Has the book of Job anything to do with that great event which we have been discussing? Did it originate out of it? Let us see.
In the first place it is, I believe, conceded by the foremost
{p. 277}
scholars that the book of Job is not a Hebrew work; it was not written by Moses; it far antedates even the time of Abraham.
That very high orthodox authority, George Smith, F. S. A., in his work shows that--
"Everything relating to this patriarch has been violently controverted. His country; the age in which he lived; the author of the book that bears his name; have all been fruitful themes of discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!"[1]
Job lived to be two hundred years old, or, according to the Septuagint, four hundred. This great age relegates him to the era of the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants, among whom such extreme ages were said to have been common.
C. S. Bryant says:
"Job is in the purest Hebrew. The author uses only the word Elohim for the name of God. The compiler or reviser of the work, Moses, or whoever he was, employed at the heads of chapters and in the introductory and concluding portions the name of Jehovah; but all the verses where Jehovah occurs, in Job, are later interpolations in a very old poem, written at a time when the Semitic race had no other name for God but Elohim; before Moses obtained the elements of the new name from Egypt."[2]
Hale says: