Musar zu Kohelet 9:11

God, Mighty and Exalted, has created the expanse of the smaller world¹There is evidently an omission in the Arabic text, p. 4, line 5; the Hebrew version includes a line omitted through the mistake of an early copyist, who skipped from the former עלי טבאיע ארבע to the latter, thus omitting the intervening line or lines. This Arabic omission is supplied by Kaufmann ("Sinne," pp. 37, 38). dependent upon four elements: He places in man blood corresponding to air, yellow gall corresponding to fire, black gall corresponding to earth, and white moisture corresponding to water.²"Fons Vitas" of Gabirol, Tractate iii. (Guttmann, p. 117, note 3); Dieterici, "Mikrokosmus," pp. 89, 90; and "Logik," p. 103; "Anthropologie der Araber im Zehnten Jahrhundert," Leipzig, 1871 (pp. 4, 42, 189); M. Friedlander, "Essays on the Writings of Abraham ibn Ezra," London, vol. iv. (p. 24, note 4). This purely Greek conception was speedily incorporated into Jewish teachings. Gabirol's immediate successor in point of time Bahya, follows him here. (Cf. Introduction, p. 13, note 2.) The teaching that man is a microcosm, constituted of the four elements, found its way even into the poetry of the Middle Ages. Cf. a poem of Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, cited by Sachs (p. 115, and p. 42 of the Hebrew supplement), who refers to an eleventh century exposition of this theory in a Piut of K. Isaac ibn Giiat ("Ritual of Tripoli," p. 92 b). Moreover God, exalted be He, equipped him, i.e., man, with perfectness of form and with every organ complete and not wanting in any respect; and He created within him five senses, as we shall relate. Solomon the Wise alludes to them when he says (Eccl. ix. 11), "I returned and saw under the sun";