The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur

Produced by David Starner, Thomas Berger

and the Distributed Prooreaders team.

THE SCEPTICS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

JOB * KOHELETH * AGUR

with English text translated for the first time from the primitive Hebrew as restored on the basis of recent philological discoveries.

by

E. J. Dillon

Late Professor of Comparative Philology and Ancient Armenian at the
Imperial University of Kharkoff; Doctor of Oriental Languages of the
University of Louvain; Magistrand of the Oriental Faculty of the Imperial
University of St. Petersburg; Member of the Armenian Academy of Venice;
Membre de la Société Asiatique de Paris, &c. &c.

* * * * *

To ALEXANDER VASSILYEVITCH PASCHKOFF, M.A. THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

* * * * *

DEDICATORY NOTE

_My Dear Paschkoff,

In the philosophical problems dealt with by the Sceptics of the Old Testament, you will recognise the theme of our numerous and pleasant discussions during the past sixteen years. Three of these are indelibly engraven in my memory, and, if I mistake not, in yours.

The first took place in St. Petersburg one soft Indian-summer's evening, in a cosy room on the Gagarine Quay, from the windows of which we looked out with admiration upon the blue expanse of the Neva, as it reflected the burnished gold of the spire of the Fortress church. At that time we gazed upon the wavelets of the river and the wonders of the world from exactly the same angle of vision.

The second of these memorable conversations occurred after the lapse of nine years. We had met together in the old place, and sauntering out one bitterly cold December evening resumed the discussion, walking to and fro on the moonlit bank of the ice-bound river, until evening merged into night and the moon sank beneath the horizon, leaving us in total darkness, vainly desirous, like Goethe, of "light, more light."

Our last exchange of views took place after six further years had sped away, and we stood last August on the summit of the historic Mönchsberg, overlooking the final resting-place of the great Paracelsus. The long and interesting discussions which we had on that occasion, just before setting out in opposite directions, you to the East and I to the West, neither of us is likely ever to forget.

It is in commemoration of these pleasant conversations, and more especially of the good old times, now past for ever, when we looked out upon the wavelets of the Neva and the wonders of the world from the same angle of vision, that I ask you to allow me to associate your name with this translation of the primitive texts of the Sceptics of the Old Testament.

Yours affectionately,

E. J. DILLON.

TREBIZOND, January 3, 1895._

* * * * *

PREFACE

A careful perusal of this first English translation of the primitive text of "Job," "Koheleth," and the "Sayings of Agur" will, I doubt not, satisfy the most orthodox reader that I am fully warranted in characterising their authors as Sceptics. The epithet, I confess, may prove distasteful to many, but the truth, I trust, will be welcome to all. It is not easy to understand why any one who firmly believes that Providence is continually educing good from evil should hesitate to admit that it may in like manner allow sound moral principles to be enshrined in doubtful or even erroneous philosophical theories. Or, is trust in God to be made dependent upon the confirmation or rejection by physical science of, say, the Old Testament account of the origin of the rainbow? Agur, "Job" and "Koheleth" had outgrown the intellectual husks which a narrow, inadequate and erroneous account of God's dealings with man had caused to form around the minds of their countrymen, and they had the moral courage to put their words into harmony with their thoughts. Clearly perceiving that, whatever the sacerdotal class might say to the contrary, the political strength of the Hebrew people was spent and its religious ideals exploded, they sought to shift the centre of gravity from speculative theology to practical morality.

The manner in which they adjusted their hopes, fears, and aspirations to the new conditions, strikes the keynote of their respective characters. "Job," looking down upon the world from the tranquil heights of genius, is manful, calm, resigned. "Koheleth," shuddering at the gloom that envelops and the pain that convulses all living beings, prefers death to life, and freedom from suffering to "positive" pleasure; while Agur, revealing the bitterness bred by dispelled illusions and blasted hopes, administers a severe chastisement to those who first called them into being. All three[1] reject the dogma of retribution, the doctrine of eternal life and belief in the coming of a Messiah, over and above which they at times strip the notion of God of its most essential attributes, reducing it to the shadow of a mere metaphysical abstraction. This is why I call them Sceptics.

"Job" and "Koheleth" emphatically deny that there is any proof to be found of the so-called moral order in the universe, and they unhesitatingly declare that existence is an evil. They would have us therefore exchange our hopes for insight, and warn us that even this is very circumscribed at best. For not only is happiness a mockery, but knowledge is a will-o'-the-wisp. Mankind resembles the bricklayer and the hodman who help to raise an imposing edifice without any knowledge of the general plan. And yet the structure is the outcome of their labour. In like manner this mysterious world is the work of man—the mirror of his will. As his will is, so are his acts, and as his acts are, so is his world. Or as the ancient Hindoos put it:

  "Before the gods we bend our necks, and yet
      within the toils of Fate
  Entangled are the gods themselves. To Fate,
      then, be all honour given.
  Yet Fate itself can compass nought, 'tis but the
      bringer of the meed
  For every deed that we perform.
  As then our acts shape our rewards, of what
      avail are gods or Fate?
  Let honour therefore be decerned to deeds
      alone."

But what, I have been frequently asked, will be the effect of all this upon theology? Are we to suppose that the writings of these three Sceptics were admitted into the Canon by mistake, and if not, shall we not have to widen our definition of inspiration until it can be made to include contributions which every Christian must regard as heterodox? An exhaustive reply to this question would need a theological dissertation, for which I have neither desire nor leisure. I may say, however, that eminent theologians representing various Christian denominations—Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran—have assured me that they could readily reconcile the dogmas of their respective Churches with doctrines educible from the primitive text of "Job," "Koheleth," and Agur, whose ethics they are disposed to identify, in essentials, with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. With the ways and means by which they effect this reconciliation I am not now concerned.

My object was neither to attack a religious dogma, nor to provoke a theological controversy, but merely to put the latest results of philological science within the reach of him who reads as he runs. And I feel confident that the reader who can appreciate the highest forms of poetry, or who has anxiously pondered over the problems of God, immortality, the origin of evil, &c., will peruse the writings of "Job," "Koheleth" and Agur with a lively interest, awakened, and sustained not merely by the extrinsic value which they possess as historical documents, but by their intrinsic merits as precious contributions to the literature and philosophy of the world.

E. J. DILLON.

CONSTANTINOPLE, New Year's Day, 1895.

Footnotes:

[1] In Agur's case, this is but an inference from his first saying, but an inference which few would think of calling in question.

