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Easton's Bible Dictionary
A great diversity of opinion exists as to the authorship of this book. From internal
evidence, such as the similarity of sentiment and language to those in the Psalms
and Proverbs (see Psalms
88 and 89),
the prevalence of the idea of "wisdom," and the style and character of the composition,
it is supposed by some to have been written in the time of David and Solomon.
Others argue that it was written by Job himself, or by Elihu, or Isaiah, or perhaps
more probably by Moses, who was "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and
mighty in words and deeds" ( Acts
7:22 ). He had opportunities in Midian for obtaining the knowledge of the
facts related. But the authorship is altogether uncertain.
As to the character of the book, it is a historical poem, one of the greatest
and sublimest poems in all literature. Job was a historical person, and the localities
and names were real and not fictious. It is "one of the grandest portions of the
inspired Scriptures, a heavenly-repleished storehouse of comfort and instruction,
the patriarchal Bible, and a precious monument of primitive theology. It is to
the Old Testament what the Epistle to the Romans is to the New." It is a didactic
narrative in a dramatic form.
This book was apparently well known in the days of Ezekiel, B.C. 600 ( Ezekiel
14:14 ). It formed a part of the sacred Scriptures used by our Lord and his
apostles, and is referred to as a part of the inspired Word ( Hebrews
12:5 ; 1
Corinthians 3:19 ).
The subject of the book is the trial of Job, its occasion, nature, endurance,
and issue. It exhibits the harmony of the truths of revelation and the dealings
of Providence, which are seen to be at once inscrutable, just, and merciful. It
shows the blessedness of the truly pious, even amid sore afflictions, and thus
ministers comfort and hope to tried believers of every age. It is a book of manifold
instruction, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and
for instruction in righteousness ( 2
Timothy 3:16 ).
It consists of,
(1) An historical introduction in
prose (Job ch. 1
,
2).
(2) The controversy and its solution, in poetry (Job ch. 3
- 42:6).
). Job's desponding lamentation (ch. 3)
is the occasion of the controversy which is carried on in three courses of dialogues
between Job and his three friends. The first course gives the commencement of
the controversy (ch. 4
- 14);
the second the growth of the controversy (15
- 21);
and the third the height of the controversy (22
- 27).
This is followed by the solution of the controversy in the speeches of Elihu and
the address of Jehovah, followed by Job's humble confession ( 42:1
- 6
) of his own fault and folly.
(3) The third division is the historical conclusion, in prose ( Job
42:7 - 15
). |
Sir J. W. Dawson in "The Expositor" says: "It would now seem that the language
and theology of the book of Job can be better explained by supposing it to be
a portion of Minean [Southern Arabia] literature obtained by Moses in Midian than
in any other way. This view also agrees better than any other with its references
to natural objects, the art of mining, and other matters."
Hitchcock's Dictionary of Bible Names
(no entry)
Smith's Bible Dictionary
This book has given rise to much discussion and criticism,
some believing the book to be strictly historical; others a religious fiction;
others a composition based upon facts. By some the authorship of the work was
attributed to Moses, but it is very uncertain. Luther first suggested the theory
which, in some form or other, is now most generally received. He says, "I look
upon the book of Job as a true history, yet I do not believe that all took place
just as it is written, but that an ingenious, pious and learned man brought it
into its present form."
The date of the book is doubtful, and there have been many theories upon the subject.
It may be regarded as a settled point that the book was written long before the
exile, probably between the birth of Abraham and the exodus of the Israelites
from Egypt --B.C. 2000-1800. If by Moses, it was probably written during his sojourn
in Midian.
"The book of Job is not only one of the most remarkable in the Bible, but in literature.
As was said of Goliaths sword, There is none like it; none in ancient or in modern
literature." --Kitto. "A book which will one day, perhaps, be seen towering up
alone far above all the poetry of the world." --J.A. Froude. "The book of Job
is a drama, and yet subjectively true. The two ideas are perfectly consistent.
It may have the dramatic form, the dramatic interest, the dramatic emotion, and
yet be substantially a truthful narrative. The author may have received it in
one of three ways: the writer may have been an eyewitness; or have received it
from near contemporary testimony; or it may have reached him through a tradition
of whose substantial truthfulness he has no doubt. There is abundant internal
evidence that the scenes and events recorded were real scenes and real events
to the writer. He gives the discussions either as he had heard them or as they
had been repeated over and over in many an ancient consensus . The very modes
of transmission show the deep impression it had made in all the East, as a veritable
as well as marvellous event." --Tayler Lewis. the design of the book. --Stanley
says that "The whole book is a discussion of that great problem of human life:
what is the intention of Divine Providence in allowing the good to suffer?" "The
direct object is to show that, although goodness has a natural tendency to secure
a full measure of temporal happiness, yet that in its essence it is independent
of such a result. Selfishness in some form is declared to be the basis on which
all apparent goodness rests. That question is tried in the case of Job." --Cook.
Structure of the book .-
The book consists of five parts: --
I. Chs. 1-3. The historical facts.
II. Chs. 4-31. The discussions between Job and his three friends.
III. Chs. 32-37. Jobs discussion with Elihu.
IV. Chs. 38-41. The theophany --God speaking out of the storm.
V. Ch. 42. The successful termination of the trial. It is all in poetry except
the introduction and the close. |
The argument .--
One question could be raised by envy: may not the goodness which secures such
direct and tangible rewards be a refined form of selfishness? Satan, the accusing
angel, suggests the doubt, "Doth Job fear God for nought ?" and asserts boldly
that if those external blessings were withdrawn, Job would cast off his allegiance"
he will curse thee to thy face." The problem is thus distinctly propounded which
this book is intended to discuss and solve: can goodness exist irrespective of
reward ? The accuser receives permission to make the trial. He destroys Jobs property,
then his children; and afterward, to leave no possible opening for a cavil, is
allowed to inflict upon him the most terrible disease known in the East. Jobs
wife breaks down entirely under the trial. Job remains steadfast. The question
raised by Satan is answered.
Then follows a discussion which arises in the most natural manner from a visit
of condolence on the part of three men who represent the wisdom and experience
of the age. Jobs friends hold the theory that there is an exact and invariable
correlation between sin and suffering. The fact of suffering proves the commission
of some special sin. They apply this to Job, but he disavows all special guilt.
He denies that punishment in this life inevitably follows upon guilt, or proves
its commission. He appeals to facts. Bad men do sometimes prosper. Here, at ch.
14, there is a pause. In the second colloquy the three friends take more advanced
ground. They assume that Job has been actually guilty of sins, and that the sufferings
and losses of Job are but an inadequate retribution for former sins. This series
of accusations brings out the in most thoughts of Job. He recognizes Gods hand
in his afflictions, but denies they are brought on by wrong-doing; and becomes
still clearer in the view that only the future life can vindicate Gods justice.
In his last two discourses, chs. 26 - 31, he states with incomparable force and
eloquence his opinion of the chief point of the controversy: man cannot comprehend
Gods ways; destruction sooner or later awaits the wicked; wisdom consists wholly
in the fear of the Lord and departing from evil."--Cook.
Elihu sums up the argument "The leading principle of Elihus statement is that
calamity, in the shape of triad, is inflicted on comparatively the best of men;
but that God allows a favorable turn to take place as soon as its object has been
realized." The last words are evidently spoken while a violent storm is coming
on.
