[100]. In 2 Sam. xxiv. 1, the temptation is ascribed to Jehovah; the Chronicler is at any rate on the road to James i. 13. Contrast the stationariness of Mohammed (‘God misleadeth whom He will,’ Korán, xxxv. 9).
[101]. So rightly Baudissin, Studien, ii. 125.
[102]. Eliphaz apparently assumes that the ‘holy ones’ might plead for Job with Eloah (comp. xxxiii. 23). There is an analogy for this in Arabian religion. The Koreish (Qurais) tribe were willing to join Mohammed, if he would only admit their three idol-gods to be mediators with the supreme God, and for a time he consented. See Palmer’s Korán, Introd., p. xxvii. This was equivalent to recognising these heathen deities as b’ur Elohim and also (Eliphaz would say) as Q’dōskīm or ‘holy ones.’
[103]. The Elohistic narrator in Gen. xxviii. 12, 17, xxxii. 2, 3 even appears to identify the terms ‘angels of Elohim’ (= God) and ‘Elohim’ (= divine powers). Beth ’elōhīm and makhani’ ’elōhīm are more naturally rendered ‘place, host, of divine powers’ than ‘place, host of God.’
[104]. The ‘Song of Moses’ is placed by Ewald and Kamphausen in the Assyrian period of Israel’s history. Ver. 8 runs, in a corrected version.
[105]. ‘When Elyōn gave the nations as inheritances, when he parted out the sons of men, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of El:’ comp. ver. 9. ‘For Jehovah is the portion of his people, Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.’ (With many recent critics, I follow the reading of the Septuagint. A scribe, offended by the no longer intelligible statement in ver. 8, inserted an Ι before ΗΛ, and so formed the usual abbreviation of Ἰσραήλ.) This passage explains Sirach xvii. 17.
[106]. There is a singular reference to a still future deposition of the patron spirits of the nations in Isa. xxiv. 21 (post-Exile), with which comp. Ps. lviii., lxxxii. In lxxxii. 6 the title ’elōhim is interchanged with b’nē ’elyōn ‘sons of the Most High.’
[107]. See Cheyne, The Prophecies of Isaiah, ed. 3, ii. 30; art. ‘Isaiah,’ Encyclopædia Britannica, xi. 380.
[108]. The Book of Job (1884), pp. lx.-lxii.
[109]. According to Ewald, the reference is to Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of which, we know, was familiar as early as Hosea’s time (Hos. xi. 8).