AT briSANA-CHAiViPAIGN STACKS CENTRAL CIRCULATION BOOKSTACKS The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its renewal or its return to the library from which it was borrowed on or before the Latest Date stamped below. You may be charged a minimum fee of $75.00 for each lost book. Theft, muHlatton, and underlining ef boeic* ore reasons for disciplinary action and may result In dlsmlssoi from the University. TO RENEW CALL TELEPHONE CENTER, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBAN A-CHAMPAIGN APR18t999 mv 1 5 1999 When renewing by phone, write new due date below previous due date. L162 Digitized by tine Internet Arcliive in 2015 https://arcliive.org/details/commentaryonbookOOcoxs_0 A COMMENTARY ON THI? BOOK OF JOB By the same Authok. Ninth Edition. Crown Hvo. 5s. SALVATOE, MUNDI; or. Is Christ the Saviour of all Men? IGino. Is. THE LARGER HOPE : A Sequel to " Salvator Mundi.'» "We are bound to acknowledge the ability, the richness of textual resource, and the felicity of language and illustration which mark these pages, as they do Mr. Cox's writings generally." — Guardian. " An able and deeply interesting volume, and makes a valuable contribution to the study of the subject." — ^jjtctator. Third Edition Crown 8vo. 6s. THE GENESIS OF EVIL, and other Sermons. Mainly Expositor3\ " A more thoughtful or broader utterance of religious thought we have not seen since the day when the voice of him whom many, themselves honoured as teachers, delighted to call ' the Prophet ' was hushed in death. There is not one sermon out of the twenty-one which is not full of thought, of suggestion, of subtle exposition, of bold and successful grappling with dil^icuitics," — Sj/CcLaior. Crown 8vo, cloth. 6s. BALAAM : An Exposition and a Study. " In its exhaustive collection of data, its sagacious interpretation of records and illusions, and its reconstructive genius, it is, we think, the most satisfactory of all the studies that we possess of this very complex character. The connection with Balaam of the noble passage in Micah vi. 6, et seq., will be new to many. The combination of strong and base passions with great spiritual emotions is one of the commonest of religious phenomena, and with a strong, skilful hand Dr. Cox dissects the base composite and its impulses." — British Quarterly Eeoiew. Crown 8vo. 2s. Gd. MIRACLES: An Argument and a Challenge. " 'J'liis is an able, temperate book. The argument is well stated and well sustained ; the cliitllonge is temperately but lirmly given. We can commend this little book to all those — ;ind nowadays they are many — interested in the study of Christian apologetics." — U uardiau. London : Keuan Paul, Tkench & Co. A COIMENTAEY ON THE BOOK OF JOB WITH A TBANSLATION By SAMUEL COX EDIIOK OF THE " EXPOSITOR " SECOND EDITION LONDON KKGAK PAUL, TKEKCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1885 ! (TAf rights of transIa/ioH and of reproduction are reserved,^ TO MY WIFE, WITH MY LOVE. 165608 THE BOOK OF JOB. INTRODUCTIOlsr. The Book of Job is admitted, with hardly a dissentient voice, to be the raost sublime religious Poem in the literature of the world. Divines and Expositors, who have studied it with devotion, find it difficult to express their sense of its beauty, grandeur, and value. Nor is it Divines and Expositors alone who have been fascinated by the spell of this sublime Poem. It is hardly possible to speak of it to an educated and thoughtful man who does not acknowledge its extraordinary power, its unrivalled excellence ; while men of genius, to whom the greatest works of literature in many languages are familiar, are forward to confess that it stands alone, far above the head of all other and similar performance. Thus, Thomas Carlyle, who can hardly be suspected of any clerical bias or prepossessions, says of this Book : ^ " I call that, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew ; such a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or noble sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble Book; all men's Book \ It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem, — man's destiny, and God's way with him here in this earth. And all in such free flowing outlines ; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way ; true eyesight and ^ " Lectures on IIeroe&" — " The Hero as Prophet.'* 2 INTRODUCTION. vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual. . . . Such living likenesses were never since drawn. Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation ; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind; — so soft and great; as the summer mid- night, as the world with its seas and stars ! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit." And yet this grand Poem is comparatively little read, and, even where it is read, it is but very imperfectly grasped and understood. Nor is it easy to read it with intelligence and 9, clear vigorous conception of its meaning. It abounds in allusions to ancient modes of thought and speculation ; its long sequences of thought and its quick cogent dialectic are disguised and obscured, in part by the limitations of the proverbial form in which it is composed, and, in part, b}^ the inevitable imperfections which cleave to translations of any and every kind, even the best. And while there are many able commentaries on it addressed to scholars, I kno\7 of only one — Canon Cook's in " The Speaker's Commentary " — from which the ordinary reader would be likely to derive much help; while even that, owing to the conditions under which it was written, leaves much to be desired. Yet there is no reason, in the Poem itself, why it should not be as well and intimately known, even to readers of the most limited education, as any one of Shakespeare's plays, and no reason why it should not become far more precious and instructive. That it is difficult to translate is true ; but Renan has rendered it into the most exquisite French with admirable felicity and force. That every Chapter of it is studded with allusions which need to be explained, and that the arg-ument of the Book needs to be " exposed " and emphasized, is also true ; but both these services have been rendered to scholars by a crowd of Commentators, in the front rank of which stand such men as Schultens, Ewald, Schlottmann, Delitzsch, Dillmann, Merx, Renan, Godet, and Professor A. B. Davidson; and it surely cannot be impossible that the results of their labours, and of labours similar to theirs, should be given to the public in a popular and convenient form. To achieve some such task as this — to make the Book of INTRODUCTION. 