* * * * *

CONTENTS

THE POEM OF JOB HEBREW PHILOSOPHY THE PROBLEM OF THE POEM JOB'S METHOD OF SOLVING THE PROBLEM DATE OF THE COMPOSITION THE TEXT AND ITS RECONSTRUCTION INTERPOLATIONS JOB'S THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

KOHELETH CONDITION OF THE TEXT PRIMITIVE FORM OF THE BOOK KOHELETH'S THEORY OF LIFE PRACTICAL WISDOM KOHELETH'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE SOURCES OF KOHELETH'S PHILOSOPHY

AGUR THE AGNOSTIC AGUR, SON OF YAKEH FORM AND CONTENTS OF THE SAYINGS OF AGUR DATE OF COMPOSITION AGUR'S PHILOSOPHY

THE POEM OF JOB (TRANSLATION OF THE RESTORED TEXT)

THE SPEAKER (TRANSLATION OF THE RESTORED TEXT)

THE SAYINGS OF AGUR (TRANSLATION OF THE RESTORED TEXT)

INDEX

THE POEM OF JOB

* * * * *

HEBREW PHILOSOPHY

According to a theory which was still in vogue a few years ago, the ancient races of mankind were distinguished from each other no less by their intellectual equipment than by their physical peculiarities. Thus the Semites were supposed to be characterised, among other things, by an inborn aptitude for historical narrative and an utter lack of the mental suppleness, ingenuity, and sharp incisive vision indispensable for the study of the problems of philosophy; while their neighbours, the Aryans, devoid of historical talent, were held to be richly endowed with all the essential qualities of mind needed for the cultivation of epic poetry and abstruse metaphysics. This theory has since been abandoned, and many of the alleged facts that once seemed to support it have been shown to be unwarranted assumptions. Thus, the conclusive proof, supplied by Biblical criticism, of the untrustworthiness of the historical books of the Old Testament, has removed one alleged difference between Aryans and Semites, while the discoveries which led to the reconstruction of the primitive poem of Job and of the treatise of Koheleth have undermined the basis of the other. For these two works deal exclusively with philosophical problems, and, together with the Books of Proverbs and Jesus Sirach, are the only remains that have come down to us of the ethical and metaphysical speculations of the ancient Hebrews whose descendants have so materially contributed to further this much-maligned branch of human knowledge. And if we may judge by what we know of these two books, we have ample grounds for regretting that numerous other philosophical treatises which were written between the fourth and the first centuries B.C. were deemed too abstruse, too irrelevant, or too heterodox to find a place in the Jewish Canon.[2] For the Book of Job is an unrivalled masterpiece, the work of one in whom poetry was no mere special faculty cultivated apart from his other gifts, but the outcome of the harmonious wholeness of healthy human nature, in which upright living, untrammelled thought, deep mental vision, and luxuriant imagination combined to form the individual. Hence the poem is a true reflex of the author's mind: it dissolves and blends in harmonious union elements that appeared not merely heterogeneous, but wholly incompatible, and realises, with the concreteness of history, the seemingly unattainable idea which Lucretius had the mind to conceive but lacked the artistic hand to execute; in a word, it is the fruit of the intimate union of that philosophy which, reckless of results, dares to clip even angels' wings, and of the art which possesses the secret of painting its unfading pictures with the delicate tints of the rainbow. Rich fancy and profound thought co-operate to produce a tertium quid—a visible proof that the beautiful is one with the true—for which neither literature nor philosophy possesses a name. It is no wonder, then, that this unique poem, which gives adequate utterance to abstract thought, truly and forcibly states the doubts and misgivings which harrow the souls of thinking men of all ages and nations, and helps them to lift a corner of the veil of delusion and get a glimpse of the darkness of the everlasting Night beyond, should appeal to the reader of the nineteenth century with much greater force than to the Jews of olden times, who were accustomed to gauge the sublimity of imaginative poetry and the depth of philosophic speculation by the standard of orthodoxy and the bias of nationality.

The Book of Job, from which Pope Gregory the Great fancied he could piece together the entire system of Catholic theology, and which Thomas of Aquin regarded as a sober history, is now known to be a regular poem, but, as Tennyson truly remarked, "the greatest poem whether of ancient or modern times," and the diction of which even Luther instinctively felt to be "magnificent and sublime as no other book of Scripture." And it is exclusively in this light, as one of the masterpieces of the world's literature, that it will be considered in the following pages. Whatever religious significance it may be supposed to possess over and above, as one of the canonical books of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, will, it is hoped, remain unaffected by this treatment, which is least of all controversial. The flowers that yield honey to the bee likewise delight the bee-keeper with their perfume and the poet with their colours, and there is no adequate reason why the magic verse which strikes a responsive chord in the soul of lovers of high art, and starts a new train of ideas in the minds of serious thinkers, should thereby lose any of the healing virtues it may have heretofore possessed for the suffering souls of the believing.

But viewed even as a mere work of art, it would be hopeless to endeavour to press it into the frame of any one of the received categories of literary composition, as is evident from the fact that authorised and unauthorised opinion on the subject has touched every extreme, and still continues oscillating to-day. Many commentators still treat it as a curious chapter of old-world history narrated with scrupulous fidelity by the hero or an eye-witness, others as a philosophical dialogue; several scholars regard it as a genuine drama, while not a few enthusiastically aver that it is the only epic poem ever written by a Hebrew. In truth, it partakes of the nature of each and every one of these categories, and is yet circumscribed by the laws and limits of none of them. In form, it is most nearly akin to the drama, with which we should be disposed to identify it if the characters of the prologue and epilogue were introduced as dramatis personae in action. But their doing and enduring are presupposed as accomplished facts, and employed merely as a foil to the dialogues, which alone are the work of the author. Perhaps the least erroneous way succinctly to describe what in fact is a unicum would be to call it a psychological drama.

Koheleth, or the Preacher, is likewise a literary puzzle which for centuries has baffled the efforts of commentators and aroused the misgivings of theologians. Regarded by many as a vade mecum of materialists, by some as an eloquent sermon on the fear of God, and by others as a summary of sceptical philosophy, it is impossible to analyse and classify it without having first eliminated all those numerous later-date insertions which, without improving the author's theology, utterly obscure his meaning and entirely spoil his work. When, by the aid of text criticism, we have succeeded in weeding it of the parasitic growth of ages, we have still to allow for the changing of places of numerous authentic passages either by accident or design, the effects of which are oftentimes quite as misleading as those of the deliberate interpolations. The work thus restored, although one, coherent and logical, is still susceptible of various interpretations, according to the point of view of the reader, none of which, however, can ignore the significant fact that the sceptically ideal basis of Koheleth's metaphysics is identical with that of Buddha, Kant, and Schopenhauer, and admirably harmonises with the ethics of Job and the pessimism of the New Testament.

The Sayings of Agur, on the contrary, tell their own interesting story, without need of note or commentary, to him who possesses a fair knowledge of Hebrew grammar, and an average allowance of mother wit. The lively versifier, the keenness of whose sense of humour is excelled only by the bitterness of his satire, could ill afford to be obscure. A member of the literary fraternity which boasts the names of Lucian and Voltaire, a firm believer in the force of common sense and rudimentary logic, Agur ridicules the theologians of his day with a malicious cruelty which is explained, if not warranted, by the pretensions of omniscience and the practice of intolerance that provoked it. The unanswerable argument which Jahveh considered sufficient to silence his servant Job, Agur deems effective against the dogmatical doctors of his own day:

"Who has ascended into heaven and come down again?

