Ecclesiastes 7:29

They have sought out many inventions The Hebrew word implies an ingenuity exercised mainly for evil but takes within its range, as in 2 Chronicles 26:15, the varied acts of life which are in themselves neither good nor evil. This inventive faculty, non-moral at the best, often absolutely immoral, was what struck the thinker as characterising mankind at large.

In this thought again we have an unmistakable echo of the language of Greek thinkers. Of this the most memorable example is, perhaps, the well-known chorus in the Antigone332 5

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινοτέρον πέλει.

σοφόν τι τὸ μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδʼ ἔχων,

ποτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἀλλοτʼ ἐπʼ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει.

"Many the things that strange and wondrous are,

None stranger and more wonderful than man.

And lo, with all this skill,

Wise and inventive still

Beyond hope's dream,

He now to good inclines

And now to ill."

Looking to the relation in which the poem of Lucretius stands to the system of Epicurus it is probable that the history of human inventions in the De Rerum Natura, v. 1281 1435 had its fore-runner in some of the Greek writings with which the author of Ecclesiastesappears to have been acquainted. The student will find another parallel in the narrative of the progress of mankind in the Prometheus Boundof Æschylus (450 514). Both these passages are somewhat too long to quote.