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but there is no doubt about the change in attitude. The dominating theme of the later texts is submission and patience; the key word, terrifyingly reiterated, is “silence.” An Old Kingdom Egyptian would have laughed incredulously at such guides to success; what, sit silent like a fool while some glib talker shoves his way ahead? The self-assertion of the earlier dynasties is not unattractive; it is breezy, bouncy, a little naive, and wholly sympathetic. In its greatest form, it dared to question the immortal gods as to the meaning of life. The spirit of ancient Egypt was indeed dead when men could boast of being silent.

The theme of silence is found in another late “instruction,” the Wisdom of Amenemopet, which has an unusual interest beyond the fact that it gives the attitudes of a particular age.

The reader may recall that we mentioned the parallels between Akhenaton’s famous sun hymn and one of the Psalms, and then rejected a romantic story by claiming that the resemblance did not prove a direct connection between Egypt and Israel at that period. With the Amenemopet text, the dramatic conclusion is hard to avoid, for its parallels with the biblical book of Proverbs are so close that only the dependence of one upon the other can satisfactorily explain the resemblance. It has been suggested that the Egyptians borrowed their text from the Hebrews, but most scholars incline toward the opposite interpretation. There is nothing “un-Egyptian” about the contents of Amenemopet; the text is perfectly consistent with the feeling of the age, as expressed in a variety of other cultural phenomena. If we compare Amenemopet with the biblical text, especially with Proverbs 22:17 through 24:22, we find the same precepts repeated, often in almost the same words. But the final proof of relationship is a really beautiful bit of research, which enabled an Egyptologist to correct the Hebrew text.

The Egyptologist was Adolf Erman, the teacher of an entire generation of philologists, British and American as well as German. In looking over the passage, Erman noted Proverbs 22:20–21, which, in the King James version, read as follows:

Have I not written unto thee excellent things in counsel and knowledge,

That I might make thee know the certainty of the words of truth; that thou mightest answer the words of truth to them that send unto thee?

The words “excellent things” were marked with a question. The Hebrew had shilshon, “formerly,” which is obviously an error; the original editors had suggested shalishim, “officers,” which is hardly an improvement. Now Hebrew, as it was originally written, resembled Egyptian—and other Semitic languages—in that it wrote only the consonants. Much later a system was developed that indicated vowels by means of “points,” small marks written above or below the line. The reader will note that the Hebrew words that have been suggested for the disputed reading differ only in the pointing, their consonants being the same.

Erman, of course, was familiar with the Amenemopet text, and he had found a passage which in many ways seemed to resemble the two verses of Proverbs. But the Egyptian text reads: “See thou these thirty chapters; they entertain, they instruct. They are the foremost of all books; they make the ignorant man to know.”

As Erman studied the text he was struck by the recollection that the Hebrew word for “thirty” is sheloshim—a word that involves only a small change in pointing and makes better sense of the Hebrew than do any of the suggested renderings. The Egyptian text contains precisely thirty chapters; the Hebrew passage is not so divided, but it does contain thirty different precepts. Erman’s discovery not only settled the question of borrowing between the two sources, but made the direction of the borrowing pretty sure, for the use of the word “thirty” is more logical in the Egyptian. The applicability of the numeral to the Hebrew text is not so obvious, and it is easy to understand why later copyists misread the word or tried to substitute a—to them—more logical alternative.

After the