It is obvious that many weighty truths have been developed in the course of the
discussion: nearly every theory of the objects and uses of suffering has been
reviewed, while a great advance has been made toward the apprehension of doctrines
hereafter to be revealed, such as were known only to God. But the mystery is not
us yet really cleared up; hence the necessity for the theophany. ch. ( Job 38:41
) From the midst of the storm Jehovah speaks. In language of incomparable grandeur
he reproves and silences the murmurs of Job. God does not condescend, strictly
speaking to argue with his creatures. The speculative questions discussed in the
colloquy are unnoticed, but the declaration of Gods absolute power is illustrated
by a marvellously beautiful and comprehensive survey of the glory of creation
and his all-embracing providence. A second address completes the work. It proves
that a charge of injustice against God involves the consequence that the accuser
is more competent that he to rule the universe.
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
I. Introductory.
1. Place in the Canon:
The greatest production of the Hebrew Wisdom literature, and one of the supreme
literary creations of the world. Its place in the Hebrew Canon corresponds to
the high estimation in which it was held; it stands in the 3rd section, the "writings"
(kethubhim) or Hagiographa, next after the two great anthologies Psalms and Proverbs;
apparently put thus near the head of the list for weighty reading and meditation.
In the Greek Canon (which ours follows), it is put with the poetical books, standing
at their head. It is one of 3 Scripture books, the others being Psalms and Proverbs,
for which the later Hebrew scholars (the Massoretes) employed a special system
of punctuation to mark its poetic character.
2. Rank and Readers:
The Book of Job was not one of the books designated for public reading in the
synagogues, as were the Pentateuch and the Prophets, or for occasional reading
at feast seasons, as were the 5 megilloth or rolls. It was rather a book for private
reading, and one whose subject-matter would appeal especially to the more cultivated
and thoughtful classes. Doubtless it was all the more intimately valued for this
detachment from sanctuary associations; it was, like Proverbs, a people's book;
and especially among the cultivators of Wisdom it must have been from its first
publication a cherished classic. At any rate, the patriarch Job (though whether
from the legend or from the finished book is not clear; see JOB) is mentioned
as a well-known national type by Ezekiel 14:14 , 20 ; and James, writing to Jewish
Christians (James 5:11), refers to the character of patriarch as familiar to his
readers. It was as one of the great classic stories of their literature, rather
than as embodying a ritual or prophetic standard, that it was so universally known
and cherished. |
II. The Literary Framework.
In view of the numerous critical questions by which the
interpretation of the book has been beclouded--questions of later alterations,
additions, corruptions, dislocations--it may be well to say at the outset that
what is here proposed is to consider the Book of Job as we have it before us today,
in its latest and presumably definitive edition. It will be time enough to remove
excrescences when a fair view of the book as it is, with its literary values and
relations, makes us sure that there are such; see III, below. Meanwhile, as a
book that has reached a stage so fixed and finished that at any rate modern tinkering
cannot materially change it, we may consider what its literary framework does
to justify itself. And first of all, we may note that preeminently among Scripture
books it bears the matured literary stamp; both in style and structure it is a
work, not only of spiritual edification, but of finished literary article This
may best be realized, perhaps, by taking it, as from the beginning it purports
to be, as a continuously maintained story, with the consistent elements of plot,
character scheme, and narrative movement which we naturally associate with a work
of the narrator's article
1. Setting of Time, Place and Scene:
The story of the Book of Job is laid in the far-off patriarchal age, such a time
as we find elsewhere represented only in the Book of Genesis; a time long before
the Israelite state, with its religious, social and political organization, existed.
Its place is "the land of Uz," a little-known region Southeast of Palestine, on
the borders of Edom; a place remote from the ways of thinking peculiar to Israelite
lawgivers, priests and prophets. Its scene is in the free open country, among
mountains, wadies, pasture-lands, and rural towns, where the relations of man
and man are more elemental and primitive, and where the things of God are more
intimately apprehended than in the complex affairs of city and state. It is easy
to see what the writer gains by such a choice of setting. The patriarchal conditions,
wherein the family is the social and communal unit, enable him to portray worship
and conduct in their primal elements: religious rites of the simplest nature,
with the family head the unchallenged priest and intercessor (compare Job 1:4
, 5 ; 42:8),
and without the austere exactions of sanctuary or temple; to represent God, as
in the old folk-stories, as communicating with men in audible voice and in tempest;
and to give to the patriarch or sheikh a function of counsel and succor in the
community analogous to that of the later wise man or sage (compare Job
29). The place outside the bounds of Palestine enables him to give an international
or rather intercommunal tissue to his thought, as befits the character of the
wisdom with which he is dealing, a strain of truth which Israel could and did
share with neighbor nations. This is made further evident by the fact that in
the discourses of the book, the designation of God is not Yahweh (with one exception,
Job 12:9), but 'Elohim or 'Eloah or Shaddai, appellatives rather than names,
common to the Semitic peoples. The whole archaic scene serves to detach the story
from complex conditions of civilization, and enables the writer to deal with the
inherent and intrinsic elements of manhood.
2. Characters and Personality:
All the characters of the story, Job included, are from non-Palestinian regions.
The chief spokes-man of the friends, Eliphaz, who is from Teman, is perhaps intended
to represent a type of the standard and orthodox wisdom of the day; Teman, and
Edom in general being famed for wisdom (Jeremiah 49:7 ; Obadiah
1:8,9).
The characters of the friends, while representing in general a remarkable uniformity
of tenet, are quite aptly individualized:
Eliphaz as a venerable and devout sage who, with his eminent penetrativeness of
insight, combines a yearning compassion; Bildad more as a scholar versed in the
derived lore of tradition; and Zophar more impetuous and dogmatic, with the dogmatist's
vein of intolerance. In Elihu, the young Aramean who speaks after the others,
the writer seems endeavoring to portray a young man's positiveness and absoluteness
of conviction, and with it a self-conceit that quite outruns his ability. The
Satan of the Prologue, who makes the wager with Yahweh, is masterfully individualized,
not as the malignant tempter and enemy of mankind, but as a spirit compact of
impudent skepticism, who can appreciate no motive beyond self-advantage. Even
the wife of Job, with her peremptory disposition to make his affliction a personal
issue with God, is not without an authentic touch of the elemental feminine. But
high above them all is the character of Job himself, which, with all its stormy
alternations of mood, range of assertion and remonstrance and growth of new conviction,
remains absolutely consistent with itself. Nor can we leave unmentioned what is
perhaps the hardest achievement of all, the sublime venture of giving the very
words of God, in such a way that He speaks no word out of character nor measures
His thought according to the standards of men.
3. Form and Style:
The Prologue, Job 1 and 2, a few verses at the beginning of chapter 32 (verses
1-6a), and the Epilogue (42:7
- 17) are written in narrative prose. The rest of the book (except the short sentences
introducing the speakers) is in poetry; a poetic tissue conforming to the type
of the later mashal (see under PROVERB), which, in continuous series of couplets,
is admirably adapted alike to imaginative sublimity and impassioned address. Beginning
with Job's curse of his day (Job 3), Job and his three friends answer each other
back and forth in three rounds of speeches, complete except that, for reasons
which the subject makes apparent, Zophar, the third friend, fails to speak the
third time. After the friends are thus put to silence, Job speaks three times
in succession (Job
26:1 - 31:40),
and then "the words of Job are ended." At this point (Job
32) a fourth speaker, Elihu, hitherto unmentioned, is introduced and speaks
four times, when he abruptly ceases in terror at an approaching whirlwind (37:24).
