The silence with which both these ‘vessels of election’ meet the Divine revelation is the silence of satisfaction, even though this be mingled with awe. Job has learned to forget himself in the wondrous creation of which he forms a part, just as Dante when he saw
Job cannot, indeed, as yet express his feelings; awe preponderates over satisfaction in the words assigned to him in xl. 4, 5. In fact, he has fallen below his better knowledge, and must be humbled for this. He has known that he is but a part of humanity—a representative of the larger whole, and might, but for his frailty, have comforted himself in that thought. God’s power and wisdom and goodness are so wondrously blended in the great human organism that he might have rested amidst his personal woes in the certainty of at least an indirect connection with the gentler manifestations of the ‘Watcher of mankind’ (vii. 20). This thought has proved ineffectual, and so the Divine Instructor tries another order of considerations. And, true enough, nature effects what ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ has failed to teach. Job, however, needs more than teaching; he needs humiliation for his misjudgment of God’s dealings with him personally. Hence in His second short but weighty speech ‘out of the tempest’ Jehovah begins with the question (xl. 8)—
This gives the point of view from which Jehovah ironically invites Job, if he thinks (see chap. xxiv.) that he can govern the world—the human as well as the extra-human world—better than the Creator, to make the bold attempt. He bids him array himself with the Divine majesty and carry out that retribution in which Jehovah, according to him, has so completely failed (xl. 11-13). If Job will prove his competence for the office which he claims, then Jehovah Himself will recognise his independence and extol his inherent strength. Did the poet mean to finish the second speech of Jehovah here? It is probable; the subject of the interrogatory hardly admitted of being developed further in poetry. A later writer (or, as Merx thinks, the poet of Job himself) seems to have found the speech too short, and therefore appended the two fancy sketches of animals which follow. But in the original draft of the poem xl. 14 must have been followed immediately by Job’s retractation, closing with those striking words (see above, p. 49) which so well supplement the less articulate confession of xl. 4, 5—
How complete a reversal of the ‘princely’ anticipations of Job in xxxi. 37! To us, indeed, it may seem somewhat ungracious to Job to give this as the last scene of his pathetic drama. But the poet leaves it open to us to animate Job’s repentance with love as well as awe and compunction. With fine feeling Blake in his seventeenth illustration almost fills the margin with passages from the Johannine writings.
The long description of the two Egyptian monsters (xl. 15, xli. 26) is, as we have hinted above, out of place in the second speech of Jehovah. It has indeed been suggested that the writer may have intended it as a development of xl. 14—
which implies that Job has no power to help himself in the government of the world. According to this view, the opening words of the behemoth section will mean, ‘Consider, pray, that thou hast fellow-creatures which are far stronger than thou; and how canst thou undertake the management of the universe?’ It must, however, be admitted that the emphasis thus laid on the omnipotence of God, apart from His righteousness, introduces an obscurity into the argument which almost compels us to assume that the sketches of behemoth and leviathan are later insertions. At any rate, even if we regard them as the work of the principal writer of Job, we must at least ascribe them to one of those after-thoughts by which poets not unfrequently spoil their best productions. The style of the description, too, is less chastened than that of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. (so that Bickell can hardly be right in placing xl. 15, &c., immediately after xxxix. 30), and if it relates to the hippopotamus and the crocodile is less true to nature than the other ‘animal pieces.’
The truth is that neither behemoth nor leviathan corresponds strictly to any known animal. The tail of a hippopotamus would surely not have been compared to a cedar by a truthful though poetic observer like the author of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. Moreover that animal was habitually hunted by the Egyptians with lance and harpoon, and was therefore no fit symbol of indomitable pride. The crocodile too was attacked and killed by the Egyptians, though in xli. 26-29 leviathan is said to laugh at his assailants. Seneca in his description of Egypt describes the crocodile as ‘fugax animal audaci, audacissimum timido’ (Quæst. Nat., iv. 2). Comp. Ezek. xxix. 4, xxxii. 3; Herod. ii. 70.
