It is so simple that a child may understand it; so profound, that the mightiest intellect cannot go beyond its depths. It is so essentially rich that it turns every language into which it is translated into a classic. At one moment it is plain narration; at another, it is all drama and tragedy, in which cataclysmic climax crashes against climax.
It records the birth of a babe, the flight of an angel, the death of a king, the overthrow of an empire or the fall of a sparrow. It notes the hyssop that groweth out of the wall and speaks of the cedars of Lebanon. It shows us so pastoral a thing as a man sitting at his tent door in the cool of the day, and then paints for us a city in heaven with jasper walls, with golden streets, and where each several gate that leadeth into the city is one vast and shining pearl.
It is full of outlines—outlines as large and bare as mountain peaks, and then it is crowded with details as minute as the sands of the sea. There are times when clouds and darkness float across its pages and we hear from within like unto the voice of him who inhabiteth eternity; in another moment the lines blaze with light, the revelation they give is high noon—and all the shadows are under the feet.
It is terrible in its analysis and cold and emotionless in the hard impact of its synthesis. It describes moments of passion in passionless words, and states infinite conclusions without the hint of an emphasis. It shows us a man in hell (hades) and, although it describes sufferings more awful than mortal flesh can know, causing the soul to shudder at the simple reading of it, it takes on no quickened pulse, no feverish rush of added speech.
In a few colorless lines it recounts the creation of the heavens and the earth. In language utterly barren of excitement it describes the most exciting and soul-moving event that can occupy the imagination—that moment when the heavens shall be on fire, the elements melted with fervent heat, the earth and the works therein burned up, and a new heaven and a new earth brought into view.
It is a book of prose and yet a book of sublimest poetry.
The book of Job is a poem by the side of which the hexameters of Horace, the drama of Shakespeare, the imagination of Milton, are not to be compared.
In all literature the book of Job alone introduces a spirit into the scene and reports its speech without utterly breaking down into the disaster of the commonplace.
Listen to the account which Eliphaz the Temanite gives. He says:
“In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling which made all my bones to shake.”