1. ‘Toleranz sollte eigentlich nur eine vorübergehende Gesinnung sein; sie muss zur Anerkennung führen.’—Goethe.
2. See essay on ‘Miracles’ in Christian Remembrancer (list of works recommended to theological honour-students in Oxford).
3. The self-humiliation of Christ is described (need I remark?) by St. Paul as a κένωσις (Phil. ii. 7). How far this κένωσις extended is a theological problem which in the sixteenth century, and again in our own, has exercised devout thinkers. For the modern form of the Kenotic view or doctrine the English reader will naturally go to Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol. iii., in Clark’s Library. Dorner’s opposition to this view is a weighty but not, of course, a decisive fact. We must be loyal to the facts of Christ’s humanity reported in the Gospels. The question as to the extent of the κένωσις is an open one.
4. Jerome already saw this. He represents the Book of Job as composed mainly in hexameters with a dactylic and spondaic movement (Præf. in Job). Does he mean double trimeters?
5. Where is the ‘Uz’ spoken of in Job i. 1? The ‘land of Uzza’ seems to have been not far from the Orontes (Shalmaneser’s Obelisk; see Friedr. Delitzsch’s Paradies, p. 259). Tradition places the home of Job in the fertile volcanic region called the Haurân (see the very full excursus in Delitzsch’s Job). But the ‘land of Uz’ might be farther south, nearer to Edom, in connection with which it is mentioned, Lam. iv. 21, Gen. xxxvi. 28 (comp. ver. 21). This is supported by the curious note appended to the Book of Job in the Septuagint. It is true that Uz is called a son of Aram (Gen. x. 23), but ‘Uz’ may have had several branches, or the use of Aramaic may have extended far beyond the limits of Aram proper.
6. Of the three friends Eliphaz comes from the Edomitish district of Teman, so famous for its wisdom; Bildad from the land of Shuah (‘Suhu’ lay, according to the inscriptions, between the mouths of the Belich and the Khabur, confluents of the Euphrates); Zophar from Naamah, some unknown district east of the Jordan. How well these notes of place agree with the Aramaic colouring of the book!
7. Bishop Lowth (Prælect. xxxiii.) admires the dramatic tact with which the poet makes Job err at first merely by the exaggeration of his complaints, thus inviting censure, which in turn leads to bold misstatements on Job’s part.
8. For a late Egyptian incantation of this class see Ancessi, Job et le Rédempteur, pp. 240-1; for the dragon myth itself see Cheyne’s note in the Prophecies of Isaiah (on Isa. xxvii. 1) and in the Pulpit Comm. on Jeremiah (on Jer. li. 34).
10. The translation follows Bickell’s text. The correction in line 2 of ver. 16 is from the Septuagint; the transposition in line 4 is suggested by 1 Kings xix. 12.
11. So xv. 15. M. Lenormant compares Gen. vi. 1-4 (an incomplete fragment). See above on the ‘sons of the Elohim’ of the prologue, and comp. Chap. X.
12. Compare the Hebrew ne’ūm in a common prophetic formula.
13. The following lines develope what Job may be supposed to have had in his mind.
14. Thomson has finely but inaccurately paraphrased this, changing the localities:—
15. Contrast the touchingly natural expressions of an Arabian poet, translated by Rückert (Hamâsa, ii. 315):—
The same sentiment is expressed more than once again; comp. Buddha’s apologue of the mustard seed.
16. So Merx and Bickell. Text, ‘my bones.’
17. Bildad more than implies that the fate which overtook Job’s children was the punishment of iniquity (viii. 4). Wonderful harshness!
18. See viii. 20. Bildad agrees with the statement in the prologue (i. 1).
19. Following Sept., with Merx and Bickell.
20. Comp. Isa. xxviii. 29 (Heb.) By a slight error of the ear the copyist whom our Hebrew Bibles follow put a Yōd for an Alef. Hence the Massoretic critics pronounce kiflayim ‘twofold,’ instead of kif’lāim ‘like wonders:’ following this text, Davidson renders, ‘that it is double in (true) understanding.’
21. Literally ‘... that God brings into forgetfulness for thee some of thy guilt.’
22. Following Sept., with Bickell. Comp. the Hebrew of Job xxxiii. 27.
23. This rendering is based on the reading of the Hebrew margin. The Hebrew text has, ‘Behold, should he slay me, for him would I wait,’ implying an expectation of a Divine interposition in Job’s favour after his death. But this idea is against the connection; besides which the restrictive particle ‘only’ (nearly = still) agrees better with the other reading and rendering. ‘Wait’ means ‘wait for a change for the better,’ as in vi. 11, which occurs in a similar context.