To me, indeed, as well as to M. Chabas, the behemoth and the leviathan seem to claim a kinship with the dragons and other imaginary monsters of the Swiss topographies of the sixteenth century. A still more striking because a nearer parallel is adduced by M. Chabas from the Egyptian monuments, where, side by side with the most accurate pictures from nature, we often find delineations of animals which cannot have existed out of wonderland.[66]
It is remarkable that the elephant should not have been selected as a type of strange and wondrous animal life; apparently it was not yet known to the Hebrew writers, though of course it might be urged that the poet was accidentally prevented from writing more. Merx has pointed out that the description of behemoth is evidently incomplete. He also thinks that the poet has not yet brought the form of these passages to final perfection: a struggle with the difficulties of expression is observable. He therefore relegates xl. 15-xli. 26 to an appendix with the suggestive title (comp. Goethe’s Faust) Paralipomena to Job. He thinks that a reader or admirer of the original poem sought to preserve these unfinished sketches by placing them where they now stand. This is probably the most conservative theory (i.e. the nearest to the traditional view) critically admissible.
We now come to the dénoûment of the story (xlii. 7-17), against which, from the point of view of internal criticism, much were possible to be said. We shall not, however, here dwell upon the inconsistencies between the epilogue on the one hand and the prologue and the speeches on the other. The main point for us to emphasise is the disappointingness of the events of the epilogue regarded as the final outcome of Job’s spiritual discipline. Surely the high thoughts which have now and then visited Job’s mind, and which, combined with the personal self-revelation of the Creator, must have brought back the sufferer to a state of childlike resignation, stand in inappropriate companionship with a tame and commonplace renewal of mere earthly prosperity. Would it not have been fitter for the hero on whom so much moral training had been lavished to pass with humble but courageous demeanour through the dark valley, at the issue of which he would ‘see God’? It is hardly a sufficient answer that a concession was necessary to the prejudices of the unspiritual multitude; for what was the object of the poem, if not to subvert the dominion of a one-sided retribution theory? The solution probably is that Job in the epilogue is a type of suffering, believing, and glorified Israel. Not only the individual believer, not only all the elect spirits of suffering humanity, but the beloved nation of the poet.—Israel, the ‘Servant of Jehovah’—must receive a special message of comfort from the great poem. In Isa. lxi. 7 we read that glorified Israel is to ‘have double (compensation) instead of its shame;’ comp. Zech. ix. 12, Jer. xvi. 14-18. The people of Israel, according to the limited view of the prophets, was bound indissolubly to the Holy Land. The only promise, therefore, which would be consolatory for suffering Israel, the only possible sign of God’s restored favour, was a material one including fresh ‘children’ and many flocks and herds (Isa. liv. 1, lx. 7). Observe in this connection the phrase, xlii. 10, ‘Jehovah turned the fortunes of Job’ (others, as A. V., ‘turned the captivity of Job’)—the phrase so well known in passages relating to Israel (e.g. Ps. xiv. 7, Joel iii. 1).
The explanation is perhaps adequate. Some, however, will be haunted by a doubt whether the author of the prologue would not have thrown more energy and enthusiasm into the closing narrative. An early reader, probably of Pharisaic leanings, felt the poverty of the epilogue,[67] and sought to remedy it by the following addition in the Septuagint: ‘And Job died, old and full of days; and it is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raiseth.’[68] The remainder of the Septuagint appendix testifies only to the love of the later Jews for amplifying Biblical notices (see Chap. VII.) Our own poet painter has also amplified the details of the epilogue, but in how different a way! (Gilchrist’s Life of Blake, i. 332-3).
This is widely different, remarks Umbreit,[69] from the question whether Job actually said and did all that is related of him in our book. It is scarcely necessary, he adds, in the present day to disprove the latter, but we have no reason to doubt the former (the theory as to the historical existence of a sort of Arabian king Priam, named Job). In truth, we have no positive evidence either for affirming or denying it, unless the ‘holy places,’ each reputed to be Job’s grave, may be mentioned in this connection. The allusion in Ezek. xiv. 14 to ‘Noah, Daniel, and Job,’ proves no more than that a tradition of some sort existed respecting the righteous Job during the Babylonian Exile: we cannot tell how much Ezekiel knew besides Job’s righteousness. In later times, Jewish students do appear to have believed that ‘Job existed;’ but the force of the argument is weakened by the uncritical character of the times, and the extreme form in which this belief was held by them. How early doubts arose, we know not. The authors of Tobit and Susanna may very likely have been only half-believers, since they evidently imitate the story of Job in their romantic compositions. At any rate, the often-quoted saying of Rabbi Resh Lakish, איוב לא היה ולא נברא אלא משל היה, ‘Job existed not, and was not created, but he is (only) a parable,’[70] shows that even before the Talmud great freedom of speech prevailed among the Rabbis on such points. In Hai Gaon’s time (d. 1037), the saying quoted must have given offence to some, for this Rabbi not only appeals for the historical character of Job to the passage in Ezekiel, but wishes (on traditional authority) to alter the reading of Resh Lakish’s words, so as to read איוב לא היה ולא נברא אלא למשל, ‘Job existed not, and was not created, except to be a parable.’[71] (See note 7, Appendix.)