* * * * *

Such an one would I question about God: What is his name?"

Footnotes:

[2] Job and Ecclesiastes were inserted in the Jewish and, one may add, the Christian Canon, solely on the strength of passages which the authors of these compositions never even saw, and which flatly contradict the main theses of their works.

* * * * *

THE PROBLEM OF THE POEM

Purged of all later interpolations and restored as far as possible to the form it received from the hand of its author, the poem of Job is the most striking presentation of the most obscure and fascinating problem that ever puzzled and tortured the human intellect: how to reconcile the existence of evil, not merely with the fundamental dogmas of the ancient Jewish faith, but with any form of Theism whatever. Stated in the terms in which the poet—whom for convenience sake we shall identify with his hero[3] manifestly conceived it, it is this: Can God be the creator of all things and yet not be responsible for evil?

The Infinite Being who laid the earth's foundation, "shut in the sea with doors," whose voice is thunder and whose creatures are all things that have being, is, we trust, moral and good. But it is His omnipotence that strikes us most forcibly. Almighty in theory, He is all active in fact, and nothing that happens in the universe is brought about even indirectly by any one but Himself. There are no second causes at work, no chance, no laws of nature, no subordinate agents, nothing that is not the immediate manifestation of His free will.[4] This is evident to our senses. But what is equally obvious is that His acts do not tally with His attribute of goodness, and that no facts known or imaginable can help us to bridge over the abyss between the infinite justice ascribed to Him and the crying wrongs that confront us in His universe, whithersoever we turn.[5] His rule is such a congeries of evils that even the just man often welcomes death as a release, and Job himself with difficulty overcame the temptation to end his sufferings by suicide. All the cut-and-dried explanations of God's conduct offered by His human advocates merely render the problem more complicated. His professional apologists are "weavers of lies," and contend for Him "with deception," and, worse than all else, He Himself has never revealed to His creatures any truth more soothing than the fact they set out with, that the problem is for ever insoluble. Wisdom "is hid from the eyes of all living,"[6] and the dead are in "the land of darkness and of gloom,"[7] whence there is no issue.

The theological views prevalent in the days of the poet, as expounded by the three friends of Job, instead of suggesting some way out of the difficulty were in flagrant contradiction with fact. They appealed to the traditional theory and insisted on having that accepted as the reality. And it was one of the saddest theories ever invented. Virtue was at best a mere matter of business, one of the crudest forms of utilitarianism, a bargain between Jahveh and His creatures. As asceticism in ancient India was rewarded with the spiritual gift of working miracles, so upright living was followed in Judea by material wealth, prosperity, a numerous progeny and all the good things that seem to make life worth living. Such at least was the theory, and those who were satisfied with their lot had little temptation to find fault with it for the sake of those who were not. In sober reality, however, the obligation was very one-sided: Jahveh, who occasionally failed to carry out His threats, observed or repudiated His solemn promises as He thought fit, whereas those among His creatures who faithfully fulfilled their part of the contract were never sure of receiving their stipulated wage in the promised coin. And at that time none other was current: there was no future life looming in the dim distance with intensified rewards and punishments wherewith to redress the balance of this. And it sadly needed redressing. The victims of seeming injustice naturally felt that they were being hardly dealt with. And as if to make confusion worse confounded, their neighbours, who had ridden roughshod over all law, human and divine, were frequently exempt from misfortune, lived on the fat of the land, and enjoyed a monopoly of the divine blessings. To Job, whose consciousness of his own righteousness was clearer and less questionable than the justice of his Creator, this theory of retribution seemed unworthy of belief.

The creation of this good God, then, is largely leavened with evil for which—all things being the work of His hands—He, and He alone, is answerable. There was no devil in those olden times upon whose broad shoulders the responsibility for sickness, suffering, misery and death could be conveniently shifted. The Satan or Adversary is still one of the sons of God who, like all his brethren, has free access to the council chamber of the Most High, where he is wont to take a critical, somewhat cynical but not wholly incorrect view of motives and of men. In the government of the world he has neither hand nor part, and his interference in the affairs of Job is the result of a special permission accorded him by the Creator. God alone is the author of good and of evil,[8] and the thesis to be demonstrated by His professional apologists consists in showing that the former is the outflow of His mercy, and the latter the necessary effect of His justice acting upon the depraved will of His creatures. But the proof was not forthcoming. Personal suffering might reasonably be explained in many cases as the meet and inevitable wage for wrong-doing; but assuredly not in all. Job himself was a striking instance of unmerited punishment. Even Jahveh solemnly declares him to be just and perfect; and Job was admittedly no solitary exception; he was the type of a numerous class of righteous, wronged and wretched mortals, unnamed and unknown:

  "Omnes illacrymabiles….
               ignotique longa
  Nocte, carent quia vate sacro."

Job is ready to admit that God, no doubt, is just and good in theory, but he cannot dissemble the obvious fact that His works in the universe are neither; indeed, if we may judge the tree by its fruits, His régime is the rule of an oriental and almighty despot whose will and pleasure is the sole moral law. And that will is too often undistinguishable from malice of the blackest kind. Thus

  "He destroyeth the upright and the wicked,
  When his scourge slayeth at unawares.
  He scoffeth at the trial of the innocent;
  The earth is given into the hand of the wicked."

In a word, the poet proclaims that the current theories of traditional theology were disembodied, not incarnate in the moral order of the world, had, in fact, nowhere taken root.

The two most specious arguments with which it was sought to prop up this tottering theological system consisted in maintaining that the wicked are often punished and the good recompensed in their offspring—a kind of spiritual entail in which the tenant for life is denied the usufruct for the sake of heirs he never knew—and that such individual claims as were left unadjusted by this curious arrangement were merged in those of the community at large and should be held to be settled in full as long as the weal of the nation was assured. In other words, the individual sows and his offspring or the nation reaps the harvest. But Job rejects both pleas as illusory and immoral, besides which, they leave the frequent prosperity of the unrighteous unexplained. "Wherefore," he asks, "do the wicked live, become old, yea wax mighty in strength?" The reply that the fathers having eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth will be set on edge, is, he contends, no answer to the objection; it merely intensifies it. For he who sows should reap, and he who sins should suffer. After death the most terrible punishment meted out to the posterity of criminals is powerless to affect their mouldering dust. That, surely, cannot be accepted as a vindication of justice, human or divine.

  "Ye say: God hoards punishment for the children.
  Let him rather requite the wicked himself that he may feel it!
  His own eyes should behold his downfall,
  And he himself should drain the Almighty's wrath.
  If his sons are honoured, he will not know it;
  And if dishonoured, he will not perceive it.
  Only in his own flesh doth he feel pain,
  And for his own soul will he lament."