Yahweh speaks from the whirlwind, two speeches, each of which Job answers briefly
(40:3
- 5; 42:1
- 6), or rather declines to answer. Such, which we may summarize in Prologue (Job
1 ; 2),
Body of Discussion (3
- 42:6), and Epilogue (42:7-17),
is the literary framework of the book. The substance of the book is in a way dramatic;
it cannot, however, be called so truly a drama as a kind of forum of debate; its
movement is too rigid for dramatic action, and it lacks besides the give-and-take
of dialogue. In a book of mine published some years ago I ventured to call it
"the Epic of the Inner Life," epic not so much in the technical sense, as in recognition
of an underlying epos which for fundamental significance may be compared to the
story underlying the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. It will not do, however, to
make too much of either of these forms as designating the Book of Job; either
term has to be accommodated almost out of recognition, because the Hebrew literary
forms were not conceived according to the Greek categories from which our terms
"epic" and "dramatic" are derived. A greater limitation on our appreciation of
its form, I think, is imposed by those who regard it as a mixture of forms. It
is too generally divided between narrative and didactic debate. To the Hebrew
mind it was all a continuous narrative, in which the poetic discussion, though
overweighting the current of visualized action, had nevertheless the movement
and value of real events. It is in this light, rather than in the didactic, that
we may most profitably regard it. |
III. The Course of the Story.
To divide the story of Job into 42 parts, according to the 42 numbered chapters,
is in the last degree arbitrary. Nothing comes of it except convenience in reading
for those who wish to take their Job in little detached bits. The chapter division
was no part of the original, and a very insignificant step in the later apprehension
of the original. To divide according to the speeches of the interlocutors is better;
it helps us realize how the conflict of views brought the various phases of the
thought to expression; but this too, with its tempting, three-times-three, turns
out to be merely a framework; it corresponds only imperfectly with the true inwardness
of the story's movement; it is rather a scheme than a continuity. We are to bear
in mind that this Book of Job is fundamentally the inner experience of one man,
as he rises from the depths of spiritual gloom and doubt to a majestic table-land
of new insight and faith; the other characters are but ancillary, helps and foils,
whose function is subordinate and relative. Hence, mindful of this inwardness
of Job's experience, I have ventured to trace the story in 5 main stages, naming
them according to the landing-stage attained in each.
A) To Job's Blessing and Curse:
1. His "Autumn Days":
The story begins (Job
1:1 - 5) with a brief description of Job as he was before his trial began;
the elements of his life, outer and inner, on which is to be raised the question
of motive. A prosperous landholder of the land of Uz, distinguished far and wide
as the greatest (i.e. richest) of the sons of the East, his inner character corresponds:
to all appearance nothing lacking, a man "perfect and upright, and one that feared
God, and turned away from evil." The typical Hebrew blessings of life were his
to the full: wealth, honor, health, family. He is evidently set before us as the
perfect example of the validity of the established Wisdom-tenet, that righteousness
and Wisdom are identical (see under PROVERBS, THE BOOK OF), and that this is manifest
in its visible rewards. This period of his life Job describes afterward by retrospect
as his "autumn days," when the friendship or intimacy (coah) of God was over his
tent (see Job 29:4, and the whole chapter). Nor are we left without a glimpse
into his heart: his constant attitude of worship, and his tender solicitude lest,
in their enjoyment of the pleasures of life, his sons may have been disloyal to
God (Job
1:4 , 5).
It is easy to see that not Job alone, but Wisdom as embodied in Job, is postulated
here for its supreme test.
2. The Wager in Heaven:
Nor is the test delayed, or its ground ambiguous when it comes. Satan proposes
it. Two scenes are given (Job
1:6 - 12 ; 2:1
- 6) from the court of God, wherever that is; for they are overheard by the reader,
not seen, and of course neither Job nor any inhabitant of earth is aware of them.
In these scenes the sons of God, the spirits who rejoiced over creation (Job
38:7), are come together to render report, and Satan, uninvited, enters among
them. He is a wandering spirit, unanchored to any allegiance, who roams through
the earth, prying and criticizing. There is nothing, it would seem, in which he
cannot find some flaw or discount. To Yahweh's question if he has considered Job,
the man perfect and upright, he makes no denial of the fact, but raises the issue
of motive:
"Doth Job fear God for nought?" and urges that Job's integrity is after all only
a transparent bargain, a paying investment with only reward in view. It is virtually
an arraignment both of God's order and of the essential human character: of God's
order in connecting righteousness so intimately with gain; and of the essential
human character, virtually denying that there is such a thing as disinterested,
intrinsic human virtue. The sneer strikes deep, and Job, the perfect embodiment
of human virtue, is its designated victim. Satan proposes a wager, to the issue
of which Yahweh commits Himself. The trial of Job is carried out in two stages:
first against his property and family, with the stipulation that it is not to
touch him; and then, this failing to detach him from his allegiance, against his
person in sore disease, with the stipulation that his life is to be spared. Yahweh
acknowledges that for once He is consenting to an injustice (2:3),
and Satan, liar that he is, uses instrumentalities that men have ascribed to God
alone: the first time, tempest and lightning (as well as murderous foray), the
second time, the black leprosy, a fell disease, loathsome and deadly, which, in
men's minds meant the immediate punitive stroke of God. The evil is as absolute
as was the reward; a complete reversal of the order in which men's wisdom had
come to trust. But in the immediate result, Yahweh's faith in His noblest creature
is vindicated. Urged by his wife in his extremity to "curse God and die," Job
remains true to his allegiance; and in his staunch utterance, "Yahweh gave, and
Yahweh hath taken away; blessed be the name of Yahweh," Job, as the writer puts
it, 'sinned not, nor attributed aught unbeseeming (tiphalah, literally, "tasteless")
to God.' Such is the first onset of Job's affliction and its result. It remains
to be seen what the long issue, days and months of wretchedness, will bring forth.
3. The Silent Friends:
We are now to imagine the lapse of some time, perhaps several months (compare
Job
7:3), during which Job suffers alone, an outcast from house and society, on
a leper's ash-heap. Meanwhile three friends of his who have heard of his affliction
make an appointment together and come from distant regions to give him sympathy
and comfort (Job
2:11 - 13). On arriving, however, they find things different from what they
had expected; perhaps the ominous nature of his disease has developed since they
started. What they find is a man wretched and outcast, with a disease (elephantiasis)
which to them can mean nothing but the immediate vengeance of God. The awful sight
gives them pause. Instead of condoling with him, they sit silent and dismayed,
and for seven days and nights no word is spoken (compare Isaiah 53:3). What they
were debating with themselves during that time is betrayed by the after-course
of the story. How can they bless one whom God has stamped with His curse? To do
so would be taking sides with the wicked. Is it not rather their duty to side
with God, and be safe, and let sympathy go? By this introduction of the friends
and their averted attitude, the writer with consummate skill brings a new element
into the story, the element of the Wisdom-philosophy; and time will show whether
as a theoretical thing, cold and intellectual, it will retain or repress the natural
outwelling of human friendship. And this silence is ominous.
4. Whose Way Is Hid:
The man who, in the first onset of trial, blessed Yahweh and set himself to bear
in silence now opens his mouth to curse. His curse is directed, not against Yahweh
nor against the order of things, but against the day of his birth. It is a day
that has ceased to have meaning or worth for him. The day stands for life, for
his individual life, a life that in the order of things should carry out the personal
promise and fruitage for which it had been bestowed. And his quarrel with it is
that he has lost its clue. Satan unknown to him has sneered because Yahweh had
hedged him round with protection and favor (Job
1:10); but his complaint is that all this is removed without cause, and God
has hedged him round with darkness. His way is hid (Job
3:23). Why then was life given at all? In all this, it will be noted, he raises
no train of introspection to account for his condition; he assumes no sinfulness,
nor even natural human depravity; the opposite rather, for a baffling element
of his case is his shrinking sensitiveness against evil and disloyalty (compare
Job
3:25 ,
26, in which the tenses should be past, with Job
1:5; see also 6:30;
16:17).
