Job and Solomon: Or, The Wisdom of the Old Testament

by T. K. Cheyne

And now to sum up the results of our comparisons. The Colloquies in Job are of later origin than Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and most of Proverbs, but possibly nearly contemporaneous with much in the second part of Isaiah, except that Isa. liii. not improbably lay before the author of Job; also that Ps. viii., a work of the Exile period, was well known to him. We are thus insensibly led on to date the Book of Job (the speeches, at any rate) during the Exile. This will account for the large amount of imitation to which the book gave rise. Men felt respecting the author that he was the first and greatest exponent of the ideas and feelings, not of a long-past age, but of their own; that he ‘sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners’ (Job xxix. 25).

CHAPTER XII.
ON THE DISPUTED PASSAGES IN THE DIALOGUE-PORTION, ESPECIALLY THE SPEECHES OF ELIHU.

A detailed exegetical study would alone enable the reader to do justice to the controversies here referred to. But I may at least ask that, even upon the ground of the slender analysis which I have given, he should recognise the difficulties at the root of these controversies. In comparison with his possession of a ‘seeing eye,’ it is of little moment to me whether he adopts my explanations or not. Poets, like painters, have different periods. It is therefore conceivable that the author of Job changed in course of time, and criticised his own work, these afterthoughts of his being embodied in the ‘disputed passages.’ It is indeed also conceivable that the phenomena which puzzle us are to be explained by the plurality of authorship. In the remarks which follow I wish to supplement the sketch of the possible or probable growth of the Book offered in section 3 of [Chap. VII.], chiefly with regard to the speeches of Elihu.

Keil has spoken of ‘the persistently repeated assaults upon the genuineness’ of these discourses. I must however protest against the use of the word ‘genuineness’ in this connection. Even if not by the author of the poem of Job, the speeches of Elihu are as ‘genuine’ a monument of Israel’s religious ‘wisdom’ as the work of the earlier writer. No critic worthy of the name thinks of ‘assaulting’ them, though divines no less orthodox than Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede have uncritically enough set the example. The speeches of Elihu only seem poor by comparison with the original work; they are not without true and beautiful passages, which, with all their faults of expression, would in any other book have commanded universal admiration. The grounds on which chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii. are denied to the original writer may be summed up thus.

(1) Elihu puts forward a theory of the sufferings of the righteous which does not essentially differ from that of the three friends (see especially xxxiii. 25-28; xxxiv. 9, 11, 12, 36, 37; xxxv. 9-16; xxxvi. 5-7, 21-25; xxxvii. 23, 24). No doubt he improves the theory, by laying more stress upon the chastening character of the righteous man’s afflictions (xxxiii. 14-30; xxxvi. 8-12, 15, 16, and comp. Eliphaz in v. 18, 19), and to many disciples of the New Covenant his form of the theory may recommend itself as true. But, even apart from the appendix or epilogue (see xlii. 7-9), it is clear from the whole plan of the poem, particularly if the discourses of Jehovah be taken in, that this was not, in the writer’s mind, an adequate solution of the problem, especially in the case of the God-fearing and innocent Job.

(2) These speeches interrupt the connection between the ‘words of Job’ and those of Jehovah, and seem to render the latter superfluous. Whether the ‘words of Job’ (to borrow the phrase of some editor of the book) should end at xxxvii. 37 or at ver. 40, it is difficult not to believe that xxxviii. 1, 2, ‘And Jehovah answered Job out of the storm, and said, Who then is darkening counsel by words without knowledge?’ was meant to follow immediately upon them. The force of this seems to some to be weakened by taking Elihu’s description of the storm (xxxvii. 2-5) as preparatory to the appearance of Jehovah in chap. xxxviii. But, evidently, to make this an argument, the storm ought to be at the end of the speech.

(3) There is no mention of Elihu in the Prologue, nor is any divine judgment passed upon him in the Epilogue. It is not enough to reply with Stickel that Jehovah himself is not mentioned in the Prologue as the umpire in the great controversy; why should he be?—and that the absence of any condemnation of Elihu on the part of Jehovah, and the harmony (?) between Elihu’s and Jehovah’s discourses, sufficiently indicate the good opinion of the Divine Judge.

(4) Elihu’s style is prolix and laboured; his phrases often very obscure, even where the words separately are familiar. As Davidson remarks, there are not only unknown words (these we meet with elsewhere in the book), but an unknown use of known words. There is also a deeper colouring of Aramaic (see [Appendix]), which F. C. Cook, following Stickel, explains by the supposed Aramæan origin of the speaker; in this case, it would be a refinement of art which adds a fresh laurel to the crown of the poet. But the statement in xxxii. 2 is that Elihu was ‘the son of Barakel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram.’ That Ram = Aram is unproved; while Buz, as Jer. xxv. 23 shows, is the name of a genuine Arabian people. It would be better to explain the increased Aramaism by the lapse of a long interval in the writer’s life. This explanation is, to me, equivalent to assigning these speeches to a different writer (as I have remarked elsewhere, comparing Goethe’s Faust). Those who will may adopt it; but my own respect for the poet of Job will not allow me to believe that his taste had so much declined as to insert this inferior poem into his masterpiece.

(5) Elihu’s allusions to passages in the rest of the book (comp. xxxiii. 15 with iv. 13; xxxiv. 3 with xii. 11; xxxv. 5 with xxii. 12; xxxv. 8 with xxii. 2; xxxvii. 8 with xxxviii. 40) and his minute reproductions of sayings of Job (see xxxiii. 8, 9; xxxiv. 5, 6; xxxv. 2, 3) point to an author who had the book before him, so far as then known, as a whole.

(6) Elihu’s somewhat scrupulous piety, or shall I call it his advance in reverential, contrite devoutness? compared with the three friends, suggests that the poet of Elihu was the child of a later and more sombre generation which found the original book in some respects disappointing.