Job and Solomon: Or, The Wisdom of the Old Testament

by T. K. Cheyne

THE BOOK OF JOB.

CHAPTER I.
JOB’S CALAMITY; THE OPENING OF THE DIALOGUES.
(CHAPS. I.-XIV.)

The Book of Job is not the earliest monument of Hebrew ‘wisdom,’ but for various reasons will be treated first in order. The perusal of some of the pages introductory to Proverbs will enable the student to fill out what is here given. The Hebrew ‘wisdom’ is a product as peculiar as the dialectic of Plato, and not less worthy of admiration; and the author of Job is its greatest master. To him are due those great thoughts on a perennial problem, which may be supplemented but can never be superseded, and which, as M. Renan truly says, cause so profound an emotion in their first naïve expression. His wisdom is that of intuition rather than of strict reasoning, but it is as truly based upon the facts of experience as any of our Western philosophies. He did not indeed reach his high position unaided by predecessors. The author of the noble ‘Praise of Wisdom’ in Prov. i.-ix. taught him much and kindled his ambition. Nor was he in all probability without the stimulus of fellow-thinkers and fellow-poets. The student ought from the outset to be aware of the existence of discussions as to the unity of the book—discussions which have led to one assured and to several probable results—though he ought not to adopt any critical results before he has thoroughly studied the poem itself. The student should also know that the supposed authors of the (as I must believe) inserted passages belong to the same circle as the writer of the main part of the book, and are therefore not to be accused of having made ‘interpolations.’ I need not here distinguish between passages added by the author himself as afterthoughts (or perhaps paralipomena inserted by disciples from his literary remains) and compositions of later poets added to give the poem greater didactic completeness. A passage which does not fall into the plan of the poem is to all intents and purposes the work of another poet. The philosophic Goethe of the second part of Faust is not the passion-tossed Goethe of the first.

All the writers who may be concerned in the production of our book are, however, well worthy of reverent study; they were not only inspired by the Spirit of Israel’s holy religion, but in their various styles true poets. In some degree we may apply to Job the lines of Schiller on the Iliad with its different fathers but one only mother—Nature. In fact, Nature, in aspects chiefly familiar, but not therefore less interesting, was an open book to these poets, and ‘Look in thine heart and write’ was their secret as well as Spenser’s for vigorous and effective expression.

I now proceed to give in plain prose the pith and substance of this great poem, which more than any other Old Testament book needs to be brought near to the mind of a Western student. I would entitle it The Book of the Trial of the Righteous Man, and of the Justification of God.

In its present form the Book of Job consists of five parts—

1. The Prologue, written in prose (ch. i.-ii.), the body of the work in the Hebrew being written in at any rate an approach to metre;[^[4]]

2. The Colloquies between Job and his three friends (ch. iii.-xxxi.);

3. The Discourses of Elihu (ch. xxxii.-xxxvii.);

4. Jehovah’s Reply to Job (ch. xxxviii.-xlii. 6);

5. The Epilogue, in prose (ch. xlii. 7-17).

There are some differences in the arrangement which will presently be followed, but these will justify themselves in the course of our study. Let us first of all examine the Prologue, which will bear to be viewed by itself as a striking specimen of Hebrew narrative. The idyllic manners of a patriarchal age are delineated with sympathy—no difficult task to one who knew the early Hebrew traditions—and still more admirable are the very testing scenes from the supernatural world.

It may perhaps seem strange that this should be only a prose poem, but the truth is that narrative poetry was entirely alien to the Hebrew genius, which refused to tolerate the bonds of protracted and continuous versification. Like that other great hero of parallelistic verse Balaam, Job is a non-Israelite; and in this the unknown author shows a fine tact, for he is thus absolved from the embarrassing necessity of referring to the Law, and so complicating the moral problem under consideration. Job, however, though an Arabian sheich[^[5]] (as one may loosely call him), was a worshipper of Jehovah, who declares before the assembled ‘sons of the Elohim’ that ‘there is none like Job in the earth,’ &c. (i. 8). Job’s virtue is rewarded by an outward prosperity like that of the patriarchs in Genesis: he was a great Eastern Emeer, and had not only a large family but great possessions. His scrupulous piety, which takes precautions even against heart-sins, is exemplified to us by the atoning sacrifice which he offers as head of his family at some annual feast (i. 4, 5). Then in ver. 6 the scene is abruptly changed from earth to heaven. The spirit of the narrative is not devoid of a delightful humour. In the midst of the ‘sons of the Elohim’—supernatural, Titanic beings, who had once been at strife with Jehovah (if we may illustrate by xxi. 22, xxv. 2), but who now at stated times paid Him their enforced homage—stood one who had not quite lost his original pleasure in working evil, and who was now employed by his Master as a kind of moral and religious censor of the human race. This malicious spirit—‘the Satan’ or adversary, as he is called—had just returned from a tour of inspection in the world, and Jehovah, who is represented under the disguise of an earthly monarch, boldly and imprudently draws his attention to the meritorious Job. The Satan refuses to give human nature credit for pure goodness, and sarcastically remarks, ‘Does Job serve God for nothing?’ (i. 9.) Jehovah therefore allows His minister to put Job’s piety to as severe a test as possible short of taking his life. One after another Job’s flocks, his servants, and his children are destroyed. His wife, however, by a touch of quiet humour, is spared; she seems to be recognised by the Satan as an unconscious ally (ii. 9). The piety of Job stands the trial; he is deeply moved, but maintains his self-control, and the scene closes with a devout ascription of blessing to Jehovah alike for giving and for recalling His gifts.

Before passing on the reader should notice that, according to the poet, the ultimate reason why these sufferings of Job were permitted by the Most High was that Job might set an example of a piety independent of favouring outward circumstances. The poet reveals this to us in the Prologue, that we may not ourselves be staggered in our faith, nor cast down by sympathy with such an unique sufferer; for after the eulogy passed upon Job in the celestial court we cannot doubt that he will stand the test, even if disturbed for a time.

A second time the same high court is held. The first experiment of the Adversary has failed, and this magnified earthly monarch, the Jehovah of the story, begins to suspect that he has allowed a good man to be plagued with no sufficient motive. Admiringly he exclaims, pointing to Job, ‘And still he holds fast his integrity, so that thou didst incite me against him to annihilate him without cause’ (ii. 3). Another sarcastic word from the Adversary (‘Touch his bone and his flesh, and then see....’), and once more he receives permission to try Job. The affliction this time is elephantiasis, the most loathsome and dangerous form of leprosy. But Job’s piety stands fast. He sits down on the heap of burnt dung and ashes at the entrance of the village, such as those where lepers are still wont to congregate, and meets the despairing counsel of his wife (comp. Tobit’s wife, Tob. ii. 14) to renounce a God from whom nothing more is to be hoped but death with a calm and pious rebuke. So baseless was the malicious suggestion of the Satan! Meantime many months pass away (vii. 3), and no friend appears to condole with him. Travelling is slow in the East, and Job’s three friends[^[6]] were Emeers like himself (the Sept. makes them kings), and their residences would be at some distance from each other. At last they come, but they cannot recognise Job’s features, distorted by disease (as Isa. lii. 14). Overpowered with surprise and grief, they sit down with him for seven days and seven nights (comp. Ezek. iii. 15). Up to this point no fault can be found with his friends.

I never yet did hear

That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear.

(Othello, act i, scene 3.)

It was their deep, unspoken sympathy which encouraged him to vent his sorrow in a flood of unpurified emotion (chap. iii.) The very next thing recorded of Job is that he ‘opened his mouth and cursed his day’ (i.e. his birthday; see ver. 3). This may at least be the poet’s meaning, though it is also possible that the prologue and the body of the poem are not homogeneous. Not to mention other reasons at present, the tone of Job’s speech in chap. iii. (the chapter read by Swift on his birthday) is entirely different from the stedfast resignation of his reply to his wife, which, as Prof. Davidson has said, ‘reveals still greater deeps in Job’s reverent piety’ than the benediction at the end of chap. i., the latter being called forth not by the infliction of positive evil, but merely by the withdrawal of unguaranteed favours.

How strangely vivid were the sensations of the race to which the author of Job belonged! How great to him must have been the pleasures of existence, and how great the pains! Nothing to him was merely subjectively true: his feelings were infallible, and that which seemed to be was. Time, for instance, had an objective reality: the days of the year had a kind of life of their own (comp. Ps. xix. 2) and paid annually recurring visits to mankind. Hence Job, like Jeremiah (Jer. xx. 14-18), in the violence of his passion[^[7]] can wish to retaliate on the instrument of his misery by ‘cursing his day.’

Perish the day wherein I was born,

and the night which said, A man has been conceived.

(iii. 3; comp. 6);

i.e. let my birthday become a blank in the calendar. Or, if this be too much and the anniversary, so sad to me, must come round, then let magicians cast their spell[^[8]] upon it and make it an unlucky day (such as the Babylonians had in abundance).

Let them curse it that curse days,

that are skilful to rouse the leviathan (iii. 8);

i.e. the cloud dragon (vii. 12, xxvi. 13, Isaiah li. 9, Jer. li. 34), the enemy of the sun (an allusion to a widely spread solar myth). So fare it with the day which might, by hindering Job’s birth, have ‘hid sorrow from his eyes!’ Even if he must be born, why could he not have died at once and escaped his ill fortune in the quiet phantom world (iii. 13-19)? Alas! this melancholy dream does but aggravate Job’s mental agony. He broods on the horror of his situation, and even makes a shy allusion to God as the author of his woe—

Wherefore gives he light to the miserable,

and life to the bitter in soul? (iii. 20.)

And now Job’s friends are shaken out of their composure. They have been meditating on Job’s calamity, which is so difficult to reconcile with their previous high opinion of him; for they are the representatives of orthodoxy, of the orthodoxy which received the high sanction of the Deuteronomic Tōra, and which connected obedience and prosperity, disobedience and adversity. Still it is not a stiff, extreme orthodoxy which the three friends maintain: calamity, as Eliphaz represents their opinion (v. 17; comp. 27), is not always a punishment, but sometimes a discipline. The question therefore has forced itself upon them, Has the calamity which has befallen our friend a judicial or a disciplinary, educational purpose? At first they may have leaned to the latter alternative; but Job’s violent outburst, so unbecoming in a devout man, too clearly pointed in the other direction, and already they are beginning to lose their first hopeful view of his case. One after another they debate the question with Job (Eliphaz as the depositary of a revelation, Bildad as the advocate of tradition, Zophar as the man of common sense)—the question of the cause and meaning of his sufferings, which means further, since Job is not merely an individual but a type,[^[9]] the question of the vast mass of evil in the world. This main part of the work falls into three cycles of dialogue (ch. iv.-xiv., ch. xv.-xxi., ch. xxii.-xxxi.) In each there are three pairs of speeches, belonging respectively to Eliphaz and Job, Bildad and Job, Zophar and Job. Eliphaz opens the debate as being the oldest (xv. 10) and the most experienced of Job’s friends. There is much to admire in his speech; if he could only have adopted the tone of a sympathising friend and not of a lecturer—

Behold, this have we searched out; so it is;

hear thou it, and know it for thyself (v. 27)—

he might have been useful to the sufferer. At the very beginning he strikes a wrong key-note, expressing surprise at his friend’s utter loss of self-control (vattibbāhēl, ver. 4), and couching it in such a form that one would really suppose Job to have broken down at the first taste of trouble. The view of the speaker seems to be that, since Job is really a pious man (for Eliphaz does not as yet presume to doubt this), he ought to feel sure that his trouble would not proceed beyond a certain point. ‘Bethink thee now,’ says Eliphaz, ‘who ever perished, being innocent?’ (iv. 7.) Some amount of trouble even a good man may fairly expect; though far from ‘ploughing iniquity,’ he is too weak not to fall into sins of error, and all sin involves suffering; or, as Eliphaz puts it concisely—

Man is born to trouble,

as the sparks fly upward (v. 7).

Assuming without any reason that Job would question this, Eliphaz enforces the moral imperfection of human nature by an appeal to revelation—not, of course, to Moses and the prophets, but to a vision like those of the patriarchs in Genesis. Of the circumstances of the revelation a most graphic account is given.

And to myself came an oracle stealthily,

and mine ear received the whisper thereof,

in the play of thought from nightly visions,

when deep sleep falls upon men,

a shudder came upon me and a trembling,

and made all my bones to shudder,

when (see!) a wind sweeps before me,

the hairs of my body bristle up:

it stands, but I cannot discern it,

I gaze, but there is no form,

before mine eyes (is) ...

and I hear a murmuring voice.[^[10]]

‘Can human kind be righteous before God?

can man be pure before his Maker?

Behold, he trusts not his own servants,

and imputes error to his angels[^[11]]’. (iv. 12-18).

There is no such weird passage in the rest of the Old Testament. It did not escape the attention of Milton, whose description of death alludes to it.

If shape it could be called that shape had none,

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;

Or substance might be called that shadow seemed.

(Par. Lost, ii. 266.)

A single phrase (‘a murmuring voice,’ ver. 16) is borrowed from the theophany of Elijah (1 Kings xix. 12), but the strokes which paint the scene, and which Milton and Blake between them have more than reproduced, are all his own. The supernatural terror, the wind betokening a spiritual visitor, the straining eyes which can discern no form, the whispering voice always associated with oracles[^[12]]—each of these awful experiences we seem to share. Eliphaz himself recalls his impressions so vividly that he involuntarily uses the present tense in describing them.

But why should Eliphaz imagine that because Job had not had a revelation of this kind he is therefore ignorant of the truth? He actually confounds the complaints wrung from Job by his unparalleled mental and bodily sufferings with the ‘impatience’ of the ‘foolish man’ and the ‘passion’ of the ‘silly’ one, and warns him against the fate which within his own experience befell one such rebellious murmurer against God—an irrelevant remark, unless he has already begun to suspect Job of impiety. Then, as if he feels that he has gone too far, he addresses Job in a more hopeful spirit, and tells him what he would do in his place, viz. turn trustfully to God, whose operations are so unsearchable, but so benevolent. Let Job regard his present affliction as a chastening and he may look forward to even more abundant blessings than he has yet enjoyed.

In these concluding verses Eliphaz certainly does his best to be sympathetic, but the result shows how utterly he has failed. He has neither convinced Job’s reason nor calmed the violence of his emotion. It is now Job’s turn to reply. He is not, indeed, in a mood to answer Eliphaz point by point. Passing over the ungenerous reference to the fate of the rebellious, which he can hardly believe to be seriously meant, Job first of all justifies the despair which has so astonished Eliphaz.[^[13]] Since the latter is so cool and so critical, let him weigh Job’s calamity as well as his words, and see if the extravagance of the latter is not excusable. Are these arrow wounds the fruit of chastisement? Does the Divine love disguise itself as terror? The good man is never allowed to perish, you say; but how much longer can a body of flesh hold out? Why should I not even desire death? God may be my enemy, but I have given Him no cause. And now, if He would be my friend, the only favour I crave is that He would shorten my agony.

Then should (this) still be my comfort

(I would leap amidst unsparing pain),

that I have not denied the words of the Holy One (vi. 10).

Job’s demeanour is thus fully accounted for; it is that of his friends which is unnatural and disappointing.

My brethren have been treacherous as a winter stream,

as the bed of winter streams which pass away:

(once) they were turbid with ice,

and the snow, as it fell, hid itself in them;

but now that they feel the glow they vanish,

when it is hot they disappear from their place.

Caravans bend their course;

they go up into the desert and perish.

The caravans of Tema looked;

the companies of Sheba hoped for them;[^[14]]

they were abashed because they had been confident;

when they came thither they were ashamed (vi. 15-20).

And was it a hard thing that Job asked of his friends? No; merely sympathy. And not only have they withheld this; Eliphaz has even insinuated that Job was an open sinner. Surely neither honesty nor wisdom is shown in such captious criticism of Job’s expressions.

How forcible is honest language,

and how cogent is the censure of a wise man!

Think ye to censure words,

and the passionate speech of one who is desperate? (vi. 25, 26.)

With an assertion of his innocence, and a renewed challenge to disprove it, this, the easiest part of Job’s first reply, concludes.

And now, having secured his right to complain, Job freely avails himself of his melancholy privilege. A ‘desperate’ man cares not to choose his words, though the reverence which never ceased to exist deep down in Job’s nature prompts him to excuse his delirious words by a reference to his bitter anguish (vii. 11). Another excuse which he might have given lies on the very surface of the poem, which is coloured throughout by the poet’s deep sympathy with human misery in general. Job in fact is not merely an individual, but a representative of mankind; and when he asks himself at the beginning of chap. vii.—

Has not frail man a warfare [hard service] upon earth,

and are not his days like the days of a hireling?—

it is not merely one of the countless thoughts which are like foam bubbles, but the expression of a serious interest, which raises Job far, very far above the patriarchal prince of the legend in the Prologue. It is the very exaggeration of this interest which alone explains why the thought of his fellow-sufferers not only brings no comfort[^[15]] to Job, but fails even to calm his excitement.

Am I the sea (he says) or the sea monster,

that thou settest a watch over me? (vii. 12.)

It is an allusion to a myth, based on the continual ‘war in heaven’ between light and darkness, which we have in these lines. Job asks if he is the leviathan (iii. 8) of that upper ocean above which dwells the invisible God (ix. 8, Ps. civ. 3). He describes Jehovah as being jealous (comp. Gen. iii. 4, 5, 22) and thinking it of importance to subdue Job’s wild nature, lest he should thwart the Divine purposes. But here, again, Job rises above himself; the sorrows of all innocent sufferers are as present to him as his own; nay, more, he bears them as a part of his own; he represents mankind with God. In a bitter parody of Ps. viii. 5 he exclaims—

What is frail man that Thou treatest him as a great one

and settest Thy mind upon him;

that Thou scrutinisest him every morning,

and art every moment testing him? (vii. 17, 18.)

It is only now and then that Job expresses this feeling of sympathetic union with the human race. Generally his secret thought (or that of his poet) translates itself into a self-consciousness which seems morbidly extravagant on any other view of the poem. The descriptions of his physical pains, however, are true to the facts of the disease called elephantiasis, from which he may be supposed to have suffered. His cry for death is justified by his condition—‘death rather than (these) my pains’[^[16]] (vii. 15). He has no respite from his agony; ‘nights of misery,’ he says, ‘have been allotted to me’ (vii. 3), probably because his pains were more severe in the night (xxx. 17). How can it be worth while, he asks, thus to persecute him? Even if Eliphaz be right, and Job has been a sinner, yet how can this affect the Most High?

(Even) if I have sinned, what do I unto thee,

O thou watcher of men? (vii. 20.)

What bitter irony again! He admits a vigilance in God, but only the vigilance of ‘espionage’ (xiii. 27, xiv. 16), not that of friendly guardianship; God only aims at procuring a long catalogue of punishable sins. Why not forgive those sins and relieve Himself from a troublesome task? Soon it will be too late: a pathetic touch revealing a latent belief in God’s mercy which no calamity could destroy.