His plight has become sharply, poignantly objective; his inner self has no part
in it. Thus in this opening speech he strikes the keynote of the real, against
which the friends' theories rage and in the end wreck themselves. |
B) To Job's Ultimatum of Protest:
1. The Veiled Impeachment:
With all the gentle regret of having to urge a disagreeable truth the friends,
beginning with Eliphaz the wisest and most venerable, enter upon their theory
of the case. Eliphaz covers virtually the whole ground; the others come in mainly
to echo or emphasize. He veils his reproof in general and implicatory terms, the
seasoned terms of wisdom in which Job himself is expert (Job 4:3
- 5); reminds him that no righteous man perishes, but that men reap what they
sow (Job
4:7 , 8); adduces a vision that he had had which revealed to him that man,
by the very fact of being mortal, is impure and iniquitous (Job
4:17 - 19); implies that Job's turbulence of mind precludes him from similar
revelations, and jeopardizes his soul (Job
5:1 , 2); advises him to commit his case to God, with the implication, however,
that it is a case needing correction rather than justification, and that the result
in view is restored comfort and prosperity. As Job answers with a more passionate
and detailed portrayal of his wrong, Bildad, following, abandons the indirect
impeachment and attributes the children's death to their sin (Job
8:4), saying also that if Job were pure and upright he might supplicate and
regain God's favor (Job
8:5 , 6). He then goes on to draw a lesson from the traditional Wisdom lore,
to the effect that sure destruction awaits the wicked and sure felicity the righteous
(Job
8:11 - 22). On Job's following this with his most positive arraignment of
God's order and claim for light, Zophar replies with impetuous heat, averring
that Job's punishment is less than he deserves (Job
11:6), and reproving him for his presumption in trying to find the secret
of God (Job
11:7 - 12). All three of the friends, with increasing emphasis, end their
admonitions in much the same way; promising Job reinstatement in God's favor,
but always with the veiled implication that he must own to iniquity and entreat
as a sinner.
2. Wisdom Insipid, Friends Doubtful:
To the general maxims of Wisdom urged against him, with which he is already familiar
(compare Job
13:2), Job's objection is not that they are untrue, but that they are insipid
(Job
6:6 , 7); they have lost their application to the case. Yet it is pain to
him to think that the words of the Holy One should fail; he longs to die rather
than deny them (Job
6:9 , 10). One poignant element of his sorrow is that the intuitive sense
(tushiyah; see under PROVERBS, THE BOOK OF) is driven away from him; see Job
6:13. He is irritated by the insinuating way in which the friends beg the
question of his guilt; longs for forthright and sincere words (Job
6:25). It is this quality of their speech, in fact, which adds the bitterest
drop to his cup; his friends, on whom he had counted for support, are deceitful
like a dried-up brook (Job
6:15 - 20); he feels, in his sick sensitiveness, that they are not sympathizing
with him but using him for their cold, calculating purposes (Job 6:27).
Thus is introduced one of the most potent motives of the story, the motive of
friendship; much will come of it when from the fallible friendships of earth he
conquers his way by faith to a friendship in the unseen (compare Job
16:19 ; 19:27).
3. Crookedness of the Order of things:
With the sense that the old theories have become stale and pointless, though his
discernment of the evil of things is undulled by sin (Job
6:30), Job arrives at an extremely poignant realization of the hardness and
crookedness of the world-order, the result both of what the friends are saying
and of what he has always held in common with them. It is the view that is forced
upon him by the sense that he is unjustly dealt with by a God who renders no reasons,
who on the score of justice vouchsafes to man neither insight nor recourse, and
whose severity is out of all proportion to man's sense of worth (Job
7:17) or right (9:17)
or claim as a creature of His hand (Job
10:8 - 14). Job 9, which contains Job's direct address to this arbitrary Being,
is one of the most tremendous, not to say audacious conceptions in literature;
in which a mortal on the threshold of death takes upon himself to read God a lesson
in godlikeness. In this part of the story Job reaches his ultimatum of protest;
a protest amazingly sincere, but not blasphemous when we realize that it is made
in the interest of the Godlike.
4. No Mediation in Sight:
The great lack which Job feels in his arraignment of God is the lack of mediation
between Creator and creature, the Oppressor and His victim. There is no umpire
between them, who might lay his hand upon both, so that the wronged one might
have voice in the matter (Job
9:32 - 35). The two things that an umpire might do: to remove God's afflicting
hand, and to prevent God's terror from unmanning His victim (see Job
13:20 - 22, as compared with the passage just cited), are the great need to
restore normal and reciprocal relations with Him whose demand of righteousness
is so inexorable. This umpire or advocate idea, thus propounded negatively, will
grow to a sublime positive conviction in the next stage of Job's spiritual progress
(Job
16:19 ; 19:25
- 27).) |
C) To Job's Ultimatum of Faith:
1. Detecting the Friends' False Note:
As the friends finish their first round of speeches, in which a remote and arbitrary
God is urged upon him as everything, and man so corrupt and blind that he cannot
but be a worm and culprit (compare Job 25:4 - 6), Job's eyes, which hitherto have
seen with theirs, are suddenly opened. His first complaint of their professed
friendship was that it was fallible; instead of sticking to him when he needed
them most (Job 6:14), and in spite of his bewilderment (Job 6:26), they were making
it virtually an article of traffic (Job 6:27), as if it were a thing for their
gain. It was not sincere, not intrinsic to their nature, but an expedient. And
now all at once he penetrates to its motive. They are deserting him in order to
curry favor with God. That motive has prevented them from seeing true; they see
only their theoretical God, and are respecting His person instead of responding
to the inner dictate of truth and integrity. To his honest heart this is monstrous;
they ought to be afraid of taking falseness for God (Job
13:3 - 12). Nor does his inference stop with thus detecting their false note.
If they are "forgers of lies" in this respect, what of all their words of wisdom?
they have been giving him "proverbs of ashes" (Job 13:12); the note of false implication
is in them all. From this point therefore he pays little attention to what they
say; lets them go on to grossly exaggerated statement of their tenet, while he
opens a new way of faith for himself, developing the germs of insight that have
come to him.
2. Staking All on Integrity:
Having cut loose from all countenancing of the friends' self-interested motives,
Job now, with the desperate sense of taking his life in his hand and abandoning
hope, resolves that come what will he will maintain his ways to God's face. This,
as he believes, is not only the one course for his integrity, but his one plea
of salvation, for no false one shall appear before him. How tremendous the meaning
of this resolve, we can think when we reflect how he has just taken God in hand
to amend His supposed iniquitous order of things; and that he is now, without
mediator, pleading the privilege that a mediator would secure (Job 13:20 , 21
; see 8, above) and urging a hearing on his own charges. The whole reach of his
sublime faith is involved in this.
3. "If a Man Die":
In two directions his faith is reaching out; in both negatively at first. One,
the belief in an Advocate, has already been broached, and is germinating from
negative to positive. The other, the question of life after death, rises here
in the same tentative way: using first the analogy of the tree which sprouts again
after it is cut down (Job 14:7 - 9), and from it inquiring, 'If a man die--might
he live again?' and dwelling in fervid imagination on the ideal solution which
a survival of death would bring (Job 14:13 - 17), but returning to his reluctant
negative, from the analogy of drying waters (Job 14:11) and the slow wearing down
of mountains (Job 14:18 , 19). As yet he can treat the idea only as a fancy; not
yet a hope or a grounded conviction.