24. He admits that he is not without sins (comp. ver. 26).
25. Comp. the well-known lamentation of Moschus (iii. 106-111).
26. See the notices from Wetzstein in Delitzsch.
27. Miss E. Smith’s rendering, ‘irksome,’ Renan’s ‘insupportable,’ are not definite enough. Job means that his would-be comforters do but aggravate his unease.
28. Notice the expressions in xvi. 10, and comp. Ps. xxii. 7, 12, 13. (Ps. xxii., like the Book of Job, has some features which belong to an individual and some to a collection of sufferers.) Job would never have spoken of his friends in the terms used in xvi. 10, 11.
29. Sur. ix. 119.
30. Comp. Ps. xxii. 6, Isa. xlix. 7, Joel ii. 17 (where we should render ‘make a byword upon them’).
31. The Argument of the Book of Job (1881), p. 200.
32. Dr. Hermann Schultz is an unexceptionable witness, because his tastes lead him more to Biblical and dogmatic theology than to minute textual studies. He is convinced, he says, after each fresh examination, of ‘the baffling intricacy and obscurity and the probable corruption of the text’ (Alttestamentliche Theologie, ed. 2 [1878], pp. 661-2).
33. I agree with Dr. W. H. Green that the third view, which ‘conceives Job to be here looking forward, not to a future state, but to the restoration of God’s favour and his own deliverance out of all his troubles in the present life,’ is to be rejected. I do not follow him in all his reasons, but these two are decisive. 1. Everywhere else Job ‘regards himself as on the verge of the grave.... Every earthly hope is annulled; every temporal prospect has vanished. He invariably repels the idea, whenever his friends present it to him, of any improvement of his condition in this world as plainly impossible.’ 2. ‘If he here utters his expectation that God will interfere to reward his piety in the present life, he completely abandons his own position and adopts [that of the friends].’ (The Argument of Job, pp. 204-5).
34. Job’s vindication, thinks Ewald, would be incomplete if at least the spirit of the dead man did not witness it.
35. The dust beneath which Job lies: comp. ‘ye that dwell in dust’ (Isa. xxvi. 19).
36. On the text see Bickell, Merx, Hitzig; on the use of metal for public notices see Chabas, quoted by Cook in Speaker’s Comm., ad loc.
37. On this characteristic word for parallelistic poetry, see on Proverbs.
38. Note that xxvii. 13 is repeated from an earlier speech of Zophar (xx. 29). There it concludes a sketch of the ‘impious’ man’s fate; here it begins a similar description. Verses 11 and 12 of the same chapter would stand more properly (Bickell and virtually Hirzel) immediately before chap. xxviii. Mr. B. Wright is very near doing the same; following Eichhorn, he takes vv. 13-23 as a specimen quoted by Job of the friends’ ‘inconsequential’ style of argument (a less natural hypothesis than that adopted here).
39. It seems clear that chap. xxii. was not written as the sequel of chap. xxx. Since, however, it bears such a strong impress of originality, one can only suppose that the author placed it here by an afterthought, and omitted to construct a connecting link with the preceding chapter.
40. These verses have been misplaced in the Massoretic text (as Isa. xxxviii. 21, 22). They clearly ought to stand at the end of the chapter. So Kennicott, Eichhorn, Merx, Delitzsch.
41. But for this tendency of the poem one might follow Delitzsch (art. ‘Hiob’ in Herzog-Plitt, vi. 133) and regard chap. xxviii. as inserted by the author of Job from his ‘portfolio.’
42. So M. Derenbourg, who points out that none of the other speakers have a genealogy, and identifies Buz with Boaz, and Ram with an ancestor of David (Ruth iv. 19). The author of chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii. might thus be a descendant of Elihu the brother of David (1 Chr. xxvii. 18).
43. On ‘drinks’ see Thomson, The Land and the Book, p. 319.
44. The text (which has ‘His words’) is generally rendered ‘because He gives not account of any of His matters,’ i.e. of the details of His government. This is very strained; the Sept. has ‘my words,’ the Vulgate ‘thy words,’ either of which readings gives a natural sense.