3 Job readable, intelligible, enjoyable, to all who care to acqiiaint themselves with it, even though they should be familiar with none but our noble mother-tongue — has long been a cherished aim with me. Three times during the last twelve years I have revised my translation of the Poem, seeking to make it less and less unworthy of the Original ; and at intervals, during those years, I have sought to acquaint myself with the best expositions of it published in Germany, England, France, and America. Thus equipped and prepared, I venture to ofter to the public the results of my reading, and of a sincere, laborious, and long continued endeavour to enter into the meaning and spirit of this great Poem. What I have aimed and tried to do is simply this : (1) To give a translation of the Poem somewhat more clear and accurate than that of our Authorized Version, and, in especial, a translation which should render the Poet's long lines, or sweeps, of consecutive thought more apparent. The Book belongs, as we shall see, to that class of Hebrew literature which is collectively designated the Chohnah, and is therefore composed in one of the most inflexible of literary forms, — the 'proverbial. At first sight it would seem utterly incredible that a mere succession of proverbs should prove an adequate instrument for expressing any of the grander and more harmonious conceptions of the human mind, above all for expressing linked sequences of thought long drawn out. But there is absolutely no literary form which does not prove flexible and elastic in the hands of genius. In the very "Book of Proverbs" itself the famous description of "Wis- dom " shews what even the proverb is capable of in the hands of a master.^ And the Book of Job is written by a * Proverbs viii. 2 It should not be forgotten that our Lord, adopting the style of his age and of the teachers of his native land, spake in proverbs, and in parables which are but expanded proverbs. The ease with which He speaks hides from us his immense intellectual force, and a certain reverence, not always wise in the forms it assumes, often makes us shrink from discussing the intellectual claims of One whom we confess to be God as well as man. But if we would form, an adequate and complete conception of Him, we must, with whatever modesty and reverence, reflect on his enormous, his immeasur' abib, superiority to all other Teachers in mental power. That He should uso 4 INTRODUCTION. hand more free and masterly than that of Solomon himself. At times, no doubt, the contracting influence of the inferior form is obvious, breaking up the train of thought into brief pictorial sentences, each of which has a certain rounded com* pleteness in itself; but at other times, and even as a rule I think, the thought triumphs over the form, subdues it to its own more imperious necessities ; gnome is linked to gnome by connections more or less subtle, so that protracted and noble sequences of argument or description are fairly wrought out. This characteristic feature of the style of the Poem I have endeavoured to preserve. (2) Another aim has been to supply such explanations, or illustrations, of the innumerable allusions to the physical phenomena of the East, to Oriental modes of thought and philosophy, to the customs and manners of human life in the so inflexible an instrument of expression as the proverb and make it flexible is no slight proof of his wisdom and intellectual force. But it is only as we compare his " sayings," and especially his paradoxes, which are usually in the gnomic form, with the sayings of the masters of human wisdom that we are sufiiciently impressed with the range and grasp of his mind. A foot-note is not the place for a dissertation, or it would be easy to institute a com- parison between the proverbial and parabolic utterances of our Lord and those of the wisest of the ancients and moderns. Take only one or two suggestive illustrations. Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " has won a secure place as a masterpiece of allegory by the suffrages of the best literary judges ; but if our Lord had taken up the allegory, would He not have compressed it into a few sentences, without omitting any point of real value? and, beautiful as Bunyan's work is, will it for a moment compare with any one of the Parables considered even as a mere work of literary genius and art ? Or, to come from parables to mere sayings, or gnomes. Lord Bacon has many fine " sentences." Schiller's saying, " Death is an universal, and tlierefore cannot be an evil," has won much applause. On the merit of Goethe's, " Do the duty that lies nearest to thee," Carlyle is never weary of insisting ; and Carlyle himself has many compressed and noble sentences charged with a weight of meaning. But if we compare with these any of our Lord's sayings, such as, for example, " If a man will save his life, let him lose it ; " or, " Let him that would be greatest among you serve," — who does not feel that we rise at once into an immeasurably larger and deeper world of thought? The very way in which He quotes mi;iht be adduced as another proof of his extraordinary and unparalleled intellectual force ; as when, for example, He takes the answer to the question, " Which is the first and best command- ment?" from the lips of the Rabbis, and resolves it at once, from the correct answer of a legal puzzle, into a practical moral code which covers the whole of bumf»n life. INTRODUCTION. 5 antique world, with which the Poem abounds, as a modern reader of the Western world may require; in short, so to annotate the Poem as that an Englishman of ordinary intelli- gence and culture may be able, not only to read it without difficulty, but to enter into and enjoy the large and crowded picture of a bygone age which it presents. (3) And, above all, it has been my aim to lift the reader to the lieight of the great argument of the Poem, to articulate the processes of thought veiled, or half veiled, by its proverbial forms, to trace out the infinite variety of fluctuating spiritual moods which pulse through it and animate it. There is far more logic, as also far more of dramatic power, in the col- loquies of the Book than we are apt to see in them, in the speeches of the Friends and the replies of Job. To bring out its logical connections, to expound the argument of the Poem, to follow it through all its windings to their several issues, and to shew how they all contribute to its triumphant close, has been my main endeavour. On the other hand, while I am not conscious of having shirked a single difficulty, while I have tried to escape the censure