camels or the grain crop--beginning his interruption almost literally in the words of Job’s friends: “Hearken unto me, I also will show mine opinion. I will answer also for my part, I also will show mine opinion. For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.”[27] So has it been in Palestine time out of mind, and it is in settings of this description that we must imagine the art of proverb-making developing in Israel. Such, then, is the significance of these features which we have been considering--the numerical proverbs, parallels with sayings of other nations, the love of the Jews for proverbs with their consequent skill in making them, and their remarkable _penchant_ for concrete expression. Otherwise, antiquity has left few traces in the Jewish proverbs. That, however, is but natural, since proverb-making was a living art among the people. New maxims kept coming into use, and they crowded out of memory the favourites of byegone generations. Doubtless a few of the sayings in the _Book of Proverbs_ are ancient, though just how old we cannot tell. For example, P. 27^{20}, _Sheol and Abaddon are never filled, and the eyes of man are never sated_ may be co-æval with the fear of death and the passion of greed. Cheyne discovers a relic of “that old nomadic love of craft and subtlety” in the saying (Pr. 22^{3}), _A shrewd man sees misfortune coming and conceals himself, whereas simpletons pass on and suffer for it_; but his interpretation of the verse seems somewhat forced. The following, however, in matter and perhaps in form also may be nearly as ancient as the settled occupation of the land: _Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers set up._ (Pr. 22^{28}). Nothing could well be easier than the removal of those landmarks--insignificant heaps of stone, set at the end of a wide furrow. But from earliest times the East has counted them adequate guardians of the fields, and from generation to generation, by consent of all decent-minded men, they have stood inviolate. Other nations, as well as Israel, called them sacred. Greece, and Rome too, gave them a god for their protection, Hermes of the Boundary, beside whose shrine of heaped-up stones travellers would stay to rest, and, rested, lay an offering of flowers or fruit before the kindly deity: “_I, who inherit the tossing mountain-forests of steep Cyllene stand here guarding the pleasant playing-fields, Hermes, to whom boys often offer marjoram and hyacinths and fresh garlands of violet._”[28]