The prevailing opinion among the Jews doubtless continued to be that the Book of Job was strictly historical, and Christian scholars (with the exception of Theodore—see Chap. XV.) found no reason to question this till Luther arose, with his genial, though unscientific, insistence on the right of questioning tradition. In his Tischreden Luther says, ‘Ich halte das Buch Hiob für eine wahre Historia; dass aber alles so sollte geschehen und gehandelt sein, glaube ich nicht, sondern ich halte, dass ein feiner, frommer, gelehrter Mann habe es in solche Ordnung bracht.’[72] Poetically treated history—that is Luther’s idea, as it was that of Grotius after him, and in our own country of that morning-star of Biblical criticism, Bishop Lowth.[73] It is acquiesced in by Schlottmann, Delitzsch, and Davidson, and with justice, provided it be clearly understood that no positive opinion can reasonably be held as to the historical origin of the tradition (Sage, Ewald) used by the author. I have said nothing of Spinoza and Albert Schultens. The former[74] pronounces most unfavourably on the religious and poetical value of the book which he regards as a heathenish fiction, reminding us somewhat (see elsewhere) of the hasty and ill-advised Theodore of Mopsuestia. The latter[75] actually defends the historical character both of the narratives and of the colloquies of Job in the strictest sense. Hengstenberg, alone perhaps among orthodox theologians, takes a precisely opposite view. Like Reuss and Merx, he regards the poem as entirely a work of imagination. We may be thankful for his protest against applying a prosaic standard to the poetical books of the Hebrew Canon. Those who do so, he remarks,[76] ‘fail to observe that the book stands, not among historical, but among poetical books, and that it would betray a very low grade of culture, were one to depreciate imaginative as compared with historical writing, and declare it to be unsuitable for sacred Scripture.’
I entirely agree with the eminent scholar, whose unprogressive theology could not entirely extinguish his literary and philological sense. But I see no sufficient reason for adopting what in itself, I admit, would add a fresh laurel to the poet’s crown. Merx indeed assures us[77] that the meaning of the name ‘Job’ is so redolent of allegory that it must be the poet’s own invention, especially as the name occurs nowhere else in the Old Testament. He adds that the story of Job is so closely connected with the didactic part of the book that it would be lost labour to separate the legendary from the new material. All was wanted; therefore all is fictitious. This is not, however, the usual course of procedure with poets whether of the East or of the West, whose parsimony in the invention of plots is well known. As for the name Job (Iyyób) it may no doubt be explained (from the Arabic) ‘he who turns to God,’[78] and in other ways, but there is no evidence that the author thought of any meaning for it. When he does coin names (see Epilogue), there is no room for doubting their significance. Ewald may, certainly, have gone too far in trying to recover the traditional element: how difficult it would be to do so with Paradise Lost, if we had not Genesis to help us! But the probability of the existence of a legend akin to the narrative in the Prologue, is shown by the parallels to it which survive, e.g. the touching Indian story of Harischandra,[79] given by Dr. Muir in vol. 1. of his Sanskrit Texts. The resemblance may be slight and superficial, but the sudden ruin of a good man’s fortunes is common to both stories. Had we more knowledge of Arabic antiquity, we should doubtless find a more valuable parallels.[80]
The story of Job had a special attraction for Mohammed, who enriched it (following the precedent of the Jewish Haggada) with a fresh detail (Korán, xxxviii. 40). To him, as well as to St. James, Job was an example of ‘endurance.’ The dialogue between Allah and Eblis in Korán, xv. 32-42, may perhaps have been suggested by the Prologue of our poem.
‘Did then, Job really live?’ That for which we most care comes not from ‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,’[81] but from an unnamed poet, who embellished tradition partly from imagination, partly (see next section) from the rich and varied stores of his own experience.
