Job had it hard. What with boils and bereavements and bankruptcy, and a fool of a wife, he wished he was dead; and I do not blame him.
His flesh was gone, and his bones were dry. His teeth wasted away until nothing but the enamel seemed left. He cried out: “I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”
There has been some difference of opinion about this passage. St. Jerome and Schultens and Doctors Good, Poole and Barnes have all tried their forceps on Job’s teeth. You deny my interpretation, and ask: “What did Job know about the enamel of the teeth?”
He knew every thing about it. Dental surgery is almost as old as the Earth. The mummies of Egypt, thousands of years old, are found today with gold filling in their teeth. Ovid, Horace, Solomon and Moses wrote about these important factors of the body.
To other provoking complaints, I think Job had added an exasperating toothache, and, putting his hand against the inflamed face, he said: “I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”
A very narrow escape, you say, for Job’s body and soul; but there are thousands of men who make just as narrow escape for their soul. There was a time when the partition between them and ruin was no thicker than a tooth’s enamel; but, as Job finally escaped, so, thank God, have they.
Paul expresses the same idea by a different figure when he says that some people are “saved as by fire.”
A vessel at sea is in flames. You go to the stern of the vessel. The boats have shoved off. The flames advance; you can no longer endure the heat on your face. You slide down on the side of the vessel, and hold on with your fingers, until the forked tongue of the fire begins to lick the back of your hand, and you feel that you must fall, when one of the life-boats comes back, and the passengers say they think they have room for one more. The boat swings under you—you drop into it—you are saved.
So some men are pursued by temptation until they are partially consumed, but, after all, get off—“saved as by fire.”