Thus to the blurred vision of the agonised sufferer the moral God whom he used to worship has been transformed into an unreasoning, unpitying Force. Bildad is shocked at this. ‘Can God pervert judgment’? (viii. 3.) In his short speech he reaffirms the doctrine of proportionate retribution, and exhorts Job to ‘seek earnestly unto God’ (viii. 5), thus clearly implying that Job is being punished for his sins.[^[17]] Instead of basing his doctrine on revelation, Bildad supports the side of it relative to the wicked by an appeal to the common consent of mankind previously to the present generation (viii. 8, 9). This common consent, this traditional wisdom, is embodied in proverbial ‘dark sayings,’ as, for instance—

Can the papyrus grow up without marsh?

can the Nile reed shoot up without water?

While yet in its verdure, uncut,

it withers before any grass.

So fares it with all that forget God,

and the hope of the impious shall perish (viii. 11-13).

It is interesting to see at how early a date the argument in favour of Theism was rested to some extent on tradition. ‘We are of yesterday, and know nothing,’ says Bildad, ‘because our days on earth are a shadow’ (viii. 9), whereas the wisdom of the past is centuries old, and has a stability to which Job’s novelties (or, for this is the poet’s meaning, those of the new sceptical school of the Exile) cannot pretend. But Job at least is better than his theories, so Eliphaz and Bildad are still charitable enough to believe, and the closing words of the speech of Bildad clear up any possible doubt with regard to his opinion of erring but still whole-hearted[^[18]] (‘perfect’) Job.

Those that hate thee shalt be clothed with shame,

and the tent of the wicked shall be no more (viii. 22).

But Job has much to say in reply. He ironically admits the truth of the saying, ‘How can man be righteous with God?’ but the sense in which he applies the words is very different from that given to them by his friends. Of course God is righteous (‘righteousness’ in Semitic languages sometimes means ‘victory’), because He is so mighty that no one, however innocent, could plead successfully before Him. This thought suggests a noble description of the stupendous displays of God’s might in nature (ix. 5-10). The verse with which it closes is adopted from Eliphaz, in whose first speech to Job it forms the text of a quiet picture of God’s everyday miracles of benevolence to man (v. 9). Where Eliphaz sees power, wisdom, and love, Job can see only a force which is terrible in proportion to its wisdom. The predominant quality in this idol of Job’s imagination is not love, but anger—capricious, inexorable anger, which long ago ‘the helpers of Rahab’ (another name for the storm dragon, which fought against the sun) experienced to their cost (ix. 13; comp. xxvi. 12). Job himself is in collision with this force; and how should he venture to defend himself? The tortures he endured would force from him an avowal of untruths (ix. 20). If only God were a man, or if there were an umpire whose authority would be recognised on both sides, how gladly would Job submit his case to adjudication! But, alas! God stands over against him with His rod (ix. 32-34). Bildad had said, ‘God will not cast away a perfect man’ (viii. 20). But Job’s experience is, ‘He destroys the perfect and the wicked’ (ix. 22). Thus Job has many fellow-sufferers, and one good effect of his trial is that it has opened his eyes to the religious bearings of facts which he had long known but not before now seriously pondered.

At last a milder spirit comes upon the sufferer. He has been in the habit of communion with God, and cannot bear to be condemned without knowing the cause (x. 2). How, he enquires, can God have the heart to torture that which has cost Him so much thought (comp. Isa. lxv. 8, 9)? A man is not a common potter’s vessel, but framed with elaborate skill.

Thy hands fashioned and prepared me;

afterwards dost thou turn[^[19]] and destroy me?

Remember now that as clay thou didst prepare me,

and dost thou turn me into dust again?

Life and favour dost thou grant me,

and thine oversight guarded my spirit (x. 8, 9, 12).

God appeared to be kind then; but, since God sees the end from the beginning, it is too clear that He must have done all this simply in order to mature a perfect human sacrifice to His own cruel self-will. Job’s milder spirit has evidently fled. He repeats his wish that he had never lived (x. 18, 19), and only craves a few brighter moments before he departs to the land of darkness (x. 20-22).

It was not likely that Zophar would be more capable of rightly advising Job than his elders. Having had no experience to soften him, he pours out a flood of crude dogmatic commonplaces, and in the complaints wrung from a troubled spirit can see nothing but ‘a multitude of words’ (xi. 2). Yet he only just misses making an important contribution to the settlement of the problem. He has caught a glimpse of a supernatural wisdom, to which the secrets of all hearts are open:—

But oh that God [Eloah] would speak,

and open his lips against thee.

and show thee the secrets of wisdom,

for wondrous are they in perfection![^[20]]

Canst thou find the depths of God [Eloah]?

canst thou reach to the end of Shaddai?

Heights of heaven! what canst thou do?

deeper than Sheól! what canst thou know? (xi. 5-8.)

If Zophar had worked out this idea impartially, he might have given to the discussion a fresh and more profitable turn. He is so taken up with the traditional orthodoxy, however, that he has no room for a deeper view of the problem. His inference is that, in virtue of His perfect knowledge, God can detect sin where man sees none, though that cruellest touch of all with which the Massoretic text[^[21]] burdens the reputation of Zophar is not supported by the more accurate text of the Septuagint, and we should read xi. 6 thus:

and thou shouldest know that God [Eloah] gives unto thee

thy deserts[^[22]] for thine iniquity.

But indeed a special revelation ought not to be necessary for Job. His trouble, proceeding as it does from one no less wise than irresistible (xi. 10, 11), ought to dispel his dream of innocence; as Zophar generalises, when God’s judgments are abroad—

(Even) an empty head wins understanding,

and a wild ass’s colt is new-born as a man (xi. 12).

We may pass over the brilliant description of prosperity consequent on a true repentance with which the chapter concludes. It fell quite unheeded on the ears of Job, who was more stung by the irritating speech of Zophar than by those of Eliphaz and Bildad.

The taunt conveyed indirectly by Zophar in xi. 12 is exposed in all its futility in the reply of Job. Zophar himself, however, he disdains to argue with; there is the same intolerable assumption of superiority in the speeches of all the three, and this he assails with potent sarcasm.

No doubt ye are mankind,

and with you shall wisdom die.

I too have understanding like you,

and who knows not the like of this? (xii. 2, 3.)

In what respect, pray, is he inferior to his friends? Has Eliphaz enjoyed a specially unique revelation? Job has had a still better opportunity of learning spiritual truth in communion of the heart with God (xii. 4). Is Bildad an unwearied collector of the wisdom of antiquity? Job too admits the value of tradition, though he will not receive it unproved (xii. 11, 12). In declamation, too, Job can vie with the arrogant Zophar; Job’s description of the omnipotence of God forms the counterpart of Zophar’s description of His omniscience. But of what account are generalities in face of such a problem as Job’s? The question of questions is not, Has God all power and all wisdom, but, Does He use them for moral ends? The three friends refuse to look facts in the face; the righteous God (we must understand the words, if there be one) will surely chastise them for insincerity and partisanship (xiii. 10).

And now Job refuses to waste any more words on his opponents.

But as for me, to Shaddai would I speak,

I crave to reason with God;

But ye—are plasterers of lies,

patchers of that which is worthless.

Your commonplaces are proverbs of ashes;

your bulwarks are bulwarks of clay (xiii. 3, 4, 12).

He forms a new project, but shudders as he does so, for he feels sure of provoking God thereby to deadly anger. Be it so; a man who has borne till he can bear no longer can even welcome death.

Behold, let him slay me; I can wait [be patient] no longer;[^[23]]

still I will defend my ways to his face (xiii. 15).

It is the sublimest of all affirmations of the rights of conscience. Job is confident of the success of his plea: ‘This also (guarantees) victory to me, that an impious man cannot come before him’ (xiii. 16) with such a good conscience. Thus virtue has an intrinsic value for Job, superior to that of prosperity or even life: moral victory would more than compensate for physical failure. He indulges the thought that God may personally take part in the argument (xiii. 20-22), and in anticipation of this he sums up the chief points of his intended speech (xiii. 23-xiv. 22), such as, ‘How many[^[24]] are my sins,’ and ‘Why chase dry stubble?’ (xiii. 23, 25). Sad complaints of the melancholy lot of mankind follow, reminding us again that Job, like Dante in his pilgrimage, is not only an individual but a representative.

Man that is born of woman,

short-lived and full of unrest,

comes up as a flower and fades,

flies as a shadow and continues not.

And upon such an one keepest thou thine eye open,

and me dost thou bring into judgment with thee! (xiv. 1-3.)

Hard enough is the natural fate of man; why make it harder by exceptional severity? An early reader misunderstood this, and thought to strengthen Job’s appeal by a reference (in ver. 4) to one of the commonplaces of Eliphaz (iv. 17-21). But ver. 5 shows that the idea which fills the mind of Job is the shortness of human life.[^[25]] A tree, when cut down according to the rules still current in Syria,[^[26]] displays a marvellous vitality; but man is only like the falling leaves of a tree (xiii. 25), or (the figure preferred here) like the canals of Egypt when the dykes and reservoirs are not properly kept up (xiv. 11; comp. Isaiah xix. 5, 6). If it were God’s will to ‘hide’ Job in dark Sheól for a time, and then to recall him to the light, how gladly would he ‘wait’ there, like a soldier on guard (comp. vii. 1), till his ‘relief’ came (xiv. 14)!—a fascinating thought, on which, baseless though he considers it, Job cannot forbear to dwell. And the beauty of the passage is that the happiness of restoration to conscious life consists for Job in the renewal of loving communion between himself and his God (xiv. 15). Alas! the dim light of Sheól darkens the glorious vision and sends Job back into despair.

CHAPTER II.
THE SECOND CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XV.-XXI.)

The three narrow-minded but well-meaning friends have exhausted their arsenal of arguments. Each with his own favourite receipt has tried to cure Job of his miserable illusion, and failed. Now begins a new cycle of speeches, in which our sympathy is still more with Job than before. His replies to the three friends ought to have shown them the incompleteness of their argument and the necessity of discovering some way of reconciling the elements of truth on both sides. They can teach him nothing, but the facts of spiritual experience which he has expounded ought to have taught them much. But all that they have learned is the impossibility of bringing Job to self-humiliation by dwelling upon the Divine attributes. No doubt their excuse lies in the irreverence of their friend’s manner and expressions. It is a part of the tragedy of Job that the advice which was meant for practical sympathy only resulted in separating Job for a time both from God and from his friends. The narrow views of the latter drove Job to irreverence, and his irreverence deprived him of the lingering respect of his friends and seemed to himself at times to cut off the slender chance of a reconciliation with God. From this point onwards the friends cease to offer their supposed ‘Divine consolations’ (xv. 11)—such as the gracious purpose of God’s ways and the corrective object of affliction (v. 8-27)—and content themselves with frightening Job by lurid pictures of the wicked man’s fate, leading up, in the third cycle of speeches, to a direct accusation of Job as a wicked man himself. And yet, strange to say, as the tone of the friends becomes harsher and more cutting, Job meets their vituperation with growing calmness and dignity. Disappointed in his friends, he clings with convulsive energy to that never quite surrendered postulate of his consciousness a God who owns the moral claims of a creature on the Creator. Remarkable indeed is the first distinct expression of this faith of the heart, of which an antiquated orthodoxy sought to deprive him. He has just listened to the personalities, the cruel assumptions, and the shallow commonplaces of Eliphaz (who treats Job as an arrogant pretender and a self-convicted blaspheming sinner), and with a few words of utter contempt he turns his back on his ‘tormenting[^[27]] comforters’ (xvi. 2). (Soon, however, he will appeal to them for sympathy; so strong is human nature! See xix. 21.) Left to his own melancholy thoughts, he repeats the sad details of his misery and of God’s hostility (and again we feel that the poet thinks of suffering humanity in general[^[28]]), and reasserts his innocence in language afterwards used of the suffering Servant of Jehovah (xvi. 17; comp. Isaiah liii. 9). Then in the highest excitement he demands vengeance for his blood. But who is the avenger of blood but God (xix. 25; comp. Ps. ix. 12)—the very Foe who is bringing him to death? And hence the strange but welcome thought that behind the God of pitiless force and undiscriminating severity there must be a God who recognises and returns the love of His servants, or, in the fine words of the Korán, ‘that there is no refuge from God but unto Him.’[^[29]] ‘Even now,’ as he lies on the rubbish-heap—

Even now, behold, my Witness is in heaven,

and he that vouches for me is on high.

My friends (have become) my scorners;

mine eye sheds tears unto God—

that he would right a man against God,

and a son of man against his friend (xvi. 20, 21).

It is a turning-point in the mental struggles of Job. He cannot indeed account for his sufferings, but he ceases to regard God as an unfeeling tyrant. He has a germ of faith in God’s goodwill towards him—only a germ, but we are sure, even without the close of the story, that it will grow up and bear the fruit of peace. And now, perhaps, we may qualify the reproach addressed above to Job’s friends. It is true that they have driven Job to irreverent speeches respecting God, but they have also made it possible for him to reach the intuition (which the prophetic Eliphaz has missed) of an affinity between the Divine nature and the human. In an earlier speech (ix. 32-35) he has already expressed a longing for an arbiter between himself and God. That longing is now beginning to be gratified by the certitude that, though the God in the world may be against him, the God in heaven is on his side. Not that even God can undo the past; Job requests no interference with the processes of nature. (Did the writer think that Job lived outside the sphere of the age of miracles?) All that he asks is a pledge from God, his Witness, to see his innocence recognised by God, his Persecutor (xvii. 3). So far we are listening to Job the individual. But immediately after we find the speaker exhibiting himself as the type of a class—the class or representative category of innocent sufferers. Job, then, has a dual aspect, like his God.

And he hath set me for a byword of peoples,

and I am one in whose face men spit.

At this the upright are appalled,

and the innocent stirs himself up against the impious;

but the righteous holds on his way,

and he who has clean hands waxes stronger and stronger

(xvii. 6, 7, 9).

Here it is difficult not to see that the circumstances of the poet’s age are reflected in his words. The whole Jewish nation became ‘a byword of peoples’ during the exile,[^[30]] and the mutual sympathy of its members was continually taxed. It was a paradox which never lost its strangeness that a ‘Servant of Jehovah’ should be trampled upon by unbelievers, and the persecutor was rewarded by the silent indignation of all good Jews. That this is the right view is shown by the depression into which Job falls in vv. 11-16, in spite of the elevating passage quoted above.

Bildad’s speech, with its barbed allusions to Job’s sad history, had a twofold effect. First of all it raised the anguish of Job to its highest point, and, secondly, it threw the sufferer back on that great intuition, already reached by him, of a Divine Witness to his integrity in the heavens. It is a misfortune which can scarcely be appraised too highly that the text of the famous declaration in xix. 25-27 is so uncertain. ‘The embarrassment of the English translators,’ remarks Prof. Green, of Princeton,[^[31]] ‘is shown by the unusual number of italic words, and these of no small importance to the meaning, which are heaped together in these verses.’ It is scarcely greater, however, than that of the ancient versions, and we can hardly doubt that the text used by the Septuagint translator was already at least as corrupt as that which has descended to us from the Massoretic critics.[^[32]] This would the more easily be the case since, as Prof. Green says again, ‘Job is speaking under strong excitement and in the language of lofty poetry; he uses no superfluous words; he simply indicates his meaning in the most concise manner.’ Without now entering on a philological discussion, we have, I think, to choose between these alternatives, one of which involves emending the text, the other does not. Does Job simply repeat what he has said in xvi. 18, 19 (viz. that God will avenge his blood and make reparation, as it were, for his death by testifying to his innocence), without referring to any consequent pleasure of his own, or does he combine with this the delightful thought expressed in xiv. 13-15 of a conscious renewal of communion with God after death?[^[33]] The context, it seems to me, is best satisfied by the former alternative. Job’s mind is at present occupied with the cruelty, not of God (as when he said, ‘O that thou wouldst appoint me a term and then remember me,’ xiv. 13), but of his friends. His starting-point is, ‘How long will ye (my friends) pain my soul?’ &c. (xix. 2.) We may admit that the best solution of Job’s problem would be ‘the beatific vision’ in some early and not clearly defined form of that deep idea; but if Job can say that he not merely dreams but knows this (‘I know that ... I shall see God,’ xix. 25, 26), the remainder of the colloquies ought surely to pursue a very different course; as a matter of fact, neither Job nor his friends, nor yet Jehovah Himself, refers to this supposed newly-won truth, and the only part of ‘Job’s deepest saying’ which the next speaker fastens upon (xx. 3) is the threatening conclusion (xix. 29). Ewald himself has drawn attention to this, without remarking its adverse bearing on his own interpretation.[^[34]]

Here, side by side, are Dr. A. B. Davidson’s and Dr. W. H. Green’s translations of the received text of vv. 25-27, and Dr. Bickell’s version of his own emended text.

But I know that my redeemer liveth,

and in after time he shall stand upon the dust[^[35]]

and after this my skin is destroyed

and without my flesh I shall see God:

whom I shall see for myself,

and mine eyes shall behold, and not another—

my reins consume within me!

And I know my redeemer liveth, and last on earth shall he arise; and after my skin, which has been destroyed thus, and out of my flesh [i.e. when my vital spirit shall be separated from my flesh] shall I see God....

Ich weiss, es lebt mein Retter,

Wird noch auf meinem Staub stehn;

Zuletzt wird Gott mein Zeuge,

Lässt meine Unschuld schauen,

Die ich allein jetzt schaun kann,

Mein Auge und kein andres.

Most critics are now agreed that the immediately preceding words (vv. 23, 24) are not an introduction, as if vv. 25-27 composed the rock inscription. Job first of all wishes what he knows to be impossible, and then announces a far better thing of which he is sure. His wish runs thus:

Would then that they were written down—

my words—in a book, and engraved

with a pen of iron, and with lead

cut out for a witness in the rock.[^[36]]

But whatever view we take of the prospect which gladdened the mind of Job, his remaining speeches contain no further reference to it. Henceforth his thoughts appear to dwell less on his own condition, and more on the general question of God’s moral government, and even when the former is spoken of it is without the old bitterness. In his next speech, stirred up by the gross violence of Zophar, Job for the first time meets the assertions of the three friends in this cycle of argument, viz. that the wicked, at any rate, always get their deserts, and, according to Zophar, suddenly and overwhelmingly. He meets them by a direct negative, though in doing so he is as much perturbed as when he proclaimed his own innocence to God’s face. He is familiar now with the thought that the righteous are not always recompensed, but it fills him with horror to think that the Governor of the world even leaves the wicked in undeserved prosperity, as if, in the language of Eliphaz, He could not ‘judge through the thick clouds’ (xxii. 16).

Why do the wicked live on,

become old, yea, are mighty in power?

Their houses are safe, without fear,

neither is Eloah’s rod upon them.

They wear away their days in happiness,

and go down to Sheól in a moment (xxi. 7, 9, 13).

CHAPTER III.
THE THIRD CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XXII.-XXXI.)