A German critic (Dillmann), in speaking of Job, has well reminded us that ‘the idea of a work of art must reveal itself in the development of the piece: it is not to be condensed into a dry formula.’ Least of all, surely, is such formulation possible when the work of art is an idealised portraiture of the author himself, and such, I think, to a considerable extent is the Book of Job. Those words of a psalmist,
might be taken as the motto of Job. In short, the author is thoroughly ‘subjective,’ like all the great Hebrew and especially the Arabian poets. ‘In the rhythmic swell of Job’s passionate complaints, there is an echo of the heart-beats of a great poet and a great sufferer. The cry “Perish the day in which I was born” (iii. 3) is a true expression of the first effects of some unrecorded sorrow. In the life-like description beginning “Oh that I were as in months of old” (xxix. 2), the writer is thinking probably of his own happier days, before misfortune overtook him. Like Job (xxix. 7, 21-25) he had sat in the “broad place” by the gate and solved the doubts of perplexed clients. Like Job, he had maintained his position triumphantly against other wise men. He had a fellow-feeling with Job in the distressful passage through doubt to faith. Like Job (xxi. 16) he had resisted the suggestion of practical atheism, and with the confession of his error (xlii. 2-6) had recovered spiritual peace.’
The man who speaks to us under the mask of Job is not indeed a perfect character; but he does not pretend to be so. How pathetic are his appeals to his friends to remember the weight of his calamity—‘therefore have my words been wild’ (vi. 3)—and not to ‘be captious about words when the speeches of the desperate are but for the wind’ (vi. 26). He was no Stoic, and had not practised himself in deadening his sensibility to pain. Strong in his sense of justice, he lacked those higher intuitions which could alone soothe his irritation. But he was throughout loyal to the God whom his conscience revered, and, even in the midst of his wild words, he let God mould him. First of all, he renounced the hope of being understood by men; he ceased to complain of his rather ignorant than unfeeling friends. He exemplified that Arabic proverb which says, ‘Perfect patience allows no complaint to be heard against (human creatures).’ Then he came by degrees to trust God. There is a kernel of truth in that passage of the Jerusalem Talmud (Berakhoth, cix. 5) where, among the seven types of Pharisees, the sixth is described as ‘he who is pious from fear, like Job,’ and the seventh, as ‘he who is pious from love, like Abraham.’ Job’s religion was at first not entirely but still too much marked by fear; it ended by becoming a religion of trust, justifying the title borne by Job among the Syrians, as if in contradiction to the Talmud, of ‘the lover of the Lord.’[82]
So far as the author of Job has any direct purpose beyond that of giving a helpful picture of his own troubles, it is no doubt principally a polemical one. He has suffered so deeply from the inveterate error (once indeed a relative truth) so tenaciously maintained by the wisest men that he would fain crush the source of so much heart-breaking misery. But that for which we love the book is its φιλανθρωπία, its brotherly love to all mankind. No doubt the author thinks first of Israel, then (as I suppose) suffering exile; but the care with which the poem is divested of Israelitish peculiarities, seems to show that he looks beyond his own people, just as in his view of God he has broken the bonds of a narrow ‘particularism.’ ‘I can see no other explanation of those apparently hyperbolical complaints, that strange invasion of self-consciousness, and that no less strange ‘enthusiasm of humanity’[83] ... than the view expressed or implied by Chateaubriand, that Job is a ‘type of righteous men in affliction—not merely in the land of Uz, nor among the Jews in Babylonia, nor yet, on Warburton’s theory of the poem, in the Judæa of the time of Nehemiah, but wherever on the wide earth tears are shed and hearts are broken.’ This is the truth in the too often exaggerated allegorical view[84] of the poem of Job. According to his wont, the author lets us read his meaning by occasional bold inconsistencies. No individual can use such phraseology as we find in xvii. 1, xviii. 2, 3, xix. 11, and perhaps I may add xvi. 10, xxvii. 11, 12. And yet the fact that Job often speaks as the ‘type of suffering humanity’ no more destroys his claim to be an individual ‘than the typical character of Dante in his pilgrimage and of Faust in Goethe’s great poem annuls the historical element in those two great poetical figures.’[85]
More precise definitions of the purpose of Job depend on the acceptance of a critical analysis of the book. Some suggestions on this subject have been already given to facilitate the due comprehension of the poem. I must now offer the reader a connected sketch of the possible or probable stages of its growth. This, if it bears being tested, will perhaps reveal the special purpose of the several parts, and above all of that most precious portion—the Colloquies of Job and his friends. (Compare below, Chap. XII.)