4. The Surviving Next of Kin:
The conviction comes by a nobler way than fancy, by the way of his personal sense
of the just and God-like order. The friends in their second round of speeches
have begun their lurid portrayals of the wicked man's awful fate; but until all
have spoken again he is concerned with a far more momentous matter. Dismissing
these for the present as an academic exercise composed in cold blood (Job 16:4,5),
and evincing a heart hid from understanding (Job 17:4), Job goes on to recount
in the most bitter terms he has yet used the flagrancy of his wrong as something
that calls out for expiation like the blood of Cain (Job 16:18), and breaks out
with the conviction that his witness and voucher who will hear his prayer for
mediation is on high (Job 16:19 - 21). Then after Bildad in a spiteful retort
has matched his complaint with a description of the calamities of the wicked (an
augmented echo of Eliphaz), and he has pathetically bewailed the treachery of
earthly friends (Job 19:13 , 14 , 21 , 22), he mounts, as it were, at a bound
to the sublime ultimatum of his faith in an utterance which he would fain see
engraved on the rock forever (Job 19:23 - 29). "I know that my Redeemer liveth,"
he exclaims; literally, my Go'el (go'ali), or next of kin, the person whose business
in the old Hebrew idea was to maintain the rights of an innocent wronged one and
avenge his blood. He does not recede from the idea that his wrong is from God
(compare Job 19:6 , 21); but over his dust stands his next of kin, and as the
result of this one's intercession Job, in his own integral person, shall see God
no more a stranger. So confident is he that he solemnly warns the friends who
have falsely impeached him that it is they, not he, who are in peril (Job 19:28
, 29 ; compare 13:10 , 11). |
D) To Job's Verdict on Things as They Are:
1. Climax and Subsidence of the Friends' Charge:
That in this conviction of a living Redeemer Job's faith has reached firm and
final ground is evident from the fact that he does not recur to his old doubts
at all. They are settled, and settled right. But now, leaving them, he can attend
to what the friends have been saying. Zophar, the third speaker, following, presses
to vehement, extreme their iterated portrayal of the wicked man's terrific woes;
it seems the design of the writer to make them outdo themselves in frantic overstatement
of their thesis. As Zophar ceases, and Job has thus, as it were, drawn all their
fire, Job refutes them squarely, as we shall presently see. Meanwhile, in the
course of his extended refutation, the friends begin a third round of speeches.
Eliphaz, who has already taken alarm at the tendency of Job's words, as those
of a depraved skeptic and ruinous to devotion (Job 15:4 - 6), now in the interests
of his orthodoxy brings in his bill of particulars. It is the kind of theoretical
cant that has had large prevalence in dogmatic religion, but in Job's case atrociously
false. He accuses Job of the most heartless cruelties and frauds (Job 22:5 - 11),
and of taking occasion to indulge in secret wickedness when God was not looking
(Job 22:12 - 14); to this it is that he attributes the spiritual darkness with
which Job is encompassed. Then in a beautiful exhortation--beautiful when we forget
its unreal condition (Job 22:23)--he ends by holding open to Job The way of reinstatement
and peace. This is the last word of the friends that has any weight. Bildad follows
Job's next speech indeed very briefly (Job 25), giving a last feeble echo of their
doctrine of total depravity; a reply which Job ridicules and carries on in a kind
of parody (Job 26). Zophar does not speak a third time at all. He has nothing
to say. And this silence of his is the writer's way of making the friends' theory
subside ingloriously.
2. The Real Cause of Job's Dismay:
The idea that Job has a defensible cause or sees farther than they is wholly lost
on the friends; to them he is simply a wicked man tormented by the consciousness
of guilt, and they attribute the tumult of his thoughts to a wrath, or vexation,
which blinds and imperils his soul (compare Job 5:2;
18:4). That is not the cause of his dismay at all, nor is it merely that his personal
fate is inscrutable (compare Job 23:17 margin).
He is confounded rather, even to horror, because the probable facts of the world-order
prove the utter falsity of all that they allege. Leaving his case, the righteous
man's, out of the account, he sees the wicked just as prosperous, just as secure,
just as honored in life and death, as the righteous (Job
21:5 - 15, 29 - 33). The friends ought to see so plain a fact as well as
he (Job 21:29). To all outward appearance there
is absolutely no diversity of fate between righteous and wicked (Job
21:23 - 26). The friends' cut-and-dried Wisdom-doctrine and their thrifty
haste to justify God (compare Job 13:7,8) have
landed them in a lie; the truth is that God has left His times mysterious to men
(Job 24:1). They may as well own to the full the
baffling fact of the impunity of wickedness; the whole of Job 24 is taken up with
details of it. Wisdom, with its rigid law of reward and punishment, has failed
to penetrate the secret. A hard regime of justice, work and wage, conduct and
desert, does not sound the deep truth of God's dealings, either with righteous
or wicked. What then? Shall Wisdom go, or shall it rise to a higher level of outlook
and insight?
3. Manhood in the Ore:
In some such dim inquiry as this, it would seem, Job goes on from where his friends
sit silenced to figure some positive solution of things as they are. He begins
with himself and his steadfastly held integrity, sealing his utterance by the
solemn Hebrew oath (Job 27:2 - 6), and as solemnly disavowing all part or sympathy
with the wicked (Job 27:7; compare 21:16). He has already found a meaning in his
own searching experience; he is being tried for a sublime assay, in which all
that is permanent and precious in him shall come out as gold (Job 23:10). But
this thought of manhood in the ore is no monopoly of his; it may hold for all.
What then of the wicked? In a passage which some have deemed the lost third speech
of Zophar (Job 27:8 - 23), and which, indeed, recounts what all the friends have
seen (Job 27:12), he sets forth the case of the wicked in its true light. The
gist of it is that the wicked have not the joy of God (Job 27:10), or the peace
of a permanent hope. It is in much the same tone as the friends' diatribes, but
with a distinct advance from outward disaster toward tendency and futility. The
ore is not being purged for a noble assay; and this will work their woe. Then
finally, in the celebrated Job 28, comes up the summary of wisdom itself. That
remains, after all this testing of motive, a thing intact and elemental; and man's
part in it is just what Job's life has been, to fear God and shun evil (Job 28:28).
4. Job Reads His Indictment:
As the crowning pronouncement on things as they are, Job in his final and longest
speech, describes in a beautiful retrospect his past life, from his "autumn days"
when the friendship of God was over his tent and he was a counselor and benefactor
among men (Job 29), through this contrasted time of his wretchedness and curse-betraying
disease, when the most degraded despise him (Job 30), until now as he draws consciously
near the grave, he recounts in solemn review the principles and virtues that have
guided his conduct--a noble summary of the highest Hebrew ideals of character
(Job 31). This he calls, in sublime irony, the indictment which his Adversary
has written; and like a prince, bearing it upon his shoulder and binding it to
him like a crown, he is ready to take it with him beyond the bourn to the presence
of his Judge. With this tremendous proposal, sanctioned Hebrew-fashion by a final
curse if it prove false, the words of Job are ended. |
E) The Denoucement:
The friends are silenced, not enlightened. They have clung to their hard thesis
to the stubborn end; postulating enough overt crime on Job's part to kill him
(Job 22:5 - 9), and clinching their hypothesis with their theory of innate depravity
(Job 4:18 ,19 ; 15:14 ,15 ; 25:4 - 6) and spiritual hebetude (Job 5:2 ; 15:26
, 27 ; 22:10 , 11); but toward Job's higher level of honest integrity and exploring
faith they have not advanced one inch; and here they lie, fossilized dogmatists,
fixed and inveterate in their odium theologicum--a far cry from the friendship
that came from afar to condole and console. Job, on the other hand, staking all
on the issue of his integrity, has held on his way in sturdy consistency (compare
Job 17:9), and stood his ground before the enigma
of things as they are. Both parties have said their say; the story is evidently
ready for its denouement. Job, too, is ready for the determining word, though
it would seem he expects it to be spoken only in some unseen tribunal; the friends
rather savagely wish that God would speak and reprove Job for his presumption
(compare Job 11:5 , 11). But how shall the solution
be brought about in this land of Uz where all may see? And above all, how shall
it affect the parties concerned? A skillfully told story should not leave this
out.
