Mein Auge und kein andres.
Most critics are now agreed that the immediately preceding words (vv. 23, 24) are not an introduction, as if vv. 25-27 composed the rock inscription. Job first of all wishes what he knows to be impossible, and then announces a far better thing of which he is sure. His wish runs thus:
Would then that they were written down—
my words—in a book, and engraved
with a pen of iron, and with lead
cut out for a witness in the rock.[[36]]
But whatever view we take of the prospect which gladdened the mind of Job, his remaining speeches contain no further reference to it. Henceforth his thoughts appear to dwell less on his own condition, and more on the general question of God’s moral government, and even when the former is spoken of it is without the old bitterness. In his next speech, stirred up by the gross violence of Zophar, Job for the first time meets the assertions of the three friends in this cycle of argument, viz. that the wicked, at any rate, always get their deserts, and, according to Zophar, suddenly and overwhelmingly. He meets them by a direct negative, though in doing so he is as much perturbed as when he proclaimed his own innocence to God’s face. He is familiar now with the thought that the righteous are not always recompensed, but it fills him with horror to think that the Governor of the world even leaves the wicked in undeserved prosperity, as if, in the language of Eliphaz, He could not ‘judge through the thick clouds’ (xxii. 16).
Why do the wicked live on,
become old, yea, are mighty in power?
Their houses are safe, without fear,