I. The narrative which forms the Prologue is based upon a traditional story which represented Job as hurled from the height of happiness into an abyss of misery, but preserving a devout serenity in the midst of trouble. It is impossible to feel sure that this Prologue is by the same author as the following Colloquies. It stands in no very close connection with them; ‘the Satan’ in particular (an omission which struck William Blake[86]), is not heard of again in the book; and there is abundant evidence of the liking of the pre-Exile writers for a tasteful narrative style. It is not a wild conjecture that the first two chapters originally formed the principal part of a prose book of Job, comparable to the ‘books’ once current of Elijah, and perhaps one may add of Balaam and of Daniel—a book free from any speculations of the ‘wise men’ and in no sense a māshāl or gnomic poem, but supplying in its own way a high and adequate solution of the great problem of the suffering of the righteous. The writer of this Prologue, whether he also wrote the Colloquies or not, firmly believed that the calamities which sometimes fell on the innocent were both for the glory of God and of human nature. It was possible, he said, to continue in one’s integrity, though no earthly advantage accrued from it. If the Prologue once formed part of a distinct prose ‘book’ of Job, one can hardly suppose that the same author wrote the Epilogue; for while the Colloquies do contain hints of Job’s typical character (as to some extent a representative of humanity), the Prologue does not, and it is only the typical or allegorical interpretation which makes the Epilogue tolerable. In fact, the Epilogue must, as it seems to me, have been written, if not by the author of the Colloquies, yet by some one who had this work before him. The prose ‘book’ of Job, if it existed, and if it originated in Judah, cannot have been written before the Chaldæan period. This period and no other explains the moral purpose of the ‘book,’ precisely as the age of the despotic Louis XIV. is the only one which suits the debate on the disinterested love of God with which the name of Fénelon is inseparably connected. The Chaldæan period, however, we must remember, did not begin with the Captivity, but with the appearance of the Babylonian power on the horizon of Palestine. We must not therefore too hastily assume that the Book of Job is a monument of the Babylonian Captivity, true as I myself believe this hypothesis to be.
We are, however, of course not confined to this hypothesis of a prose ‘book’ of Job. The author of the Colloquies may have been equally fitted to be a writer of narrative, and may have felt that the solution mentioned above, although the highest, was not the only one admissible. We may therefore conceive of him as following up the solution offered in the Prologue by a ventilation of the great moral problem before himself and his fellow ‘wise men.’ He throws the subject open as it were to general discussion, and invests all the worthiest speculations of his time in the same flowing poetical dress, that no fragment of truth contained in them may be lost. He himself is far from absolutely rejecting any of them; he only seems to deny that the ideas of the three representative sages can be applied at once, as they apply them, to the case of one like Job.
[Böttcher, however, regards Job as the work of one principal and several subordinate writers. It was occasioned, he thinks, by a conversation on the sufferings of innocent men, at that time so frequent (i.e. in the reign of Manasseh). See his Achrenlese, p. 68.]
II. The completion or publication of the colloquies revealed (or seemed to reveal) sundry imperfections in the original mode of treating the subject. Some other ‘wise men,’ therefore (or possibly, except in the case of III., the author himself), inserted passages in the poem with the view of qualifying or supplementing its statements. These were merely laid in, without being welded with the rest of the book. The first in order of these additions is chap. xxviii., which cannot be brought into a logical connection with the chapters among which it is placed, in spite of the causal particle ‘for’ prefixed to it (‘For there is a vein’). It is possible, indeed, that it has been extracted from some other work. The hypothesis of insertion (or, if used without implying illicit tampering with the text, ‘interpolation’) is confirmed by the occurrence of ‘Adonai’ in ver. 28, which is contrary to the custom of the author of Job, and by its highly rhetorical character. If the passage was written with a view to the Book of Job, we must suppose the author to have been dissatisfied with the original argument, and to have sought a solution for the problem in the inscrutableness of the divine wisdom. Zophar, it is true, had originally alluded to this attribute, but with a more confined object. According to him, God, being all-wise, can detect sins invisible to mortal eyes (xi. 6):—it is needless to draw out the wide difference between this slender inference and the large theory which appears to be suggested in chap. xxviii.
III. One of the less progressive ‘wise men’ was scandalised at the irreverent statements of Job and dissatisfied with the three friends’ mode of dealing with them (xxxii. 2, 3). Hence the speeches of Elihu, the most generally recognised of all the inserted portions (chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii.) The author partly imitates the speeches of Jehovah.
