In Ezek. xiv. 14, 20 the name of Job occurs with Noah and Daniel as exemplary righteous men, who, if they were alive, could nevertheless not save the wicked city of Jerusalem from its doom; but whether the story Ezekiel knew about Job had any resemblance to the prologue of our book, no one can tell. It may very well be that there was a prose book of Job (in which, possibly, the friends played the opposite rôle from that given them in the poem), and that the poet took from it the incidents and setting that he needed; but about that also nothing can be known.
The age of the book is determined chiefly by the problem with which it deals. The doctrine of individual retribution is the application to the individual of the prophetic teaching about God's dealing with the nation; it appears in a peculiarly crude and hard form in Ezekiel at the moment of the break up of the nation. It was furthered by the teaching of the sages, as in Proverbs, about the connection between prosperity and happiness and virtue. Experience contradicted the dogma, and so the problem of theodicy arose—arose in a peculiarly difficult form, because all that befell a man was attributed to the immediate act of God, who was not relieved of any part of his responsibility by talk of second causes and natural laws, and because the sphere of retribution was limited to this life, with no relief in the possible compensations of another.
This is the problem of Job, and of itself suffices to put the book in what is called the post-exilic age. It belongs to the literature of Jewish Wisdom, with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The latter book, one of the latest certainly in the Old Testament, is much concerned with the same conflict of dogma with experience, though in a very different spirit. Job may be a work of the fifth century B.C., or perhaps of the fourth. The language would incline us to the earlier date.
CHAPTER XXIV
ECCLESIASTES. SONG OF SONGS
Two singular books remain, about the inspiration of both of which the straitest sect of the Pharisees in the first century of our era had grave difficulties, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. Both are attributed to Solomon, the Song by title, Ecclesiastes by implication in the book itself, and doubtless the supposed authorship had much to do with finally securing the two books a place in the Jewish Bible.
Ecclesiastes.—The title of Ecclesiastes runs, "The words of Koheleth the son of David, king in Jerusalem," under which pseudonym no one but Solomon can be meant; see also Eccl. i. 12, and especially ii. 1-11. In the body of the book, Koheleth is regularly used as a proper name; it is apparently coined for the nonce. Like many pseudonyms in other literatures, it is probably a mystification, piquant to the author's contemporaries but impenetrable to us. That it means "Preacher"—an ancient guess—is highly improbable; but even if the meaning were transparent, there is no more reason for translating a fictitious proper name than a real one.
The theme of this symphony of pessimism is stridently announced in the first notes of the overture: "Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! Everything is vanity." The world and its happenings, man and his strivings, pleasure, pain, wisdom, folly, good and evil—all is utterly empty; existence has no meaning and no worth. All is chance and change, in which things endlessly go round and round, but plan, purpose, progress is nowhere to be seen. And as all have one lot, even this senseless and inconstant fortune, so death sooner or later overtakes all alike and ends the strange play without plot we call human life.
Of a divine providence directed to any end or by any principle, of a justice above which requites men according to their deeds, long years and happiness to the wise and good, adversity and premature death to the wicked and foolish, Koheleth, looking on the world of things as they are with searching eyes, discovers no sign. Of another world and an immortal soul, with which some of his contemporaries consoled themselves, he, keeping his thinking within the bounds of experience, knows nothing. Man dies as the beast dies, the same vital breath is in them both, all are of dust and turn to dust again; nor has man any advantage over the beast, they all have the same end (iii. 19-21; ix. 4-6). There is consolation in this thought, when the misery of the world weighs too heavy on the heart. The dead are better off than the living, but happier still it would be never to be born to see the evils that are under the sun (iv. 2 f.).