which Young pronounced on those Commentators who — each dark passage shun, And hold* a farthing candle to the sun, I have not enumerated the readings, renderings, explanations of all who have gone before me, though I have considered most of them before arriving at my own conclusions. It is the vice of recent Commentators, especially in Germany, that they comment on each other rather than on the Sacred Text, and so produce works too tedious for mortal patience to endure. Moreover, by piling up commentary on commentary, they are apt more and more to get ofl" the perpendicular, to draw apart from and perilously lean over the real facts of human life and experience, till there is much danger that the whole structure will come toppling to the ground. If, when we have them in our hands, any should ask us what we read, we should have to reply, with Hamlet, "Words, words, words ! " and little but words. What we want in these busy and over-busy days are expositions in which each man will G INTRODUCTION. give us his own conclusions based on his own study of the Word, and not his refutation of the conclusions at which his predecessors or rivals have arrived. And if any credit be conceded me, I hope it will not be that I have compiled a catena of opinions, or shewn how great a variety of meanings may be extracted from a single passage by scholars who seek to raise their own reputation on the torn and tarnished reputations of the scholars who preceded them, or by proving that they too can — Torture one poor word ten thousand ways ; but that I have tried to bring the words of Scripture straight to the facts of human experience, and sought to interpret the former by the latter. As a rule I have simply given my own reading and my own interpretation — for which, however, I have frequently been indebted to the labours of others : only when the passage was exceptionally difficult, or important, have I asked the reader to consider the best readings or interpretations which differ from my own, that he might have the means of judging and determining the question for himself I do not propose to open my exposition with a long and elaborate Introduction; valuable essays and dissertations on the Book are easily accessible, and may be found in the works of any of the Commentators named on a previous page : but a few words on the date and origin, the scene, and, above all, the problem of the Book are indispensable. As to the Bate and Origin of the Poem nothing can be safely inferred — though on this point some scholars lay great stress — from the AramfBan words which are frequently em- ployed in it ; and that, not simply because the Aramseisms occur chiefly in the speech of Elibu, and are appropriate in his mouth, since he himself was an AramaBan; nor simply because all Hebrew poetry, of whatever age, is more or less Araniaic: but also and mainly because the presence ol Aramaean words in any Scripture* may indicate either its extreme antiquity or its comparatively modern date. For these Aramseisms— as " Kabbi " Duncan tersely puts the INTRODUCTION. 7 conclusion of all competent scholars — are either " (1) late words borrowed from intercourse with the Syrians, or (2) early ones common to both dialects." Any argument, there- fore, which is based on the use of these words cuts both ways. Nor, 1 think, do the other arguments commonly adduced on this point carry much weight, with the exception of one, which is so weighty as to be conclusive. Both the pervading tone of the Book and its literary style point steadily and unmistakably to the age of Solomon as the period in which it, at least, assumed the form in which it has come down to us. That which first impresses a thoughtful reader of the Poem is the noble universality which Carlyle found in it, " as if it were not Hebrew." Although it is part of the Hebrew Bible, it is catholic in its tone and spirit. The persons who figure in it are not Jews ; the scene is laid beyond the borders of Palestine ; the worship we see practised in it is that of the patriarchal age: it does not contain a single allusion to the Mosaic laws or customs, or to the characteristic beliefs of the Jews, or to the recorded events of their national history. Hence many have concluded that it was written in the patriarchal age ; by Moses, perhaps, before he was called to be the redeemer and lawgiver of his people, or by some Temanite or Idumean poet, whose work was afterwards trans- lated into the Hebrew tongue. But to this conclusion there is, I think, at least one fatal objection. The literary form of the Poem, the 'proverbial form, decisively marks it out as one of the Chokmah books, and forbids us to ascribe it to any age earlier than that of Solomon. It is beyond dispute that in his age, and under the in- fluence of his commanding genius, a new kind of literature — new in spirit, new in form — came into vogue ; of which we have some noble samples in the Book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, many of the Psalms, several of the Apocryphal Books, and even in the nobler passages of the Talmud. They are characterized by a catholic and universal spirit new in Hebrew literature, and might, one thinks, have been written by the sages and poets of almost any of the lead- ing Oriental races. This non-Hebraic catholic tone, which 8 INTRODUCTION. differentiates them from the other Hebrew Scriptures, was doubtless but one out of many results of the enlarged com- merce with the great heathen world which commenced in the reign of David. During his reign the Hebrew Commonwealth entered into new and wider relations — political, mercantile, literary — with many of the nobler and more cultivated races of antiquity, which bore fruit in the reign of his son. In the court of Solomon there grew up, as Godet has pointed out, a school of wisdom, or of moral philosophy, which set itself to search more deeply into the knowledge of things human and divine. " Beneath the Israelite they tried to find the man ; beneath the Mosaic system, that universal principle of the moral law of which it is an expression. Thus they reached to that idea of wisdom which is the common feature of the three books, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes ; of the wisdom whose delight is not in the Jews only, but in the children of men!' This endeavour to humanize Judaism, to spiritualize the precepts of Moses, "to reach that fundamental stratum of moral being in which the Jewish law and the human con- science find their unity," is the distinctive " note " of the Chokmah literature. And if the spirit, the ruling moral tone, of this literature is novel and original, so also is the form which its noblest productions assumed, viz., the proverbial, or parabolic. To utter ethical wisdom in portable and picturesque sentences, the wise saying often being wrought out into a little parable or poem complete in itself, was the task in which the leading minds of the Solomonic era took delight. We have only to compare their peculiar mode of expression — its weighty sen- tentiousness, its conscious elaboration of metaphor, its devo- tion to literary feats and dexterities, and, in singular com- bination with these, its thoughtful handling of the moral problems which tax and oppress the thoughts of men — with " the lyrical cry " of many of the Psalmists of Israel, in order to become aware of the marked and immense difference between the two. " Job " belongs to the Chokmah both in spirit and in form. Its noble and catholic tone of thought finds admirable expres- sion in the graphic vet weighty gnomes of which it is for the INTRODUCTION. 