As to the latter argument, that the well-being of the nation was a settlement in full of the individual's claims to happiness, it was equally irrelevant, even had the principle underlying it been confirmed by experience. Granting that a certain wholesale kind of equity was administered, why must the individual suffer for no fault of his own? Wherein lies the justice of a Being who, credited with omnipotence, permits that by a sweep of the wild hurricane of disaster, "green leaves with yellow mixed are torn away"?

But the contention that, viewing the individual merely as a unit of the aggregate, justice would be found to be dealt out fairly on the whole, ran counter to experience. The facts were dead against it. The Hebrew nation had fared as badly among neighbouring states as Job among his friends and countrymen. In this respect the sorely tried individual was the type of his nation. The destruction of the kingdom of Samaria which had occurred nearly two hundred years before and the captivity of Judah, which was not yet at an end, gave its death-blow to the theory. "The tents of robbers prosper and they that provoke Shaddai[9] are secure."

In truth, there was but one issue out of the difficulty: divine justice might not be bounded by time or space; the law of compensation might have a larger field than our earth for its arena; a future life might afford "time" and opportunity to right the wrongs of the present, and all end well in the best of future worlds. This explanation would have set doubts at rest and settled the question for at least two thousand years; and it seemed such a necessary postulate to the fathers of the Church, who viewed the matter in the light of Christian revelation, that they actually put into Job's mouth the words which he would have uttered had he lived in their own days and been a member of the true fold. And they effected this with a pious recklessness of artistic results and of elementary logic that speaks better for their intentions than for their aesthetic taste. In truth, Job knows absolutely nothing of a future life, and his friends, equally unenlightened, see nothing for it but to "discourse wickedly for God," and "utter lies on His behalf."[10] There was, in fact, no third course. Indeed, if the hero or his friends had even suspected the possibility of a solution based upon a life beyond the tomb, the problem on which the book is founded would not have existed. To ground, therefore, the doctrines of the Resurrection, the Atonement, &c., upon alleged passages of the poem of Job is tantamount to inferring the squareness of a circle from its perfect rotundity. In the Authorised Version of the Bible the famous verses, which have probably played a more important part in the intellectual history of mankind than all the books of the Old Testament put together, run thus: "For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me."[11]

Now this, it is hardly necessary to say, is not a translation from the poem nor from any known text of it, but the embodiment of the salutary beliefs of well-intentioned theologians—of St. Jerome among others— momentarily forgetful of the passage: "Will ye speak wickedly for God?" The Christian conception of a Redeemer would, had he but known it, have proved balm to the heart of the despairing hero. As a matter of mere fact, his own hope at that critical moment was less sublime and very much less Christian: the coming of an avenger who would punish his enemies and rehabilitate his name. It was the one worldly and vain longing that still bound him to the earth. Other people demanded happiness as their reward for virtue, too often undistinguishable from vice; Job challenged the express approval of the Deity, asked only that he should not be confounded with vulgar sinners. The typical perfect man, struck down with a loathsome disease, doomed to a horrible death, alone in his misery, derided by his enemies, and, worse than all, loathed as a common criminal by those near and dear to him, gives his friends and enemies, society and theologians, the lie emphatic—nay, he goes the length of affirming that God Himself has, failed in His duty towards him. "Know, then, that God hath wronged me."[12] His conscience, however, tells him that inasmuch as there is such a thing as eternal justice, a time will come when the truth will be proclaimed and his honour fully vindicated; Shaddai will then yearn for the work of His hands, but it will be too late, "For now I must lay myself down in the dust; and Thou shalt seek me, but I shall not be." And it is to this conviction, not to a belief in future retribution, that the hero gives utterance in the memorable passage in question:

  "But I know that my avenger liveth,
  Though it be at the end upon my dust;
  My witness will avenge these things,
  And a curse alight upon mine enemies."

He knows nothing whatever of the subsistence of our cumbrous clods of clay after they have become the food of worms and pismires; indeed, he is absolutely certain that by the sleep of death

      "we end
  The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
  That flesh is heir to."

And he emphasises his views in a way that should have given food for wholesome reflection to his commentators.

  "There is a future for the tree,
  And hope remaineth to the palm;
  Cut down, it will sprout again,
  And its tender branch will not cease.

  "Though its roots wax old in the earth,
  And its stock lie buried in mould,
  Yet through vapour of water will it bud,
  And put forth boughs like a plant.

  "But man dieth and lieth outstretched;
  He giveth up the ghost, where is he then?
  He lieth down and riseth not up;
  Till heaven be no more he shall not awake."[13]

Nothing could well be further removed from the comforting hope of a future life, the resurrection of the body, and eternal rewards, than this unshaken belief that Death is our sole redeemer from the terrible evils of life.

Footnotes:

[3] Although the former was a Jew and the latter a Gentile.

[4] Cf. Translation, strophe ci.:

      "Is not the soul of every living thing in his hand,
      And the breath of all mankind?"

Strophe civ.:

      "With him is strength and wisdom,
      The erring one and his error are his."

[5] Strophe cxcii.-cxciii.:

      "Look upon me and tremble,
      And lay your hand upon your mouth!
      When I remember I am dismayed,
      And trembling taketh hold on my flesh."

Strophe ccxxi.:

      "Why do the times of judgment depend upon the Almighty,
      And yet they who know him do not see his days?

[6] Strophe ccxxxiv.

[7] Strophe lxxxix.

[8] "The erring one and his error are his" (God's): strophe civ. Cf. also strophe cvii.

[9] God.

[10] Strophe cxi.

[11] Job xix. 25-27. The Revised Version gives the passage as follows: "But I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand up at the last upon the earth: and after my skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another."

[12] Strophe clxix.

[13] Job, strophes cxxiv.-cxxvi. of my English translation.

* * * * *

JOB'S METHOD OF SOLVING THE PROBLEM

It is perhaps hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine of eternal pains and rewards as laid down by the Christian Church, unless reinforced by faith, neither solves the problem nor simplifies it. If the truth must be told, it seems to unenlightened reason to entangle it more hopelessly than before. In simple terms and in its broadest aspect the question may be stated as follows: God created man under conditions of His own choosing which necessarily led to the life-long misery of countless millions upon earth and their never-ending torments in hell. To the question, Did He know the inevitable effect of His creative act, the answer is, God is omniscient. To the query, Could He have selected other and more humane conditions of existence for His creature—conditions so adjusted that, either with or without probation, man would have been ultimately happy? the reply is, God is almighty.