45. See 2 Sam. xxiv. 16, and comp. 1 Chr. xxi. 15, Ps. xxviii. 49, Prov. xvi. 14, Ezek. ix. 1, x. 7; also Jost, Gesch. des Judenthums, i. 304. For Assyria see Records of the Past, i. 131-5: iv. 53-60 (the sinner was thought to be given up in displeasure by his God into the hands of the evil spirits). For Arabia see Korán, lxxix. 1, 2—
for the early Christian, Justin M. Dial. e. Tryph. 105, τὰ αὐτὰ αἰτῶμεν τὸν θεὸν, τὸν δυνάμενον ἀποστρέψαι πάντα ἀναιδῆ πονηρὸν ἄγγελον μὴ λαβέσθαι ἡμῶν τῆς ψυχῆς: and for the medieval, Dante, Inferno, xxvii. 112-123: Purgatorio, v. 103-108. Comp. below, Chap. X.
46. Blake seems to have felt Elihu’s strong faith in the angels. The border of his 12th illustration is filled with a stream of delicate angel forms.
47. Davidson. Ewald explains the ‘ransom’ partly of the intercession of the angel, partly of the prayer of repentance.
48. Turner, Studies Biblical and Oriental, p. 146.
49. Cox, Commentary on the Book of Job, p. 489.
50. So Lightfoot (see Lowth, Prælect. xxxii.).
51. Le livre de Job, p. liv.
52. Davidson, The Book of Job, p. xlv.
53. See Sayce on ‘Babylonian Astronomy’ (Translations of Soc. of Bibl. Archæology, 1874); Lenormant, La magic chez les Chaldéens, and his Syllabaires cunéiformes (1876), p. 48.
54. This is not mere ‘patriarchal simplicity’ (Renan, p. lvi.), but a contradiction of the mythic view that a nature god like Baal is the ‘father’ or producer of the rain and the crops (see Cheyne, Isaiah, ed. 3, i. 28, 294, ii. 295). Elihu no doubt goes further in his explanations; see xxxvi. 27, 28.
55. Heb. kima; comp. Ass. kimtu, ‘a family.’ The word occurs again in ix. 9, Am. v. 8 (but are not this verse and the closely related one in iv. 13 additions by a later editor of Amos in the Exile period?)
56. Heb. k’sīl, the name of the foolhardy giant who strove with Jehovah. The Chaldeo-Assyrian astrology gave the name kisiluv to the ninth month, connecting it with the zodiacal sign Sagittarius. But there are valid reasons for attaching the Hebrew popular myth to Orion.
57. ‘He did not watch the stars of heaven, nor the mazarati.’ So Fox Talbot quotes from a cuneiform tablet (Transactions of Soc. of Bibl. Archæology, 1872, p. 341). The above explanation, however, which is that of Delitzsch on Job, differs from that of Fox Talbot.
58. Mr. Bateson Wright’s pointing, lá’ereb for la’ōrēbh, is plausible. The raven is an insignificant companion to the lion, and the birds of prey are mentioned at the end of Job’s picture gallery. Render ‘who provides in the evening his food,’ &c.; but in this case should not lābhī in ver. 39 be rendered ‘lion’ rather than ‘lioness’ (note ‘his young ones’)? The root idea is probably voracity. That lābhī in iv. 11 is the feminine is no objection. Comp. Ps. lvii. 5, and perhaps Hos. xiii. 8. Possibly, however, the ‘raven’ was inserted here to make up the number ten, by a reminiscence of Ps. cxlvii. 9.
59. The ‘unicorn’ of A. V. comes from the Sept. and Vulg.; but in Deut. xxxiii. 17 the re’ēm is said to have ‘horns.’ Schlottmann and Delitzsch identify it with the oryx or antelope, but the oryx was tamable (Wilkinson, Egyptians, i. 227), whereas our poet asks, ‘Will the re’ēm be willing to serve thee?’ See Cheyne on Isa. xxxiv. 7.
60. Blake, Songs of Experience.
61. Purg., iii. 37.
62. Inf., iii. 5, 6.
63. Parad., xxxiii. 142.
64. Parad., xxxiii. 91.
65. [All his thinkings seemed like hearsay. This, then, was the real God.] So an anonymous writer well expresses it (Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, p. 196).
66. Etudes sur l’antiquité historique, prem. éd., pp. 391-393.
67. Other readers, however, found no difficulty in the close of the story; to such St. James addresses himself in the words, ‘Ye have heard of the endurance of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord’ (James v. 11), i.e. the blessed end vouchsafed by the Lord to Job. It was also, no doubt, such a reader who composed the beautiful romance of Tobit, to show that, however tried, the righteous man is at last delivered by his God.
68. Those rabbis who in later times held this view appear to have assumed that Job was of the Israelitish race (Frankl in Grätz’s Monatsschrift, 1872, p. 311).