9 most part composed. And as it is beyond all comparison the most perfect and original specimen of the Chokmah school, we can hardly refer it to any age but that of Solomon, in which that school arose and in which it also achieved its most signal triumphs. This conclusion is confirmed by the admitted fact that " the Book of Job bears a far closer affinity in style and in modes of thought " to the Book of Proverbs than to any other portion of the Old Testament Scriptures. It does not follow, however, that the Book of Job is a mere poem, a mere work of imagination, produced in the age to which the genius of Solomon gave its special character and form. If, on the one hand, it is impossible to take the Book as a literal story of events which transpired in the patriarchal age, if we must admit that the Story has passed through the shaping imagination of some unknown poet; on the other hand, it is, as Renan remarks, quite as impossible to believe that any poet of Solomon's age should have thrown himself back into an age so distant, and have maintained the tone of it throughout. Such a feat has never been achieved ; such a feat was wholly foreign to the spirit of the time. We must admit, therefore, that the Poem had an historical basis ; that it embalms a veritable chronicle ; that a man named Job really lived and suffered — lived and suffered, moreover, in the times of the Patriarchs, since all the allusions of the Poem point to that age. The most probable hypothesis of the date and origin of the Book, and that to which nearly all competent judges lend the weight of their authority, is, in short, that the story of Job, of his sufferings and his patience, was handed down by tradition from patriarchal times, through every succeeding generation, till, in the age of Solomon, at once the most ^catholic and the most literary period of Hebrew history, a gifted and inspired poet threw the tradition into the splendid dramatic form in which we now possess it. Just as the heroic deeds of the wandering Ulysses were recited by and preserved in the memories of the trained bards, or rhapsodists, of Greece for centuries, and at last took shape on the lips of the man caUed Homer or of the gens called Homerids, but were only reduced to their present form and written down in the age of 10 INTRODtiOTION. Pisistratus ; so, I suspect, the story of J ob was passed from lip to lip among the Abrahamides, and from memory to memory, growing in volume and in beauty as it went, till, in the literary age of Solomon, the Poet arose who gave it its final and most perfect form, and wrote it down for the edification and delight of all who should come after him. As for the Scene of the Story, history and tradition com- bine with all the indications contained in the Poem itself to place it in the Hauran. On the east of the J ordan, in that strange, lovely, and fertile volcanic region which stretches down from Syria to Idumea, there is every reason to believe that J ob dwelt, and suffered, and died, and in the upper part of it, north of Edom, north even of Moab, within easy reach of Damascus itself. The Arabs who live in this district to-day claim it as " the land of Job." The whole district, moreover, is full of sites and ruins which Tradition connects with his name. And it fulfils all the conditions of the Poem; The personages of the Story, for example, are admitted to be without exception descendants of Abraham — not through Isaac and Jacob, but thi'ough Ishmael, or Esau, or the sons of Keturah ; and it was in this great belt of volcanic land, stretching down from Damascus to Idumea, that most of these Abrahamides found their homes. On the east, too, the Hauran is bordered by " the desert," out of which came the great Avind which smote the four corners of the house of Job's first- born. To this day it is rich in the very kinds of wealth of which Job was possessed, and is exposed to raids similar to those which deprived him of his wealth as in a moment. It presents, moreover, both the same natural features, being especially "for miles together a complete network of deep gorges," — the wadys, or valleys, whose treacherous streams the Poet describes, ^ and the same singular combination of civic and rural life which is assumed throughout the Book. Even the fact that the robber-bands, which fell upon the ploughing oxen of Job and smote the ploughmen with the edge of the sword, came from the distant rocks of Petra, and that the bands which carried off his camels came from the distant plains of » Cf, Chap. vi. 15-20. INTRODUCTION. 11 Chaldea, point to the same conclusion. For, probably, Job had entered into compacts with the nearer tribes of the marauders, as the chiefs of the Hauran do to this day, paying them an annual tax, or mail, to buy off their raids, and was surprised by those more remote freebooters just as to this day the Hauranites are often pillaged by freebooting tribes from the neighbourhood of Babylon. I take it, then, that we may with much reason conceive of Job as living, during the remote patriarchal age, amid the fertile plains of the Hauran — so fertile that even now its wheat (" Batansean wheat," as it is called) " is always at least twenty-five per cent, higher in price than other kinds," — with its deep wadys and perfidious streams, the volcanic mountains rising on the horizon, and the wide sandy desert lying beyond them. The Prohlem of the Book is not one, but manifold, and is not, therefore, easy to determine. No doubt, the Poet in- tended to vindicate the ways of God with men. No doubt, therefore, he had passed through and beyond that early stage of religious faith in which