It is not wonderful that the gulf between Job and his friends should only be widened by such a direct contradiction of the orthodox tenet. The friends, indeed, cannot but feel the force of Job’s appeal to experience, as they show by the violence of their invective. But they are neither candid nor, above all, courageous enough to confess the truth; they speak, as the philosopher Kant observes, as if they knew their powerful Client was listening in the background. And so a third cycle of speeches begins (chaps. xxii.-xxxi.), in which the friends grasp the only weapon left them and charge Job directly with being a great sinner. True to his character, however, Eliphaz even here seeks to soften the effect of his accusations by a string of most enticing promises, partly worldly and partly other-worldly in their character, and which in a different context Job would have heartily appreciated (xxii. 21-30).

But Job cares not to reply to those charges of Eliphaz; his mind is still too much absorbed in the painful mystery of his own lot and that of all other righteous sufferers. He longs for God to set up his tribunal, so that Job and his fellows might plead their cause (xxiii. 3-7, xxiv. 1). What most of all disturbs him is that he cannot see God—that is cannot detect the operation of that moral God in whom his heart cannot help believing. ‘I may go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him’ (xxiii. 8). With the ardour of a pessimist he depicts this failure of justice in the darkest colours (chap. xxiv.), and is as powerless as ever to reconcile his deep sense of what God ought to be and must be and the sad realities of life. Upon this Bildad tries to frighten Job into submission by a picture of God’s irresistible power, as exhibited not only in heaven and earth, but even beneath the ocean depths in the realm of the shades (xxv., xxvi. 5-14). Not a very comforting speech, but fine in its way (if Bildad may really be credited with all of it), and the speaker frankly allows its inadequacy.

Lo! these are the outskirts of his ways,

and how faintly spoken is that which we hear!

but the thunder of his power who can understand? (xxvi. 14.)

In a speech, the first which is described as a mashal,[^[37]] Job demolishes his unoriginal and rhetorical opponent, and with dignity reasserts his innocence (xxvi. 1-4, xxvii. 1-7). He may have said more; if so, it has been lost. But, in fact, all that was argumentative in Bildad’s speech was borrowed from Eliphaz, and though Job had the power (see chaps. ix., xii.), he had not the will to compete with his friends in rhetoric. The only speaker who is left is Zophar, and, as it is unlikely that the poet left one of his triads of speeches imperfect, we may conjecture that xxvii. 8-10, 10-23 belongs to the third speech of Zophar.[^[38]] Certainly they are most inappropriate in the mouth of Job, being in direct contradiction to all that he has yet said. If so it seems very probable that besides the introductory formula a few opening verses have dropped out of the text. The verses which now stand at the head of the speech transport us to the disputes of those rival schools of which Job and his friends were only the representatives. Hence the use of the plural in ver. 12, of which an earlier instance occurs in the second speech of Bildad (xviii. 2). What Zophar says is in effect this: Job’s condition is desperate, for he is an ‘impious’ or ‘godless’ man. It is too late for any one to attempt to pray when overtaken by a fatal calamity. For how can he feel that ‘deep delight’ in God which enables a man to pray, with the confidence of being heard, ‘in every season’ of life, whether prosperous or the reverse? The rest of the speech is substantially a repetition of Zophar’s former description of the retribution of the wicked. It was not to be expected that Job should reply to this, and accordingly we find that in continuing his mashal (xxix. 1) he utterly ignores his opponents. But unhappily he is almost as far as ever from a solution of his difficulty. His friends, we may suppose, have left him, and he is at liberty to revive those melancholy memories which are all that remain to him of his prosperity.

In chap. xxix. (a fine specimen of flowing, descriptive Hebrew poetry) Job recalls the honour in which he used to be held, and the beneficent acts which he was enabled to perform. Modesty were out of place, for he is already in the state of ‘one turned adrift among the dead’ (Ps. lxxxviii. 5). The details remind us of many Arabic elegies in the Hamâsa (e.g. No. 351 in Rückert’s adaptation, vol. i., or 97 in Freytag). In chaps. xxx., xxxi. he laments, with the same pathetic self-contemplation, his ruined credit and the terrible progress of his disease. Then, by a somewhat abrupt transition,[^[39]] he enters upon an elaborate profession of his innocence, which has been compared to the solemn repudiation of the forty-two deadly sins by the departed souls of the good in the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead.’ The resemblance, however, must not be pressed too far. Job’s morality, even if predominantly ‘legal,’ has a true ‘evangelical’ tinge. Not merely the act of adultery, but the glance of lust; not merely unjust gain, but the confidence reposed in it by the heart; not merely outward conformity to idol-worship, but the inclination of the heart to false gods, are in his catalogue of sins. His last words are a reiteration of his deeply cherished desire for an investigation of his case by Shaddai. With what proud self-possession he imagines himself approaching the Divine Judge! In his hands are the accusations of his friends and his own reply. Holding them forth, he exclaims—

Here is my signature—let Shaddai answer me—

and the indictment which mine adversary has written.

Surely upon my shoulder will I carry it,

and bind it as chaplets about me.

The number of my steps will I declare unto him;

as a prince will I come near unto him (xxxi. 35-37).[^[40]]

We must here turn back to a passage which forms one of the most admired portions of the Book of Job as it stands—the mashal on Divine Wisdom in chap. xxviii. The first eleven verses are at first sight most inappropriate in this connection. The poet seems to take a delight in working into them all that he knows of the adventurous operations of the miners of his day—probably those carried on for gold in Upper Egypt, and for copper and turquoises in the Sinaitic peninsula (both skilfully introduced by Ebers into his stories of ancient Egypt). How vividly the superiority of reason to instinct is brought out to vary the technical description of the miners’ work in vv. 7, 8.

A path the eagle knows not,

nor has the eye of the vulture scanned it;

the sons of pride have not trodden it,

nor hath the lion passed over it.

No earthly treasures lie too deep for human industry; but—here we see the use of the great literary feat (Prov. i.-ix.) which has gone before—‘where can wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?’ And then follows that fine passage in which language is strained to the uttermost (with another of those pictorial inventories in which poets delight, vv. 15-19) to convey at once the preciousness and the unattainableness of the higher wisdom. The moral of the whole, however, is not revealed till the last verse.

And unto man he said,

‘Behold, the fear of the Lord is wisdom,

and to turn aside from evil is understanding’ (xxviii. 28).

Thus there is no allusion whatever to Job’s problem, and it is only the present position of the mashal in the Book of Job which suggests a possible relation for it to that problem.

And now, looking at the passage by itself, is it conceivable that it was originally written to stand where it now does? Is it natural that the solemn contents of chap. xxvii. (even if we allow the first seven verses only to be Job’s) should leave Job in a mood for an elaborate poetical study of mining operations, or that after agonising so long over the painful riddles of Divine Providence he should suddenly acquiesce in the narrow limits of human knowledge, soon, however, to relapse into his old inquisitiveness? Is it not, on the other hand, very conceivable (notice the opening word ‘For’) that it was transferred to its present position from some other work? In a didactic poem on Wisdom (i.e. the plan of the universe), similar to Prov. i.-ix., it would be as much in place as the hymn on Wisdom in Prov. viii. To this great work indeed it presents more than one analogy, both in its subject and its recommendation of religious morality (or moral religion) as the branch of wisdom suitable to man. The only difference is that the writer of Job xxviii. expressly says that this is the only wisdom within human ken, whereas the writer of Prov. viii. does not touch on this point. But, whether an extract from a larger work or written as a supplement to the poem of Job, the passage in its present position is evidently intended to have a reference to Job’s problem. The author, or the extractor, regarded the foregoing debates much as Milton regarded those of the fallen angels, who ‘found no end, in wandering mazes lost;’ in short, he could only solve the problem by pronouncing it insoluble.[^[41]] Verses 11 and 12 of chap. xxvii. have very much the appearance of an artificial bridge inserted by the new author or the extractor.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SPEECHES OF ELIHU.
(CHAPS. XXXII.-XXXVII.)

At a (perhaps) considerably later period than the original work (including chap. xxviii.)—symbolised by the youthfulness of Elihu as compared with the four older friends—the problem of the sufferings of the innocent still beset the minds of the wise men, the attempt of the three friends to ‘justify the ways of God’ to the intellect having proved, as the wise men thought, a too manifest failure (xxxii. 2, 3). One of their number therefore invented a fourth friend, Elihu (or is this the name of the author himself?[^[42]]), who is described as having been a listener during the preceding debates, and who reduces Job to silence. It is noteworthy that the sudden introduction of Elihu required the insertion of a fresh narrative passage (xxxii. 1-6) as a supplement to the original prologue.

I assume, as the reader will observe, the one assured result of the criticism of Job. To those who follow me in this, the speeches of Elihu will, I think, gain greatly in interest. They mark out a time when, partly through the teaching of history, partly through a deeper inward experience, and partly through the reading of the poem of Job, the old difficulties of faith were no longer so acutely felt. Two courses were open to the Epigoni of that age—either to force Job to say what, as it seemed, he ought to have said (this, however, was not so easy as in the case of Ecclesiastes), or to insert fresh speeches in the style of the original, separating the corn from the chaff in the pleadings of the three friends, and adding whatever a more advanced religious thought suggested to the writer. In forms of expression, however, it must be admitted that Elihu does not shine. (True, he does not profess to comfort Job.) For offensiveness the two following verses are not easily matched:

Where is there a man like Job,

who drinks[^[43]] scoffing like water? (xxxiv. 7.)

Would that Job might be tried to the uttermost

because of his answers in the manner of wicked men (xxxiv. 36).

A ‘vulgar braggart’ he may not be from an Oriental point of view, nor is he ‘the prototype of the Bachelor in Faust;’ but that he is too positive and dogmatic, and much overrates his own powers, is certain. He represents the dogmatism of a purified orthodoxy, which thinks too much of its minute advances (‘one perfect in knowledge is with thee,’ xxxvi. 4).

Elihu distributes his matter (of which he says that he is ‘full,’ xxxii. 18-20) over four speeches. His themes in the first three are: 1, the ground and object of suffering (chaps. xxxii., xxxiii.); 2, the righteousness of God (chap. xxxiv.); and 3, the use of religion (chap. xxxv.), all of which are treated in relation to the questionable or erroneous utterances of Job. Then, in his last and longest effort, Elihu unrolls before Job a picture of the government of God, in its beneficence and righteousness as well as its omnipotence, in the hope of moving Job to self-humiliation (chaps. xxxvi., xxxvii.) Let us remember again that Elihu represents the debates of the ‘wise men’ of the post-regal period, who were conscious of being in some sense ‘inspired’ like their prophetic predecessors (xxxii. 8, xxxvi. 4; Ecclus. xxiv. 32-34, l. 28, 29), so that we cannot believe that the bizarre impression made by Elihu on some Western critics was intended by the original author. That his portrait suggests certain grave infirmities, may be granted; but these are the failings of the circle to which the author belongs: the self-commendation of Elihu in his exordium is hardly excessive from an Oriental point of view, or would at any rate be justifiable in a more original thinker. Indeed, he only commends himself in order to excuse the unusual step of criticising the proceedings of men so much older than himself. After what he thinks sufficient excuse has been offered, Elihu takes up Job’s fundamental error, self-righteousness, but prepares the way by examining Job’s assertion (xix. 7, xxx. 20) that God took no heed of his complaints.

Wherefore hast thou contended with Him

because ‘He answers none of my words’?[^[44]] (xxxiii. 13.)

To this Elihu replies that it is a man’s own fault if he cannot hear the Divine voice. For God is constantly speaking to man, if man would only regard it (‘revelation,’ then, is not confined to a class or a succession). Two means of communication are specially mentioned—nightly dreams and visions, and severe sickness. The object of both is to divert men from courses of action which can only lead to destruction. At this point a remarkable intimation is given. In order to produce conversion, and so to ‘redeem a man from going down to the pit,’ a special angelic agency is necessary—that of a ‘mediator’ or ‘interpreter’ (Targ. p’raqlītā; comp. παράκλητος, John xiv. 16, 26), whose office it is to ‘show unto man his rightness’ (i.e. how to conform his life to the right standard, xxxiii. 23).

We must pause here, however, to consider the bearings of this. It seems to show us, first, that inspired minds (see above) were already beginning to refine and elevate the popular notions of the spiritual world. That there were two classes of spirits, the one favourable, the other adverse to man, had long been the belief of the Israelites and their neighbours.[^[45]] The author of the speeches of Elihu now introduces one of them among the symbols of a higher stage of religion. In antithesis to the ‘destroyers’[^[46]] (ver. 22) he implies that God has thousands of angels (the ‘mediator’ is ‘one among a thousand’), whose business it is to save sinners from destruction by leading them to repentance. Such is the φιλανθρωπία, the friendliness to man, of the angelic world, without which indeed, according to Elihu, the purpose of sickness would be unobserved and a fatal issue inevitable. To students of Christianity, however, it has a deeper interest, if the concluding words, ‘I have found a ransom,’ be a part of the Old Testament foundation of the doctrine of redemption through Christ. This, however, is questionable, and even its possibility is not recognised by the latest orthodox commentator.[^[47]] In his second speech Elihu returns to the main question of Job’s attitude towards God. He begins by imputing to Job language which he had never used, and which from its extreme irreverence Job would certainly have disowned (xxxiv. 5, 9), and maintains that God never acts unjustly, but rewards every man according to his deeds. There is nothing in his treatment of this theme which requires comment except its vagueness and generality, to which, were the speech an integral part of the poem, Job would certainly have taken exception.

The subject of the third speech is handled with more originality. Job had really complained that afflicted persons such as himself appealed to God in vain (xxiv. 12, xxx. 20). Elihu replies to this (xxxv. 9-13) that such persons merely cried from physical pain, and did not really pray. The fourth and last speech, in which he dismisses controversy and expresses his own sublime ideas of the Creator, has the most poetical interest. At the very outset the solemnity of his language prepares the reader to expect something great, and the expectation is not altogether disappointed. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is mighty, but despiseth not any’ (xxxvi. 5); He has given proof of this by the trials with which He visits His servants when they have fallen into sin. Might and mercy are the principal attributes of God. The verses in which Elihu applies this doctrine to Job’s case are ambiguous and perhaps corrupt, but it appears as if Elihu regarded Job as in danger of missing the disciplinary object of his sufferings. It is in the second part of his speech (xxxvi. 26-xxxvii. 24) that Elihu displays his greatest rhetorical power, and though by no means equal to the speeches of Jehovah, which it appears to imitate, the vividness of its descriptions has obtained the admiration of no less competent a judge than Alexander von Humboldt. The moral is intended to be that, instead of criticising God, Job should humble himself in devout awe at the combined splendour and mystery of the creation.

It is tempting to regard the sketch of the storm in xxxvi. 29-xxxvii. 5 and the appeals which Elihu makes to Job as preparatory to the appearance of Jehovah in xxxviii. 1. ‘While Elihu is speaking,’ says Mr. Turner, ‘the clouds gather, a storm darkens the heavens and sweeps across the landscape, and the thunder utters its voice ... out of the whirlwind that passes by Jehovah speaks.’[^[48]] So too Dr. Cox thinks that Job’s invisible Opponent ‘opens His mouth and answers him out of the tempest which Elihu has so graphically described.’[^[49]] In fact in xxxviii. 1 we may equally well render ‘the tempest’ (i.e. that lately mentioned) and ‘a tempest.’ The objection is (1) that the storm does not come into the close of Elihu’s speech, as it ought to do, and (2) that in His very first words Jehovah distinctly implies that the last speaker was one who ‘darkened counsel by words without knowledge’ (xxxviii. 3).

Such are the contributions of Elihu, which gain considerably when considered as a little treatise in themselves. It is, indeed, a strange freak of fancy to regard Elihu as representing the poet himself.[^[50]] Neither æsthetically nor theologically do they reach the same high mark as the remainder of the book. ‘The style of Elihu,’ as M. Renan remarks, ‘is cold, heavy, pretentious. The author loses himself in long descriptions without vivacity.... His language is obscure and presents peculiar difficulties. In the other parts of the poem the obscurity comes from our ignorance and our scanty means of comprehending these ancient documents; here the obscurity comes from the style itself, from its bizarrerie and affectation.’[^[51]] Theologically it is difficult to discover any important point (but see [Chap. XII.], below, on Elihu) in which, in spite of his sharp censure of the friends, he distinctly passes beyond them. His arguments have been so largely anticipated by the three friends that, on the whole, we may perhaps best regard chaps. xxxii.-xxxix. as a first theological criticism on the contents of the original work. From this point of view it is interesting that the idea of affliction as correction, which had already occurred to Eliphaz, acquired in the course of years a much deeper hold on thinking minds (see xxxiii. 19-30, xxxvi. 8-10). There is one feature of the earlier speeches which is not imitated by Elihu, and that is the long and terrifying descriptions in each of the three original colloquies of the fate of the impious man, and one of the most considerate of Elihu’s Western critics[^[52]] thinks it possible that Elihu, who says in one place—

And the impious in heart cherish wrath,

and supplicate not when he hath bound them (xxxvi. 13)—

considered no calamity whatever as penal in the first instance.

CHAPTER V.
THE SPEECHES OF JEHOVAH.
(CHAPS. XXXVIII.-XLII. 6.)