1. The Self-constituted Interpreter:
For this determining pronouncement the writer has chosen to have both parties
definitely represented, apparently at their best. So, instead of proceeding at
once to the summons from the whirlwind, he introduces here a new character, Elihu,
a young man, who has listened with growing impatience to the fruitless discussion,
and now must set both parties right or burst (Job 32:19). It is like the infusion
of young blood into a theodicy too arrogant in its antiquity (compare Job 8:8
- 10 ; 15:10 , 18 ; 12:12 margin, or better as question). This character of Elihu
is conceived in a spirit of satire, not without a dash of grim humor. His self-confidence,
not to say conceit, is strongly accentuated (Job 32:11 - 22); he assumes the umpire
function for which Job has pleaded (Job 33:6 ,
7 ; compare 9:33 - 35 ; 13:20 - 22); and is sure he represents the perfect in
knowledge (Job 36:2 - 4 ; 37:16). He speaks four
times, addressing himself alternately to Job and the friends. His words, though
designedly diffuse, are not without wisdom and beauty; he makes less of Job's
deep-seated iniquity than do the friends, but blames him for speaking in the wicked
man's idiom (Job 34:7 - 9 , 36 , 37), and warns
him against inclining more to iniquity than submission (Job
36:21); but his positive contribution to the discussion is the view he
holds of the chastening influence of dreams and visions (Job
33:14 - 18; compare 7:13 - 15), and of the pains of disease (Job
33:19 - 28), especially if the sufferer has an "angel (messenger) interpreter"
to reveal its meaning, such a one perhaps as Elihu feels himself to be. As he
proceeds in his speech, his words indicate that a storm is rising; and so long
as it is distant he employs it to descant on the wonders of God in Nature, wonders
which to him mean little more than arbitrary marvels of power; but as it approaches
nearer and shows exceptional phenomena as of a theophany, his words become incoherent,
and he breaks off with an abject attempt to disclaim his pretensions. Such is
the effect, with him, of the near presence of God. It overwhelms, paralyzes, stops
the presumptuous currents of life.
2. The Whirlwind and the Voice:
The writer of the book has not committed the literary fatuity of describing the
whirlwind, except as Elihu has seen its oncoming, first with conceit of knowledge,
then with wild access of terror--a description in which his essentially vapid
personality is reflected. For the readers the significance of the whirlwind is
in the Voice it encloses, the thing it says. And here the writer has undertaken
the most tremendous task ever attempted by the human imagination: to make the
Almighty speak, and speak in character. And one fatuity at least he has escaped;
he has not made God bandy arguments with men, or piece together the shifting premises
of logic. The whole of the two discourses from the whirlwind is descriptive; a
recounting of observable phenomena of created nature, from the great elemental
things, earth and sea and light and star and storm, to the varied wonders of animal
nature--all things in which the questing mind of man may share, laying hold in
his degree on its meaning or mystery. Thus, as a sheer literary personation, it
fails at no point of the Godlike. It begins with a peremptory dismissal of Elihu:
"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?" (Job 38:2). Then
Job is bidden gird up his loins like a strong man, and listen and answer. The
fact that Job alone, of all the company, can stand, as it were, on common terms
with God is premonitory of the outcome. Of the two Divine discourses, the first
(Job 38 ; 39) emphasizes more especially the unsearchable wisdom of creation;
and the lesson it brings home to Job is that a being who is great enough--or presumptuous
enough--to criticize and censure is great enough to resolve his own criticism
(Job 40:2). To this, of course, Job has no answer;
he has presented his plea, which he neither adds to nor takes back (Job
40:3 - 5). Resuming, then, the Voice in the second discourse (Job 40:6 - 41:34) goes on to describe two great beasts, as it were, elemental
monsters of Nature: Behemoth--probably the hippopotamus--vast in resisting and
overcoming power, yet unaware of it, and easily subduable by man; and Leviathan--probably
the crocodile--a wonder of beautiful adaptedness to its function in Nature, yet
utterly malignant, unsubduable, untamable. And the lesson brought home to Job
by this strange distribution of creative power is that he, who has called in question
God's right to work as He does, had better undertake to lower human pride and
"tread down the wicked where they stand" (Job 40:12),
thus demonstrating his ability to save himself and manage mankind (Job 40:14). By this illuminating thought Job's trenchancy of demand is utterly
melted away into contrition and penitence (Job 42:1
- 6); but one inspiring effect is his, the thing indeed which he has persistently
sought (compare Job 23:3): God is no more a hearsay,
such as the friends have defended and his Wisdom has speculated about; his eye
sees Him here on earth, and in his still unremoved affliction, no stranger, but
a wise and communable Friend, just as his confident faith had pictured he would,
in some embodied sphere beyond suffering (Job 19:27).
3. The Thing That Is Right:
Two of the parties in the story have met the august theophany, and it has wrought
its effect on them according to the spirit of the man. The self-constituted interpreter,
Elihu, has collapsed as suddenly as he swelled up and exhibited himself. The man
of integrity, Job, has reached the beatific goal of his quest. What now of the
friends who came from far to confirm their Wisdom, and who were so sure they were
defending the mind of God? they are not left without a sufficing word, addressed
straight to their spokesman Eliphaz (Job 42:7); but their way to light is through
the man whose honesty they outraged. Eliphaz' closing words had promised mediatorial
power to Job if he would return from iniquity and acquaint himself with God (Job 22:30); Job is now the mediator, though he has held consistently to the
terms they reprobated. And the Divine verdict on them is:
"Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (Job 42:7). These are the words of the Being who acknowledged that in permitting
this whole trial He was 'swallowing Job up causelessly' (Job 2:3). Job's honest and immensely revelatory words, anger, remonstrance,
bold arraignment of God's way and all, were "the thing that is right." There is
no more tremendous Divine pronouncement in all Scripture than this.
4. The Restored Situation:
Here certain myopic students of the Book of Job think the story should end. It
offends them, apparently, to see Satan's work undone; if they had had the making
of the story they would have left Job still suffering, as if disinterested virtue
could not be its own reward without it. The author, at least the final author,
evidently did not think so; in the ideals and sanctions that prevailed in his
age he knew better what he was about. It is not my business to cut the book to
modern pattern, but to note what is there. Job is restored to health, to double
his former wealth, to family and honor and a ripe old age. These were what the
friends predicted for him on condition of his owning to guilt and calling injustice
desert; but in no word of his has he intimated that worldly reinstatement was
his wish or his object, the contrary rather. And what he sought he obtained, in
richer measure than he sought; obtained it still in suffering, and on earth, "in
the place where may see" (compare Job 34:26 margin).
It is no discount to the value of this, nor on the other hand is it an essential
addition, to express it not only in spiritual terms, but in terms current among
men. And one fundamental thing this restored situation shows, or at least takes
for granted, namely, that the quarrel has not been with Wisdom itself, its essence
or its sanctions, but only with its encroaching false motive. Deepened, not invaded,
its Newtonian law that it is well with the righteous, ill with the wicked, remains
intact, an external sanction to live by, in spite of temporal exceptions. A spiritual
principle of great significance, too, seems to be indicated, as it were, furtively,
in the words, "And Yahweh turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his
friends." He had stood on his integrity demanding his right, and became a self-loathing
penitent; out of dust and ashes he prayed for his friends, and became again such
a power in health and wealth as he had been in his "autumn days." |
|
IV. The Problem and the Purpose
1. Beyond the Didactic Tether:
If the foregoing section has rightly shown that the main thrust and interest of
the Book of Job lies not in its debate but in its narrative, we have therein the
best clue to its problem and its purpose. The sublime self-portrayal of a man
who held fast his integrity against God and man and death and darkness tells its
own story and teaches its own lesson, beyond the power of didactic propositions
or deductions to compass. The book is not a sermon but a vital, throbbing uprising
of the human spirit. It is warm with the life of sound manhood; the inner life
with its hopes, its doubts, its convictions, its supreme affiance; to impose on
this any tether of didacticism is to chili its spirit and make it dogmatic and
academic. The reading of its problem which mainly holds the field today is expressed
in the question, "Why does God afflict the righteous?" and so the book is resolved
into a theodicy, a justification of God's ways with man. Well the friends of Job
do their best to make their interpretation a theodicy, even outraging palpable
fact to do it; they monopolize the didactic element of the poem; but their chief
contention is that God does not afflict the righteous but the wicked, and that
Job is a flagrant case in point who adds rebellion to his sin (compare 34:37).