Involuntarily, then, the question forces itself upon us, Is He all-good? Can that Being be deemed good who, moved by no necessity, free to create or to abstain from creating, at liberty to create for happiness or for misery, calls mankind into existence under such conditions and surroundings that myriads are miserable, so unutterably miserable, that, compared with their tortures, the wretch bleeding and quivering on the wheel is lolling in the lap of enjoyment? Why did God make man under such conditions? Or at least how are we to reconcile His having done so with His attribute of goodness? To this question there are many replies but no answer, the former being merely attempts to explain the chronic effects of the primordial ethical poison commonly called original sin.

Job's main objection to the theological theories in vogue among his contemporaries, and, indeed, to all conceivable explanations of the difficulty, is far more weighty than at first sight appears. Everything, he tells us—if anything—is the work of God's hands; and as pain, suffering, evil, are everywhere predominant, it is not easy to understand in what sense God can be said to be good. The poet does not formulate the argument, of which this is the gist, in very precise terms, nor press it home to its last conclusions. But he leaves no doubt about his meaning. Some men are relatively good by nature, others wicked; but all men were created by God and act in accordance with the disposition they received from Him. If that disposition or character brought forth sin and evil, these then are God's work, not man's, and He alone is responsible therefor. The individual who performs an act through an agent is rightly deemed to have done it himself. A man, therefore, who, being free to do a certain thing or to leave it undone, and perfectly aware of the nature of its necessary consequences, performs it, is held to be answerable for the results, should they prove mischievous. Much greater is his responsibility if, instead of being restricted to the choice between undertaking a work certain to prove pernicious and abstaining from it, he was free to select a third course and to accomplish it in such a way that the result would not be evil, but unmixed good. In this case it would hardly seem possible to exonerate the doer from a charge of wanton malice, diabolic in degree. And such is the position in which many theologians seem—to those who view things in the light of reason—to have placed God Himself. It was open to Him, they maintain, to create or to refrain from creating. Having declared for the former alternative, He is chargeable with the consequences. The consequences, however, need not have been evil; He might, had He so willed it, have endowed His creature with such qualities and placed him in such surroundings that, without ceasing to be man, he would never have fallen at all. Yet it did not please Him to adopt that course. This admission, rationalists urge, is conclusive as to the origin of sin and evil.

But the arguments are not yet exhausted. Even then the Creator might have made everything right by an act which it seems impossible to distinguish from elementary justice. Had He regarded the first man who brought sin into the world as a mere individual, and treated him as such—and this, theologians assure us, He could easily have done[14]—He might have punished him as an individual, and the matter would have been at an end. But instead of this, He contemplated him as the type and representative of the human race, and decreed that his sin should, like a subtle spiritual poison, infect the soul of every man coming into the world. In other words, God, who is supposed to hate evil so profoundly that He damns for ever in hell a man guilty of one single "mortal" transgression, enacted that if one sin were committed it should be needlessly made to engender myriads of other sins, and that the tiny seed of evil which was first thrown upon the earth by His creature in a moment of pardonable weakness, and might have so easily been trampled out, should take root, sprout up and grow into a vast Upas tree whose poisonous branches overshadow all creation. This proposition, it is contended, explicitly taxes God, if not with the sole authorship of sin and evil, at least with the moral responsibility for propagating it. And this is the prevailing view among modern apologists.

As to the origin of evil, it is to be sought for, theologians have discovered, in the free will with which God endowed man. This, they allege, shifts all the responsibility on the human creature because, instead of evil, he might have chosen good. Unfortunately, the same argument would seem to apply to the Creator Himself.[15] He, too, being omnipotent, might have chosen good instead of evil subjects, and created human beings whose acts would have been blameless and virtuous, their will remaining what it is. Further, not having done this and having needlessly allowed an abyss to be made by sin between Himself and the first man, it was still open to Him to have abstained from widening it until it became an impassable gulf between Himself and the entire human race. But He did not abstain; instead of localising, He deliberately and wantonly spread the evil, and the ruin that overwhelmed all mankind cannot therefore be said to have sprung from the will of the race, but from His own. Again, the interposition of a free will between God and evil, it is urged, affords no real solution of the problem, for the question still remains, why were the workings of that free will evil and not good? Obviously because such was its God-created nature; for the action of outward circumstances upon the will neither builds up nor modifies this nature, but simply discloses it to our view.

These ideas were adopted, developed and defended by a few of the most profound Christian philosophers of the early Church, and most ably of all by Scotus Erigena,[16] who held that the origin of evil which cannot be sought for in God must not be placed in the free will of man, because the latter hypothesis would still leave the responsibility with the Creator, the human will being His own handiwork.

At the root of this argument lies yet another consideration upon which unbelieving thinkers rely still more: it is drawn from the alleged incompatibility between the conception of a created being and free will, and will be noticed presently. It is commonly regarded as the principal difficulty which Theists and Pantheists are condemned continually to encounter without ever being able to explain—the rock, so to say, upon which their optimistic systems strike, and are shattered to pieces—unless protected by the armour of supernatural faith.

But besides the Christian and Pantheistic theories, there is another explanation of the origin of evil offered by the religion of more than one-third of the human race. It is a theory which can readily be labelled and libelled by the most unphilosophical reader, but cannot be grasped and appreciated without serious study and reflection by the most intelligent, for it is based upon the doctrine that time, space and causality have no existence outside the human mind.[17] The world which we see and know, therefore, and everything it contains is "such stuff as dreams are made of"—the woof and warp being evolved from, and interwoven by, our own minds. Underlying the innumerable illusive appearances which we call the world is a reality, a being or force which is one. We and everything else are but manifestations, in time and space, of this one reality with which, however, each and every one of us is at bottom identical and whose sole attribute is unity. This force or will manifests itself in myriads of facets, so to say, in the universe, and these manifestations are not good, constitute, indeed, a sort of fall. Intelligence is not one of the primary attributes of this eternal will. It attained to clear consciousness and knowledge only in man and then for the first time perceived that the existence for which it yearned is evil and not good. Man therefore is his own work; and existence, as it constitutes a fall, is its own punishment; for his life is a series of inane desires which, when momentarily satiated, are immediately succeeded by others equally vain, fruitless and hollow, and the cessation of desire is the beginning of tedium which is oftentimes still less endurable, seeing that it leaves little room for hope.

  "Life which ye prize is long-drawn agony;
  Only its pains abide, its pleasures are
  As birds which light and fly."

Every wish springs from want which causes pain, the attainment of the wished-for object—commonly called pleasure—is but the cessation of that pain: in other words it is a mere negation. Man's life is a never-ending oscillation between pleasure and pain: the former mere illusion, the latter a dread reality. The origin of this and of all other evil is individual existence, and individual existence is the free act of the one substance or force which is identical with each and all of us.