‘The words of Job are ended’ (xxxi. 40b), remarks the ancient editor, and amongst the last of these words is an aspiration after a meeting with God. That Job expected such a favour in this life is in the highest degree improbable, whatever view be taken of xix. 25-27. It is true, he sometimes did almost regard a theophany as possible, though he feared it might be granted under conditions which would make it the reverse of a boon (ix. 3, 15, 33-35; xiii. 21, 22). He wished for a fair investigation of his character, and he craved that God would not appear in too awful a form. It seems at first sight as if Jehovah, casting hard questions at Job out of the tempest, and ignoring both the friends’ indictment and Job’s defence (xxxi. 35-37), were realising Job’s worst fears and acting as his enemy. The friends had already sought to humble Job by pointing him to the power and wisdom and goodness of God, and Job had proved conclusively that he was no stranger to these high thoughts. Is the poet consistent with himself, first, in introducing Jehovah at all, and, secondly, in making Him overpower Job by a series of sharp, ironical questions? Several answers may be given if we wish to defend the unity of the poem. Job himself (it may be said) has not continued at the same high level of faith as in xix. 25-27 (assuming Prof. Davidson’s view of the passage); he needs the appearance of Jehovah more than he did then. As to the course attributed in xxxviii. 1 to Jehovah, this too (the poet may have felt in adding these speeches) was really the best for Job. Jehovah might no doubt have declared Job to be in the right as against his friends. He might next have soothed the sufferer’s mind by revealing the reason why his trials were permitted (we know this from the Prologue). But this would not have been for Job’s spiritual welfare: there was one lesson he needed to learn or to relearn, one grace of character he needed to gain or to regain—namely, devout and trustful humility towards God. In the heat of debate and under the pressure of pain Job’s old religious habit of mind had certainly been weakened—not destroyed, but weakened—and a strong remedy was necessary if he was not to carry his distracted feelings to the grave. And so, as a first joyful surprise, came the theophany: to ‘see’ God before death must have been a joyful surprise; and if the questioning cast him down, yet it was only to raise him up in the strength of self-distrust. The object of these orations of Jehovah is not to communicate intellectual light, but to give a stronger tone to Job’s whole nature. He had long known God to be strong and wise and good, but more as a lesson learned than as personal experience (xlii. 5). And the means first adopted to convey this life-giving ‘sight’ is not without a touch of that humour which we noticed in the Prologue. Job, who was so full of questions, now has the tables turned upon him. He is put through a catechism which admits of but one very humbling answer, each question being attached to a wonderfully vivid description of some animal or phenomenon. For descriptive power the first speech of Jehovah, at any rate, is without a parallel. The author, as Prof. Davidson remarks, ‘knew the great law that sublimity is necessarily also simplicity.’ It is true he does but give us isolated features of the natural world: no single scene is represented in its totality. But this is in accordance with the Hebrew genius, to which nature appears, not in her own simple beauty, but bathed in an atmosphere of emotion. The emotion which here animates the poet is mainly a religious one; it is the love of God, and of God’s works for the sake of their Maker. He wishes to cure the murmuring spirits of his own day by giving them wider views of external nature and its mysteries, so wondrously varied and so full of Divine wisdom and goodness. He has this great advantage in doing so, that they, like himself (and Job), are theists; they are not of those who say in their heart, ‘There is no God,’ but of the ‘Zion’ who complains, ‘Jehovah has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me’ (Isaiah xlix. 14). And the remedy which he applies is the same as that of the Babylonian-Jewish prophet, a wider study of the ways of God. Job had said, ‘I would tell Him the number of my steps;’ Jehovah replies by showing him, in a series of questions, not irritating but persuasive, the footprints of His own larger self-manifestation.

The Divine Speaker is introduced by the poet thus:

And Jehovah answered Job out of a tempest, and said.

A storm was the usual accompaniment of a Divine appearance: there was no intention of crushing Job with terror. In Blake’s thirteenth drawing Job (and his wife!) are represented kneeling and listening, with countenances expressive of thankfulness; in his fourteenth, Job and his four friends kneel rapt and ecstatic, while the ‘sons of God,’ sweet, vital, heavenly forms, are shouting for joy. In fact, the speeches of Jehovah contain, not accusations (except in xxxviii. 2), but remonstrances, and, though the form of these is chilling to Job’s self-love, yet the glorious visions which they evoke are healing to every sorrow of the mind. The text of the speeches is unfortunately not in perfect order. For instance, there are four verses which have, no one can tell how, been deposited in the description of behemoth (xli. 9-12, A. V.) but which most probably at one time or another opened the first speech of Jehovah. Perhaps the author himself removed them, feeling them to be too depressing for Job to hear; or perhaps it was purely by accident that they were transferred, and Merx and Bickell have done well to replace them in their corrected editions of Job between xxxi. 37 and xxxviii. 1. As corrected by the former they run thus:—

Behold, his hope is belied:

will he fight against mine appearing?

He is not so bold as to stir me up;

who indeed could stand before me?

Who ever attacks me in safety?

all beneath the whole heaven is mine.

I will not take his babbling in silence,

his mighty speech and its comely arrangement.

We must regard this as a soliloquy, after which, directly addressing Job, Jehovah upbraids the ‘mighty speaker’ with having shut himself out by his ‘blind clamour’ from a view of the Divine plan of his life.

Who is this that darkens counsel

by words without knowledge? (xxxviii. 2.)

To gain that ‘knowledge’ which will ‘make darkness light before him,’ Job must enrich his conception of God. Those striking pictures already referred to have no lower aim than to display the great All-wise God, and the irony of the catechising is only designed to bring home the more forcibly to Job human littleness and ignorance. Modern readers, however, cannot help turning aside to admire the genius of the poet and his sympathetic interest in nature. His scientific ideas may be crude; but he observes as a poet, and not as a naturalist. Earth, sea, and sky successively enchain him, and we can hardly doubt that the natural philosophy of the Chaldæans was superficially at least known to him.[^[53]] In his childlike curiosity and willingness to tell us everything he reminds us of the poet of the Commedia.

Has the rain a father?[^[54]]

or who has begotten the dew-drops?

from whose womb came forth the ice,

and the hoar frost of heaven—who engendered it,

(that) the waters close together like a stone,

and the face of the deep hides itself?

Dost thou bind the knots of the Pleiades,[^[55]]

or loose the fetters of Orion?[^[56]]

Dost thou bring forth the moon’s watches at their season,

and the Bear and her offspring—dost thou guide them?

Knowest thou the laws of heaven?

dost thou determine its influence upon the earth?

(xxxviii. 28-33.)

‘The laws of heaven!’ Can we refuse to observe the first beginnings of a conception of the cosmos, remembering other passages of the Wisdom Literature in which the great world plan is distinctly referred to? Without denying a pre-Exile, native Hebrew tendency (comp. Job xxxviii. 33 with Jer. xxxi. 35, 36) may we not suppose that the physical theology of Babylonia had a large part in determining the form of this conception? Notice the reference to the influence of the sky upon the earth, and especially the Hebraised Babylonian phrase Mazzaroth (i.e. mazarati,[^[57]] plural of mazarta, a watch), the watches or stations of the moon which marked the progress of the month. But it is not so much the intellectual curiosity manifest in these verses which we would dwell upon now as the poetic vigour of the gallery of zoology, and, we must add, the faith which pervades it, reminding us of a Bedouin prayer quoted by Major Palmer, ‘O Thou who providest for the blind hyæna, provide for me!’ Ten (or nine) specimens of animal life are given—the lion and (perhaps) the raven,[^[58]] the wild goat and the hind, the wild ass, the wild ox,[^[59]] the ostrich, the war horse, the hawk and the eagle. It is to this portion that the student must turn who would fain know the highest attainments of the Hebrew genius in pure poetry, such as Milton would have recognised as poetry. The delighted wonder with which the writer enters into the habits of the animals, and the light and graceful movement of the verse, make the ten descriptions referred to an ever-attractive theme, I will not say for the translator, but for the interpreter. They are ideal, as the Greek sculptures are ideal, and need the pen of that poet-student, faint hints of whose coming have been given us in Herder and Rückert. The finest of them, of course, is that of one of the animals most nearly related in Arabia to man (in Arabia, but not in Judæa), the horse.

Dost thou give might to the horse?

Dost thou clothe his neck with waving mane?

Dost thou make him bound as a locust?

The peal of his snort is terrible!

He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength;

he goes forth to meet the weapons;

he laughs at fear, and is not dismayed,

and recoils not from the sword:

the quiver clangs upon him,

the flashing lance and the javelin:

bounding furiously he swallows the ground,

and cannot stand still at the blast of the trumpet;

at every blast he says, ‘Aha!’

and smells the battle from afar,

the captain’s thunder and the cry of battle (xxxix. 19-25).

The terrible element in animal instincts seems indeed to fascinate the mind of our poet; he closes his gallery with a sketch of the cruel instincts of the glorious eagle. We are reminded, perhaps, of the lines of a poet painter inspired by Job—

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?[^[60]]

And now we might almost think that the object of the theophany has been attained. Never more will Job presume to litigate with Shaddai, or measure the doings of God by his puny intellect. He has learned the lesson expressed in Dante’s line—

State contenti, umana gente, al quia,[^[61]]

but also that higher lesson, so boldly expressed by the same poet, that in all God’s works, without exception, three attributes are seen united—

Fecemi la divina potestate,

La somma sapienza, e ’l primo amore.[^[62]]

He is silenced, indeed, but only as with the poet of Paradise—

All’ alta fantasia qui mancò possa.[^[63]]

The silence with which both these ‘vessels of election’ meet the Divine revelation is the silence of satisfaction, even though this be mingled with awe. Job has learned to forget himself in the wondrous creation of which he forms a part, just as Dante when he saw

La forma universal di questo nodo.[^[64]]

Job cannot, indeed, as yet express his feelings; awe preponderates over satisfaction in the words assigned to him in xl. 4, 5. In fact, he has fallen below his better knowledge, and must be humbled for this. He has known that he is but a part of humanity—a representative of the larger whole, and might, but for his frailty, have comforted himself in that thought. God’s power and wisdom and goodness are so wondrously blended in the great human organism that he might have rested amidst his personal woes in the certainty of at least an indirect connection with the gentler manifestations of the ‘Watcher of mankind’ (vii. 20). This thought has proved ineffectual, and so the Divine Instructor tries another order of considerations. And, true enough, nature effects what ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ has failed to teach. Job, however, needs more than teaching; he needs humiliation for his misjudgment of God’s dealings with him personally. Hence in His second short but weighty speech ‘out of the tempest’ Jehovah begins with the question (xl. 8)—

Wilt thou make void my justice?

wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?

This gives the point of view from which Jehovah ironically invites Job, if he thinks (see chap. xxiv.) that he can govern the world—the human as well as the extra-human world—better than the Creator, to make the bold attempt. He bids him array himself with the Divine majesty and carry out that retribution in which Jehovah, according to him, has so completely failed (xl. 11-13). If Job will prove his competence for the office which he claims, then Jehovah Himself will recognise his independence and extol his inherent strength. Did the poet mean to finish the second speech of Jehovah here? It is probable; the subject of the interrogatory hardly admitted of being developed further in poetry. A later writer (or, as Merx thinks, the poet of Job himself) seems to have found the speech too short, and therefore appended the two fancy sketches of animals which follow. But in the original draft of the poem xl. 14 must have been followed immediately by Job’s retractation, closing with those striking words (see above, p. 49) which so well supplement the less articulate confession of xl. 4, 5—

I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,

but now mine eye sees thee:[^[65]]

therefore I retract and repent

in dust and ashes (xlii. 5, 6).

How complete a reversal of the ‘princely’ anticipations of Job in xxxi. 37! To us, indeed, it may seem somewhat ungracious to Job to give this as the last scene of his pathetic drama. But the poet leaves it open to us to animate Job’s repentance with love as well as awe and compunction. With fine feeling Blake in his seventeenth illustration almost fills the margin with passages from the Johannine writings.

The long description of the two Egyptian monsters (xl. 15, xli. 26) is, as we have hinted above, out of place in the second speech of Jehovah. It has indeed been suggested that the writer may have intended it as a development of xl. 14—

Then will I in return confess unto thee

that thy right hand can help thee—

which implies that Job has no power to help himself in the government of the world. According to this view, the opening words of the behemoth section will mean, ‘Consider, pray, that thou hast fellow-creatures which are far stronger than thou; and how canst thou undertake the management of the universe?’ It must, however, be admitted that the emphasis thus laid on the omnipotence of God, apart from His righteousness, introduces an obscurity into the argument which almost compels us to assume that the sketches of behemoth and leviathan are later insertions. At any rate, even if we regard them as the work of the principal writer of Job, we must at least ascribe them to one of those after-thoughts by which poets not unfrequently spoil their best productions. The style of the description, too, is less chastened than that of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. (so that Bickell can hardly be right in placing xl. 15, &c., immediately after xxxix. 30), and if it relates to the hippopotamus and the crocodile is less true to nature than the other ‘animal pieces.’

The truth is that neither behemoth nor leviathan corresponds strictly to any known animal. The tail of a hippopotamus would surely not have been compared to a cedar by a truthful though poetic observer like the author of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. Moreover that animal was habitually hunted by the Egyptians with lance and harpoon, and was therefore no fit symbol of indomitable pride. The crocodile too was attacked and killed by the Egyptians, though in xli. 26-29 leviathan is said to laugh at his assailants. Seneca in his description of Egypt describes the crocodile as ‘fugax animal audaci, audacissimum timido’ (Quæst. Nat., iv. 2). Comp. Ezek. xxix. 4, xxxii. 3; Herod. ii. 70.

To me, indeed, as well as to M. Chabas, the behemoth and the leviathan seem to claim a kinship with the dragons and other imaginary monsters of the Swiss topographies of the sixteenth century. A still more striking because a nearer parallel is adduced by M. Chabas from the Egyptian monuments, where, side by side with the most accurate pictures from nature, we often find delineations of animals which cannot have existed out of wonderland.[^[66]]

It is remarkable that the elephant should not have been selected as a type of strange and wondrous animal life; apparently it was not yet known to the Hebrew writers, though of course it might be urged that the poet was accidentally prevented from writing more. Merx has pointed out that the description of behemoth is evidently incomplete. He also thinks that the poet has not yet brought the form of these passages to final perfection: a struggle with the difficulties of expression is observable. He therefore relegates xl. 15-xli. 26 to an appendix with the suggestive title (comp. Goethe’s Faust) Paralipomena to Job. He thinks that a reader or admirer of the original poem sought to preserve these unfinished sketches by placing them where they now stand. This is probably the most conservative theory (i.e. the nearest to the traditional view) critically admissible.

CHAPTER VI.
THE EPILOGUE AND ITS MEANING.

We now come to the dénoûment of the story (xlii. 7-17), against which, from the point of view of internal criticism, much were possible to be said. We shall not, however, here dwell upon the inconsistencies between the epilogue on the one hand and the prologue and the speeches on the other. The main point for us to emphasise is the disappointingness of the events of the epilogue regarded as the final outcome of Job’s spiritual discipline. Surely the high thoughts which have now and then visited Job’s mind, and which, combined with the personal self-revelation of the Creator, must have brought back the sufferer to a state of childlike resignation, stand in inappropriate companionship with a tame and commonplace renewal of mere earthly prosperity. Would it not have been fitter for the hero on whom so much moral training had been lavished to pass with humble but courageous demeanour through the dark valley, at the issue of which he would ‘see God’? It is hardly a sufficient answer that a concession was necessary to the prejudices of the unspiritual multitude; for what was the object of the poem, if not to subvert the dominion of a one-sided retribution theory? The solution probably is that Job in the epilogue is a type of suffering, believing, and glorified Israel. Not only the individual believer, not only all the elect spirits of suffering humanity, but the beloved nation of the poet.—Israel, the ‘Servant of Jehovah’—must receive a special message of comfort from the great poem. In Isa. lxi. 7 we read that glorified Israel is to ‘have double (compensation) instead of its shame;’ comp. Zech. ix. 12, Jer. xvi. 14-18. The people of Israel, according to the limited view of the prophets, was bound indissolubly to the Holy Land. The only promise, therefore, which would be consolatory for suffering Israel, the only possible sign of God’s restored favour, was a material one including fresh ‘children’ and many flocks and herds (Isa. liv. 1, lx. 7). Observe in this connection the phrase, xlii. 10, ‘Jehovah turned the fortunes of Job’ (others, as A. V., ‘turned the captivity of Job’)—the phrase so well known in passages relating to Israel (e.g. Ps. xiv. 7, Joel iii. 1).

The explanation is perhaps adequate. Some, however, will be haunted by a doubt whether the author of the prologue would not have thrown more energy and enthusiasm into the closing narrative. An early reader, probably of Pharisaic leanings, felt the poverty of the epilogue,[^[67]] and sought to remedy it by the following addition in the Septuagint: ‘And Job died, old and full of days; and it is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raiseth.’[^[68]] The remainder of the Septuagint appendix testifies only to the love of the later Jews for amplifying Biblical notices (see Chap. VII.) Our own poet painter has also amplified the details of the epilogue, but in how different a way! (Gilchrist’s Life of Blake, i. 332-3).

CHAPTER VII.
THE TRADITIONAL BASIS AND THE PURPOSE OF JOB.

I.
Did Job really live?

This is widely different, remarks Umbreit,[^[69]] from the question whether Job actually said and did all that is related of him in our book. It is scarcely necessary, he adds, in the present day to disprove the latter, but we have no reason to doubt the former (the theory as to the historical existence of a sort of Arabian king Priam, named Job). In truth, we have no positive evidence either for affirming or denying it, unless the ‘holy places,’ each reputed to be Job’s grave, may be mentioned in this connection. The allusion in Ezek. xiv. 14 to ‘Noah, Daniel, and Job,’ proves no more than that a tradition of some sort existed respecting the righteous Job during the Babylonian Exile: we cannot tell how much Ezekiel knew besides Job’s righteousness. In later times, Jewish students do appear to have believed that ‘Job existed;’ but the force of the argument is weakened by the uncritical character of the times, and the extreme form in which this belief was held by them. How early doubts arose, we know not. The authors of Tobit and Susanna may very likely have been only half-believers, since they evidently imitate the story of Job in their romantic compositions. At any rate, the often-quoted saying of Rabbi Resh Lakish, איוב לא היה ולא נברא אלא משל היה, ‘Job existed not, and was not created, but he is (only) a parable,’[^[70]] shows that even before the Talmud great freedom of speech prevailed among the Rabbis on such points. In Hai Gaon’s time (d. 1037), the saying quoted must have given offence to some, for this Rabbi not only appeals for the historical character of Job to the passage in Ezekiel, but wishes (on traditional authority) to alter the reading of Resh Lakish’s words, so as to read איוב לא היה ולא נברא אלא למשל, ‘Job existed not, and was not created, except to be a parable.’[^[71]] (See [note 7, Appendix].)

The prevailing opinion among the Jews doubtless continued to be that the Book of Job was strictly historical, and Christian scholars (with the exception of Theodore—see [Chap. XV.]) found no reason to question this till Luther arose, with his genial, though unscientific, insistence on the right of questioning tradition. In his Tischreden Luther says, ‘Ich halte das Buch Hiob für eine wahre Historia; dass aber alles so sollte geschehen und gehandelt sein, glaube ich nicht, sondern ich halte, dass ein feiner, frommer, gelehrter Mann habe es in solche Ordnung bracht.’[^[72]] Poetically treated history—that is Luther’s idea, as it was that of Grotius after him, and in our own country of that morning-star of Biblical criticism, Bishop Lowth.[^[73]] It is acquiesced in by Schlottmann, Delitzsch, and Davidson, and with justice, provided it be clearly understood that no positive opinion can reasonably be held as to the historical origin of the tradition (Sage, Ewald) used by the author. I have said nothing of Spinoza and Albert Schultens. The former[^[74]] pronounces most unfavourably on the religious and poetical value of the book which he regards as a heathenish fiction, reminding us somewhat (see elsewhere) of the hasty and ill-advised Theodore of Mopsuestia. The latter[^[75]] actually defends the historical character both of the narratives and of the colloquies of Job in the strictest sense. Hengstenberg, alone perhaps among orthodox theologians, takes a precisely opposite view. Like Reuss and Merx, he regards the poem as entirely a work of imagination. We may be thankful for his protest against applying a prosaic standard to the poetical books of the Hebrew Canon. Those who do so, he remarks,[^[76]] ‘fail to observe that the book stands, not among historical, but among poetical books, and that it would betray a very low grade of culture, were one to depreciate imaginative as compared with historical writing, and declare it to be unsuitable for sacred Scripture.’

