In Job’s case the only recantation is that of Jahveh himself, who admits (xlii. 7) that Job had all along spoken the right thing about him (Jahveh). The epilogue is a complete denial of Jahvist theology.
Job’s small voice of scepticism which followed the whirlwind was never silenced. The fragment of Agur (Proverbs xxx. 1–4) appears to have been written as the alternative reply of Job to Jahveh. Job had said, “I am vile, I will lay my hand upon my mouth, I have uttered that I understand not.” Agur adds ironically, “I am more stupid than other men, in me is no human understanding nor yet the wisdom to comprehend the science of sacred things.” Then quoting Jahveh’s boast about distributing the wind (Job xxxviii. 24), about his “sons shouting for joy” (Ibid. 7), and giving the sea its garment of cloud (Ibid. 9), Agur, the “Hebrew Voltaire,” as Professor Dillon aptly styles him, asks:
“Who has ascended into heaven and come down again?
Who can gather the wind in his fists?
Who can bind the seas in a garment?
Who can grasp all the ends of the earth?
Such an one I would question about God: ‘What is his name?
And what the name of his sons, if thou knowest?’”
The stupid Jahvist commentator who follows Agur (Proverbs xxx. 5–14) and in the same chapter interpolates 17 and 20, has the indirect value of rendering it probable that there were a great many “Agurites” (a “bad generation” he calls them) and that they were rather aristocratic and distrustful of the masses. This commentator, who cannot understand the Agur fragments, also shows us, side by side with the brilliant genius, lines revealing the mentally pauperised condition into which Jahvism must have fallen when such a writer was its champion.
It is tolerably certain that such fragments as those of Agur imply a literary atmosphere, a cultured philosophic constituency, and a long precedent evolution of rationalism. Such peaks are not solitary, but rise from mountain ranges. Professor Dillon, whose admirable volume merits study, finds Buddhistic influence in Agur’s fragments.[1] But I cannot find in them any trace of the recluse or of the mystic; he does not appear to be even an “agnostic,” for when he says “I have worried myself about God and succeeded not,” the vein is too satirical for a mind interested in theistic speculations. He is a man of the world,—more of a Goethe than a Voltaire; he regards Jahveh as a phantasm, is well domesticated in his planet, and does not moralise on the facts of nature in the Oriental any more than in the Pharisaic way. He appears to be a true Solomonic philosopher and naturalist. I cannot agree to Professor Dillon’s omission of the “Four Cunning Ones” (Proverbs xxx. 24–28), because they are not of the same metrical form as the others, and lead “nowhither.” The lines