LEMUEL (SN'tin; LXX., lizr6 0E6? Aquila, .
Acowav ; Symmachus, Twit:3677X; Theodotion, Pe 1300EX), a king, to whom his mother addressed the lessons of chastity and temperance contained in Prov. xxxi. 2-9. As we are told nothing else re specting him, and his name does not occur else where, a wide field has been opened to the conjec tures of the learned The Jews in general, and the fathers, both Greek and Latin, identify Lemuel with Solomon. According to the Jews, Solomon had eisht names, of which this was one. The name means either (created) by God,' like Lael in Num. iii. 24 (Gesen. Thes. s.v.), or (dedicated) to God' (J. Simonis, Onomast. V. T., p. 503) ; (a), Simonis thinks that is equivalent to (ver. 43 and cf. Samuel) ; and that '0} is the same as (as it is in Job xxvii. 14), that form being chosen for the sake of the alliteration which it furnished with n6t); 03) Schultens thinks that the name Lemuel was used as a. mere synonym of Jedidiall, one of the names of Solomon (2 Sam. xii. 25) ; (7), M. Geier regards it as a pet name given to Solo mon in his infancy by Bathsheba, to avoid the harsher 9t;4, and J. F. Schelling also looks upon it as a diminutive. 2. Grotius first suggested that Lemuel was Hezekiah, referring to Prov. xxv. 1, and giving to Lemuel, which Ile derives from the Arabic, the same meanin, as Hezekiah, which he interprets to be a Deo prehensus.' 3. The purely arbitrary conjecture of Hitzig, Ziegler, and others (Hitzig, Die Spriiche Sal., ad loc. ; Rosenmiiller, .S.chol., ad loc.) is, that Lemuel was an Arab or Edomite emir, celebrated (as the Arabs often were) for skill in proverbs. To support this view Hitzig, both in xxx. 1, and xxxi. 1, takes :In (A. V. 'prophecy') as a proper name, Massa,' in which opinion sen partly agrees. The absence of the article with 19n, renders it, however, inadmissible to translate Che verse, Lemuel, king of Massa,' in xxxi. ;
although Davidson, by altering the reading in xxx. t, makes Massa a proper name in that verse (Infra. ii. 33S). Hitzig ingeniously compares Lemuel with Nemuel, Simeon's first-born (i Chron. iv. 24) ; and then shews that Massa may have been founded by those 500 Simeonites who smote the remnant of the Amalekites in Mount Seir (t Chron. iv. 39 43). He therefore concludes that Agur and Lem uel were both sons of the queen of Massa Cher obeycd in Massa,' as he renders xxx. 1), but that they were of Israelite descent. 4. Eichhorn v. 105), Ewald (Spriiche Sal., 173), Keil (Einf., sec. 120), and others, regard Lemuel as a merely poetic and imaginary name, chosen to represent some ideal king, who may well be supposed to have been addressed in the moral precepts contained in xxxi. 2-9. It is, in the absence of all trustworthy data, impossible to decide between these conflicting theories. The LXX. give us no assistance what ever, since they render xxxi. t, oi eAot M5yot eipnvrat z'or6 Beal) pao-aeces, and in ver. 4 they wander so widely from the Hebrew as to leave us hopelessly in the dark as to the reading they may have fol lowed. If we are to choose between the theories mentioned, it is obvious that the first and the fourth are less arbitrary than the others. The first is sup ported by the authority of Jewish tradition ; the fourth is in accordance with a practice very preva lent among the Jews during the later period of their literature. We would, however, prefer to class Lemuel with Agur, Ithiel, Heal, Darda, Ethan, and many other persons mentioned incidentally in Scripture, of whom all further record and memory have been lost.—F. W. F.