I entirely agree with the eminent scholar, whose unprogressive theology could not entirely extinguish his literary and philological sense. But I see no sufficient reason for adopting what in itself, I admit, would add a fresh laurel to the poet’s crown. Merx indeed assures us[^[77]] that the meaning of the name ‘Job’ is so redolent of allegory that it must be the poet’s own invention, especially as the name occurs nowhere else in the Old Testament. He adds that the story of Job is so closely connected with the didactic part of the book that it would be lost labour to separate the legendary from the new material. All was wanted; therefore all is fictitious. This is not, however, the usual course of procedure with poets whether of the East or of the West, whose parsimony in the invention of plots is well known. As for the name Job (Iyyób) it may no doubt be explained (from the Arabic) ‘he who turns to God,’[^[78]] and in other ways, but there is no evidence that the author thought of any meaning for it. When he does coin names (see Epilogue), there is no room for doubting their significance. Ewald may, certainly, have gone too far in trying to recover the traditional element: how difficult it would be to do so with Paradise Lost, if we had not Genesis to help us! But the probability of the existence of a legend akin to the narrative in the Prologue, is shown by the parallels to it which survive, e.g. the touching Indian story of Harischandra,[^[79]] given by Dr. Muir in vol. 1. of his Sanskrit Texts. The resemblance may be slight and superficial, but the sudden ruin of a good man’s fortunes is common to both stories. Had we more knowledge of Arabic antiquity, we should doubtless find a more valuable parallels.[^[80]]

The story of Job had a special attraction for Mohammed, who enriched it (following the precedent of the Jewish Haggada) with a fresh detail (Korán, xxxviii. 40). To him, as well as to St. James, Job was an example of ‘endurance.’ The dialogue between Allah and Eblis in Korán, xv. 32-42, may perhaps have been suggested by the Prologue of our poem.

‘Did then, Job really live?’ That for which we most care comes not from ‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,’[^[81]] but from an unnamed poet, who embellished tradition partly from imagination, partly (see next section) from the rich and varied stores of his own experience.

2.
The Autobiographical Element in its Bearing on the Purpose of the Poem.

A German critic (Dillmann), in speaking of Job, has well reminded us that ‘the idea of a work of art must reveal itself in the development of the piece: it is not to be condensed into a dry formula.’ Least of all, surely, is such formulation possible when the work of art is an idealised portraiture of the author himself, and such, I think, to a considerable extent is the Book of Job. Those words of a psalmist,

Come and hear, all ye that fear God,

and I will declare what he hath done for my soul

(Ps. lxvi. 16, R. V.)

might be taken as the motto of Job. In short, the author is thoroughly ‘subjective,’ like all the great Hebrew and especially the Arabian poets. ‘In the rhythmic swell of Job’s passionate complaints, there is an echo of the heart-beats of a great poet and a great sufferer. The cry “Perish the day in which I was born” (iii. 3) is a true expression of the first effects of some unrecorded sorrow. In the life-like description beginning “Oh that I were as in months of old” (xxix. 2), the writer is thinking probably of his own happier days, before misfortune overtook him. Like Job (xxix. 7, 21-25) he had sat in the “broad place” by the gate and solved the doubts of perplexed clients. Like Job, he had maintained his position triumphantly against other wise men. He had a fellow-feeling with Job in the distressful passage through doubt to faith. Like Job (xxi. 16) he had resisted the suggestion of practical atheism, and with the confession of his error (xlii. 2-6) had recovered spiritual peace.’

The man who speaks to us under the mask of Job is not indeed a perfect character; but he does not pretend to be so. How pathetic are his appeals to his friends to remember the weight of his calamity—‘therefore have my words been wild’ (vi. 3)—and not to ‘be captious about words when the speeches of the desperate are but for the wind’ (vi. 26). He was no Stoic, and had not practised himself in deadening his sensibility to pain. Strong in his sense of justice, he lacked those higher intuitions which could alone soothe his irritation. But he was throughout loyal to the God whom his conscience revered, and, even in the midst of his wild words, he let God mould him. First of all, he renounced the hope of being understood by men; he ceased to complain of his rather ignorant than unfeeling friends. He exemplified that Arabic proverb which says, ‘Perfect patience allows no complaint to be heard against (human creatures).’ Then he came by degrees to trust God. There is a kernel of truth in that passage of the Jerusalem Talmud (Berakhoth, cix. 5) where, among the seven types of Pharisees, the sixth is described as ‘he who is pious from fear, like Job,’ and the seventh, as ‘he who is pious from love, like Abraham.’ Job’s religion was at first not entirely but still too much marked by fear; it ended by becoming a religion of trust, justifying the title borne by Job among the Syrians, as if in contradiction to the Talmud, of ‘the lover of the Lord.’[^[82]]

So far as the author of Job has any direct purpose beyond that of giving a helpful picture of his own troubles, it is no doubt principally a polemical one. He has suffered so deeply from the inveterate error (once indeed a relative truth) so tenaciously maintained by the wisest men that he would fain crush the source of so much heart-breaking misery. But that for which we love the book is its φιλανθρωπία, its brotherly love to all mankind. No doubt the author thinks first of Israel, then (as I suppose) suffering exile; but the care with which the poem is divested of Israelitish peculiarities, seems to show that he looks beyond his own people, just as in his view of God he has broken the bonds of a narrow ‘particularism.’ ‘I can see no other explanation of those apparently hyperbolical complaints, that strange invasion of self-consciousness, and that no less strange ‘enthusiasm of humanity’[^[83]] ... than the view expressed or implied by Chateaubriand, that Job is a ‘type of righteous men in affliction—not merely in the land of Uz, nor among the Jews in Babylonia, nor yet, on Warburton’s theory of the poem, in the Judæa of the time of Nehemiah, but wherever on the wide earth tears are shed and hearts are broken.’ This is the truth in the too often exaggerated allegorical view[^[84]] of the poem of Job. According to his wont, the author lets us read his meaning by occasional bold inconsistencies. No individual can use such phraseology as we find in xvii. 1, xviii. 2, 3, xix. 11, and perhaps I may add xvi. 10, xxvii. 11, 12. And yet the fact that Job often speaks as the ‘type of suffering humanity’ no more destroys his claim to be an individual ‘than the typical character of Dante in his pilgrimage and of Faust in Goethe’s great poem annuls the historical element in those two great poetical figures.’[^[85]]

3.
The Purpose of Job as illustrated by Criticism.

More precise definitions of the purpose of Job depend on the acceptance of a critical analysis of the book. Some suggestions on this subject have been already given to facilitate the due comprehension of the poem. I must now offer the reader a connected sketch of the possible or probable stages of its growth. This, if it bears being tested, will perhaps reveal the special purpose of the several parts, and above all of that most precious portion—the Colloquies of Job and his friends. (Compare below, [Chap. XII.])

I. The narrative which forms the Prologue is based upon a traditional story which represented Job as hurled from the height of happiness into an abyss of misery, but preserving a devout serenity in the midst of trouble. It is impossible to feel sure that this Prologue is by the same author as the following Colloquies. It stands in no very close connection with them; ‘the Satan’ in particular (an omission which struck William Blake[^[86]]), is not heard of again in the book; and there is abundant evidence of the liking of the pre-Exile writers for a tasteful narrative style. It is not a wild conjecture that the first two chapters originally formed the principal part of a prose book of Job, comparable to the ‘books’ once current of Elijah, and perhaps one may add of Balaam and of Daniel—a book free from any speculations of the ‘wise men’ and in no sense a māshāl or gnomic poem, but supplying in its own way a high and adequate solution of the great problem of the suffering of the righteous. The writer of this Prologue, whether he also wrote the Colloquies or not, firmly believed that the calamities which sometimes fell on the innocent were both for the glory of God and of human nature. It was possible, he said, to continue in one’s integrity, though no earthly advantage accrued from it. If the Prologue once formed part of a distinct prose ‘book’ of Job, one can hardly suppose that the same author wrote the Epilogue; for while the Colloquies do contain hints of Job’s typical character (as to some extent a representative of humanity), the Prologue does not, and it is only the typical or allegorical interpretation which makes the Epilogue tolerable. In fact, the Epilogue must, as it seems to me, have been written, if not by the author of the Colloquies, yet by some one who had this work before him. The prose ‘book’ of Job, if it existed, and if it originated in Judah, cannot have been written before the Chaldæan period. This period and no other explains the moral purpose of the ‘book,’ precisely as the age of the despotic Louis XIV. is the only one which suits the debate on the disinterested love of God with which the name of Fénelon is inseparably connected. The Chaldæan period, however, we must remember, did not begin with the Captivity, but with the appearance of the Babylonian power on the horizon of Palestine. We must not therefore too hastily assume that the Book of Job is a monument of the Babylonian Captivity, true as I myself believe this hypothesis to be.

We are, however, of course not confined to this hypothesis of a prose ‘book’ of Job. The author of the Colloquies may have been equally fitted to be a writer of narrative, and may have felt that the solution mentioned above, although the highest, was not the only one admissible. We may therefore conceive of him as following up the solution offered in the Prologue by a ventilation of the great moral problem before himself and his fellow ‘wise men.’ He throws the subject open as it were to general discussion, and invests all the worthiest speculations of his time in the same flowing poetical dress, that no fragment of truth contained in them may be lost. He himself is far from absolutely rejecting any of them; he only seems to deny that the ideas of the three representative sages can be applied at once, as they apply them, to the case of one like Job.

[Böttcher, however, regards Job as the work of one principal and several subordinate writers. It was occasioned, he thinks, by a conversation on the sufferings of innocent men, at that time so frequent (i.e. in the reign of Manasseh). See his Achrenlese, p. 68.]

II. The completion or publication of the colloquies revealed (or seemed to reveal) sundry imperfections in the original mode of treating the subject. Some other ‘wise men,’ therefore (or possibly, except in the case of III., the author himself), inserted passages in the poem with the view of qualifying or supplementing its statements. These were merely laid in, without being welded with the rest of the book. The first in order of these additions is chap. xxviii., which cannot be brought into a logical connection with the chapters among which it is placed, in spite of the causal particle ‘for’ prefixed to it (‘For there is a vein’). It is possible, indeed, that it has been extracted from some other work. The hypothesis of insertion (or, if used without implying illicit tampering with the text, ‘interpolation’) is confirmed by the occurrence of ‘Adonai’ in ver. 28, which is contrary to the custom of the author of Job, and by its highly rhetorical character. If the passage was written with a view to the Book of Job, we must suppose the author to have been dissatisfied with the original argument, and to have sought a solution for the problem in the inscrutableness of the divine wisdom. Zophar, it is true, had originally alluded to this attribute, but with a more confined object. According to him, God, being all-wise, can detect sins invisible to mortal eyes (xi. 6):—it is needless to draw out the wide difference between this slender inference and the large theory which appears to be suggested in chap. xxviii.

III. One of the less progressive ‘wise men’ was scandalised at the irreverent statements of Job and dissatisfied with the three friends’ mode of dealing with them (xxxii. 2, 3). Hence the speeches of Elihu, the most generally recognised of all the inserted portions (chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii.) The author partly imitates the speeches of Jehovah.

IV. In another inserted passage (ch. xxxviii.-xl. 14, xlii. 1-6), the Almighty is represented as chastising the presumption of Job, and showing forth the supreme wisdom by contrast with Job’s unwisdom. It is clear that the copy in which it was inserted was without the speeches of Elihu, for the opening words of Jehovah (xxxviii. 2) clearly have reference to the last discourse of Job, which they must have been intended to follow. The effect of this fine passage is much impaired by the interposition of the speeches of Elihu.

V. The description of the behémoth and the leviathan (xl. 15-24, xli.) seems also to be a later insertion, and somewhat more recent than the speeches of Jehovah. It is a ‘purple patch,’ and the appendix last mentioned gains by its removal.

VI. An editor appended the epilogue. He must have had the prologue before him, but took no pains to bring his own work into harmony with it, except in the one point which he could not help adopting, namely the vast riches of his hero. He agreed with Job’s friends on the grand question of retribution, though he would not sanction their line of argument. Job’s doubts, according to him, contained more faith than their uncharitable dogmatism.

Can we feel grateful to this writer? He has at any rate relieved the strain upon the imagination of the reader, and possibly, if we assume him to be distinct from the author of the Prologue, carried out an unfulfilled intention of that author (note the words in i. 12, ‘only upon himself put not forth thy hand’). But he did so in a prosaic spirit, and made a sad concession to a low view of providential dealings. He has also, I think, caused much misunderstanding of the object of the book. Thus we find Dr. Ginsburg saying,[^[87]]

The Book of Job ... only confirms the old opinion that the righteous are visibly rewarded here, inasmuch as it represents their calamities as transitory, and Job himself as restored to double his original wealth and happiness in this life.

Against which I enter a respectful protest.

The view here adopted of the gradual growth of the book seems important for its right comprehension. In its present form, it seems like a very confused theodicy, designed to justify God against the charge of bringing misfortune upon innocent persons. But when the disturbing elements are removed, we see that the book is simply an expression of the conflicting thoughts of an earnest, warm-hearted man on the great question of suffering. He protests, it is true, against the rigour and uncharitableness of the traditional orthodox belief, but is far more aspiring to solve the problem theoretically. This is one chief point in which he differs from his interpolators (if the word may be used), who mostly appear to have had some favourite theory (or partial view of truth) to advocate.

CHAPTER VIII.
DATE AND PLACE OF COMPOSITION.

We have seen ([Chap. VII.]) that the unity of authorship of the Book of Job is not beyond dispute, but we shall not at present assume the results of analysis. Let us endeavour to treat of the date and place of composition on the hypothesis that the book is a whole as it stands (on the Elihu-portion however, comp. [Chap. XII.]) It is at any rate probable that the greater part of it at least proceeds from the same period. Can that period be the patriarchal? The author has sometimes received credit for his faithful picture of this early age. This is at any rate plausible. For instance, he avoids the use of the sacred name Jehovah, revealed to Moses according to Ex. vi. 3. Then, too, the great age ascribed to Job in the Epilogue (xlii. 16) agrees with the notices of the patriarchs. The uncoined piece of silver (Heb. kesita) which each kinsman of Job gave him after his recovery (xlii. II), is only mentioned again in Gen. xxxiii. 19 (Josh. xxiv. 32). The musical instruments referred to in xxi. 12, xxx. 31, are also mentioned in Gen. iv. 21, xxxi. 27. There is no protest against idolatry either in the Book of Job[^[88]] or in Genesis. Job himself offers sacrifices to the one true God, like the patriarchs, and the kind of sacrifice offered is the burnt-offering (i. 5, xlii. 8), there is no mention of guilt-or sin-offerings. The settled life of Job, too, as described in the Prologue is not inconsistent with the story of Jacob’s life in the vale of Shechem,[^[89]] though in reality the author probably described it from his observation of settled life in Arabia. But none of these allusions required any special gift of historical imagination. The tone of the few descriptive passages in the Colloquies, and of the reflections throughout, is that of an age long subsequent to the patriarchal. The very idea of wise men meeting together to discuss deep problems (as in the later Arabic maqāmāt, compared by Bertholdt and others) is an anachronism in a ‘patriarchal’ narrative, and (like the religious position of the speeches in general) irresistibly suggests the post-Solomonic period. The Job of the Colloquies is a travelled citizen of the world at an advanced period of history; indeed, he now and then seems expressly to admit this (xxiv. 12, xxix. 7). It is therefore needless to discuss the theory which assigns the book to the Mosaic or pre-Mosaic age,—a theory which is a relic of the cold, literal, unsympathetic method of the critics of the last two centuries. A few scholars of eminence, feeling this, placed the poem in the Solomonic period, a view which is in itself plausible, if we consider the pronounced secular turn of the great king, and his recorded taste for eastern parabolistic ‘wisdom,’ but which falls with the cognate theory of the authorship of Proverbs. A more advanced stage of society than that of the period referred to, and a greater maturity of the national intellect, are presupposed on every page of the poem. The tone of the book—I refer especially to the Colloquies—suggests a time when the nationalism of the older periods had, in general, ceased to satisfy reflecting minds. The doubters, whom Job and his friends represent, have been so staggered in their belief in Israel’s loving God, that they decline to use His revealed name:—[^[90]] once or twice only does it slip in (xii. 9; cf. xxviii. 28), as if to show that the poet himself has fought his way to a reconciling faith. As is clear from the cognate psalms xxxvii., xlix., lxxiii., the patriarchal theory of prosperity and adversity had been found wanting. Doubts had arisen, most painful in their intensity, from observing the disproportion between character and fortune—doubts which might indeed insinuate themselves at any time, but acquire an abnormal force in a declining community (ix. 24, xii. 4-6, 23, and especially chap. xxi.) Some had even ventured on positive doctrinal heresy. In opposition to these, Eliphaz professes his adhesion to the tradition of the fathers, in whose time religion was untainted by alien influence (xv. 17-19). It is merely an incidental remark of Eliphaz, but it points to a date subsequent to the appearance of Assyria on the horizon of Palestine. For it was the growing influence of that power, which, for good and for evil, modified the character of Israelitish religion both in its higher and in its lower forms.

Precise historical allusions are almost entirely wanting. We may, however, infer with certainty that the book was written subsequently to the ‘deportation’ of Israel, or of Judah, or at the very least of some neighbouring people (xii. 17-19; comp. xv. 19[^[91]]). For the uprooting of whole peoples from their original homes was peculiar to the Assyrian policy.[^[92]] But which of these forced expatriations is intended?—We are not compelled to think of the Babylonian Exile by the reference to the Chaldæans in the Prologue. The Chaldæans might have been known to a well-informed Hebrew writer ever since the ninth century B.C., at which time they became predominant in the southern provinces on the lower Euphrates: we find Isaiah, speaking of the ‘land of Chaldæa’ (Isa. xxiii. 13) in the eighth century. Still I own that the description of the Chaldæans as robbers does appear to me most easily explained by supposing a covert allusion to the invasions of Nebuchadnezzar.[^[93]] The Assyrians are indeed once called ‘treacherous dealers’ by Isaiah (xxxiii. 1), but the Babylonians impressed the Hebrew writers by their rapacity far more than the Assyrians. The ‘unrighteous’ of the Psalms are, when foreigners are spoken of, not the Assyrians, but either the Babylonians or still later oppressors (e.g. Ps. cxxv. 3); and the description of the Babylonians in the first chapter of Habakkuk strongly reminds us of those complaints of Job, ‘The earth is given over into the hand of the unrighteous’ (ix. 24), and ‘The robbers’ tents are in peace, and they that provoke God are secure, they who carry (their) god in their hand’ (xii. 6; comp. Hab. i. 11, 16).

