2. The recently discovered original of a fragment of Ecclesiasticus includes the passage about Solomon in xlvii., and it is said in verse 18: "Thou (Solomon) wast called by the glorious name which is called over Israel." This seems to be a plain reference to the ascriptions in Ps. xlv., where alone the divine name is applied to any individual mortal. Ecclesiasticus was compiled early in the second century before our era, and on the basis of much earlier compilations, as its prologue states. 3. In the "Wisdom of Solomon" the monarch is represented as a mortal who by the divine gift of supernatural Wisdom had gained immortality; he had become privy to the mysteries of God, was his Beloved, his Son. This was written about the first year of our era. 4. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews translates the Psalm xlv. as it is translated above, interpreting the words of deification as meant for the Firstborn of God at his ancient appearance on earth (i. 6), and applicable to his reappearance as Christ; arguing from such language of deification the superiority of the Son of God over the angels, who were never so addressed. A court poet addresses a princely bridegroom as Elohim, as a god--as it were, an Apollo. Had more songs of like antiquity by poets of his race been preserved, no doubt other instances of such rhapsody might be found, but it happens that this is the only instance in Hebrew literature where an individual man is clearly addressed as God (for Exod. vii. 1 and 1 Sam. xxviii. 13 are not really exceptions). As in the Psalm that is the only instance in which an individual man is, in the Old Testament, addressed as God, so is its application in the Epistle to the Hebrews the only indisputable instance in which an individual is addressed as God in the New Testament. "Thy throne, O God." Fateful words! The word of God, says this Epistle, is sharper than any two-edged sword, but its writer himself unwittingly unsheathed from a courtier's compliment just such a sword. One edge has slaughtered innumerable Jews, Moslems, Arians, Socinians, mingling their blood with that of the humane Jesus himself on the sacrificial altar he tried so hard to exchange for mercifulness. The other edge turned against the moral heart of Jesus himself, lowering the tone of all narratives and utterances ascribed to him after his connection with Jahveh, and consequently lowering all Christendom under its dishonourable burden of accommodating human veracity and kindness to the bad heavenly manners that were acquired by the deified Christ. For there was no other God to adopt him but a particularly rude one.