This theory excludes creation. For free will is utterly incompatible with the state of a created being;[18] because operari sequitur esse—i.e., the operation, the working of every being, must be the necessary result of its qualities which are themselves known only by the acts they bring forth. If these acts be praiseworthy, the qualities are good: if reprehensible, they are bad. But if the acts are to be free, they should be neither good nor bad. A being therefore to be perfectly free should have no qualities at all—i.e., should not be created. For it must be borne in mind that it is not the motives that impart to the will its ethical quality. Motives are accidental and operate in the same way as the rays of the sun falling upon a tree or a flower: they reveal the nature of the object but are powerless to change it, for better or for worse.[19] But if this be so, one may ask, why do we feel sorrow, shame, repentance for acts which we were not free to perform or abstain from performing? Because we are "metaphysically" free, that is to say, our inborn disposition from which they necessarily emanate, is the work of our free will, which specific acts are not. No doubt, when we do right or wrong, we are conscious that we might have acted differently—had we willed it. But this proves nothing; the all-important question being, could we, under the circumstances, have willed otherwise than we did? And to this the reply is an emphatic negative. But for our personal character, be it good or evil, we are answerable, and therefore likewise for the acts that flow from it with the rigorous necessity characteristic of all causality. For individuality in the human race is identical with character, and as individuality is the work of our own free will exercised outside the realm of time and space, we are responsible for it, and conscious of the responsibility, although not of the manner in which it was incurred.

Our acts, therefore, and they only, show us what we really are; our sufferings what we deserve. The former are the necessary outcome of our character which external circumstances, in the guise of motives, call into play; just as gravitation is acted upon when we shake an apple off the tree. Our deeds then being the inevitable resultant of that self-created character acted upon by motives, must consequently follow with the same necessity as any other link in the chain of cause and effect. The knowledge of our character and the foreknowledge of these outward events which, in the unbroken chain of cause and effect, act upon it, would suffice to enable us to foresee our future as readily as astronomers foresee eclipses of the sun and moon. Now if the root of all evil be individuality, the essence of all morality is self-denial; and no act performed for the purpose of obtaining happiness, temporal or eternal, is moral. The evil and pain, therefore, which befall us upon earth cannot be regarded as the retribution for the deeds done in this life; for these are necessary and inevitable. They are the fruits of our character whence these acts emanate; and it is only our character which is our own work. With the ethical nature of that character each individual gradually grows acquainted as well in his own case as in that of his neighbour's, solely from a study of his own acts, which often astonish himself quite as much as his friends.

Brahmanism and Buddhism symbolized these notions in the somewhat gross but only intelligible form in which the mind can readily grasp them, viz., in the dogma of the transmigration of souls, according to which a man's good deeds and bad follow him like his shadow from one existence to another, and in this life he expiates the sins or enjoys the fruits of a previous existence:[20]

                      "Each man's life
  The outcome of his former living is;
  The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes,
  The bygone right breeds bliss.

  "That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields!
  The sesamum was sesamum, the corn
  Was corn. The Silence and the Darkness knew!
  So is man's fate born."

In the former religion, Brahma, who is identical with all of us, produces the world by a kind of fall from his primeval state and remains therein until he has redeemed himself. In the latter there is no god; man being his own handiwork and sin and evil the result of his blind striving after individual existence. It is however in his power, and in his alone, to right the wrong and remedy the evil, by starving out the fatal hunger for life. And in this work, faith, supplication and sacrifice avail him nothing.

  "Pray not! the Darkness will not brighten! Ask
  Nought from the Silence, for it cannot speak!
  Vex not your mournful minds with pious pains!
  Ah, brothers, sisters! seek
  Naught from the helpless gods by gift and hymn,
  Nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruits and cake;
  Within yourself deliverance must be sought:
  Each man his prison makes."

The ethical bearing of this view is more easily discerned than its metaphysical basis. Individual existence with its tantalising mirage of pleasures being the root of all evil, the first step towards finding a remedy is to recognise this truth, to obtain insight into the heart of things athwart the veil of Maya or delusion. The conviction that all beings are not merely brothers but one and the same essence, is the death of egotistic desire, of the pernicious distinction between me and thee, and the birth of pity, love and sympathy for all men. And this is a very old doctrine. In India it was taught in the Veda and the Vedanta under the formula tat tvam asi—thou art this—i.e., individual differs not essentially from individual, nor a man from the whole human race. He who obtains this insight and perceives how sorrow is shadow to life, who weans his thirst for existence, seeks not, strives not, wrongs not, starves out his passions, resigns himself wholly to pain and suffering as to "ills that flow from foregone wrongfulness" and asks for no clue from the Silence which can utter naught, he is truly blessed and released from all misery forever. He glides "lifeless to nameless quiet, nameless joy, blessed Nirvana."

It is probable, not to say certain, that it was an intuition of this kind that finally reconciled Job with the grey monotony of misery and seeming injustice which characterises all human existence and enabled him to resign himself cheerfully to whatever might befall. This at least would seem to be the only reasonable construction of which Jahveh's apparition and discourse are susceptible. That they are resorted to by the poet solely as an image and symbol of the inner illumination of his hero's intellect, is evident to most readers. Nothing that Jahveh has to disclose to Job and his three friends even remotely resembles a clue to the problem that exercised them. The human mind would be unable to grasp a solution if any existed, for it possesses no forms in which to apprehend it. This will soon become apparent even to the non-philosophical reader who endeavours to reason about a state in which time, space, and causality have no existence. But there is no solution. Jahveh virtually asks, as Buddha had asked before:

  "Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,
  Or any searcher know with mortal mind?
  Veil after veil will lift—but there must be
  Veil upon veil behind."

Unless we assume some such sudden illumination of the mind as Buddha obtained under the shadow of the fig-tree and the author of the 73rd Psalm among the ruins of the kingdom of Juda, it is impossible to account for Job's unforeseen and entire resignation, or to bring his former defiant utterances into harmony with the humble sentiments to which he now gives expression. For nothing but his mind had meanwhile undergone a change. All the elements of the problem remained what they were. The evils that had fired his indignation were not denied by their presumptive author, nor was any explanation of them vouchsafed to him. No remedy was promised in this life, no hope held out of redress in a possible world to come. On the contrary, Jahveh confirms the terrible facts alleged by His servant; He admits that pleasure and pain are not the meed of deeds done upon earth, and that the explanation we seek, the light we so wistfully long for, will never come; for human existence is not a dark spot in an ocean of dazzling splendour, but a will'-o'-the-wisp that merely intensifies the murkiness of everlasting Night.

Moreover, Job was detached from the world already. He had overcome all his passions and kept even his legitimate affections under control. He had no word of regret on losing his cattle, his possessions, his children. During his most exquisite sufferings, he declared that he held only to his good name. This, too, he now gives up and demanding nothing, avers that he is satisfied. "I resign and console myself. Though it be in dust and ashes." Complete detachment from existence, and not for the sake of some other and better existence (for there is none) is the practical outcome of Job's intuition. But in a God-created world made for the delectation of mankind, to forego its pleasures would be to offend the Creator, if indeed stark madness could kindle His ire. But to curb one's thirst for life and to spurn its joys because one holds them to be the tap root of all evil, is an action at once intelligible and wise. And this is what Job evidently does when he practises difficult virtues and undergoes terrible sufferings without the consciousness of past guilt or the faintest hope of future recompense.