The view here propounded might be supported by an argument from linguistic data (see [Chap. XIII.]) which would lead us into details out of place here. It is that of Umbreit, Knobel, Grätz, and (though he does not exclude the possibility of a later date) the sober and thorough Gesenius. Long after the present writer’s results were first committed to paper, he had the rare satisfaction of finding them advocated, so far as the date is concerned, in a commentary by a scholar of our own who has the best right to speak (A. B. Davidson, Introduction to The Book of Job, 1884). On the other hand, Stickel, Ewald, Magnus, Bleek, Renan (1860), Kuenen (1865), Hitzig, Reuss, Dillmann, Merx, prefer to place our poem in the period between Isaiah and Jeremiah, and this seems to me the earliest date from which the composition and significance of the book can be at all rightly understood. Reasons enough for this statement of opinion will suggest themselves to those who have followed me hitherto; let me now only add that the pure monotheism of the Book makes an earlier date, on historical principles, hardly conceivable.[^[94]] A later date than the Exile-period is not, I admit, inconceivable (see Vatke, Die biblische Theologie, i. 563 &c.), and is now supported by Kuenen.[^[95]] If there were an allusion to the doctrine of the Resurrection, in xix. 26, or if the portraiture of Job were (as Kuenen thinks it is) partly modelled on the Second Isaiah’s description of the Servant of Jehovah, I should in fact be driven to accept this view. I have stated above that I cannot find the Resurrection in Job, and in Isaiah, ii. 267 that the priority of Job seems to me to be made out. I need not combat Clericus and Warburton, who ascribe the authorship of Job to Ezra. For Jeremiah (Bateson Wright) or the author of Lamentations (i.e. Baruch, according to Bunsen) something might perhaps be said, but—Ezra!

As to the place of composition. Hitzig and Hirzel think of Egypt on account of the numerous allusions to Egypt in the book; and so Ewald with regard to xl. 15-xli. 34. ‘Die ganze Umgebung ist egyptisch,’ says Hitzig with some exaggeration.[^[96]] More might be said in favour of the theory which places the author in a region where Arabic and Aramaic might both be heard. Stickel, holding the pre-Exile origin of the book, supposed it to have come from the far south-east of Palestine. Nowhere better than in the hill-country of the South could the poet study simple domestic relations, and also make excursions into N. Arabia. He thus accounts[^[97]] for the points of contact between the Book of Job and the prophecy of Amos of Tekoa (see below, [Chap. XI.]), which include even some phonetic peculiarities (the softening of the gutturals and the interchange of sibilants). To me, the whole question seems well-nigh an idle one. The author (or, if you will, the authors) had travelled much in various lands, and the book is the result. The place where is of far less importance than the time when it was composed.

CHAPTER IX.
ARGUMENT FROM THE USE OF MYTHOLOGY.

One of the peculiarities of our poet (which I have elsewhere compared with a similar characteristic in Dante) is his willingness to appropriate mythic forms of expression from heathendom. This willingness was certainly not due to a feeble grasp of his own religion; it was rather due partly to the poet’s craving for imaginative ornament, partly to his sympathy with his less developed readers, and a sense that some of these forms were admirably adapted to give reality to the conception of the ‘living God.’ Several of these points of contact with heathendom have been indicated in my analysis of the poem. I need not again refer to these, but the semi-mythological allusions to supernatural beings who had once been in conflict with Jehovah (xxi. 22, xxv. 2), and the cognate references to the dangerous cloud-dragon (see below) ought not to be overlooked. Both in Egypt and in Assyria and Babylonia, we find these very myths in a fully developed form. The ‘leviathan’ of iii. 8, the dragon probably of vii. 12 (tannīn) and certainly of xxvi. 13 (nākhāsh), and the ‘rahab’ of ix. 13, xxvi. 12, remind us of the evil serpent Apap, whose struggle with the sun-god Ra is described in chap. xxxix. of the Book of the Dead and elsewhere. ‘A battle took place,’ says M. Maspero, ‘between the gods of light and fertility and the “sons of rebellion,” the enemies of light and life. The former were victorious, but the monsters were not destroyed. They constantly menace the order of nature, and, in order to resist their destructive action, God must, so to speak, create the world anew every day.’[^[98]] An equally close parallel is furnished by the fourth tablet of the Babylonian creation-story, which describes the struggle between the god Marduk (Merodach) and the dragon Tiamat or Tiamtu (a fem. corresponding to the Heb. masc. form t’hom ‘the deep’), for which see Delitzsch’s Assyrische Lesestücke, 3rd edition, Smith and Sayce’s Chaldæan Genesis, p. 107 &c., and Budge in Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, Nov. 6, 1883.

Nor must I forget the ‘fool-hardy’ giant (K’sīl = Orion) in ix. 9, xxxviii. 31, nor the dim allusion to the sky-reaching mountain of the north, rich in gold (comp. Isa. xiv. 13, and Sayce, Academy, Jan. 28, 1882, p. 64), and the myth-derived synonyms for Sheól—Death, Abaddon, and ‘the shadow of death’ (or, deep gloom), xxvi. 6, xxviii. 22, xxxviii. 17, also the ‘king of terrors’ (xviii. 14), who like Pluto or Yama rules in the Hebrew Underworld. Observe too the instances in which a primitive myth has died down into a metaphor, e.g. ‘the eyelids of the Dawn’ (iii. 9, xli. 18), and especially that beautiful passage,

Hast thou ever in thy life given charge to the Morning,

and shown its place to the Dawn,

that it may take hold of the skirts of the earth,

so that the wicked are shaken out of it,

and the earth changes as clay under a seal,

and (all things) stand forth as in a garment,

and light is withheld from the wicked,

and the arm lifted up is broken? (xxxviii. 12-15).

How very vivid! The personified Dawn seizes the coverlet under which the earth has slept at its four ends and shakes the evil-doers out of it like flies; upon which form and colour return to the earth, as clay (a Babylonian image) receives a definite form from the seal, and as the sad-coloured night-wrapper is exchanged for the bright, embroidered holiday-robe. Could we only transfer the poet to an earlier stage of mythic consciousness, we should find him expressing the same ideas—that morning-light creates all fair things anew, and discomfits the evil-doer—very much in the style of the Vedic hymns to Ushas (the Dawn), from which I quote the following in Grassmann’s translation (Rig Veda, I. 123, 4, 5),—

Die tageshelle kommt zu jedem Hause

und jedem Tage gibt sie ihren Namen;

zu spenden willig, strablend naht sie immer

und theilet aus der Güter allerbestes.

Als Bhaga’s Schwester, Varuna’s Verwandte,

komm her zuerst, o schöne Morgenröthe;

Wer frevel übt, der soll dahinter bleiben,

von uns besiegt sein mit der Uschas Wagen.

(There is also an Egyptian parallel in a hymn to the Sun-god, Records of the Past, viii. 131, ‘He fells the wicked in his season.’) How far the poet of Job believed in the myths which he has preserved, e.g. in the existence of potentates or potencies corresponding to the ‘dragon’ of which he speaks, we cannot certainly tell. Mr. Budge has suggested that Tiamat, the sky-dragon of the Babylonians, conveyed a distinct symbolic meaning. However this may have been, the ‘leviathan’ of Job was probably to the poet a ‘survival’ from a superstition of his childhood, and little if anything more than the emblem of all evil and disorder.

And now for the bearing of the above on criticism. It is a remarkable fact that there are mythological allusions, very similar to some of those in Job, in the later portions of the Book of Isaiah (Isa. xxiv. 21, xxvii. 1, ii. 9). This evidently suggests a date for the Book of Job not earlier than the Exile. It is not necessary to assume that the authors of these books borrowed either from Egypt or from Babylonia. They drew from the unexhausted store of Jewish popular beliefs. They wrote for a larger public than the older poets and prophets could command, and adapted themselves more completely to the average culture of their people.

CHAPTER X.
ARGUMENT FROM THE DOCTRINE OF ANGELS.

The facts on which our argument is based are mainly the passages in Job which refer to ‘sons of Elohim’ (or better, as Davidson, ‘of the Elohim’), to ‘the Satan,’ and to the mal’akim. The first of these three phrases means probably inferior members of the class of beings called Elohim (i.e. ‘superhuman powers’); the second, ‘the adversary (or opposer);’ the third, ‘envoys or messengers’ (ἄγγελοι). We may at once draw an inference from the expression ‘the Satan,’ the full importance of which will be seen later on. ‘The Satan’ being an appellative, the book in which it occurs was probably written before Chronicles, where we find ‘Satan’ without the article, almost[^[99]] as if a proper name; and being applied to a minister and not an opponent of Jehovah, the Book of Job is probably earlier than the prophecies of Zechariah and the Books of Chronicles; see Zech. iii. 1, 2 (where observe that Jehovah’s only true representative gives a severe reproof to ‘the Satan’), 1 Chron. xxi. 1 (where ‘Satan,’ uncommissioned, ‘entices’ David to an act displeasing to Jehovah[^[100]]). The difference between the notices of the Satan (or Satan) may not seem great to an unpractised student, but no one who has followed the development of any single doctrine will undervalue such traces of a growing refinement in the conceptions of good and evil. Whether or no the ideas of the Chronicler and his age had been modified by hearing of the Persian Ahriman, may be questioned; but a similar supposition cannot be allowed in the case of the author of Job. The Satan of the Prologue is, in theory at least, simply Jehovah’s agent, though he certainly betrays a malicious pleasure in his invidious function of trying or sifting the righteous. It is not impossible that the author of the Prologue was the first to use the term Satan in this sense. At any rate, it is a pure Hebrew term, unlike the Ashmedai or Asmodæus of the Book of Tobit. [Ashmedai, in later Judaism, is the head of the Shedim—demons who were never angels of God, just as Sammael is the ‘head of all Satans,’ i.e. the prince of the fallen angels. Weber, System der altsynagog. Palästin. Theologie, pp. 243-5.]

Next, turning to the mal’akim, observe that the word occurs very rarely in Job, viz. once in the original Colloquies (iv. 18), and once (virtually) in the first speech of Elihu (xxxiii. 23). We find, however, a kindred phrase ‘the q’doshim,’ or ‘holy ones,’ i.e. superhuman, heavenly beings, separate from the world of the senses[^[101]] (v. 1, xv. 15), and comparing v. 1 with iv. 18 we cannot doubt that the same class of beings is intended. We nowhere meet with the Mal’ak Yahvè, so familiar to us in certain Old Testament narratives; Elihu’s mal’ak mēlīç (xxxiii. 23) is not synonymous with the older expression (see account of Elihu). In fact, the thousands of mal’akim known at the period of the writers of Job have made the one great mal’ak unnecessary, just as, but for the influence of Persian ideas, the multitudinous ‘hurtful angels’ (Ps. lxxviii. 49) might sooner or later have entirely supplanted the single Satan. And yet even an ordinary mal’ak, when he appears, is more awful than the great mal’ak Yahvè; the angel who appears to Eliphaz (Job iv. 15, 16) is as unrecognisable as the ‘face’ of Jehovah himself. This is an indication, though but a slight one, of a somewhat advanced age, when the gulf between God and man was more acutely felt, and religious thought was more specially directed to filling it up.

The title ‘holy ones’ (v. 1) enables us to identify the ‘angels’ with the ‘sons of the Elohim.’ Separateness from human weakness, though not mediatorial ability[^[102]] is equally, predicated of both. But neither the poet of Job, nor any of the psalmists, identifies the phrases in express terms;[^[103]] a virtual identification (see above, and Ps. lxxxix. 7, 8) is all that they venture upon. There was a good reason for this—viz. their recollection of the physical and mythological origin of the phrase, ‘the sons of the Elohim.’ ‘Angels’ and ‘sons of the Elohim’ are indeed alike ‘holy’ and ‘servants’ of the supreme God, but not always so, according to Hebrew tradition, were the ‘sons of the Elohim.’ In support of this, we may refer, not only to Gen. vi. 4 (which the author of Job need not have known), but to the allusions in his poem (see above) to a war among the inhabitants of heaven. This war, I think, stands in connection not merely with the physical phenomena of light and darkness, but also with speculations of pious Jehovists, or worshippers of Jehovah, as to the basis and value of ‘heathen’ religions. According to Deut. xxxii. 8,[^[104]] each of the nations of the world was allotted by the Most High (Elyōn)[^[105]] to some one of the ‘sons of El’ (the simplest name for God); of course we are to suppose that these ‘sons of El’ and their worshippers were meant to recognise the supremacy of the ‘God of Gods’—Jehovah. But (so we may suppose the train of thought of the Jehovists to have run) the nations and their deities formed the vain dream of independence. The result of the struggle between Jehovah and the inferior Elohim is referred to in Job: the Elohim renounced their dream of independent sovereignty and were admitted into Jehovah’s service. Henceforth they were no longer shīdīm, i.e. ‘lords’ (?), Deut. xxxii. 17, but mal’akīm ‘messengers.’ But the ‘heathen’ nations go on worshipping the Elohim, ignorant that their divinities have been dispossessed of their misused lordship.[^[106]] Instead of Him who alone henceforth is ‘enthroned in the heavens’ (Ps. ii. 4), they honour ‘that which is not God’ (Deut. xxxii. 21), phantom-divinities whom they localise, like Jehovah, in the sky. Thus, except as to the region of the divine habitation, they differ radically from Jehovists like the author of Job. In that one point he agrees with them: the stars and the ‘sons of Elohim’ he still pictures to himself as closely conjoined (xxxviii. 6). Thus, the old and the new are fermenting in his brain, and on the ground of their angelology we can safely date the authors of Job somewhere in the great literary period which opens with the ‘Captivity.’

CHAPTER XI.
ARGUMENT FROM PARALLEL PASSAGES.

The new phase into which the controversy as to the early Christian work on the Teaching of the Apostles has passed excuses me from justifying the importance (in spite of its difficulty) of the study of parallel passages. A great point has been gained in one’s critical and exegetical training when one has learned so to compare parallel passages as to distinguish true from apparent resemblances, and to estimate the degree of probability of imitation. In Essay viii. of vol. ii. of The Prophecies of Isaiah, I endeavoured to help the student to do this for himself within the field of the Book of Isaiah. I shall not attempt this with the same thoroughness for the Book of Job. It is a sign of the consummate skill of the writer that he is an artist even in his imitations. As Luther says, ‘Die Rede dieses Buches ist so reisig und prächtig als freilich keines Buches in der ganzen Schrift.’ The author retains the parallelistic distich, but is no longer content with a bare synonymous or antithetic bifurcation of his material, and dwells on the decoration of an idea with a freedom which sometimes obscures his meaning; hence too the germinal phrase or word suggested by an earlier book may easily escape notice. I shall confine my attention to the most defensible points of contact, referring for the rest, without pledging myself to agreement, to Dr. J. Barth’s Beiträge zur Erklärung des Buches Job (Leipzig, s.a.), pp. 1-17.

The influence of Job on the works which all admit to be of post-Exile origin need not detain us here. There is but one undoubted reference to Job in Ecclesiastes (v. 14; comp. Job i. 21)—we should perhaps have expected more. But Sirach with a true instinct detected an affinity between his own ideas and Job xxviii. (comp. this chapter with Ecclus. i. 3, 5, &c.), though he neglects the rest, and does not include our poet among the ‘famous men’ and the ‘fathers that begot us.’ Passing upwards, we shall, if historical criticism be our guide, make our first pause at the undeniably later psalms and at the later portions of Isaiah. In the former compare (as specimens).

Ps. ciii. 16 with Job vii. 12

— cvii. 40 — — xii. 21, 24

— — 41 — — xxi. 11

— — 42 — — xxii. 19, v. 16

— cxix. 28 — — xvi. 20

— — 50 — — vi. 10

— — 69 — — xiii. 4

— — 103 — — vi. 25.

There is, I think, no question that these psalm-passages were inspired by the parallels in Job. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. there are, as I have pointed out (Isaiah, ed. 3, ii. 250), at least twenty-one parallels to passages in our poem. I do not, however, think that we can venture to describe either set of passages en bloc as imitations. But there are at least two clear cases of imitation, and here the original is not the prophet but the poet (comp. Isa. li. 9b, 10a, with Job xxvi. 12, 13, and Isa. liii. 9 with Job xvi. 17). With regard to the book (II. Isaiah) as a whole, or at least the greater part of it, we may say that there is a parallelism of idea running through it and the Book of job, which may to a large extent account for parallelisms of expression. This does not, however, apply everywhere, least of all to the great prophetic dirge on the ‘despised and rejected’ one, which presents stylistic phenomena so unlike that of its context that we seem bound to assign the substratum of Isa. lii. 13-liii. to a time of persecution previous to the Exile.[^[107]] How the poet of Job became acquainted with this striking passage, we know not. Did it form part of some prophetic anthology similar to the poetic Golden Treasury called ‘The Book of the Righteous’? or shall we follow those bolder critics who suppose the author of Job to have lived in the post-Exile times, when he may easily have had access to both parts of our Book of Isaiah? These are questions not to be evaded on account of their difficulty, but not to be decided here.

Our next halt may be made at the Book of Proverbs, the three concluding sections of which composite work belong at the earliest to the last century of the Jewish state. Among the clearest literary allusions in Job are those to this book, and some of these are especially important with regard to the disputed question of the relation between our poem and the introduction to the Book of Proverbs (Prov. i.-ix.) That the latter work is the earlier seems to me clear from a comparison of the general positions indicated by the following passages from Prov. i.-ix. and the Book of Job. Compare—

Prov. i. 7 with Job xxviii. 28

— iii. 11 — — v. 17

— iii. 14, 15} — — xxviii. 15-19

— viii. 10, 11}

— iii. 19, 20 — — xxviii. 26, 27

— viii. 22, 25 — — xv. 7, 8

— viii. 29 — — xxxviii. 10.

It will be seen by any one who will compare these passages that the case here is different from that of the parallelisms in Job and the second part of Isaiah. The latter do not perhaps allow us to determine with confidence which of the two books is the earlier. But, as Prof. Davidson has amply shown,[^[108]] the stage of intellectual development represented by Job is more advanced than that in the ‘Praise of Wisdom.’ The general subjects may be the same, but in Job they have entered upon a new phase.—We now pass to the earliest of the proverbial anthologies (Prov. x.-xxii. 16). Here of course the relation is reversed: the proverbs are the originals to which the author of Job alludes. Compare—

Prov. xiii. 19 } with Job xviii. 5, 6, xxi. 17

— xxiv. 20 }

— xv. 11 — — xxvi. 6

— xvi. 15 — — xxix. 23, 24.

We may infer from this group of parallels that the author of Job not only studied venerated ‘Solomonic’ models, but even ventured directly to controvert their leading doctrine; see especially Job xxi. 17. In our next comparison the relation seems reversed. The author of Prov. xxx. 1-4 not improbably alludes sarcastically to the theophany in Job xxxviii.-xlii. 6. Note in passing the occurrence of Eloah for ‘God’ in Prov. xxx. 5 (comp. the speeches in Job).

There are several parallels in the Book of Lamentations; I restrict myself to those in the third elegy, which differs in several points from the others, especially in its poetic feebleness. It is easier to believe that the author of the elegy was dependent on Job than to take the reverse view. A poem, the hero of which was obviously the typical righteous man, naturally suggested features in the description of the representative Israelite. Compare, then, Lam. iii. 7, 9 with Job xix. 8; iii. 8 with Job xxx. 20; iii. 10 with Job. x. 16; iii. 12, 13 with Job vii. 20, xvi. 12, 13; iii. 14, 63 with Job xxx. 9.

