It is an allusion to a myth, based on the continual ‘war in heaven’ between light and darkness, which we have in these lines. Job asks if he is the leviathan (iii. 8) of that upper ocean above which dwells the invisible God (ix. 8, Ps. civ. 3). He describes Jehovah as being jealous (comp. Gen. iii. 4, 5, 22) and thinking it of importance to subdue Job’s wild nature, lest he should thwart the Divine purposes. But here, again, Job rises above himself; the sorrows of all innocent sufferers are as present to him as his own; nay, more, he bears them as a part of his own; he represents mankind with God. In a bitter parody of Ps. viii. 5 he exclaims—
What is frail man that Thou treatest him as a great one
and settest Thy mind upon him;
that Thou scrutinisest him every morning,
and art every moment testing him? (vii. 17, 18.)
It is only now and then that Job expresses this feeling of sympathetic union with the human race. Generally his secret thought (or that of his poet) translates itself into a self-consciousness which seems morbidly extravagant on any other view of the poem. The descriptions of his physical pains, however, are true to the facts of the disease called elephantiasis, from which he may be supposed to have suffered. His cry for death is justified by his condition—‘death rather than (these) my pains’[[16]] (vii. 15). He has no respite from his agony; ‘nights of misery,’ he says, ‘have been allotted to me’ (vii. 3), probably because his pains were more severe in the night (xxx. 17). How can it be worth while, he asks, thus to persecute him? Even if Eliphaz be right, and Job has been a sinner, yet how can this affect the Most High?
(Even) if I have sinned, what do I unto thee,
O thou watcher of men? (vii. 20.)
What bitter irony again! He admits a vigilance in God, but only the vigilance of ‘espionage’ (xiii. 27, xiv. 16), not that of friendly guardianship; God only aims at procuring a long catalogue of punishable sins. Why not forgive those sins and relieve Himself from a troublesome task? Soon it will be too late: a pathetic touch revealing a latent belief in God’s mercy which no calamity could destroy.
Thus to the blurred vision of the agonised sufferer the moral God whom he used to worship has been transformed into an unreasoning, unpitying Force. Bildad is shocked at this. ‘Can God pervert judgment’? (viii. 3.) In his short speech he reaffirms the doctrine of proportionate retribution, and exhorts Job to ‘seek earnestly unto God’ (viii. 5), thus clearly implying that Job is being punished for his sins.[[17]] Instead of basing his doctrine on revelation, Bildad supports the side of it relative to the wicked by an appeal to the common consent of mankind previously to the present generation (viii. 8, 9). This common consent, this traditional wisdom, is embodied in proverbial ‘dark sayings,’ as, for instance—