boasting.
But suddenly the prophetic speaker plunges the sword into its sheath: so
is symbolically introduced the fate of Ammon to return to the land of
his birth and perish there.

/vii. Wreck of the Goodly Ship Tyre./ This illustrates a characteristic
of Ezekiel's style by which, in place of visible symbolism, illustrated
by the last example, a single image is sustained through the whole of a
discourse. In the present case it is the image of a ship. Tyre was the
great maritime city of antiquity: its grandeur is conveyed under the
image of a ship which all the nations of the known world combine to
build and load; the judgment is the wrecking of this goodly ship.

/viii./ Amongst other things the prophetic books contain 'Sentences,'
that is, brief sayings of prophets, each like an epigram, complete in
itself. These no doubt passed from mouth to mouth like proverbs, and
were collected by the prophets. The examples in this section are from
the Book of Jeremiah.

WISDOM

'Wisdom' is the name given to the department of Biblical literature
which corresponds to Philosophy in modern literature. It is however
always philosophy in application to human life and conduct.

The starting-point of Wisdom literature is the /Unit Proverb/, which is
a unit of thought in a unit of form. The unit of form is the couplet or
triplet of verse: see above, page 242. Examples are given on pages
107-9. It will be seen that this Unit Proverb is a meeting-point of
prose and verse literature: its form is verse, its matter (philosophy)
belongs to the literature of prose. Accordingly it is natural that the
more extended forms of Wisdom literature should take two directions: one
on the side of verse, the other on the side of prose.

/Epigrams/ and /Maxims/: examples of these are found on pages 109-11.
The Epigram is a verse saying, of a few lines in length, in which two
lines (not necessarily consecutive) are capable of standing by
themselves as a unit proverb. In the examples given the two lines in
each epigram that stand out on the left may be read as a proverb
complete in itself. Such a germ proverb is the text of the epigram, the
remaining lines serve to expand this text. The corresponding prose form
is the Maxim, a unit proverb text with a brief prose comment.

/Essays./ A more extended form of Wisdom literature, on the side of
prose, is the Essay. The word has various uses: the Scriptural essays
are not of the modern type (like those of