IV. In another inserted passage (ch. xxxviii.-xl. 14, xlii. 1-6), the Almighty is represented as chastising the presumption of Job, and showing forth the supreme wisdom by contrast with Job’s unwisdom. It is clear that the copy in which it was inserted was without the speeches of Elihu, for the opening words of Jehovah (xxxviii. 2) clearly have reference to the last discourse of Job, which they must have been intended to follow. The effect of this fine passage is much impaired by the interposition of the speeches of Elihu.
V. The description of the behémoth and the leviathan (xl. 15-24, xli.) seems also to be a later insertion, and somewhat more recent than the speeches of Jehovah. It is a ‘purple patch,’ and the appendix last mentioned gains by its removal.
VI. An editor appended the epilogue. He must have had the prologue before him, but took no pains to bring his own work into harmony with it, except in the one point which he could not help adopting, namely the vast riches of his hero. He agreed with Job’s friends on the grand question of retribution, though he would not sanction their line of argument. Job’s doubts, according to him, contained more faith than their uncharitable dogmatism.
Can we feel grateful to this writer? He has at any rate relieved the strain upon the imagination of the reader, and possibly, if we assume him to be distinct from the author of the Prologue, carried out an unfulfilled intention of that author (note the words in i. 12, ‘only upon himself put not forth thy hand’). But he did so in a prosaic spirit, and made a sad concession to a low view of providential dealings. He has also, I think, caused much misunderstanding of the object of the book. Thus we find Dr. Ginsburg saying,[87]
The Book of Job ... only confirms the old opinion that the righteous are visibly rewarded here, inasmuch as it represents their calamities as transitory, and Job himself as restored to double his original wealth and happiness in this life.
Against which I enter a respectful protest.
The view here adopted of the gradual growth of the book seems important for its right comprehension. In its present form, it seems like a very confused theodicy, designed to justify God against the charge of bringing misfortune upon innocent persons. But when the disturbing elements are removed, we see that the book is simply an expression of the conflicting thoughts of an earnest, warm-hearted man on the great question of suffering. He protests, it is true, against the rigour and uncharitableness of the traditional orthodox belief, but is far more aspiring to solve the problem theoretically. This is one chief point in which he differs from his interpolators (if the word may be used), who mostly appear to have had some favourite theory (or partial view of truth) to advocate.
We have seen (Chap. VII.) that the unity of authorship of the Book of Job is not beyond dispute, but we shall not at present assume the results of analysis. Let us endeavour to treat of the date and place of composition on the hypothesis that the book is a whole as it stands (on the Elihu-portion however, comp. Chap. XII.) It is at any rate probable that the greater part of it at least proceeds from the same period. Can that period be the patriarchal? The author has sometimes received credit for his faithful picture of this early age. This is at any rate plausible. For instance, he avoids the use of the sacred name Jehovah, revealed to Moses according to Ex. vi. 3. Then, too, the great age ascribed to Job in the Epilogue (xlii. 16) agrees with the notices of the patriarchs. The uncoined piece of silver (Heb. kesita) which each kinsman of Job gave him after his recovery (xlii. II), is only mentioned again in Gen. xxxiii. 19 (Josh. xxiv. 32). The musical instruments referred to in xxi. 12, xxx. 31, are also mentioned in Gen. iv. 21, xxxi. 27. There is no protest against idolatry either in the Book of Job[88] or in Genesis. Job himself offers sacrifices to the one true God, like the patriarchs, and the kind of sacrifice offered is the burnt-offering (i. 5, xlii. 8), there is no mention of guilt-or sin-offerings. The settled life of Job, too, as described in the Prologue is not inconsistent with the story of Jacob’s life in the vale of Shechem,[89] though in reality the author probably described it from his observation of settled life in Arabia. But none of these allusions required any special gift of historical imagination. The tone of the few descriptive passages in the Colloquies, and of the reflections throughout, is that of an age long subsequent to the patriarchal. The very idea of wise men meeting together to discuss deep problems (as in the later Arabic maqāmāt, compared by Bertholdt and others) is an anachronism in a ‘patriarchal’ narrative, and (like the religious position of the speeches in general) irresistibly suggests the post-Solomonic period. The Job of the Colloquies is a travelled citizen of the world at an advanced period of history; indeed, he now and then seems expressly to admit this (xxiv. 12, xxix. 7). It is therefore needless to discuss the theory which assigns the book to the Mosaic or pre-Mosaic age,—a theory which is a relic of the cold, literal, unsympathetic method of the critics of the last two centuries. A few scholars of eminence, feeling this, placed the poem in the Solomonic period, a view which is in itself plausible, if we consider the pronounced secular turn of the great king, and his recorded taste for eastern parabolistic ‘wisdom,’ but which falls with the cognate theory of the authorship of Proverbs. A more advanced stage of society than that of the period referred to, and a greater maturity of the national intellect, are presupposed on every page of the poem. The tone of the book—I refer especially to the Colloquies—suggests a time when the nationalism of the older periods had, in general, ceased to satisfy reflecting minds. The doubters, whom Job and his friends represent, have been so staggered in their belief in Israel’s loving God, that they decline to use His revealed name:—[90] once or twice only does it slip in (xii. 9; cf. xxviii. 