Parallels to Job also occur in Jeremiah. It is often, indeed, not easy to say on which side is the originality. But in one of the most important instances we may pronounce decidedly in favour of Job (comp. Jer. xx. 14-18 with Job iii. 3-10). The despairing utterance referred to is an exaggeration in the mouth of Job, but suitable enough in Jeremiah’s. In Job, l.c., we seem to recognise the slightly artificial turn which the author loves to give to the ideas and phrases of his predecessors; while the cutting irony of the words ‘making him very glad’ (Jer. xx. 15) as clearly betokens the hand of the original writer. Compare also Job vi. 15 with Jer. xv. 18; ix. 19 with Jer. xlix. 19; x. 18-22 with Jer. xx. 14-18; xii. 4, xix. 7 with Jer. xx. 7, 8; xii. 6, xxi. 7 with Jer. xii. 1; xix. 24 with Jer. xvii. 1; xxxviii. 33 with Jer. xxxi. 35, 36.

There are two plausible points of contact in Job with Deuteronomy (comp. Job xxiv. 2, Deut. xix. 14 [removing landmarks]; Job xxxi. 9, 11, Deut. xxii. 22), but only one worth mentioning with Genesis (xxii. 16; comp Gen. vi. &c.), and here observe that the word for A.V.’s ‘flood’ (Job, l.c.) is not mabbūl but nāhār.[^[109]] Hitzig and Delitzsch find another in xxxi. 33. But ādām in Job always means ‘men:’ in xv. 7, 8, where the first man is referred to, he is not named. The reference in xxxi. 33 is not to hiding sins from God, but from man. I think, however, that the Prologue implies a general acquaintance with some current descriptions of the patriarchal period—the ‘golden age’ to men of a more advanced civilisation.

It is remarkable, what interesting parallels are afforded by the prophets of the Assyrian period. Isaiah, as might be expected, contains the largest number (see The Prophecies of Isaiah, ed. 3, ii. 243); but Hosea follows close after. Compare especially—

Isa. xix. 5, certainly the original of Job, l.c., where the special reference to the sea-like Nile is dropped	Job xiv. 11, ‘the waters fail from the sea,’ i.e. any inland body of water
Isa. xxviii. 29	Job xi. 6 (God’s wisdom marvellous; see Merx, and Isaiah, ii. 154)
Hos. x. 13, combined with Prov. xxii. 8	Job iv. 8 (‘ploughing iniquity,’ &c.)
Hos. vi. 1 (or Deut. xxxii. 39)	Job v. 18 (‘he maketh sore and bindeth up,’ &c.)
Hos. v. 14, xiii. 7, 8	Job x. 16 (God compared to a lion)
Hos. xiii. 12 (or Deut. xxxii. 34)	Job xiv. 17 (‘transgression sealed up,’ &c.)
Am. iv. 13, v. 8 (the comparison suggests that v. 8, 9 stood immediately after iv. 13 when Job was written, and that ‘the sea,’ i.e. the upper ocean, stood for ‘the earth’)	Job ix. 8, 9 (‘that treadeth upon the heights of the sea; that maketh the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades’)

Comp. also Am. v. 8, ix. 6 with Job xii. 15; Am. ii. 9 with Job xviii. 16.

I say nothing here of the parallels in the Song of Hezekiah (Isa. xxxviii. 10-20). I have shown reason in Isaiah, i. 228, for believing that the Song is a highly imitative work, and largely based on Job, such a work in fact as can only be accounted for in the Exile or post-Exile period.

There still remains the great body of psalms of disputed date. The parallelisms in Ps. xxxvii.[^[110]] are too general to be mentioned here, striking as they are; but we may venture to compare Ps. viii. 5 with Job vii. 17; Ps. xxxix. 12b with Job iv. 19b; ib. 14a with Job vii. 19a, x. 20; ib. 14b with Job x. 21, 22; Ps. lxxii. 12 with Job xxix. 12; ib. 16 with Job v. 25b; Ps. lxxxviii. 16b with Job xx. 25 (the rare word ’ēmīm); ib. 17 with Job vi. 4 (bi’ūthīm); ib. 19 (lxix. 9) with Job xix. 14; and note throughout this psalm the same correspondence of extreme inward and outward suffering which we find in Job. Then, turning to the psalms of different tenor, comp. lxxii. 12 with Job xxix. 12; ib. 16 with Job v. 25b. I have selected these instances precisely because they allow us to draw an inference as to priority. Ps. lxxxviii. is clearly imitative, and no doubt there is more imitation of the great poem in other psalms. Psalms viii., xxxix., and (probably) lxxii. were however known to and imitated by the authors of Job. The parallel in Ps. viii. is specially important. That this psalm is not earlier than the Exile is disputed, but extremely probable; the bitter ‘parody’ in Job vii. 17 must in this case be of the same or a later period.

And now to sum up the results of our comparisons. The Colloquies in Job are of later origin than Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and most of Proverbs, but possibly nearly contemporaneous with much in the second part of Isaiah, except that Isa. liii. not improbably lay before the author of Job; also that Ps. viii., a work of the Exile period, was well known to him. We are thus insensibly led on to date the Book of Job (the speeches, at any rate) during the Exile. This will account for the large amount of imitation to which the book gave rise. Men felt respecting the author that he was the first and greatest exponent of the ideas and feelings, not of a long-past age, but of their own; that he ‘sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners’ (Job xxix. 25).

CHAPTER XII.
ON THE DISPUTED PASSAGES IN THE DIALOGUE-PORTION, ESPECIALLY THE SPEECHES OF ELIHU.

A detailed exegetical study would alone enable the reader to do justice to the controversies here referred to. But I may at least ask that, even upon the ground of the slender analysis which I have given, he should recognise the difficulties at the root of these controversies. In comparison with his possession of a ‘seeing eye,’ it is of little moment to me whether he adopts my explanations or not. Poets, like painters, have different periods. It is therefore conceivable that the author of Job changed in course of time, and criticised his own work, these afterthoughts of his being embodied in the ‘disputed passages.’ It is indeed also conceivable that the phenomena which puzzle us are to be explained by the plurality of authorship. In the remarks which follow I wish to supplement the sketch of the possible or probable growth of the Book offered in section 3 of [Chap. VII.], chiefly with regard to the speeches of Elihu.

Keil has spoken of ‘the persistently repeated assaults upon the genuineness’ of these discourses. I must however protest against the use of the word ‘genuineness’ in this connection. Even if not by the author of the poem of Job, the speeches of Elihu are as ‘genuine’ a monument of Israel’s religious ‘wisdom’ as the work of the earlier writer. No critic worthy of the name thinks of ‘assaulting’ them, though divines no less orthodox than Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede have uncritically enough set the example. The speeches of Elihu only seem poor by comparison with the original work; they are not without true and beautiful passages, which, with all their faults of expression, would in any other book have commanded universal admiration. The grounds on which chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii. are denied to the original writer may be summed up thus.

(1) Elihu puts forward a theory of the sufferings of the righteous which does not essentially differ from that of the three friends (see especially xxxiii. 25-28; xxxiv. 9, 11, 12, 36, 37; xxxv. 9-16; xxxvi. 5-7, 21-25; xxxvii. 23, 24). No doubt he improves the theory, by laying more stress upon the chastening character of the righteous man’s afflictions (xxxiii. 14-30; xxxvi. 8-12, 15, 16, and comp. Eliphaz in v. 18, 19), and to many disciples of the New Covenant his form of the theory may recommend itself as true. But, even apart from the appendix or epilogue (see xlii. 7-9), it is clear from the whole plan of the poem, particularly if the discourses of Jehovah be taken in, that this was not, in the writer’s mind, an adequate solution of the problem, especially in the case of the God-fearing and innocent Job.

(2) These speeches interrupt the connection between the ‘words of Job’ and those of Jehovah, and seem to render the latter superfluous. Whether the ‘words of Job’ (to borrow the phrase of some editor of the book) should end at xxxvii. 37 or at ver. 40, it is difficult not to believe that xxxviii. 1, 2, ‘And Jehovah answered Job out of the storm, and said, Who then is darkening counsel by words without knowledge?’ was meant to follow immediately upon them. The force of this seems to some to be weakened by taking Elihu’s description of the storm (xxxvii. 2-5) as preparatory to the appearance of Jehovah in chap. xxxviii. But, evidently, to make this an argument, the storm ought to be at the end of the speech.

(3) There is no mention of Elihu in the Prologue, nor is any divine judgment passed upon him in the Epilogue. It is not enough to reply with Stickel that Jehovah himself is not mentioned in the Prologue as the umpire in the great controversy; why should he be?—and that the absence of any condemnation of Elihu on the part of Jehovah, and the harmony (?) between Elihu’s and Jehovah’s discourses, sufficiently indicate the good opinion of the Divine Judge.

(4) Elihu’s style is prolix and laboured; his phrases often very obscure, even where the words separately are familiar. As Davidson remarks, there are not only unknown words (these we meet with elsewhere in the book), but an unknown use of known words. There is also a deeper colouring of Aramaic (see [Appendix]), which F. C. Cook, following Stickel, explains by the supposed Aramæan origin of the speaker; in this case, it would be a refinement of art which adds a fresh laurel to the crown of the poet. But the statement in xxxii. 2 is that Elihu was ‘the son of Barakel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram.’ That Ram = Aram is unproved; while Buz, as Jer. xxv. 23 shows, is the name of a genuine Arabian people. It would be better to explain the increased Aramaism by the lapse of a long interval in the writer’s life. This explanation is, to me, equivalent to assigning these speeches to a different writer (as I have remarked elsewhere, comparing Goethe’s Faust). Those who will may adopt it; but my own respect for the poet of Job will not allow me to believe that his taste had so much declined as to insert this inferior poem into his masterpiece.

(5) Elihu’s allusions to passages in the rest of the book (comp. xxxiii. 15 with iv. 13; xxxiv. 3 with xii. 11; xxxv. 5 with xxii. 12; xxxv. 8 with xxii. 2; xxxvii. 8 with xxxviii. 40) and his minute reproductions of sayings of Job (see xxxiii. 8, 9; xxxiv. 5, 6; xxxv. 2, 3) point to an author who had the book before him, so far as then known, as a whole.

(6) Elihu’s somewhat scrupulous piety, or shall I call it his advance in reverential, contrite devoutness? compared with the three friends, suggests that the poet of Elihu was the child of a later and more sombre generation which found the original book in some respects disappointing.

Putting all this together, if the main part of the Book of Job belongs to the Exile, the Elihu-portion may well belong to the post-Exile period.

To this view, it is no objection that, on the one hand, Elihu not merely (to express oneself shortly) criticises the position of the three friends, but, by ignoring it, criticises the view of Job’s afflictions taken in the Prologue, and, on the other, has much in common with the rest of the book in orthographic, grammatical, and lexical respects. The idea that God permits affliction simply to try the disinterestedness of a good man, is one which might easily shock the feelings of one only too conscious that he was not good; and the linguistic points which ‘Elihu’ and the rest of the book have in common are such as we should expect to find in works proceeding from the same class of writers. If Jeremiah wrote all the pieces which contain Jeremian phraseology, or Isaiah all the prophecies which remind one at all of the great prophet, or the same ‘wise man’ wrote Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, then we may perhaps believe that the author of Job also wrote the speeches of Elihu and perhaps one or two of the didactic psalms.

Professor Briggs, the author of that excellent work Biblical Study, takes up a different position, which, though not new, acquires some authority from his respected name. He does not see any literary or theological merit in Elihu’s speeches, and yet regards them as ‘an important part of the original work.’ The author designed to portray Elihu as a young and inexperienced man, and uses these ambitious failures ‘as a literary foil ... to prepare the way for the divine interposition, to quiet and soothe by their tediousness the agitated spirits of Job and his friends.’[^[111]] To me, this view of the intention of the speeches lowers the character of the original writer. So reverent and devout a speaker as Elihu is ill rewarded by being treated as a literary and theological foil. Artistically, the value of this part may be comparatively slight, but theologically it enriches the Old Testament with a monument of a truly Christian consciousness of sin. Had the original writer equalled him in this, we should perhaps have missed a splendid anticipation of the life of Christ, who ‘did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.’ But the Elihu-section expresses in Old Testament language the great truth announced by St. Paul in 1 Cor. xi. 32.[^[112]]

On the other ‘disputed passages’ I have little to add.

(a) To me, the picture of the behémoth and the leviathan (xl. 15-xli.) seems but little less probably a later insertion than the speeches of Elihu; this view of the case has the authority of Ewald. That cautious critic, Dr. Davidson, remarks that this passage has a very different kind of movement from that of the tight and graceful sketches in chaps. xxxviii., xxxix., and that the poetic inventory which it contains reminds us more of an Arab poet’s description of his camel or his horse (Job, p. liv.)

(b) I cannot speak so positively as to the speeches of Jehovah. From a purely æsthetic point of view, I am often as unwilling as any one to believe that they were ‘inserted.’ At other times I ask myself, Can the inconsistencies of this portion as compared with the Colloquies be explained as mere oversights? The appearance of the Almighty upon the scene is in itself strange. Job had no doubt expressed a wish for this, but did not suppose that it could be realised,[^[113]] at any rate in his own lifetime. It is still stranger that the Almighty should appear, not in the gentle manner which Job had desired (ix. 34, 35), not with the object of a judicial investigation of the case, but in the whirlwind, and with a foregone conclusion on Job’s deserts. For in fact that splendid series of ironical questions which occupies chaps. xxxviii., xxxix., and which Job had by anticipation deprecated (ix. 3), is nothing less than a long drawn-out condemnation of Job. The indictment and the defendant’s reply, to which Job has referred with such proud self-confidence (xxxi. 35, 36), are wholly ignored; and the result is that which Job has unconsciously predicted in the words,—

To whom, though innocent, I would not reply,

but would make supplication unto my Judge (ix. 15).

(c) Great difficulties have been found in xxvii. 8 (or 11)-23, xxviii. First of all, Is there an inner connection between these passages? Dr. Green seeks to establish one. ‘While continuing,’ he says, ‘to insist upon his own integrity, notwithstanding the afflictions sent upon him, he freely admits, and this in language as emphatic as their own, the reality of God’s providential government, and that punishment does overtake the ungodly. Nevertheless there is a mystery enveloping the divine administration, which is quite impenetrable to the human understanding’ (The Book of Job, p. 233). This is very unnatural.[^[114]] How can Job suddenly adopt the language of the friends without conceding that he has himself hitherto been completely in error? And what right have we to force such a subtle connection between chaps. xxvii. and xxviii? Looking at the latter by itself, one cannot help suspecting that it once formed part of a didactic treatise similar to the Introduction to the Book of Proverbs (see end of Chap. III). For a careful exegetical study of chaps. xxvii., xxviii., see Giesebrecht (see ‘Aids to the Student,’ after Chap. XV.), with whom Dr. Green seems to accord, but who fails to convince me. See also Budde in his Beiträge, and Grätz, ‘Die Integrität der Kap. 27 und 28 im Hiob,’ Monatsschrift, 1872, p. 241 &c.

CHAPTER XIII.
IS JOB A HEBRÆO-ARABIC POEM?

That the Book of Job is not as deeply penetrated with the spirit of revelation, nor even as distinctly Israelitish a production, as most of the Old Testament writings, requires no argument. May we venture to go further, and infer from various phenomena that, not merely the artistic form of the māshāl, but the thoughts and even the language of Job came in a greater or less degree from a foreign source? The question has been answered in the affirmative (as in the case of the words of Agur in Prov. xxx., and those of Lemuel in chap. xxxi.) by some early as well as some more modern writers. This view has been supposed to be implied in the Greek postscript to the Septuagint version[^[115]] (strongly redolent of Jewish Midrash), which contains the statement, οὗτος ἑρμηνεύεται ἐκ τῆς Συριακῆς βίβλου, but though Origen appears so to have understood,[^[116]] it is more probable that οὗτος merely refers to the postscript (Zunz; Frankl). Ibn Ezra, however, on independent grounds does express the opinion (commenting on Job ii. 11) that the Book of Job is a translation; he ascribes to the translator the words in xxxviii. 1 containing the sacred name Jehovah. The increased study of Arabic in the 17th century led several theologians of eminence to the same conclusion. Spanheim, for instance, thought that Job and his friends wrote down the history and the colloquies in Arabic, after the happy turn in the fortunes of the sufferer, and that some inspired Israelitish writer, in the age of Solomon, gave this work a Hebrew dress. Albert Schultens, in the preface to his Liber Jobi (1737), is at the pains to discuss this theory, which he rejects on two main grounds, (1) the disparagement to our magnificent Book of Job involved in calling it a translation, and (2) that in those primitive and, according to him, pre-Mosaic times, the Hebrew and Arabic languages cannot have been so different (!) as Spanheim from his point of view imagines. Elsewhere he expresses his own opinion shortly thus,[^[117]] ‘Linguam quâ liber Jobi conscriptus est, genuinum illius temporis Arabismum esse.’ He actually imagines that Job and his friends extemporised the Colloquies we have before us, referring to the amazing faculty of improvisation still possessed by the Arabs—a view scarcely worthier than that of Spanheim, for, as Martineau remarks in another connection, Who ever improvised a great poem or a great sermon? Both these great scholars have fallen into the error of confounding the poet with his hero and the use of poetic and didactic fiction with deliberate fraud. One cannot be severe upon this error, for it has survived among ourselves in Prof. S. Lee’s great work (1837), where our Book of Job is actually traced back through Jethro to Job himself. The only form however in which a critic of our day could discuss the question mentioned above would be this, Is it in some degree probable that the author of Job was a Hebrew who had passed some time with the Arabic- and Aramaic-speaking peoples bordering on the land of Israel?

On grounds independent of Eichhorn and Dean Plumptre, the former of whom combines his theory with that of a pre-Mosaic, and the latter with that of a Solomonic date of Job, I think that we may venture to reply in the affirmative. These grounds have reference (1) to the ideas of Job, (2) to its vocabulary.

