neither is Eloah’s rod upon them.

They wear away their days in happiness,

and go down to Sheól in a moment (xxi. 7, 9, 13).

CHAPTER III.
THE THIRD CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XXII.-XXXI.)

It is not wonderful that the gulf between Job and his friends should only be widened by such a direct contradiction of the orthodox tenet. The friends, indeed, cannot but feel the force of Job’s appeal to experience, as they show by the violence of their invective. But they are neither candid nor, above all, courageous enough to confess the truth; they speak, as the philosopher Kant observes, as if they knew their powerful Client was listening in the background. And so a third cycle of speeches begins (chaps. xxii.-xxxi.), in which the friends grasp the only weapon left them and charge Job directly with being a great sinner. True to his character, however, Eliphaz even here seeks to soften the effect of his accusations by a string of most enticing promises, partly worldly and partly other-worldly in their character, and which in a different context Job would have heartily appreciated (xxii. 21-30).

But Job cares not to reply to those charges of Eliphaz; his mind is still too much absorbed in the painful mystery of his own lot and that of all other righteous sufferers. He longs for God to set up his tribunal, so that Job and his fellows might plead their cause (xxiii. 3-7, xxiv. 1). What most of all disturbs him is that he cannot see God—that is cannot detect the operation of that moral God in whom his heart cannot help believing. ‘I may go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him’ (xxiii. 8). With the ardour of a pessimist he depicts this failure of justice in the darkest colours (chap. xxiv.), and is as powerless as ever to reconcile his deep sense of what God ought to be and must be and the sad realities of life. Upon this Bildad tries to frighten Job into submission by a picture of God’s irresistible power, as exhibited not only in heaven and earth, but even beneath the ocean depths in the realm of the shades (xxv., xxvi. 5-14). Not a very comforting speech, but fine in its way (if Bildad may really be credited with all of it), and the speaker frankly allows its inadequacy.

Lo! these are the outskirts of his ways,

and how faintly spoken is that which we hear!

but the thunder of his power who can understand? (xxvi. 14.)

In a speech, the first which is described as a mashal,[[37]] Job demolishes his unoriginal and rhetorical opponent, and with dignity reasserts his innocence (xxvi. 1-4, xxvii. 1-7). He may have said more; if so, it has been lost. But, in fact, all that was argumentative in Bildad’s speech was borrowed from Eliphaz, and though Job had the power (see chaps. ix., xii.), he had not the will to compete with his friends in rhetoric. The only speaker who is left is Zophar, and, as it is unlikely that the poet left one of his triads of speeches imperfect, we may conjecture that xxvii. 8-10, 10-23 belongs to the third speech of Zophar.[[38]] Certainly they are most inappropriate in the mouth of Job, being in direct contradiction to all that he has yet said. If so it seems very probable that besides the introductory formula a few opening verses have dropped out of the text. The verses which now stand at the head of the speech transport us to the disputes of those rival schools of which Job and his friends were only the representatives. Hence the use of the plural in ver. 12, of which an earlier instance occurs in the second speech of Bildad (xviii. 2). What Zophar says is in effect this: Job’s condition is desperate, for he is an ‘impious’ or ‘godless’ man. It is too late for any one to attempt to pray when overtaken by a fatal calamity. For how can he feel that ‘deep delight’ in God which enables a man to pray, with the confidence of being heard, ‘in every season’ of life, whether prosperous or the reverse? The rest of the speech is substantially a repetition of Zophar’s former description of the retribution of the wicked. It was not to be expected that Job should reply to this, and accordingly we find that in continuing his mashal (xxix. 1) he utterly ignores his opponents. But unhappily he is almost as far as ever from a solution of his difficulty. His friends, we may suppose, have left him, and he is at liberty to revive those melancholy memories which are all that remain to him of his prosperity.