(There is also an Egyptian parallel in a hymn to the Sun-god, Records of the Past, viii. 131, ‘He fells the wicked in his season.’) How far the poet of Job believed in the myths which he has preserved, e.g. in the existence of potentates or potencies corresponding to the ‘dragon’ of which he speaks, we cannot certainly tell. Mr. Budge has suggested that Tiamat, the sky-dragon of the Babylonians, conveyed a distinct symbolic meaning. However this may have been, the ‘leviathan’ of Job was probably to the poet a ‘survival’ from a superstition of his childhood, and little if anything more than the emblem of all evil and disorder.
And now for the bearing of the above on criticism. It is a remarkable fact that there are mythological allusions, very similar to some of those in Job, in the later portions of the Book of Isaiah (Isa. xxiv. 21, xxvii. 1, ii. 9). This evidently suggests a date for the Book of Job not earlier than the Exile. It is not necessary to assume that the authors of these books borrowed either from Egypt or from Babylonia. They drew from the unexhausted store of Jewish popular beliefs. They wrote for a larger public than the older poets and prophets could command, and adapted themselves more completely to the average culture of their people.
CHAPTER X.
ARGUMENT FROM THE DOCTRINE OF ANGELS.
The facts on which our argument is based are mainly the passages in Job which refer to ‘sons of Elohim’ (or better, as Davidson, ‘of the Elohim’), to ‘the Satan,’ and to the mal’akim. The first of these three phrases means probably inferior members of the class of beings called Elohim (i.e. ‘superhuman powers’); the second, ‘the adversary (or opposer);’ the third, ‘envoys or messengers’ (ἄγγελοι). We may at once draw an inference from the expression ‘the Satan,’ the full importance of which will be seen later on. ‘The Satan’ being an appellative, the book in which it occurs was probably written before Chronicles, where we find ‘Satan’ without the article, almost[[99]] as if a proper name; and being applied to a minister and not an opponent of Jehovah, the Book of Job is probably earlier than the prophecies of Zechariah and the Books of Chronicles; see Zech. iii. 1, 2 (where observe that Jehovah’s only true representative gives a severe reproof to ‘the Satan’), 1 Chron. xxi. 1 (where ‘Satan,’ uncommissioned, ‘entices’ David to an act displeasing to Jehovah[[100]]). The difference between the notices of the Satan (or Satan) may not seem great to an unpractised student, but no one who has followed the development of any single doctrine will undervalue such traces of a growing refinement in the conceptions of good and evil. Whether or no the ideas of the Chronicler and his age had been modified by hearing of the Persian Ahriman, may be questioned; but a similar supposition cannot be allowed in the case of the author of Job. The Satan of the Prologue is, in theory at least, simply Jehovah’s agent, though he certainly betrays a malicious pleasure in his invidious function of trying or sifting the righteous. It is not impossible that the author of the Prologue was the first to use the term Satan in this sense. At any rate, it is a pure Hebrew term, unlike the Ashmedai or Asmodæus of the Book of Tobit. [Ashmedai, in later Judaism, is the head of the Shedim—demons who were never angels of God, just as Sammael is the ‘head of all Satans,’ i.e. the prince of the fallen angels. Weber, System der altsynagog. Palästin. Theologie, pp. 243-5.]
Next, turning to the mal’akim, observe that the word occurs very rarely in Job, viz. once in the original Colloquies (iv. 18), and once (virtually) in the first speech of Elihu (xxxiii. 23). We find, however, a kindred phrase ‘the q’doshim,’ or ‘holy ones,’ i.e. superhuman, heavenly beings, separate from the world of the senses[[101]] (v. 1, xv. 15), and comparing v. 1 with iv. 18 we cannot doubt that the same class of beings is intended. We nowhere meet with the Mal’ak Yahvè, so familiar to us in certain Old Testament narratives; Elihu’s mal’ak mēlīç (xxxiii. 23) is not synonymous with the older expression (see account of Elihu). In fact, the thousands of mal’akim known at the period of the writers of Job have made the one great mal’ak unnecessary, just as, but for the influence of Persian ideas, the multitudinous ‘hurtful angels’ (Ps. lxxviii. 49) might sooner or later have entirely supplanted the single Satan. And yet even an ordinary mal’ak, when he appears, is more awful than the great mal’ak Yahvè; the angel who appears to Eliphaz (Job iv. 15, 16) is as unrecognisable as the ‘face’ of Jehovah himself. This is an indication, though but a slight one, of a somewhat advanced age, when the gulf between God and man was more acutely felt, and religious thought was more specially directed to filling it up.
