherwise the mother is indeed mentioned along with the father, but always with the father and always in the second place. "Listen to the commandment of thy father and despise not the instruction of thy mother" (Prov. i. 8). And the following passage in Proverbs is especially characteristic: "When I was a son unto my father, tender and only beloved in the charge of my mother, then he taught me and said unto me" (iv. 3-4). Here, in poetic parallelism, the mother is mentioned first, one may say for propriety's sake, but after that she is utterly ignored: it is the father alone who teaches and educates. That this is nothing accidental is proved by the comparison of two very similar poetical passages, one German, the other Israelitish. We have a eulogy of the virtuous housewife in The Song of the Bell, and we also have one in the Proverbs of Solomon, xxxi. 10-31. Now in our Schiller we find directly that— "She ruleth wisely Her sphere of home, The boys restraining." In the much longer Biblical eulogy of the virtuous housewife we find no word of this: she is depicted as one who takes excellent care of her husband and his household and keeps everything in the best condition,-but of the children and of her domestic control as mother, not a word! Toward the end, indeed, there is found the very beautiful expression: "She opens her mouth with wisdom and understandeth kindly instruction" (xxxi. 26), but this is put in very general terms and comes in quite incidentally. We meet here an undeniable and very surprising fact. Not, indeed, that the Old Testament is altogether lacking in appreciation of mother love. When, for instance, we read in the First Book of Samuel how Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, visits her son, who is dedicated to the sanctuary, once a year at the time of the harvest festival in the temple at Shiloh, and brings to him a suit of clothing made by herself, it moves our heart to its depths. To express the highest degree of sadness the Psalmist says (xxxv. 14): "Like one who is mourning for his mother." Repeatedly the love of God is compared with the love of a mother, and perhaps nothing more beautiful and touching was ever written than the word of the Prophet: "As a man whom his mother comforteth" (Isaiah lxvi. 13). It is not, "As a son whom his mother comforteth," but "As a man." For even a man, proud and conscious of strength, has moments when only a mother can restore and comfort him. If then, despite this warm appreciation of mother-love, the mother is slighted in comparison with the father in the very realm which our modern notion regards as her peculiar domain, we must assume that it was a conscious purpose in Israel that placed the education absolutely in the hands of the father, and we can, moreover, recognise this purpose elsewhere. It was desired that the training should be serious and severe, not the coddling of a "mother's pet," but a school for life, and this they felt could be better given the child by the father who knew life because he stood in the midst of it. And certainly it would be very salutary for the present day if fathers devoted themselves more to their children and their children's education, and we must surely hold to this as an ideal re quirement. At the same time we will not forget that such conditions are possible only in a patriarchal state which knows nothing of special callings and professional work. It is a matter of course that we cannot demand of a modern father who labors day after day in his office or his counting-room all that was done and could well be done by the father in ancient Israel. And what of the daughters? First of all I must discuss some passages of Luther's Bible translation where "daughters" are mentioned. In the so-called Sayings of Jacob, Genesis xlix., where Luther translated in the sayings about Joseph, "His daughters go about the management" (of the house?), ("Seine Töchter treten einher im Regiment"), this is simply a very queer misunderstanding of what is to be sure a very difficult passage, which is speaking of grapevines and not of daughters. And in the famous parable of the Prophet Nathan regarding the one lamb of the poor man, where it is said, "It did eat of his own morsel and drink of his own cup and slept in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter" (2 Sam. xii. 3), this gives us the impression that it is intended to express a greater degree of tenderness than if it had said, "It was unto him as a son." But the lamb is in Hebrew of the feminine gender: the passage is strictly: "She was unto him," so that there was nothing to do but add, "a daughter." For our sense of language the only correct translation would be, "And it was unto him as a child." And when Luther translates in the eulogy of the virtuous woman, Proverbs xxxi. 29, "Many daughters bring wealth," many a Bible reader with a wealth of daughters may have shaken his head incredulously over the passage and thought to himself: that relentless realist Jesus Sirach certainly knew life better. For in an exceedingly drastic disquisition, much too drastic for our sensibilities, he shows that a daughter is a very questionable treasure which keeps the poor father awake of nights with anxiety (xlii. 914). Now the passage in question in Proverbs of the many daughters who bring wealth, should read, "There are indeed many excellent maidens." As to the education of daughters, there is in the entire Old Testament only a single utterance, and that in Jesus Sirach, but a very striking one: "If thou hast daughters, train them to walk virtuously, and regard them not too tenderly. If thou dispose of a daughter in marriage, thou hast done a good work, but give her to a man of understanding" (vii. 24-251). That is all that we have on the subject! Of course the religious instruction was given to the daughters also, yet in addition they received instruction in domestic work, which of course was taught by the mother. But as for education in the special sense of the word, viz., writing, reading, and arithmetic, we have neither direct nor indirect information on the subject. For even though Queen Jezebel in the familiar account of Naboth writes a letter to the elders of Jesreel and seals it with the seal of King Ahab (1 Kings xxi. 9), we cannot conclude from this alone that girls in general could read and write. And we have a classic illustration of the view of the later Orient on this subject. An exceedingly popular variety of literature is what is known as the literature of apothegms, in which are collected maxims, opinions, sententious sayings of famous men, chiefly Greek philosophers. These apothegms are found throughout the entire Orient in translations and the greatest variety of versions so that we may fairly regard their contents as typical. And among these apothegms the following story is told of the philosopher Diogenes: Seeing one day some one teaching a girl to write, he said, They are dipping her arrows in poison! That means a vigorous and thoroughgoing hostility to all feminine education, and this the Oriental clearly regarded as wise and correct. For the Oriental has never been able to rise to the recognition of the equal rights of man and woman, or even of an equal humanity in them. And in this respect the Israelite is Oriental. In the Talmud we find three times the saying: "Well for him whose children are boys; woe to him whose children are girls!" In the Old Testament there is indeed nothing like this directly expressed, but without doubt this is what the Israelite of old thought. The Koran also furnishes instructive material on this point. The heathen Arabs worshipped chiefly three feminine divinities, 1 In Luther's Bible verses 26-27. |