28), as if to show that the poet himself has fought his way to a reconciling faith. As is clear from the cognate psalms xxxvii., xlix., lxxiii., the patriarchal theory of prosperity and adversity had been found wanting. Doubts had arisen, most painful in their intensity, from observing the disproportion between character and fortune—doubts which might indeed insinuate themselves at any time, but acquire an abnormal force in a declining community (ix. 24, xii. 4-6, 23, and especially chap. xxi.) Some had even ventured on positive doctrinal heresy. In opposition to these, Eliphaz professes his adhesion to the tradition of the fathers, in whose time religion was untainted by alien influence (xv. 17-19). It is merely an incidental remark of Eliphaz, but it points to a date subsequent to the appearance of Assyria on the horizon of Palestine. For it was the growing influence of that power, which, for good and for evil, modified the character of Israelitish religion both in its higher and in its lower forms.
Precise historical allusions are almost entirely wanting. We may, however, infer with certainty that the book was written subsequently to the ‘deportation’ of Israel, or of Judah, or at the very least of some neighbouring people (xii. 17-19; comp. xv. 19[91]). For the uprooting of whole peoples from their original homes was peculiar to the Assyrian policy.[92] But which of these forced expatriations is intended?—We are not compelled to think of the Babylonian Exile by the reference to the Chaldæans in the Prologue. The Chaldæans might have been known to a well-informed Hebrew writer ever since the ninth century B.C., at which time they became predominant in the southern provinces on the lower Euphrates: we find Isaiah, speaking of the ‘land of Chaldæa’ (Isa. xxiii. 13) in the eighth century. Still I own that the description of the Chaldæans as robbers does appear to me most easily explained by supposing a covert allusion to the invasions of Nebuchadnezzar.[93] The Assyrians are indeed once called ‘treacherous dealers’ by Isaiah (xxxiii. 1), but the Babylonians impressed the Hebrew writers by their rapacity far more than the Assyrians. The ‘unrighteous’ of the Psalms are, when foreigners are spoken of, not the Assyrians, but either the Babylonians or still later oppressors (e.g. Ps. cxxv. 3); and the description of the Babylonians in the first chapter of Habakkuk strongly reminds us of those complaints of Job, ‘The earth is given over into the hand of the unrighteous’ (ix. 24), and ‘The robbers’ tents are in peace, and they that provoke God are secure, they who carry (their) god in their hand’ (xii. 6; comp. Hab. i. 11, 16).
The view here propounded might be supported by an argument from linguistic data (see Chap. XIII.) which would lead us into details out of place here. It is that of Umbreit, Knobel, Grätz, and (though he does not exclude the possibility of a later date) the sober and thorough Gesenius. Long after the present writer’s results were first committed to paper, he had the rare satisfaction of finding them advocated, so far as the date is concerned, in a commentary by a scholar of our own who has the best right to speak (A. B. Davidson, Introduction to The Book of Job, 1884). On the other hand, Stickel, Ewald, Magnus, Bleek, Renan (1860), Kuenen (1865), Hitzig, Reuss, Dillmann, Merx, prefer to place our poem in the period between Isaiah and Jeremiah, and this seems to me the earliest date from which the composition and significance of the book can be at all rightly understood. Reasons enough for this statement of opinion will suggest themselves to those who have followed me hitherto; let me now only add that the pure monotheism of the Book makes an earlier date, on historical principles, hardly conceivable.[94] A later date than the Exile-period is not, I admit, inconceivable (see Vatke, Die biblische Theologie, i. 563 &c.), and is now supported by Kuenen.[95] If there were an allusion to the doctrine of the Resurrection, in xix. 26, or if the portraiture of Job were (as Kuenen thinks it is) partly modelled on the Second Isaiah’s description of the Servant of Jehovah, I should in fact be driven to accept this view. I have stated above that I cannot find the Resurrection in Job, and in Isaiah, ii. 267 that the priority of Job seems to me to be made out. I need not combat Clericus and Warburton, who ascribe the authorship of Job to Ezra. For Jeremiah (Bateson Wright) or the author of Lamentations (i.e. Baruch, according to Bunsen) something might perhaps be said, but—Ezra!