The title ‘holy ones’ (v. 1) enables us to identify the ‘angels’ with the ‘sons of the Elohim.’ Separateness from human weakness, though not mediatorial ability[[102]] is equally, predicated of both. But neither the poet of Job, nor any of the psalmists, identifies the phrases in express terms;[[103]] a virtual identification (see above, and Ps. lxxxix. 7, 8) is all that they venture upon. There was a good reason for this—viz. their recollection of the physical and mythological origin of the phrase, ‘the sons of the Elohim.’ ‘Angels’ and ‘sons of the Elohim’ are indeed alike ‘holy’ and ‘servants’ of the supreme God, but not always so, according to Hebrew tradition, were the ‘sons of the Elohim.’ In support of this, we may refer, not only to Gen. vi. 4 (which the author of Job need not have known), but to the allusions in his poem (see above) to a war among the inhabitants of heaven. This war, I think, stands in connection not merely with the physical phenomena of light and darkness, but also with speculations of pious Jehovists, or worshippers of Jehovah, as to the basis and value of ‘heathen’ religions. According to Deut. xxxii. 8,[[104]] each of the nations of the world was allotted by the Most High (Elyōn)[[105]] to some one of the ‘sons of El’ (the simplest name for God); of course we are to suppose that these ‘sons of El’ and their worshippers were meant to recognise the supremacy of the ‘God of Gods’—Jehovah. But (so we may suppose the train of thought of the Jehovists to have run) the nations and their deities formed the vain dream of independence. The result of the struggle between Jehovah and the inferior Elohim is referred to in Job: the Elohim renounced their dream of independent sovereignty and were admitted into Jehovah’s service. Henceforth they were no longer shīdīm, i.e. ‘lords’ (?), Deut. xxxii. 17, but mal’akīm ‘messengers.’ But the ‘heathen’ nations go on worshipping the Elohim, ignorant that their divinities have been dispossessed of their misused lordship.[[106]] Instead of Him who alone henceforth is ‘enthroned in the heavens’ (Ps. ii. 4), they honour ‘that which is not God’ (Deut. xxxii. 21), phantom-divinities whom they localise, like Jehovah, in the sky. Thus, except as to the region of the divine habitation, they differ radically from Jehovists like the author of Job. In that one point he agrees with them: the stars and the ‘sons of Elohim’ he still pictures to himself as closely conjoined (xxxviii. 6). Thus, the old and the new are fermenting in his brain, and on the ground of their angelology we can safely date the authors of Job somewhere in the great literary period which opens with the ‘Captivity.’
CHAPTER XI.
ARGUMENT FROM PARALLEL PASSAGES.
The new phase into which the controversy as to the early Christian work on the Teaching of the Apostles has passed excuses me from justifying the importance (in spite of its difficulty) of the study of parallel passages. A great point has been gained in one’s critical and exegetical training when one has learned so to compare parallel passages as to distinguish true from apparent resemblances, and to estimate the degree of probability of imitation. In Essay viii. of vol. ii. of The Prophecies of Isaiah, I endeavoured to help the student to do this for himself within the field of the Book of Isaiah. I shall not attempt this with the same thoroughness for the Book of Job. It is a sign of the consummate skill of the writer that he is an artist even in his imitations. As Luther says, ‘Die Rede dieses Buches ist so reisig und prächtig als freilich keines Buches in der ganzen Schrift.’ The author retains the parallelistic distich, but is no longer content with a bare synonymous or antithetic bifurcation of his material, and dwells on the decoration of an idea with a freedom which sometimes obscures his meaning; hence too the germinal phrase or word suggested by an earlier book may easily escape notice. I shall confine my attention to the most defensible points of contact, referring for the rest, without pledging myself to agreement, to Dr. J. Barth’s Beiträge zur Erklärung des Buches Job (Leipzig, s.a.), pp. 1-17.
The influence of Job on the works which all admit to be of post-Exile origin need not detain us here. There is but one undoubted reference to Job in Ecclesiastes (v. 14; comp. Job i. 21)—we should perhaps have expected more. But Sirach with a true instinct detected an affinity between his own ideas and Job xxviii. (comp. this chapter with Ecclus. i. 3, 5, &c.), though he neglects the rest, and does not include our poet among the ‘famous men’ and the ‘fathers that begot us.’ Passing upwards, we shall, if historical criticism be our guide, make our first pause at the undeniably later psalms and at the later portions of Isaiah. In the former compare (as specimens).
Ps. ciii. 16 with Job vii. 12