69. Book of Job (1836), E. T. i. 7.
70. Baba Bathra § 15, 1. Comp. Frankl in Grätz’s Monatsschrift, 1872, pp. 309-310.
71. Ewald and Dukes, Beitrage zur Gesch. der ültesten Auslegung, ii. 166.
72. Werke (Walch), xxii. 2093.
73. De sacrâ poesi (1753), Prælect. xxxii.
74. Tractatus theologico-politicus, c. x.
75. Liber Jobi (1737), vol. i., in fine Praf.
76. Das Buch Hiob (1870-75), i. 35.
77. Das Buch Hiob, Vorbemerkungen, p. xxxv.
78. In Korán, xxxviii. 16, 29, 44, David, Solomon, and Job are all called, one after another, awwāb, i.e. not ‘penitent,’ but ‘ever turning to God.’ Hitzig remarks that Iyyób (Arabic Ayyàb) will thus be equivalent to the mythic prophet Saleh (= ‘pious’) in the Korán (Das Buch Hiob, Einl., S. x.), on whom see Palmer, Desert of the Exodus, p. 50, where he is identified with Moses. This is bold, and, in any case, must not such a name be comparatively modern?
79. This was perhaps first pointed out by Schlottmann, in chap. 1. of the Introduction to his Commentary.
80. Nothing can be built upon the occurrence of the name Ayyûb in pre-Islamic times, for Jews and Arabs were in frequent intercourse before Mohammed.
81. Davenant.
82. Hottinger, referred to by Delitzsch, Iob, p. 7. In the Peshitto, Heb. xii. 3-11 has for a sub-title, ‘In commemoration of Job the righteous.’ The choice of the section shows in what sense Job’s ‘righteousness’ is affirmed—not the Talmudic.
83. See especially Job vi. 2, 3, vii. 1-3, xiv. 1-3.
84. This view goes back to the last century (Warburton, Michaelis, &c.) It has been remodelled by Seinecke and Hoekstra, who regard Job, not as the people of Israel in general, but the idealised Israel or ‘Servant of Jehovah.’ See especially Hoekstra’s essay, Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1871, p. 1 &c., and Kuenen’s reply, Th. Ti., 1873, p. 492 &c.
85. Quoted from Essay ix. in vol. ii. of The Prophecies of Isaiah.
86. Blake’s 16th design is devoted to the defeat of Satan. Beneath the enthroned Jehovah and his angels, ‘the Evil One falls with tremendous plummet-force. Hell naked before his face, and Destruction without a covering.’ Another point in which Blake corrects his author is the introduction of Job’s wife into the illustrations of the Colloquies.
87. Art. ‘Ecclesiastes,’ Ency. Brit., 9th ed.
88. The absence of such a protest is characteristic of the Wisdom-literature in general. The reference to star-worship in Job xxxi. 26 suggests a date subsequent to the origination of the title ‘Jehovah (God) of Hosts.’ See appendix to Isa. i. in my commentary.
89. Mr. Tomkins compares Job’s mode of life with that of Abram before his departure from Kharran (Studies on the Times of Abraham, 1878, p. 61).
90. I cannot go quite so far as Lagarde, who argues from the use of ‘Eloah’ (instead of ‘Elohim’ and ‘Jehovah’) that the doubters have cast off belief in all the supposed various manifestations of divinity in the world, and merely retain a comfortless belief in τὸ θεῖον. ‘Numen quoddam esse non negant, sed’ &c. Psalterium Hieronymi, pp. 155-6 (‘Corollarium’).
91. Job xv. 19 certainly implies the siege and capture of Jerusalem by some foreign foe. Comp. Joel iii. (Heb. iv.) 17.
92. Dr. Barth quotes Am. i. 6, ii. 1-3, ix. 11, 15 in proof that ‘deportation’ also took place in the ‘pre-Assyrian’ time. But, in fact, Amos is not ‘pre-Assyrian.’
93. It is no sufficient objection that the ravages of the Chaldæans in Job are on a small scale, nor yet that side by side with them are mentioned the Sabeans, surely not those of S. Arabia (Noldeke), but those of N. Arabia (Delitzsch), detachments of whom might have encamped on the borders of Edom. Comp. Wetzstein in Delitzsch’s Iob, ed. 2, p. 596 &c.
94. I write this with deference to the contrary opinion of Delitzsch, who is, however, too prejudiced against late dates, and biassed by his belief in the authenticity of the Song of Hezekiah. If the Book of Job be pre-Hezekian, it is of course natural to throw it back to the age of Solomon.
95. Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1873, p. 538.
96. Das Buch Hiob (1874), p. xlix.
97. Das Buch Hiob (1842), p. 276.
98. Maspero, Histoire ancienne de l’Orient, ed. 1, p. 30. Comp. Chabas’ translation from the Harris papyrus, Records of the Past, x. 142-146.
99. It is not likely that Satan was ever used entirely as a proper name; but being frequently in men’s mouths, it naturally lost the article. At last the name Sammael was invented for the arch-Satan (see above).
100. In 2 Sam. xxiv. 1, the temptation is ascribed to Jehovah; the Chronicler is at any rate on the road to James i. 13. Contrast the stationariness of Mohammed (‘God misleadeth whom He will,’ Korán, xxxv. 9).
101. So rightly Baudissin, Studien, ii. 125.
102. Eliphaz apparently assumes that the ‘holy ones’ might plead for Job with Eloah (comp. xxxiii. 23). There is an analogy for this in Arabian religion. The Koreish (Qurais) tribe were willing to join Mohammed, if he would only admit their three idol-gods to be mediators with the supreme God, and for a time he consented. See Palmer’s Korán, Introd., p. xxvii. This was equivalent to recognising these heathen deities as b’ur Elohim and also (Eliphaz would say) as Q’dōskīm or ‘holy ones.’
103. The Elohistic narrator in Gen. xxviii. 12, 17, xxxii. 2, 3 even appears to identify the terms ‘angels of Elohim’ (= God) and ‘Elohim’ (= divine powers). Beth ’elōhīm and makhani’ ’elōhīm are more naturally rendered ‘place, host, of divine powers’ than ‘place, host of God.’
104. The ‘Song of Moses’ is placed by Ewald and Kamphausen in the Assyrian period of Israel’s history. Ver. 8 runs, in a corrected version.
105. ‘When Elyōn gave the nations as inheritances, when he parted out the sons of men, he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of El:’ comp. ver. 9. ‘For Jehovah is the portion of his people, Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.’ (With many recent critics, I follow the reading of the Septuagint. A scribe, offended by the no longer intelligible statement in ver. 8, inserted an Ι before ΗΛ, and so formed the usual abbreviation of Ἰσραήλ.) This passage explains Sirach xvii. 17.
106. There is a singular reference to a still future deposition of the patron spirits of the nations in Isa. xxiv. 21 (post-Exile), with which comp. Ps. lviii., lxxxii. In lxxxii. 6 the title ’elōhim is interchanged with b’nē ’elyōn ‘sons of the Most High.’
107. See Cheyne, The Prophecies of Isaiah, ed. 3, ii. 30; art. ‘Isaiah,’ Encyclopædia Britannica, xi. 380.
108. The Book of Job (1884), pp. lx.-lxii.
109. According to Ewald, the reference is to Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of which, we know, was familiar as early as Hosea’s time (Hos. xi. 8).
110. See Bateson Wright’s The Book of Job, Appendix. The author concludes that the poet of Job ‘selects the main threads from the complete treatise of Ps. xxxvii. and interweaves them into the highly poetical discourse of Eliphaz.’
111. Presbyterian Review, 1885, p. 353.
112. Delitzsch, art. ‘Hiob,’ Herzog-Plitt’s Realencyklopädie, vi. 132.
113. Since this wish cannot be realised, Job pleads his cause against an invisible God with the same earnestness as if he stood before His face.
114. It is a pleasure to quote the forcible summing-up of Mr. Froude. ‘A difficulty,’ he remarks, ‘now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the 27th is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the 11th to the 23rd verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has maintained before—is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of Job’s last and highest position, supposes that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem’ (Short Studies, vol. i.) He then proceeds to mention with cautious approbation the theory of Kennicott (see note on Text at end of Chap. XV.)
115. There is a doubt whether the Septuagint postscript or the statement of the Egyptian Jew (?) Aristeas (as given by Eusebius from Alexander Polyhistor in Præf. Evang. l. ix.) be the earlier. The ordinary view is that Aristeas had the Septuagint Job before him; Freudenthal, however, infers from the strange description of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar in Sept. Job ii. 11 (taken verbally from Aristeas) that the reverse was the case, and that the fragment of Aristeas is only a condensed extract from the prologue and epilogue of the Book of Job (Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, 139, 140; Grätz, Monatsschrift, 1877, p. 91). This inference in turn suggests Grätz’ hypothesis that the Septuagint Job is a work of the first century A.D. (see note at end of Chap. XV.)