(1) I am well aware that the argument from the ideas of Job cannot claim a strong degree of cogency. It is possible to account for the conceptions of the author from the natural progress of the (divinely-guided) moral and religious history of Israel, and those who believe (I do not myself) that Psalms xvii., xxxvii., xlix., lxxiii., are Palestinian works of earlier date than Job will have a ready argument in favour of a purely native origin of the latter book. Still it seems to me that we can still better account for the author’s point of view by supposing that he was in sympathy with an intellectual movement going on outside Israel. The doctrine of retribution in the present life, which he finds inadequate, is common to the friends and to the religion which has in all ages been that of the genuine Arab—the so-called dīn Ibrāhīm (or ‘religion of Abraham’). The Eloah and the Shaddai of Job are the irresponsible Allah who has all power in heaven and on earth, and before whom, when mysteries occur in human life which the retribution-doctrine cannot solve, the Arab and every true Moslem bows his head with settled, sad resignation. The morality alike of the dīn Ibrāhīm, and of the religion of Mohammed (who professed to restore it in its purity), is faulty precisely as the religion of the three friends (and originally of Job himself) is faulty. The same conflict which arose in the heart of Job arose in the midst of the Moslem world. I refer to the dispute between the claimants of orthodoxy and the sect of the Mo’tazilites (8th and 9th centuries); the latter, who were worsted in the strife, viewed God as the absolutely Good, the former as a despotic and revengeful tyrant.[^[118]] May not this conflict have been foreshadowed at an earlier time? Is not the difficulty which led to it a constantly recurring one, so soon as reflection acquires a certain degree of maturity? It may well have been felt among the Jews, especially in the decline of the state, but it must also have been felt among their neighbours, and freedom of speech has always, in historical times, been an Arab characteristic. Putting aside the anachronism of placing Job in the patriarchal age, does not the poet himself appear to hint that it was so felt by the names and tribal origins of the speakers in the great religious discussion?

(2) As to the Arabisms and Aramaisms of the language of Job (see [Appendix]). Jerome already says that his own translation follows none of the ancients, but reproduces, now the words, now the sense, and now both, ‘ex ipso hebraico arabicoque sermone et interdum syro.’ In the 17th and 18th centuries, De Dieu, Bochart, and above all Schultens made it a first principle in the study of Job to illustrate it from Aramaic and especially Arabic. Schultens even describes the language as not so much Hebrew, as Hebræo-Arabic, and says that it breathes the true and unmixed genius of Arabia. This is every way an exaggeration, and yet, after all reasonable deductions, our poem will stand out from the Old Testament volume by its foreign linguistic affinities. It is not enough to say that the Arabisms and Aramaisms have from the first formed part of the Hebrew vocabulary, and were previously employed only because the subjects of the other books did not call for their use. Unless a more thorough study of Assyrian should prove that the Arabism (for of these I am chiefly thinking) belonged to northern as well as to southern Semitic, it will surely be more natural to suppose that the author of Job replenished his vocabulary from Arabic sources. There is not a little in the phraseology of Job which is still as obscure as in the days of Ibn Ezra, but which receives, or may yet receive, illustration from the stores of written and spoken Arabic.[^[119]]

May we not, in short, conjecture that the poem of Job is a grand attempt to renovate and enrich the Hebrew language?[^[120]] If so, the experiment can hardly have been made before the great subversion of Hebrew traditions at the Babylonian captivity. Residence in a foreign land produces a marked effect on one’s language. Recollect too that our author was a literary man. Internal evidence converges to show that Job belonged to that great literary movement among the wise men, philosophers, or humanists, to which we shall have to refer Prov. i-ix., the Wisdom of Sirach, and the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Before leaving this subject, let us notice the parallels to descriptions in the speeches of Jehovah in the Arabian poets, who show the same attention to the striking phenomena of earth and sky as the author of these speeches. The Arabian tone and colouring of the descriptions of animals in Job has been already remarked upon by Alfred von Kremer in vol. ii. of his Culturgeschichte des Orients. Is it possible to conceive that those sketches of the wild goat, the wild ass, and the horse, were not written by one who was familiar with the sight? Or that the author had not observed the habits of the ostrich, when he penned his lines on the ostrich’s neglect of her eggs? Or that his interest in astronomy was not deepened by the spectacle of a night-sky in Arabia? Or that personal experience of caravan life did not inspire the touching figure in vi. 15-20? And observation of the mines in the Sinaitic peninsula[^[121]] the fine description of xxviii. 1-10? It is possible that some of these passages may be due to other travelled ‘wise men;’ but this only increases the probability that the Hebrew movement was strengthened by contact with similar movements abroad. The ‘wise men’ had certainly travelled far and wide among Arabic-speaking populations, though nowhere perhaps were they so much at home as in Idumæa and its neighbourhood. As M. Derenbourg remarks, ‘Les riantes oasis, au milieu des contrées désolées, environnant la mer Morte, étaient la demeure des sages et des rêveurs. Bien des siècles après l’auteur de Job, les Esséniens et les Thérapeutes se plongeaient là dans la vie contemplative, ou bien ils se livraient à une vie simple, active et dégagée de tout souci mondain. Encore un peu plus tard cette contrée devint probablement le berceau de la kabbale ou du mysticisme juif.’

CHAPTER XIV.
THE BOOK FROM A RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW.

Motto: ‘Jedem nämlich wollte ich dienen, der hinlänglich Sinn hat in die grosse Frage tiefer einzugehen, welche das ernste Leben einmal gewiss an Jeden heranbringt, nach der Gerechtigkeit der göttlichen Waltung in den menschlichen Geschicken.’—Stickel (Das Buch Hiob, Einl. S. vi.)

There was a period, not so long since, when a Biblical writing was valued according to its supposed services to orthodox theology. From this point of view, the Book of Job was regarded partly as a typical description of the sufferings of our Saviour,[^[122]] partly as a repository of text-proofs of Christian doctrines, which though few in number acquired special importance from the immense antiquity assigned to the poem. We must not, in our reaction from the exclusively theological estimate of the Old Testament, shut our eyes to the significance of each of its parts in the history of the higher religion. The Book of Job is theological, though the theology of its writer, being that of a poet, is less logical than that of an apostle, less definite even than that of a prophet, in so far as the prophet obtained (or seemed to obtain) his convictions by a message or revelation from without. Being a poet, moreover, the writer of Job can even less than a prophet have had clear conceptions of the historical Messiah and His period. Moral and spiritual truths—these were his appointed province, not the secret counsels of God, nor those exceptional facts or truths which orthodoxy still perhaps regards as among the postulates of the faith of the Hebrew prophets. Nor can the hero of the poem be considered a strict and proper type of the Christ, for this reason among others, that Job is to all intents and purposes a creation of the fancy, whether of the unconsciously working fancy of the people, or of the rich and potent imagination of a poet. In what sense, then, may the Book of Job still claim a theological significance, and be allowed to fill a not unimportant place in the Vorgeschichte of Christianity?

I. The hero of the poem (I exclude from consideration the speeches of Elihu[^[123]]) is, not indeed a type, but in some sense prophetic of the Christ, inasmuch as the very conception of a righteous man enduring vast calamities, not so much for his own sake as for the world’s, is a bold hypothesis which could only in the Christ be made good. The poet does more than merely personify the invisible Church of righteous and believing sufferers; he idealises this Church in doing so, and this idealising is a venture of faith. Job is an altogether exceptional figure: he is imperfect, no doubt, if viewed as a symbol of the Christ, but this does not diminish the reality and the grandeur of the presentiment which he embodies. To a religious mind, this remarkable creation will always appear stamped by the hand of Providence. Job is not indeed a Saviour, but the imagination of such a figure prepares the way for a Saviour. In the words of Dr. Mozley, ‘If the Jew was to accept a Messiah who was to lead a life of sorrow and abasement, and to be crucified between thieves, it was necessary that it should be somewhere or other distinctly taught that virtue was not always rewarded here, and that therefore no argument could be drawn from affliction and ignominy against the person who suffered it.’[^[124]]

II. This then is the grandest of the elements in the Book of Job which helped to prepare the noblest minds among the Jews for the reception of primitive Christianity—viz. the idea of a righteous man suffering simply because (as was said of One parallel in many respects to Job) ‘it pleased Jehovah (for a wise purpose) to bruise him.’ The second element is the idea of a supra-mundane justice, which will one day manifest itself in favour of the righteous sufferer, not only in this world (xvi. 18, 19, xix. 25, xlii.), so that all men may recognise their innocence, but also beyond the grave, the sufferers themselves being in some undefined manner brought back to life in the conscious enjoyment of God’s favour (xiv. 13-15, xix. 26, 27?) There may be only suggestions of these ideas, but suggestions were enough when interpreted by sympathetic readers. Let me add that by ‘sympathetic,’ I mean in sympathy with the conception of God formed by the author of Job. Nothing is more out of sympathy with this conception than the saying of the Jewish scholar, S. D. Luzzatto, ‘The God of Job is not the God of Israel, the Gracious One; He is the Almighty and the Righteous, but not the Kind and Faithful One.’ No; the God of Job would be less than infinitely righteous if He were not also kind (comp. Ps. lxii. 12). And of this enlarged conception of God, faith in the continuance of the human spirit is a consequence. Justice to those with whom God is in covenant requires that He should not after a few years hurl them back into non-existence (comp. Job x. 8-13). But I can only skirt the fringe of the great religious problems opened by this wonderful book.

In conclusion, and in the spirit of my motto, let me invite the reader’s attention (even if he be no theologian) to the spectacle of a powerful mind dashing itself against perennial problems too mighty for it to solve. The author of our poem missed the only adequate and possible solution, and hence he has been erroneously regarded by several moderns as the representative of a mental attitude akin to their own. Heine, for instance, can term this book ‘the Song of Songs of scepticism.’ No doubt those who are at sea on religious matters can find sayings in Job which may seem as if spoken by themselves; but in truth these only enhance the significance of the counteracting elements in the poem. It is the logical incompleteness of Job which at once exposes the book to misjudgment, and gives it an eternal fascination. As Quinet has said, ‘Ce qui fait la grandeur de ce livre, c’est qu’en dépassant la mesure de l’Ancien Testament il appelle, il provoque nécessairement des cieux nouveaux.... Le christianisme vit au fond de ce blasphème.’ We need a second part of Job, or at least a third speech of Jehovah, which could however only be given by some Hebrew poet who had drunk at the fountains of the Fourth Gospel. Failing these, the reader must supply what is necessary for himself,—a better compensation to Job for his agony than the Epilogue provides, and a more touching and not less divine theophany (comp. Job ix. 32, 33). This Christianity will enable him to do. Intellectually, the problem of Job’s life may remain, but to the Christian heart the cloud is luminous.

The Infinite remains unknown,

Too vast for man to understand:

In Him, the ‘Woman’s Seed,’ alone

We trace God’s footprint in the sand.[^[125]]

CHAPTER XV.
THE BOOK OF JOB FROM A GENERAL AND WESTERN POINT OF VIEW.

The Book of Job is even less translatable than the Psalter. And why? Because there is more nature in it. ‘He would be a poet,’ says Thoreau, ‘who could impress the winds and streams into his service to speak for him.’ They do speak for the poet of Job; the ‘still sad music of humanity’ is continually relieved by snatches from the grand symphonies of external nature. And hence the words of Job are ‘so true and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring.’ It is only a feeble light which the Authorised Version sheds upon this poem; and even the best prose translation must for several reasons be inadequate. Perhaps, though English has no longer its early strength, a true poet might yet achieve some worthy result. Rarely has the attempt been made. George Sandys was said by Richard Baxter to have ‘restored Job to his original glory,’ but he lived before the great era of Semitic studies. The poetical translator of Job must not disdain to consult critical interpreters, and yet by his own unassisted skill could he bring this Eastern masterpiece home to the Western reader? I doubt it. Even more than most imaginative poems the Book of Job needs the help of the painter. It is not surprising therefore that a scholar of Giotto should have detected the pictorial beauties of the story of Job. Though only two of the six Job-frescoes remain entire, the Campo Santo of Pisa will be impoverished when time and the sea-air effect the destruction of these. I know not whether any modern painter besides William Blake has illustrated Job. He, a ‘seer’ born out of due time, understood this wonderful book as no modern before him had done. The student will get more help of a certain kind from the illustrations thus reproduced in the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, compared with the sympathetic descriptions by Blake’s biographer (vol. i. pp. 330-333), than from any of the commentaries old or new.

In every respect the poem of Job stands in a class by itself. More than any other book in the Hebrew canon it needs bringing near to the modern reader, untrained as he is in Oriental and especially in Semitic modes of thought and imagination. Such a reader’s first question will probably relate to the poetic form of the book. Is it, for instance, a drama? Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428) answered in the affirmative, though he was censured for this by the Council of Constantinople. The author of Job, he says, wronged the grand and illustrious story by imitating the manner of the pagan tragedians. ‘Inde et illas plasmationes fecit, in quibus certamen ad Deum fecit diabolus, et voces sicut voluit circumposuit, alias quidem justo, alias vero amicis.’[^[126]]

Bishop Lowth devotes two lectures of his Sacred Poetry to the same question. He replies in the negative, after comparing Job with the two Œdipi of Sophocles (dramas with kindred subjects), on the ground that action is of the essence of a drama and the Book of Job contains not even the simplest action. Afterwards indeed he admits that Job has at least one point in common with a regular drama, viz. the vivid presentation of several distinct characters in a tragic situation. The view that it is an epic, held in recent times by Dr. Mason Good and M. Godet, found favour with one no less than John Milton, who speaks, as he who knows, of ‘that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the Book of Job a brief model.’[^[127]] Something is to be said for this opinion if Paradise Regained be a true epic. Dialogue with the addition of a certain amount of narrative is, roughly speaking, the literary form of the Book of Job as well as of the unequally great English poem, and Coleridge is probably right in representing Milton as indebted to the former for his plan. It is however open to us to doubt not only whether Paradise Regained is a true epic poem, but whether any section of the Book of Job except the Prologue partakes of the nature of an epic. The Prologue certainly does; it is more than a mere introduction to the subsequent speeches; it is an independent poetical narrative,[^[128]] if not a narrative poem; nor is there wanting a strong infusion of that supernatural element which tradition regards as essential to the epic. True, it is a torso, but this does not interfere with its genuinely poetic character: it is, as Milton says, a ‘brief model’ or miniature of an epic poem. The Colloquies on the other hand are as undoubtedly a germinal character-drama, as the Song of Songs is a germinal stage-drama. The work belongs to the same class as Goethe’s Iphigenie and Tasso; only there is much more passion in it than in these great but distinctively modern poems. Some one has said that ‘there is no action and reaction between the speakers’ [in the Colloquies]. This is an over-statement. Not only is each speaker consistent with his type of character, but the passionate excitement of Job, and his able though fragmentary confutation of his opponents, do produce an effect upon the latter, do force them to take up a new position, though not indeed to recall their original thesis.[^[129]]

But in order to bring the Book of Job nearer to the modern Western mind, we must not only study it from the point of view of form, but also compare its scope and range with those of the loftiest modern Western poems of similar import; only then shall we discover the points in which it is distinctively ancient, Oriental, Semitic.—The greatest English work of kindred moral and religious import is Paradise Lost. Like Job, it is a theodicy, though of a more complex character, and aims

... (to) assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to man.

And the author of Paradise Lost, though not to be equalled with the founders of Biblical religion, is still distinguished from all modern poets (except Dante and Bunyan) by his singularly intense faith in the operations of the Divine Spirit. That prayer of his, beginning ‘And chiefly Thou, O Spirit,’ and a well-known parallel passage in his Reason of Church Government, prove conclusively that he held no contracted views as to the limits of Inspiration. This, in addition to his natural gifts, explains the overpowering impression of reality produced by the visions of Milton, and perhaps in a still greater degree by those of our Puritan prose-poet, John Bunyan. A similar faith in the divine Spirit, but more original and less affected by logical theories, was one great characteristic of the author of Job. He felt, like all the religious ‘wise men’ (of whom more presently), that true wisdom was beyond mortal ken, and could only be obtained by an influence from above. In the strength of this confidence he ventured, like Milton, on untrodden paths, and presumed to chronicle, in symbolic form, transactions of the spiritual world. Whether or not he believed in the Satan of the Prologue, as a Sunday School child might, we need not decide; that he used popular beliefs in a wide, symbolic sense, has been pointed out elsewhere. Probably both Milton and he, if questioned on the subject, would have replied in the spirit of those words of our Lord, ‘If ye will receive it,’ and ‘All men cannot receive this saying.’ It is not to be forgotten that the author of Job distinctly places the Satan in a somewhat humorous light, and though Milton is far from doing the same, yet we know from Comus that the conception of a symbol was as familiar to him as to Lord Bacon. Notice, in conclusion, that Milton’s Satan, though unlike the Satan of his predecessor in some points,[^[130]] resembles him in this striking particular, that he is not yet (in spite of Milton’s attempt to represent him as such) the absolutely evil being.

Faust has in some respects a better right to be compared with Job than Paradise Lost. Not so much indeed in the Prologue, though Goethe deserves credit for detecting the humorous element in the Hebrew poet’s Satan, an element which he has transferred, though with much exaggeration, to his own Mephistopheles. Neither the Satan nor Mephistopheles (a remote descendant of the Hebrew[^[131]] mastema, from the root satam=satan) is the Origin of Evil in a personal form,[^[132]] but the Hebrew poet would never have accepted the description in Faust of the peculiar work of the ‘denying spirit.’ But in the body of the poem there is this marked similarity to the Book of Job—that the problem treated of is a purely moral and spiritual one; the hero first loses and then recovers his peace of mind; it is the counterpart in pantheistic humanism of what St. Paul terms working out one’s own salvation. Still there are great and most instructive divergences between the two writers. Observe, first, the complete want of sympathy with positive religion—with the religion from which Faust wanders—on the part of the modern poet. Next, a striking difference in the characteristics of Job and Faust respectively. Faust succumbs to his boundless love of knowledge, alternating with an unbridled sensual lust; Job is on the verge of spiritual ruin through his demand for such an absolute correspondence of circumstances to character as can only be realised in another world. The greatness of Faust lies in his intellect; that of Job (who in chap. xxviii. directly discourages speculation) in his virtue. Hence, finally, Faust requires (even from a pantheistic point of view) to be pardoned, while Job stands so high in the divine favour that others are pardoned on his account.

A third great poem which deserves to be compared with Job is the Divina Commedia. Dante has the same purpose of edification as the author of Job and even of Faust, though he has not been able to fuse the didactic and narrative elements with such complete success as Goethe. Nor is he so intensely autobiographical as either Goethe or the author of Job; his own story is almost inextricably interlaced with the fictions which he frames as the representative of the human race. He allows us to see that he has had doubts (Parad. iv. 129), and that they have yielded to the convincing power of Christianity (Purgat. iii. 34-39), but it was not a part of his plan to disclose, like the author of Job, the vicissitudes of his mental history. In two points, however—the width of his religious sympathies (which even permits him to borrow from the rich legendary material of heathendom[^[133]]) and the morning freshness of his descriptions of nature—he comes nearer to the author of Job than either Goethe or Milton, while in the absoluteness and fervour of his faith Milton is in modern times his only rival.

The preceding comparison will, it is hoped, leave the reader with a sense of our great literary as well as religious debt to the author of Job. His gifts were varied, but in one department his originality is nothing less than Homeric; his Colloquies are the fountain-head from which the great river of philosophic poetry took its origin. He is the first of those poet-theologians from whom we English have learned so much, and who are all the more impressive as teachers because the truths which they teach are steeped in emotion, and have for their background a comprehensive view of the complex and many-coloured universe.