the heart simply and calmly assumes the perfect goodness of God, and had become aware that some justification of the Divine ways was demanded by ' the doubt and anguish of the human heart. The heavy and ' the weary weight of the mystery which shrouds the provi- dence of God, the burden of this unintelligible world, was obviously making itself profoundly felt. There are many indications in the Poem itself that the age in which it took form was one of transition, one of growing scepticism; that the current beliefs were being called in question, that men could no longer be content with the moral and theological conceptions which had satisfied the world's grey fathers. More than once, when he is passionately challenging the orthodox assertions of the Friends, Job seems to be giving utterance to misgivings which had struck coldly into his heart even while he still sunned himself in the unclouded favour of God. From the attitude assumed by Elihu, moreover, we may infer that the younger men of the time had already' thought — or rather, perhaps, felt — out for themselves a broader 12 INTEODUOTION. and more generous theology than that of their elders, and were not a little puzzled how to state it without giving them offence. And yet, though it proceeds on the lines just indi- cated, the popular conception of the Problem of this Book is not an adequate one ; it fails to satisfy some of the leading- conditions of the Story. That conception, which Mr. Froude, in his " Essay on Job," has eloquently expressed, is, that both Job and his Friends had assumed prosperity to be the in- ~variable concomitant, or result, cf righteousness, and adversity to be the no less invariable consequence of sin ; and that J ob was afflicted, although his righteousness was attested by God Himself, in order to shew that this interpretation of the Pro- vidential mystery was inadequate and partial, that it did not cover, and could not be stretched to cover, all the facts of .human life. Those who have read Mr. Froude's charming Essay will not easily forget the force and humour with which he describes the endeavour of the Friends to stretch the old formula and make it cover the new fact, until it cracked and broke in their hands, and, in its rebound, smote them to the earth.^ And there is much truth in this conception, though not the whole truth. Unquestionably the Book of Job does shew, in the most tragic and pathetic way, that good, no less than wicked, men lie open to the most cruel losses and sor- rows ; that these losses and sorrows are not always signs of the Divine anger against sin ; that they are intended to cor- rect and perfect the righteousness of the righteous, — or, in our Lord's figure, that they are designed to purge the trees which already bear good fruit, in order that they may bring forth more fruit. But, after all, can it be the main and ruling intention of the Book to teach us that noble lesson ? When we follow the Story to its close, do we not see that " the Lord gave to Job twice as much as he had before " ? And, might we not fairly infer from the Story, as a whole, that the formula of Job's Friends was not so much too narrow as it is commonly held to be ? that it might very easily be stretched till it covered the * I must not be understood to imply, however, that Mr. Froude adopts the ;jopular conception. He is far too acute a critic to miss the true Problem 0/ this great Poem. INTRODUCTION. 13 new fact ? that where they were wrong was in assummg that happy outward conditions ai'e the immediate result of obey- ino: the Divine Law, and miserable outward conditions the immediate result of violating that Law ? that, had they only affirmed that in the long run righteousness always conducts a man to prosperity and sin to adversity, they would have been sufficiently near the mark ? Even in our own day, Mr. Matthew Arnold— not a bigot surely, nor at all disposed to stand up for theological dogmas against verified facts — has affirmed and argued for this very conception : he has affirmed and re-affirmed it to be well-nigh impossible to escape the conviction that "the stream of ten- dency " is in favour of those who do well and adverse to those who do ill. And though some of us might word the proposi- tion differently, yet he would betray a singular dulness or hardihood who should venture to question the main tenour and drift of it. The facts of history, experience, consciousness, compel us to believe that, in the long run, — though we may admit that the run is often very long, and that we do not see the end of it here — happy and auspicious conditions are vouchsafed to men, or to nations, who follow after righteous- ness, while those who walk in unrighteousness are overtaken by miserable and inauspicious conditions. Job was righteous. Did he suff'er for his righteousness ? Nay, but rather he suffered that he might be made more righteous ; that he might learn to trust in God when all things were against him, when even God Himself seemed to be against him, as well as when all things went to his mind ; he suffered in order that he might learn that his very righteousness was not his oivn in any sense which would warrant him in claiming it and in taking his stand upon it as against God : and, when he was thus stablished and perfected in righteousness, the stream of prosperity flowed back upon him in double tide. We cannot, therefore, accept the popular conception of the meaning and intention of this great Poem as adequate and satisfactory. There is a higher and a far more gracious mean- ing in it, which rules and overr rules this lower meaning : and this higher intention is expressly stated in the Prologue. When the Poem opens. Job stands before us "perfect/' i,e. INTRODUCTIOK. single-hearted and sincere, without duplicity or hypocrisy — and " upright," fearing God and eschewing evil. He is an Arab sheikh, or chieftain, of immense wealth, the richest as well as the best and wisest man of his race : A creature such As to seek througli the regions of the earth For one his like, there would be something failing In him that should compare. I do not think So fair an outward and such stuff within Endows a man but he. He is the priest of his family, if not of his clan. Unconscious of iniquity in himself, fearing nothing for his sons but that in the gaiety of their hearts they may have momentarily for- gotten God, he nevertheless offers a weekly sacrifice in atone- ment of their possible sins. Over and around this good man, standing full in the sunshine, the dark clouds gather and roll ; the lightnings leap out and strike down all that he has, all that he loves : for many days neither sun nor stars appear ; the tempest beats him down till all hope that he will be saved seems taken away : but, at last, the clouds clear off, the sun shines forth with redoubled splendour, and we leave him a wealthier, better, wiser man than he was even at the first. Now if we could see nothing but the earth on which he stood, and the sky which alternately frowned and smiled above his head, we might be unable to seize the moral and intention of the scene ; we might reasonably doubt whether the Poem was designed to teach us more than that, as righteousness conducts men to prosperity, so a tried and constant righteous- ness conducts them to a more stable and a more ample pros- perity. But a door is opened into Heaven, and we are permitted to enter and " assist " at a celestial divan, a council to which God summons all the ministers of his kingly state. The King sits on the throne ; his ministers gather round him and sit in session : among them appears a spirit, here simply named the " Adversary," or the " Accuser," whose function is to scrutinize the actions of men, to present them in their worst aspect, that they may be thoroughly sifted and explored. He himself has sunk into an evil condition, for he delights in making even good men seem bad, in fitting good deeds with INTKODUCTIOX. evil motives. Self is his centre, not God ; and he suspects all the world of a selfishness like his own. He cannot, or will not, believe in an unselfish, a disinterested goodness. When Jehovah challenges him to find a fault in Job, he boldly challenges Jehovah to put Job to the proof, and avows before- hand his conviction that it will be found that Job has served God only for what he could gain thereby. This challenge, as Godet has been quick to observe, does not merely affect the character of man : it touches the very honour of God Himself : " for if the most pious of mankind is incapable of loving God gratuitously — that is, really, it follows that God is incapable of making Himself loved." And, " as no one is honoured excerpt in so far as he is loved," by this malignant aspersion the Adversary really assails the very heart and crown of the Master of the universe. Jehovah, therefore, takes up the chal- lenge, and Himself enters the lists against the Adversary ; Jehovah undertaking to prove that man is capable of a real and disinterested goodness, Satan undertaking to prove that the goodness of man is but a veiled selfishness ; and the heart of Job is to be the arena of the strife. Now it is not necessary that we should believe that such a scene as this actually took place, that such a Celestial Divan was held, that such a challenge was given and accepted. All this may be only the dramatic form in which the Poet clothed certain spiritual facts and convictions ; though, on the other hand, we know too little of the spiritual world to deny that a transaction occurred in it which can only be rendered to human thought by such words and figures as the Poet employs.^ But we should miss the very intention of this inspired Teacher if we did not infer from his "scene in heaven" some such spiritual verities as these : that there is a Good and Supreme Spirit, who is ever seeking to promote the true welfare of men ; that there is an evil spirit, who is ever seeking to deprave men and dishonour them; that even this evil spirit is under law to God, and is used by God to promote the ultimate welfare of men, and that, "somehow, good is to be the end of ill." Such a conception of the function of the spirit of all ill runs right in the teeth of the modern 1 See " The Genesis of Evil, and other Seimons," pp. 280-28G. 15 INTRODtJCTION. sceptical suggestion, which, admitting that the plan of the great Architect of the universe may have been divinely wise, contends that somehow the devil — an independent spirit well- nigh as powerful as the Creator Himself — "contrived to become clerk of the works, and has put in a good deal which was not included in the original specification : " even as it also runs straight in the teeth of those who deny the existence of an evil spirit, and of those who fear that evil is too strong to be utterly overcome by good. But I do not see how it can be denied that our Poet firmly believed both that such a spirit is actively at work in the universe, and that his evil activity will, in the end, be seen only to have contributed to larger good. We may lay much or little stress on the dramatic drapery of this vital scene, as the bent of our minds may determine, but we must all lay great stress on the design announced in it on pain of misapprehending the main scope of the Poem. For here the ruling intention of the Poem is clearly and distinctly set forth. That intention is to prove, and to prove to the whole hierarchy of heaven, that God is capable of winning, and that man is capable of cherishing, an unselfish and dis- interested goodness ; that he ean serve God for nought, that he can hold fast his confidence in God even when that sujDreme Friend seems to be turned into his Foe. This is the higher intention of the Poem, this the heaven- ward intention. But Job does not, and can not, know of the great issue to be fought out in his own soul. Had he known what Jehovah was proving in and by him, the trial would have been no trial to him, but an honour to be accepted with impassioned gratitude and devotion. He would have cheer- fully borne any calamities, any heart-searching miseries, by which the love of God and man was to be demonstrated. He would have rejoiced — as surely we may well rejoice — in the goodness of God in undertaking to prove the goodness of man. Of all this, however, he was necessarily unconscious. And, therefore, the Poem must have a second intention, subservient to the first and highest. The Problem must be, and is, a double one, having an earthward as well as a heavenward face. And, on its earthly side, the Problem is not stated for PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. The poets themselves acknowledge Job to be the greatest, or at least one of the greatest, poems ever written; and even the dullest reader can hardly be unaware of a certain magnifi- cence both in its theme and style, or fail to cull from it many weighty sentences, many noble and picturesque illustrations. But, with all their admiration of it, even our poets, as one of the greatest of them has confessed, have often failed to catch the argument of the poem, its growing disclosure of spiritual truth ; while many of its less gifted readers have not so much as suspected that any argument was being wrought out in the discussion