The earliest cited proverb ( 1 Samuel 10:12, repeated with varied occasion, 1 Samuel 19:24) seems to have risen spontaneously from the people's observation. The idea of how the thing is said, or by what phrasing, would be a later differentiation, coming in with literary refinement. The word is just as likely to be connected with the verb mashal, "to rule" or "master" so by a natural secondary meaning to denote that statement which gives the decisive or final verdict, says the master word. As to the primitive sense of the word, it is usually traced to a root meaning "likeness," or "comparison," as if the first sense of it were of the principle of analogy underlying it but this derivation is a guess. The mashal, nearly in our sense of proverb, traces back to the heart and life of the common folk it is a native form reflecting in a peculiarly intimate way the distinctive genius of the Hebrew people. The Hebrew mind was not inductive but intuitive it saw and asserted and the word mashal is the generic term for the form in which its assertion was embodied. The mashal broadened indeed in the course of its history, until it became the characteristic idiom of Hebrew philosophy, as distinguished from the dialectic method of the Greeks. Its scope was broader than that of our word "proverb," taking in subject matter as well as form. The mashal was an enunciation of truth, self-evident and self-illustrative, in some pointed or concentrated form adapted to arrest attention, awaken responsive thought, and remain fixed in memory. Numbers 23:7,18 24:3,15 Job 27:1 29:1), is translated the Hebrew word (mashal), which designates the formal unit or vehicle of didactic discourse. Prov'-erb (mashal, chidhah parabole ( Luke 4:23), paroimia ( John 16:25,29)):īy this term mainly, but sometimes by the term "parable" (e.g.
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