Ecclesiastes 12:2

while the sun, or the light The imagery falls in naturally with the thought that the approach of death is represented by the gathering of a tempest. It does not follow, however, that this excludes the thought of a latent symbolism in detail as well as in the general idea. The thought that man was as a microcosm, and that each element in the universe had its analogue in his nature, was a familiar one to the Greek and Oriental mind, and was susceptible of many applications. So, to take an instance belonging to a different age or country, we find an Eastern poet thus writing, circ. a. d. 1339,

"Of all that finds its being in the world

Man in himself the symbol true may find.

His body is as earth, and as the Heaven

His head, with signs and wonders manifold,

And the five senses shine therein as stars.

The Spirit, like the sun, pours light on all.

The limbs, that bear the body's burden up,

Are as the hills that raise their height to heaven.

Hair covers all his limbs, as grass the earth,

And moisture flows, as flow the streams and brooks.

So on the day when soul and body part,

And from the body's load the soul is freed,

Then canst thou see the body all a-tremble,

As earth shall tremble at the last great day;

The Spirit with its senses fall away,

As stars extinguished fall on earth below;

The last death-sigh with which the body dies

Thrill through the bones, like tempest-blast and storm.

As on that day the hills shall pass away,

So does death's storm break up our mortal frame.

A sea of death-damps flows from every pore:

Thou plungest in, and art as drowned therein:

So is thy dying like the great world's death;

In life and death it is thy parallel."

From the Gulschen Rasof Mahmud, quoted in Tholuck's Blüthen-Sammlung aus der morgenländischen Mystik, p. 213.

It will be admitted that the parallelism is singularly striking and suggestive. With this clue to guide us we may admit all that has been urged by Umbreit, Ginsburg and others in favour of the "storm" interpretation and yet not reject the more detailed symbolic meaning of Jewish and other commentators. We may have the broad outline of the phenomena that precede a tempest, sun, moon and stars, hidden by the gathering blackness. A like imagery meets us as representing both personal and national calamity in Isaiah 13:10; Jeremiah 15:9; Amos 8:9. The sun may be the Spirit, the Divine light of the body, the moon as the Reason that reflects that light, the stars as the senses that give but a dim light in the absence of sun and moon. The clouds that return after rain are the natural symbol of sorrows, cares, misfortunes, that obscure the shining of the inward light, perhaps of the showers of tears which they cause, but after which in the melancholy and gloom of age and weakness they too commonly "return." The mere anatomical interpretation which interprets the first four symbols as referring to the eyes, the brow, the nose, the cheeks, and finds in the "clouds after rain" the symptoms of the catarrh of old age, may be looked upon as a morbid outgrowth of prosaic fancy in men in whom the sense of true poetic imagination was extinct.