The Literature of the Old Testament

by George Foot Moore

Now a new disputant comes on the scene, whose name does not appear among the dramatis personæ, the youthful Elihu; a short prose introduction tells us who he is, and why he intrudes. He is incensed at them all; at Job for justifying himself at God's expense, at the friends for not having found arguments to put him down. For his part, he is so full of words that he cannot hold in. He delivers himself, accordingly, of four speeches (cc. 32 f.; 34; 35; 36), to which Job vouchsafes no reply.

Suddenly God, whom Job had alternately challenged and implored to appear, answers him out of the whirlwind (cc. 38-41); with Job's confession of his presumption in speaking of things he understood not (xlii. 1-6), the poem ends.

In the prose epilogue God condemns the three friends, whom he pardons at Job's prayer; and the trial over, God, in poetical justice, restores Job to a prosperity greater than the first.

In the argument, the three friends and Elihu maintain throughout the view of divine retribution which was plainly the orthodoxy of the author's time: God rewards piety and virtue with prosperity and requites sin with adversity. This law is grounded in the righteousness of God; it is inconceivable that he should act otherwise. Consequently if a man is overwhelmed by calamity, as Job is, the only explanation their religion can allow is that he is a great sinner; any other interpretation would impugn the justice of God or bring into question the existence of a divine providence. They recognize, indeed, that in sending suffering God may design through chastisement or by way of warning to bring the sinner to repentance and amendment; they admit that suffering may be a trial of man's faith. They present the matter to Job thus, especially in their earlier speeches; but the character of Job's replies convinces them that neither of these is his case, and they come at last to outspoken accusation.

Job denies their insinuations and their charges. He has done nothing to deserve such a fate; if they insist on calling this God's justice, he will say straight in God's face that he is an almighty tyrant, who unjustly destroys an innocent man. If God slay him for it, he will not belie his conscious rectitude.

The argument goes round and round, takes this or that turn, grows hotter as it proceeds, but does not get beyond this deadlock. The author's motive so far is clear: he means to controvert the dogma that all suffering, or at least extraordinary suffering, is retributive, and to show in the instance of Job how this doctrine may drive a godly man to the denial of God's justice altogether. With remarkable psychological insight, however, he makes Job not only cling to the belief that God is more just than his dealings with him show, but makes this faith grow in even steps with his passionate charges of injustice. He appeals from the injustice of God to the just God who some day will have to justify him.

The author meant to refute the doctrine that God's providence is exhaustively explained by distributive justice. Had he his own solution of the problem of theodicy to put in the place of that cruel dogma? Job, we have seen, finds no solution. In the speeches of Jehovah, where dramatic fitness would lead us to look for the author's solution if he had one, there is no refutation of Job's charges, no response to his pleadings. The speeches are splendid, but the gist of them is that God's ways are inscrutable. If man cannot comprehend God's operations in nature, what folly, what presumption, to pretend to fathom his dealings in providence! In that Job acquiesces for the soul of man. Let his sufferings be a mystery, he can submit and trust; call them punitive, and he revolts against the injustice. That is the end to which the author would bring his readers. Some one has said that there is nothing about which men are usually so sure as about the character of God, and nothing they are so ready to do as to interpret his dealings by his character—especially his dealings with others. Such were Job's friends. And from this point of view we have no difficulty in understanding, what has stumbled some critics, how they, with their zeal for God's character—that is, for their orthodox conception of it—come off in the epilogue with so smart a rebuke, while Job, whose words seemed to them sheer blasphemy, is praised for saying what was right about God.

The theme of the Book of Job is one which exercised the greatest of the Greek tragic poets, and it is treated with an Æschylean grandeur; in conception and execution it declares the genius of its author. It has not come into our hands altogether as it left his, and certain parts of the poem are generally recognized as additions by other pens.

The most considerable of these are the speeches of Elihu (cc. 32-36). It has already been noted that Elihu's name is not in the prologue, he comes in with a bit of a prologue of his own (xxxii. 1-5); and when the three friends are rebuked in the epilogue, he, who surely deserved the same condemnation, is ignored. All his speeches, provocative enough, draw no reply from Job. When, at the end of Elihu's discourse, God answers out of the whirlwind (xxxviii. 1 ff.), "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge," it is to Job he addresses himself, not Elihu; and the appearance of God is naturally taken as the response to Job's challenge in xxxi. 35, "O that I had one to hear me," etc., just before Elihu breaks in. All these signs indicate that Elihu is an intruder. This inference is borne out by the arguments so pretentiously announced. They are in the main variations on the themes in the preceding speeches of the friends, with a certain evident predilection for the idea that suffering is a warning. It would seem that another poet thought, as he makes Elihu boast, that he could improve on the arguments of the friends. The unbiassed reader, without depreciating the poetical merit of the speeches, will be likely to differ with him.

The eulogy of the divine wisdom (Job 28) is a very fine poem, in the vein of Prov. 8, of which it is probably not independent, but it is, to say the least, inappropriate in the mouth of Job at this point in the debate. The description of ancient mining is particularly noteworthy. In the speeches of God, the long descriptions of the hippopotamus and the crocodile (xl. 15-xli. 34) are not without reason suspected of being purple patches, and in putting them in some damage has been done to the margins. It has been questioned whether the prose prologue and epilogue really belong with the poem; but it would not be intelligible without them.