[110]. See Bateson Wright’s The Book of Job, Appendix. The author concludes that the poet of Job ‘selects the main threads from the complete treatise of Ps. xxxvii. and interweaves them into the highly poetical discourse of Eliphaz.’
[111]. Presbyterian Review, 1885, p. 353.
[112]. Delitzsch, art. ‘Hiob,’ Herzog-Plitt’s Realencyklopädie, vi. 132.
[113]. Since this wish cannot be realised, Job pleads his cause against an invisible God with the same earnestness as if he stood before His face.
[114]. It is a pleasure to quote the forcible summing-up of Mr. Froude. ‘A difficulty,’ he remarks, ‘now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the 27th is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the 11th to the 23rd verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has maintained before—is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of Job’s last and highest position, supposes that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem’ (Short Studies, vol. i.) He then proceeds to mention with cautious approbation the theory of Kennicott (see note on Text at end of [Chap. XV.])
[115]. There is a doubt whether the Septuagint postscript or the statement of the Egyptian Jew (?) Aristeas (as given by Eusebius from Alexander Polyhistor in Præf. Evang. l. ix.) be the earlier. The ordinary view is that Aristeas had the Septuagint Job before him; Freudenthal, however, infers from the strange description of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar in Sept. Job ii. 11 (taken verbally from Aristeas) that the reverse was the case, and that the fragment of Aristeas is only a condensed extract from the prologue and epilogue of the Book of Job (Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, 139, 140; Grätz, Monatsschrift, 1877, p. 91). This inference in turn suggests Grätz’ hypothesis that the Septuagint Job is a work of the first century A.D. (see note at end of [Chap. XV.])
[116]. Opera, Delarue, ii. 851, ap. Delitzsch, Iob, p. 603.
[117]. Opera minora (Lugd. Bat. 1769), p. 497.
[118]. Kremer, Herrschende Ideen des Islams, p. 27 &c.; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, p. 48 &c.
[119]. Prof. Socin once observed to me how useful spoken Arabic would be found for this purpose.