As Buddha taught his followers: "When the disciple has lost all doubt as to the reality of suffering; when his doubts as to the origin of suffering are dispelled; when he is no longer uncertain as to the possibility of annihilating suffering and when he hesitates no more about the way that leads to the annihilation of suffering: then is he called a holy disciple, one who is in the stream that floweth onwards to perfection, one who is delivered from evil, who is guaranteed, who is devoted to the highest truth."[21]

Footnotes:

[14] One of the best accredited exponents of this theory, which is now generally accepted by Catholic divines, is Father (now Cardinal) Mazella.

[15] And Job more than once applies it.

[16] Cf. Editio Princeps, Oxford, 1681, p. 287.

[17] Many pious Christians who scoff at such emotions, without endeavouring to understand them, would do well to remember that whatever truth there is in the dogma of the immorality of the soul, is dependant upon this proposition, that time, space, and the law of casuality have no real existence whatever, but are merely the furniture of the human mind—the forms in which it apprehends. As time exists only in our consciousness, and as beginning and end can take place only in time, they can affect only our consciousness, which ends in death, but not our souls, which are distinct from mind and consciousness.

[18] Job, who rejected all secondary causes whatever, could not in logic, and did not in fact, believe in free will as it is commonly understood in our days.

[19] Cf. Matt. xii. 33-35.

[20] Even the Bible is not wholly devoid of traces of the same symbol employed to convey the same ideas; cf. Matt. xi. 14, John ix. 2, for the New Testament, and Ps. xc. 3 for the Old. The apparent inner absurdity of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls arises mainly from our inability to grasp and realise the two propositions which it presupposes—viz., that there is no such thing as time outside of the human mind, and therefore no past or future; and, secondly, that soul is but individualised will momentarily illumined by the intellect which is a function of the brain. Metempsychosis was originally no more than a symbol.

[21] "Samyuttaka-Nikayo," vol. iii. chap. iii. p. 24. Cf. Dr. K. E. Neumann's "Buddhistische Anthologie," Leiden, 1892, p. 204.

* * * * *

DATE OF THE COMPOSITION

The question which frequently exercised the ingenuity of former commentators, whether the poem of Job is the work of one or of many authors, has no longer any actuality. It is absolutely certain that the book, as we find it in the Authorised Version, and even in the best Hebrew manuscripts, is a mosaic put together by a number of writers widely differing in their theological views and separated from each other by whole centuries; and it is equally undoubted that, restored to its original form, it is "a poem round and perfect as a star"—the masterpiece of one of the most gifted artists of his own or any age. To the inquiry where he lived and wrote, numerous tentative replies have been offered but no final answer. To many he is the last of the venerable race of patriarchs, and his verse the sweet, sublime lisping of a childlike nature, disporting itself in the glorious morning of the world.[22]

This, however, is but a pretty fancy, which will not stand the ordeal of scientific criticism, nor even the test of a careful common-sense examination. The broader problems that interest thinking minds of a late and reflective age, the profounder feelings and more ambitious aspirations of manhood and maturity, are writ large in every verse of the poem. The lyre gives out true, full notes, which there is no mistaking. The hero is evidently a travelled cosmopolitan, who has outgrown the narrow prejudices of petty patriotism and national religious creeds to such an extent that he studiously eschews the use of the revealed name of the God of his people, and seems to believe at most in a far-away and incomprehensible divinity who sometimes merges into Fate. In the God of theologians he had no faith. His comforters, who from the uttermost ends of the earth meet together in a most unpatriarchal manner to discuss the higher problems of philosophy, allude to the views in vogue in the patriarchal age as to traditions of bygone days before the influence of foreign invaders had tainted the purity of the national faith; and passages like xii. 17, xv. 19, seem to point to the captivity of the Hebrew people as an accomplished fact. In a word, the strict monotheism of the hero, which at times borders upon half-disguised secularism, has nothing in common with the worship of the patriarchs except the absence of priests and the lack of ceremonies. The language of the poem, flavoured by a strong mixture of Arabic and Aramaic words and phrases, and the frequent use of imagery borrowed from Babylonian mythology, to say nothing of a number of other signs and tokens of a comparatively late age, render the patriarchal hypothesis absolutely untenable.[23] This, at least, is one of the few results of modern research about which there is perfect unanimity among all competent scholars.

If the date of the composition of Job cannot be fixed with any approach to accuracy, there are at least certain broad limits within which it is agreed on all hands that it should be placed. This period is comprised between the prophetic activity of Jeremiah and the second half of the Babylonian Exile. The considerations upon which this opinion is grounded are drawn mainly, if not exclusively, from authentic passages of Job which the author presumably borrowed from other books of the Old Testament. Thus a comparison of the verses in which the hero curses the day of his birth[24] with an identical malediction in Jeremiah (xx. 14-15), and of the respective circumstances in which each was written, leads to the conviction that the borrower was not the prophet whose writings must therefore have been familiar to the poet. This conclusion is confirmed by a somewhat far-fetched but none the less valid argument drawn from the circumstance that Ezekiel,[25] who would probably have known the poem had it existed in his day, obviously never heard of it; for this prophet, broaching the question, apparently for the first time among his countrymen, as to the justice of human suffering, denies point blank that any man endures unmerited pain,[26] and affirms in emphatic terms that to each one shall be meted out reward or punishment according to his works.[27] And this he could hardly have done had he been aware of the fact that the contradictory proposition was vouched for by no less an authority than Jahveh Himself.

Again, it is highly probable, although one would hardly be justified in stating it as an established fact, that certain striking poetic images clothed in the same form of words in Job and in the Second Isaiah,[28] are the coinage of the rich imagination of the latter,[29] from whose writings they must consequently have been taken by the author of Job. If this assumption be correct, and it is considerably strengthened by collateral evidence, we should have no choice but to assign to the composition of the poem a date later than that of the Second Isaiah who wrote between 546 and 535 B.C. The ingenious and learned German critic, Dr. Cornill, holds it to be no less than two or three hundred years younger still, and bases his opinion principally upon the last verse of the last chapter of the Book of Job, where the expression (Job died) "old and full of days," is, in his opinion, borrowed from the Priests' Code. It is, however, needless to analyse this argument, seeing that the verse in question was wanting in the Septuagint[30] version, and must therefore be held to be a later addition.