between Job and his three Friends. To indicate and emphasize this argument, to shew how it advances from step to step, though its advance be veiled from us under Oriental modes of thought and expression, was my leading aim in writing this Commentary. I must also plead guilty to the ambition of writing an Exposition which any man of ordinary culture might read, as he reads other books, from end to end, with interest and even with pleasure; and not simply a Commentary to be consulted here or there, now and then. And it often tasked my ingenuity to give all necessary explanations on this passage and that, indirectly and allusively, without con- stantly bringing the reader to an abrupt halt ; and yet so to vary the form in which these necessary explanations were given as to avoid tedious repetitions. I had still another aim before me, which lay very close to my heart. The Book of Job opens and discusses the very problems in which Modern Thought is most concerned ; and viii PKEFACE furnishes, as I believe, a sovereign antidote to the scepticism which Modern Science has bred, while leading us, however unconsciously, to larger conceptions of truth, and to a more steadfast, because reasonable, faith both in God and in the Word of God. I endeavoured to deal with these problems in a devout and generous spirit, and could not but cherish the hope that those who have been troubled and perplexed by them might here find some aids to faith and answers to doubt, whether their doubts sprang from the too hard and narrow dogmata of Science or of the Church. In the preface to the First Edition I confessed that these were my aims; and I have now thankfully to acknowledge that — at least in the judgment of many of our most eminent scholars, critics, and men of letters — these aims have in some good measure been attained, and that my work has received a much more generous recognition than I had ventured to expect. In this Second Edition I have been able to do no more than to correct certain obvious errors of the press or of the pen. I would fain have rewritten some parts of the book, if I might and could, and have made considerable additions to other parts. And I am not without hope that the task of a thorough revision may yet be achieved. In due place I have acknowledged how much I owe to the labours of the scholars who preceded me in this field, and especially to those of Davidson, Delitzsch, Ewald, Kenan, and Rodwell. But to Professor A. B. Davidson I owe a special debt, for which I must once more offer him my most grateful thanks. Not only did he invite me to make the freest use of whatever would serve my turn in his own admirable but unfinished Commentary on Job ; but, with rare and singular generosity, he placed at my disposal the notes of his Class lectures on Chapters xv.-xxi. An act so gracious speaks for itself, and must be its own best reward. SAMUEL COX. Nottingham. CONTENTS, SBCTIOW TAOW Introductiott ... ... ... ... ... ... 1 I. The Prologue (Chapters i. and ii.) ... ... ... 22 II. The Curse (Chapter iii.) ... ... ... ... ... GO III. The First Colloquy (Chapters iv.-xiv.) ... ... 73 1. Eliphaz to Job (Chapters iv. and V.) ... ... ... 76 2. Job to Eliphaz (Chapters vi. and vii.) . ... ... 88 3. Bildad to Job (Chapter viii.) ... ... ... ... Ill 4. Job to Bildad (Chapters ix. and x.) ... ... ... 118 5. Zophar to Job (Chapter xi.) ... ... ... ... 141 6. Job to Zophar (Chapters xii.-xiv.) ... ... ... 149 IV. The Second Colloquy (Chapters xv.-xxi.) ... ... ... 181 1. Eliphaz to Job (Chapter XV.) ... ... ... 185 2 Job to Eliphaz (Chapters xvi. and xvii.) ... ... ... 197 3. Bildad to Job (Chapter xviii.) ... ... ... 216 4. Job to Bildad (Chapter xix.) ... ... ... ... 230 5. Zophar to Job (Chapter XX.) ... ... ... 261 6. Job to Zophar (Chapter xxi.) ... ... ... ... 274 V. The Third Colloquy (Chapters xxii.-xxvi.) ... ... 291 1. Eliphaz to Job (Chapter xxii.) ... ... ... ... 294 2. Job to Eliphaz (Chapters xxiii. and xxiv.) ... ... 304 8. Bildad to Job (Chapter XXV.) ... ... ... ... 321 4. Job to Bildad (Chapter xxvi.) ... ... ... 326 TI. The Soliloquy of Job (Chapters xxvii.-xxxi.) ... ... 336 First Monologue (Chapters xxvii. and xxviii.) ... ... 342 Second Monologue (Chapters xxix.-xxxi.) ... ... 366 VII. The Intervention of Elihu (Chapters xxxii.-xxxvii.) ... 406 First Discourse (Chapters xxxii. 6-xxxiii. 33) „. ... 419 Second Discourse (Chapter xxxiv.) ... ... 437 Third Discourse (Chapter xxxv.) ... ... ... 455 Fourth Discourse (Chapters xxxvi. and xxxvii.) ... ... 463 VIU. The Theophany (Chapters xxxviii.-xlii. 6) ... ... ... 4S9 First Divine Eemonstrance (Chapters xxxviii. 1-xl. 5) ... 506 Second Divine Remonstrance (Chapters xl. 6-ilii. 6) ... 527 IX. Thb Epilogue (Chapter xlii. 7 17) ,„ ... ... 542 INTRODUCTION. 17 us in the Poem itself; we have to think it out for ourselves. Apparently, it is much more complicated than the other, and cannot be so simply stated. But so far as I can gather it, it may be stated thus : that the dark mystery of human life is capable of a happy solution ; that the afflictions of the righteous are designed for correction, not for punishment ; and that the inequalities of this life are to be redressed in the life to come. This, then, I take to be the double intention, or purpose, of the Poem. On the one hand it was designed to demonstrate to the spiritual powers in heavenly places that God is capable of inspiring a pure and disinterested love, by proving that man is capable of a real, an unselfish goodness ; and, on the other hand, it was designed to relieve the mystery of human life by shewing that its miseries are corrective, and by strengthening the hope of a future life in which all the wrongs of time are to be redressed. The first intention is speedily and obviously carried out. Jehovah baffles and silences the Adversary, who, indeed, seems to have made but a sorry stand. He vanishes from the scene before the conflict has well begun. As, when Job is robbed of goods, children, health, he does not fulfil the prediction of the Adversary by renouncing God, Satan is at once overcome. So complete is his overthrow that the Poet does not deign even to mention it, but lets him silently drop out from the list of his dramatis personce. But, for other and nobler ends than the defeat of him " who was a liar from the beginning," the conflict is permitted to rage on in the heart of Job. He is tried In all ways — not only by the loss of wealth, children, health, though even these losses were so contrived as to mark him out for a man " smitten by God and afflicted " — but also by the despair of his wife, by the condolences and rebukes of his Friends, by the scorn of his tribe,^ by the insolence of the very outcasts whom he had once disdained to rank with the do^s of his flocks,^ by the laughter and mockery of the little children who played about the ash-heap on which he lay : ^ tried, most of all, by having his good conscience enlisted against the goodness of God, by the temptation to deem Him inequitable, » Chap. xix. 13—15. 