This contention would be conclusive, if it were based on demonstrable facts. But what is the evidence for it? Graetz offers none in his brilliant Commentary on Canticles. In proof of his startling view that, throughout post-Exilic times, the shepherd vocation was held in low repute among Israelites, he merely refers to an article in his _Monatsschrift_ (1870, p. 483). When one turns to that, one finds that it concerns a far later period, the second Christian century, when the shepherd vocation had fallen to the grade of a small and disreputable trade. The vocation was then no longer a necessary corollary of the sacrificial needs of the Temple. While the altar of Jerusalem required its holocausts, the breeders of the animals would hardly have been treated as pariahs. In the century immediately following the destruction of the Temple, the shepherd began to fall in moral esteem, and in the next century he was included among the criminal categories. No doubt, too, as the tender of flocks was often an Arab raider, the shepherd had become a dishonest poacher on other men's preserves. The attitude towards him was, further, an outcome of the deepening antagonism between the schoolmen and the peasantry. But even then it was by no means invariable. One of the most famous of Rabbis, Akiba, who died a martyr in 135 C.E., was not only a shepherd, but he was also the hero of the most romantic of Rabbinic love episodes. At the very time when Graetz thinks that agriculture had superseded pastoral pursuits in general esteem, the Book of Ecclesiasticus was written. On the one side, Sirach, the author of this Apocryphal work, does not hesitate (ch. xxiv) to compare his beloved Wisdom to a garden, in the same rustic images that we find in Canticles; and, on the other side, he reveals none of that elevated appreciation of agriculture which Graetz would have us expect. Sirach (xxxvii. 25) asks sarcastically: How shall he become wise that holdeth the plough, That glorieth in the shaft of the goad: That driveth oxen, and is occupied with their labors, And whose talk is of bullocks? Here it is the farmer that is despised, not a word is hinted against the shepherd. Sirach also has little fondness for commerce, and he denies the possibility of wisdom to the artisan and craftsman, "in whose ear is ever the noise of the hammer" (_ib_. v. 28). Sirach, indeed, is not attacking these occupations; he regards them all as a necessary evil, "without these cannot a city be inhabited" (v. 32). Our Jerusalem _savant_, as Dr. Schechter well terms him, of the third or fourth century B.C.E.; is merely illustrating his thesis, that The wisdom of the scribe cometh by opportunity of leisure; And he that hath little business shall become wise,