Job does not know why God afflicts the righteous; he only knows that it is a grievous
fact, which to him seems utterly un-Godlike. God knows, undoubtedly, but He does
not tell. Yet all the while an answer to the question is shaping itself in personality,
in intrinsic manhood, in the sturdy truth and loyalty of Job's spirit. So, going
beyond the didactic tether, we may say that in a deeper sense God is justified
after all; if such a result of desperate trial is possible in man, it is worth
all the rigor of the experiment. But it is as truly an anthropodicy (excuse the
word!) as a theodicy; it puts the essential man on a plane above all that Satan
can prove by his lying sneers of self-interest, or the friends' poisoning of the
wells by their theory of natural depravity. It comes back after all to the story
of Job; he lives the answer to the problem, his personality is the teaching.
2. What Comes of Limiting the Purpose:
It is from this point of view that we can best judge of the critical attacks that
have been made on the structure and coherence of the Book of Job. The book has
suffered its full share of negative disintegration at the hands of the critics;
mostly subjective it seems to me, coming from a too restricted view of its problem
and purpose, or from lack of that long patient induction which will not be content
until it sees all the elements of its creative idea in fitting order and proportion.
To limit the purpose to the issue of a debated theodicy, is to put some parts
in precarious tenure; accordingly, there are those to whom the Epilogue seems
a superfluity, the Prologue an afterthought, Job 28 a fugitive poem put in to
fill up--not to go on to still more radical excisions. On the score of regularity
of structure, too, this limitation of design has had equally grave results. Elihu
has perhaps fared the worst. He must go, the critics almost universally say, because
forsooth he was not formally introduced in the Prologue; and naturally enough,
as soon as he has received notice to quit, the language which in one view fits
him so dramatically to his part begins to bristle with Aramaisms ('of the kindred
of Ram,' Job 32:2) and strange locutions, the alleged
marks of a later bungling hand. Then, further, Zophar must needs round out the
mechanical three-times-three of structure by coming up the third time; accordingly,
Job is levied upon to contribute some of his words (Job
27:13 - 23) to help him out. I need not go into further detail. The foregoing
section has done something, I hope, to justify my conviction that the book has
a homogeneous design and structure just as it is. Whatever its vicissitudes since
the first draft was made, it may turn out after all that the last edition is the
best.
3. The Book's Own Import of Purpose:
We are not left in the dark as to the large purpose of the Book of Job, if we
will follow its own indications consistently. Satan's question at the beginning,
"Doth Job fear God for nought?" sets us on the track of it. To give that question
a Godlike and not a Satanic answer, to prove in the person of Job That man has
it in him to make his life an unbought loyalty to the Divine, is a purpose large
enough to include many subsidiary purposes. But behind this appears, on the part
of the author, a purpose which relates his story intimately to the intellectual
tendencies of his day. The book embodies, especially in theories of the friends,
a searching epitome of the status to which the wisdom philosophy of his time had
arrived. That philosophy was a nobly founded theory of life; Job himself had been
and continued (compare Job 28:28) thoroughly at
one with it. Soundly identified with righteousness and piety, Wisdom had in religious
idiom defined the elements of right and wrong living, and had in no uncertain
terms fixed its sanctions of reward and penalty. But from a warm, pulsating life
it had become an orthodoxy. Its rigid world had room for only two classes of men:
the righteous, bound for the sure rewards of life; the wicked, bound for sure
failure and destruction. It brooked no real exception to this austere law of being.
But two grave evils were invading its system. One was its hard blindness to facts,
or, what is as bad, its determination at all hazards to explain them away. From
the psalms of the period (compare e.g. Psalms 37; 49; 73) we can see how the evident
happiness and prosperity of the wicked was troubling devout minds. The other was
that under this prevailing philosophy life was becoming too cold-blooded and calculable
a thing, a virtual feeder of self-interest. The doubt lay very near whether conduct
so sanctioned was a thing intrinsic and sincere or a thing bought and sold. This
equivocal state of things could not long endure. Sooner or later Satan's question
of motive must stab it to the heart; and we may be sure that to the author of
the book the impulse to ask the question was not all Satanic. The interests of
true wisdom, no less than of skepticism, demanded that the question of inner motive
be raised and solved. Nay, Yahweh Himself, whom Satan mocked as abettor of the
situation, was on trial. Have we not material here, then, for a sublime purpose,
a mighty epic of test and trial and victory? Out of it, not Job alone, but Wisdom
must emerge purified, enlightened, spiritualized.
4. Problem of the Intrinsic Man:
So much for the purpose of the book. The problem corresponds to it. If we take
it as the baffling problem of suffering, or more specifically why God afflicts
the righteous, the sufficing answer is, Job is why. To give such essential integrity
as his its ultimate proof and occasion is worth the injustice and the unmerited
pain. In other words, the problem is more deeply concerned with man's intrinsic
nature than with God's mysterious dealings. When God created man in His own image,
did He endow him most fundamentally with the spirit of commercialism, or with
the spirit of unbought loyalty to the Godlike? And when created man was made fallible
and mortal, did that mean an inescapable inherent depravity, or was the potency
of noblest manhood still left at the center of his being? Here again Job is the
embodied answer. The friends, veritable Calvinists before Calvin, urge depravity;
they would exalt God by making man His utter contrast. But Job's stedfast integrity
proves that man, one man at least, is at heart sound and true. And if one man,
then the potency of soundness exists in manhood. The book is indeed a theodicy;
