Good day, friend Job! thou art one of the most ancient originals of which books make mention; thou wast not a Jew; we know that the book which bears thy name is more ancient than the Pentateuch. If the Hebrews, who translated it from the Arabic, made use of the word "Jehovah" to signify God, they borrowed it from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, of which men of learning are assured. The word "Satan" was not Hebrew; it was Chaldæan, as is well known.
Thou dwelledst on the confines of Chaldæa. Commentators, worthy of their profession, pretend that thou didst believe in the resurrection, because, being prostrate on thy dunghill, thou hast said, in thy nineteenth chapter, that thou wouldst one day rise up from it. A patient who wishes his cure is not anxious for resurrection in lieu of it; but I would speak to thee of other things.
Confess that thou wast a great babbler; but thy friends were much greater. It is said that thou possessedst seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, one thousand cows, and five hundred she-asses. I will reckon up their value:
LIVRES
Seven thousand sheep, at three livres ten sous apiece 22,500
Three thousand camels at fifty crowns apiece 450,000
A thousand cows, one with the other, cannot
be valued at less 80,000
And five hundred she-asses, at twenty francs
an ass 10,000
The whole amounts to 562,500
without reckoning thy furniture, rings and jewels.
I have been much richer than thou; and though I have lost a great part of my property and am ill, like thyself I have not murmured against God, as thy friends seem to reproach thee with sometimes doing.
I am not at all pleased with Satan, who, to induce thee to sin, and to make thee forget God, demanded permission to take away all thy property, and to give thee the itch. It is in this state that men always have recourse to divinity. They are prosperous people who forgot God. Satan knew not enough of the world at that time; he has improved himself since; and when he would be sure of any one, he makes him a farmer-general, or something better if possible, as our friend Pope has clearly shown in his history of the knight Sir Balaam.
Thy wife was an impertinent, but thy pretended friends Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar, the Naamathite, were much more insupportable. They exhorted thee to patience in a manner that would have roused the mildest of men; they made thee long sermons more tiresome than those preached by the knave V——e at Amsterdam, and by so many other people.
It is true that thou didst not know what thou saidst, when exclaiming—"My God, am I a sea or a whale, to be shut up by Thee as in a prison?" But thy friends knew no more when they answered thee, "that the morn cannot become fresh without dew, and that the grass of the field cannot grow without water." Nothing is less consolatory than this axiom.
Zophar of Naamath reproached thee with being a prater; but none of these good friends lent thee a crown. I would not have treated thee thus. Nothing is more common than people who advise; nothing more rare than those who assist. Friends are not worth much, from whom we cannot procure a drop of broth if we are in misery. I imagine that when God restored thy riches and health, these eloquent personages dared not present themselves before thee, hence the comforters of Job have become a proverb.