As to the place of composition. Hitzig and Hirzel think of Egypt on account of the numerous allusions to Egypt in the book; and so Ewald with regard to xl. 15-xli. 34. ‘Die ganze Umgebung ist egyptisch,’ says Hitzig with some exaggeration.[96] More might be said in favour of the theory which places the author in a region where Arabic and Aramaic might both be heard. Stickel, holding the pre-Exile origin of the book, supposed it to have come from the far south-east of Palestine. Nowhere better than in the hill-country of the South could the poet study simple domestic relations, and also make excursions into N. Arabia. He thus accounts[97] for the points of contact between the Book of Job and the prophecy of Amos of Tekoa (see below, Chap. XI.), which include even some phonetic peculiarities (the softening of the gutturals and the interchange of sibilants). To me, the whole question seems well-nigh an idle one. The author (or, if you will, the authors) had travelled much in various lands, and the book is the result. The place where is of far less importance than the time when it was composed.
One of the peculiarities of our poet (which I have elsewhere compared with a similar characteristic in Dante) is his willingness to appropriate mythic forms of expression from heathendom. This willingness was certainly not due to a feeble grasp of his own religion; it was rather due partly to the poet’s craving for imaginative ornament, partly to his sympathy with his less developed readers, and a sense that some of these forms were admirably adapted to give reality to the conception of the ‘living God.’ Several of these points of contact with heathendom have been indicated in my analysis of the poem. I need not again refer to these, but the semi-mythological allusions to supernatural beings who had once been in conflict with Jehovah (xxi. 22, xxv. 2), and the cognate references to the dangerous cloud-dragon (see below) ought not to be overlooked. Both in Egypt and in Assyria and Babylonia, we find these very myths in a fully developed form. The ‘leviathan’ of iii. 8, the dragon probably of vii. 12 (tannīn) and certainly of xxvi. 13 (nākhāsh), and the ‘rahab’ of ix. 13, xxvi. 12, remind us of the evil serpent Apap, whose struggle with the sun-god Ra is described in chap. xxxix. of the Book of the Dead and elsewhere. ‘A battle took place,’ says M. Maspero, ‘between the gods of light and fertility and the “sons of rebellion,” the enemies of light and life. The former were victorious, but the monsters were not destroyed. They constantly menace the order of nature, and, in order to resist their destructive action, God must, so to speak, create the world anew every day.’[98] An equally close parallel is furnished by the fourth tablet of the Babylonian creation-story, which describes the struggle between the god Marduk (Merodach) and the dragon Tiamat or Tiamtu (a fem. corresponding to the Heb. masc. form t’hom ‘the deep’), for which see Delitzsch’s Assyrische Lesestücke, 3rd edition, Smith and Sayce’s Chaldæan Genesis, p. 107 &c., and Budge in Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, Nov. 6, 1883.
Nor must I forget the ‘fool-hardy’ giant (K’sīl = Orion) in ix. 9, xxxviii. 31, nor the dim allusion to the sky-reaching mountain of the north, rich in gold (comp. Isa. xiv. 13, and Sayce, Academy, Jan. 28, 1882, p. 64), and the myth-derived synonyms for Sheól—Death, Abaddon, and ‘the shadow of death’ (or, deep gloom), xxvi. 6, xxviii. 22, xxxviii. 17, also the ‘king of terrors’ (xviii. 14), who like Pluto or Yama rules in the Hebrew Underworld. Observe too the instances in which a primitive myth has died down into a metaphor, e.g. ‘the eyelids of the Dawn’ (iii. 9, xli. 18), and especially that beautiful passage,