but still more truly it is a boldly maintained anthropodicy, a vindication of
the intrinsic worth of man. |
V. Considerations of Age and Setting.
1. Shadowy Contacts with History:
The questions who was the personal author of the Book of Job, and what was its
age, are at best only a matter of conjecture; and my revised conjecture, arrived
at since I wrote my Epic of the Inner Life, must go for what it is worth. It seems
to me much better to regard a story so homogeneous and interrelated as in the
main the composition of one mind than to distribute it, as some critics do, among
various authors, supplementers, and editors. As to its age, there is so little
identifiable contact with political or ecclesiastical history that its composition
has been ascribed to many periods, from the time of Abraham to late in post-exilic
times. The fact that its scene is laid in the patriarchal past and in a land outside
of Palestine indicates the author's design to dissociate it from contemporary
events and conditions; such contact with these as exist, therefore, must be read
between the lines. The book does not hold with full consistency to patriarchal
conditions. Job's friends appeal with the complacency of wisdom-prospered men
to the ancient tenure of the land (Job 15:19);
and yet, as Job complains, the heartless greed of the landholding class in removing
landmarks and oppressing the poor (Job 24:2 - 12)
connotes the prevalence of such outrages as were denounced by Isaiah and Micah
before the Assyrian crisis. Such evils would not decrease under Manasseh and Jehoiakim,
and might well be portrayed in reminiscence by an exilic writer. On the top of
this consideration may be cited the most definite reference to a historical event
that the book contains: the passage Job 12:17-25, which vividly describes, by
an eyewitness ("Lo, mine eye hath seen all this," Job
13:1), a wholesale deportation and humiliation of eminent persons, just
like that told of Jehoiachin and his court in 2 Kings 24:13 - 15. To my mind this
is illuminative for the age of the book. It seems to have been written by one
who saw the Chaldean deportation of 587 BC. May I be suffered to carry the suggestion
a step farther? It will be remembered that the chief personage of that deportation
was for 37 years a state prisoner in Babylon, at the end of which time he was
"taken from durance and judgment" (compare Isaiah 53:8 the King James Version)
and lived thenceforth honored with kings (2 Kings 25:27 - 30 = Jeremiah 52:31
- 34). I take him to have been the original of the individualized Servant of Yahweh
described and describing himself in Second Isa. In one of his self-descriptions
he says that Yahweh has given him "the tongue of them that are taught" (Isaiah
50:4); in another that Yahweh has made his "mouth like a sharp sword" and himself
"a polished shaft" (Isaiah 49:2). What he said or wrote is of course unidentifiable;
but it is certain that in some cultural way he was a hidden power for good to
his people. What if this Book of Job were a prison-made book, like Pilgrim's Progress
and Don Quixote, but as much greater as the experience that underlay it was more
momentous? I do not see but this suggestion is as probable as any that have been
made; and some expressions of the book become thereby very striking, as for instance,
the reference to prisoners (Job 3:18 , 19), to
the servant longing for release (Job 7:2), the
general sense of being despised, the several references to Job as "my servant
Job" (Job 1:8 ; 2:3 ; 42:7 , 8), the description
of his restoration as a turned captivity, and his successful intercession for
the friends (Job 42:10 ; compare Isaiah 53:12).
I would merely suggest the idea, however, not press it.
2. Place in Biblical Literature:
If the Book of Job is a product of the time of Jehoiachin's imprisonment, it is
in worthy and congenial literary company. Isaiah, fostering the faith of a new-born
spiritual "remnant," had gathered the elements of that sublime vision (Isaiah
1:1) of Israel's mission among the nations which a later hand was even now, four
generations after, working to supplement and finish, in a prophecy (Isaiah 40:1
- 66:24) which, as all recognize, constitutes the closest parallel in spirited
idea to our book. Seers, priests and singers had long busied themselves with the
literary treasures of the past; drawing out of dusty archives and putting into
popular idiom the ancient laws and counsels of Moses (Deuteronomy; see under JOSIAH);
Collecting and adapting the old Davidic psalms and composing new ones, as Hezekiah's
reorganization of the worship required. Ezekiel was at Tel Abib planning for the
reconstruction of the temple, and perhaps by his use of the name "Job" veiling
a cryptic reference (Ezekiel 14:14 , 20). The affiliations of the Book of Job,
however, were more specifically, with the wisdom literature; and long before this
the "men of Hezekiah" (Proverbs 25:1) had gathered their aftermath of the Solomonic
proverbs, to supplement the maxims which had been the educative pabulum of the
people (see under PROVERBS, THE BOOK OF). It was with the care and principle of
this diffused instruction, now the most popular vein of literature, that the Book
of Job concerned itself. That had become apparent as soon as the maxims were coordinated
in an anthology, and an introduction to the collection had been composed, extolling
Wisdom as the guide and savior of life. To a spiritually-minded thinker with the
Hebrew genius for religion the motivation of Wisdom must sooner or later come.
With its values should be apprehended also its unguarded points and tendencies.
It was exposed to the one-sided drift of all popular things. In an age when revision
and deeper insight were the literary order of the day, Wisdom would come in with
the other strains of literature for purification and maturing; and there was not
wanting an experience, the basis of an almost unbelievable report (compare Isaiah
53:1) to give depth and poignancy to Job's personal story of suffering and integrity.
3. Parallels and Echoes:
In the amazing sureness and vigor. of its message the Book of Job stands out unique
and alone; but it is by no means without its lesser parallels in faith and doubt,
above which it rises like a mountain above its retinue of foothills. Mention has
been made above of a number of Psalms (e.g. Psalm 37 ; 49 ; 73) which with different
degrees of assurance witness to the struggle of faith with the problem of the
rampant and successful wicked. Psalms 49, one of the psalms of the sons of Korah,
is especially noteworthy, because it expressly employs the popular mashal, that
is, the Wisdom vehicle, to convey a corrective lesson about unblest riches, drawing
a conclusion not unlike that of Job 27:8 - 23, though in milder tone. Not less
noteworthy also is the note of suffering and its mysteriousness which pervades
many of the psalms, especially of Asaph and Heman; Psalms 88 and 102 might both
have been composed with special reference to Hezekiah's sickness and set beside
his psalm in Isaiah 38, but also they are so fully in the tone of Job's complaint,
especially Psalms 88, that Professor Godet, not unplausibly, conjectures that
the Book of Job was written by its author Heman. Hezekiah's deadly sickness itself
(Isaiah 38), which was of a leprous nature, banishing him from the house of God,
and which was miraculously healed--an experience regarding which Hezekiah's own
writing (Isaiah 38:10 - 20) is strikingly in the key of Job's complaint--furnishes
the nearest parallel to, or adumbration of, Job's affliction; but also in the
accounts of the Servant of Yahweh there are hints of a similar stroke of God's
judgment (compare Isaiah 52:14 ; 53:3). The passage Job 7:17,18 has been called
"a bitter parody" of Psalms 8:4; it may be so, but the conditions are in utter
contrast, and nothing can be concluded as to which is original and which echo.
As to expression, the most remarkable parallel to Job, perhaps, is the passage
Jeremiah 20:14 - 18, in which, like Job, the prophet Jeremiah curses the day of
his birth. This curse in Job would naturally be remembered by all readers as one
of the most characteristic features of the book; and in like manner the curse
in Jer may have stood out in the memory of his disciples, of whom the writer of
Job may have been one, and figure in a similar literary situation. Ezekiel's naming
of Job along with Noah and Daniel (Ezekiel 14:14 , 20), as a type of atoning righteousness,
is doubly remarkable if the writer of Job was a contemporary; he may have taken
the name from a well-known legend, and there may have underlain it a double meaning,
known to an inner circle, referring cryptically to one whose real name it might
be impolitic to pronounce. Whenever written, the outline and meaning of Job's
momentous experience must have won speedily to a permanent place in the universal
Hebrew memory; so that centuries afterward James could write to the twelve tribes
scattered abroad (James 5:11), "Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have
seen the end of the Lord." |
LITERATURE. A.B. Davidson, "The Book or Job" (Cambridge Bible for Schools),
1884; A.S. Peake, "Job" (New Century Bible), 1905; S.R. Driver, The Book of Job
in the Revised Version, 1906; J. T. Marshall, The Book of Job, 1904; J.F. Genung,.
Epic of the Inner Life, 1891; G.G. Bradley, Lectures on Job in Westminster Abbey,
1887; F.C. Cook in The Speaker's Commentary, 1882. Among German writers, A. Dillmann,
Hiob erklart, 1891; K. Budde, Das Buch Hiob ubersetzt und erklart, 1896 (see The
Expositor T, VIII, iii); B. Duhm, Das Buch Hiob erklart, 1897; G. Beer, Der text
des Buches Hiob untersucht, 1897; Gibson, "The Book of Job" (Oxford Commentaries),
1899.
John Franklin Genung
Tags:
bible commentary, bible history, bible reference, bible study, book of job, define, does job fear God for nothing?, friends, job, lament, old testament, oldest book in the bible, restore twofold, satan test, suffering, trials
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