Another question, once a sure test of orthodoxy, the discussion of which has become equally superfluous to-day, is to what extent the narrative is based upon historical facts. The second council of Constantinople solemnly condemned Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia, one of the most enlightened Fathers of the Church, for having advanced the opinion that the story of Job was a pious fiction and the doctrine it embodies irreconcileable with orthodoxy. It would be rash to say what conclusion a council sitting at the end of the nineteenth century would be likely to arrive at. But it would hardly find fault with the majority of contemporary critics who hold that the prologue and epilogue, which are in prose and contain in outline the popular legend of Job, were anterior to the colloquies between the hero and his friends, bear in fact the same relation to the poem that the mediaeval legend of Johan Faustus does to the masterpiece of Goethe. And it was to the popular legend, not to the poem, that Ezekiel alluded in the passage in which he instances Job as the type of the just man. But one must needs be endowed with a strong and child-like faith to accept, in the light of ancient history and modern science, as sober facts the familiar conversation between Jahveh and the Adversary in the council-chamber of heaven, the sudden intervention of the latter in the life of Job, the ease with which he breaks through the chain of causality and bends even the human will to his purpose, the indecent haste with which he overwhelms the just man with a torrent of calamities in the course of one short day, the apparition of Jahveh in a storm-cloud, and many other equally improbable details. Improbability, however, is the main feature of all miracles; and faith need not be dismayed even by the seemingly impossible. In any case where it is hopeless to convince, it is needless to discuss, and if there still be readers to whose appreciation of the poem belief in its historical truth is absolutely indispensable, it would be cruel to seek to spoil or even lessen their enjoyment of one of the most sublime creations known to any literature of the world.

Footnotes:

[22] One of the main grounds for this opinion is the absolute ignorance of the Mosaic law manifested by the author of Job. The line of reasoning is that he must have been either a Jew—and in that case have lived before or simultaneously with Moses—or else an Arab, like his hero, and have written the work in Arabic, Moses himself probably doing it into Hebrew. To a Hebrew scholar this sounds as plausible as would the thesis, to one well versed in Greek, that the Iliad is but a translation from the Sanscrit. The Talmud makes Job now a contemporary of David and Solomon, now wholly denies his existence. Jerome, and some Roman Catholic theologians of to-day, identify the author of the poem with Moses himself, a view in favour of which not a shred of argument can be adduced. Cf. Loisy, "Le Livre de Job," Paris, 1892, p. 37; Reuss, "Hiob.," Braunschweig, 1888, pp. 8 ff.

[23] The subject of the date and place of composition has been treated by Cornill, "Einleitung in das Alte Testament," 235 fol., by Prof. Duhm, "The Book of Job" (cf. "The New World," June, 1894), and others. But the most lucid, masterly, and dispassionate discussion of the subject is to be found in Prof. Cheyne's "Job and Solomon," chaps. viii.-xii.

[24] Job A.V. iii. 3-10.

[25] 592-572 B.C.

[26] Ezek. xviii. 2, 3.

[27] Ibid. 4-9.

[28] "The Second Isaiah" is the name now usually given to the unknown author of one of the sublimest books of the Old Testament, viz., chaps, xl.-lxvi. of the work commonly attributed to Isaiah. It was composed most probably between 546 and 535 B.C.

[29] They may be found by referring to the parallel passages given in the margin of the Authorised Version of Job; for instance, chap. xiv. One example may suffice: In the Second Isaiah, xl. 6-8, we read "The Voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever." In Job we find the winged word embodied in the verse 2, chap. xiv. A.V. (strophe cxxi.).

      Man that is born of a woman,
      Poor in days and rich in trouble;
      He cometh forth as a flower and fadeth,
      He fleeth like a shadow and abideth not.

[30] For the value of the testimony of the Septuagint, cf. following chapter.

* * * * *

THE TEXT AND ITS RECONSTRUCTION

Our Authorised Version of Job is based upon the text handed down to us in existing Hebrew manuscripts and upon Jerome's Latin translation. None of the manuscripts, the most important of which are those of the Vatican,[31] of Alexandria[32] and of Sinai,[33] go further back than the fourth century A.D. And some of the modifications, made by Jerome in the Latin translation, particularly in chap. xxi. 25-27, into which he introduces the Christian idea of the Resurrection, were not based upon the various readings of the Codices, but inspired by a pious desire to render the work more edifying. As our Hebrew manuscripts are all derived from a single copy which was probably contemporaneous with the reign of the Emperor Hadrian,[34] the words and the corrections of which they reproduce with Chinese scrupulosity, the utmost we can expect from them is to supply us with the text as it existed at that relatively late age.

The comparative indifference that reigned before that time as to the purity of the text of the most important books of the Canon, and the utter carelessness with which down to the first century of the Christian era the manuscripts of the Hagiographa[35] were treated, render it highly probable that long before the reign of Hadrian the poem of Job had undergone many and serious modifications. The ease with which words written with consonants only, many of which resembled each other, were liable to be interchanged, strengthens this probability; while a detailed study of the various manuscripts and translations transforms it into certainty. The parallel passages alone of almost any of the books of the Old Testament yield a rich harvest of divergences.

But involuntary errors of the copyists are insufficient to explain all the bewildering changes which disfigure many of the books of the Sacred Scriptures. The gradual evolution of the Hebrew religion from virtual polytheism to the strictest monotheism seemed peremptorily to call for a corresponding change in the writings in which the revelation underlying it was enshrined. A later stadium of the evolution—which, of course, was never felt to be such—might naturally cause the free and easy views and lax practices which once were orthodox and universal to assume the odious form of heresy and impiety, and a laudable respect for the author of revelation was held to impose the sacred duty of bringing the documentary records of ancient practices into harmony with present theories. This was especially true of the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, in which not only was the general tone lacking in respect for all that the Jewish community held sacred, but likewise long and eloquent passages directly called in question the truth of revelation and blasphemously criticised the attributes of the Most High.

Gauged by the narrow standards of the Jewish community,[36] some of Job's most sublime outbursts of poetic passion must have seemed as impious to his contemporaries as to the theologians of our own country the "blasphemies" hurled by Byron's Lucifer against the "Everlasting Tyrant." There can be no doubt that it is to the feeling of holy horror which his plain speaking aroused in the minds of the strait-laced Jews of 2400 years ago that we have to ascribe the principal and most disfiguring changes which the poem underwent at the hands of well-meaning censors. It is quite possible even now to point out, by the help of a few disjointed fragments still preserved, the position, and to divine the sense, of certain spiritful and defiant passages which, in the interest of "religion and morals," were remorselessly suppressed, to indicate others which were split up and transposed, and to distinguish many prolix discourses, feeble or powerful word-pictures and trite commonplaces which were deliberately inserted later on, for the sole purpose of toning down the most audacious piece of rationalistic philosophy which has ever yet been clothed in the music of sublime verse.

The disastrous results of these corrections which were made at various times and by different persons is writ large in the present text of Job as we find it in the Hebrew manuscripts and our Authorised Version, which offer us in many places a jumble of disjointed fragments, incoherent, irrelevant or self-contradictory.