2 chap. xxx. 1—15. 3 chap. xix. 18. 18 INTKODUCTION. tyrannical, pitiless. But amid all his trials he constantly and passionately refused to part with his integrity, or to confess sins of which he believed himself to be innocent : nor would he, under any pressure, renounce God or let go, for more than a moment, his confidence in Him. Like a loving child chastised for an unknown fault, or for no fault at all, he turned toward, not from, his Father in heaven ; the deepest and most abiding emotion of his heart being, " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." In the paroxysms of his anguish and despair he might speak wildly ; he might impugn the equity of God : nevertheless, it is always to God that he appeals j and, at the close of the Story, God Himself, with the mag- nanimity constantly attributed to Him in Holy Writ, admits that in his wildest upbraidings Job had not been guilty of wilful wrong, nay. He affirms even that Job had kept his very lips in righteousness: to the three humbled and amazed Friends, who thought that they had stood up for God against Job, He says, " Go to my servant, and ask him to intercede for you : for ye have not spoken of me aright, like my servant Johr Nor is it less clear that the second and subsidiary intention of the Poem is also carried out ; though I must not now attempt to point out how, through the v/hole course of the Book, we are shewn that the afiiictions of the righteous are signs not of wrath but of love ; that the dark mystery which hangs over human life is capable of a happy solution : and that the inequalities of this life are to be redressed in the life to come. There will be many opportunities of recurring to these points as the Exposition proceeds. For the present it will be enough to say that, even when we reach the end of Job's First Colloquy with the Friends, when, therefore, his spirit was smarting with the keenest anguish, the darkness of his despair is broken by some faint rays of hope ; that even then he could argue that as there is a chance for a tree that, even when it is felled, it will sprout again at the scent of water, so for man there may be a hope that, though he die, he will live again. When we reach the end of the Second Colloquy, and his spirit is gaining some measure of composure this hope has risen into the assurance that his Redeemer lives INTRODUCTION. and that "without," i.e. apart from, "his mortal llesh," he shall see God. While at the close of the Third Colloquy, when he has triumphed over the Friends, he affirms that, whatever appearances may say to the contrary, God is and must be just, and that the fear of the Lord this is wisdom, and to turn from evil this is understanding. Thus both ends are gained, God is vindicated, and man is reconciled to God. A new polemical value has been given to the Book of Job by the attitude and tone modern scepticism has assumed, or re-assumed. The whole school represented by the Author of " Supernatural Religion " — and it is a large one, and has many disciples among the unlearned — sets, or affects to set, great value on the ethical element of the Christian Faith. They affirm that Christ "carried morality to the sublimest point attained, or even attainable, by humanity." But they are very anxious to divorce the ethical from the supernatural element, although in the New Testament the two are inter- woven into one piece, so that it is impossible to detach the one from the other without utterly destroying the whole fabric. And, hence, they also affirm both that the morality of Christ was the offspring of a merely human brain, uncharged by any Divine energy or inspiration ; and that this morality will never take its due place or exert its due influence until we accept it simply as "the perfect development" and ex- pression of the moral faculties natural to man. So long as we cleave to the belief in a revelation of the will of God rather than to a discovery of that high Will by mortal powers, we place ourselves, it appears, at a serious disadvantage, and shaU be the richer and the better for giving it up. "We gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of Divine Revelation. While we retain pure and unimpaired the treasure of Christian morality, we relinquish nothing but the debasing elements added to it by human superstition." ^ Now it would be hard to find a more cogent and complete answer to this argument for the sufficiency of Morality apart from Revelation than that supplied by the Book of Job. For, * " Supernatural Religion," vol. ii. part iii, chap. iii. 20 INTRODUCTION. obviously, J ob had no miraculous and supernatural revelation of the will of God. He moved and lived and had his being outside the charmed and sacred circle in which such revela- tions were, or were supposed to be, vouchsafed. His one importunate complaint throughout the book is that he cannot see God, nor hear his voice, nor learn what his will and intention are. There is not a single reference in the Poem to the Hebrew law, to the Sacred Writings accredited by the Jews, or to the forms of life and worship which obtained among them. He is indebted for all that he knows of God to the great primitive Tradition, to the inherited and slowly developed conceptions of the human mind. And, on the other hand, it is equally obvious that he had a pure and noble morality, hardly inferior to that taught by Christ Himself The tumultuous agitation and excitement of his spirit under the trials to which he was exposed, prove him to be very man ; and his own description of the temptations which he had successfully encountered (cf. Chap, xxxi.) shews that he was open to the very influences by which men in all ages have been turned from righteousness. And yet no one can read the Poem without feeling throughout that he is brought into contact with a man of a singularly pure, high, and noble soul ; his own delineation of himself (Chaps, xxix. and xxxi.) shews him to have been a masterpiece of human goodness, with " a daily beauty in his life " up to the level of most men's exceptional and heroic moments : and Jehovah Himself is represented as pronouncing him what we feel him to be, "a perfect man and an upright, one that feareth God and escheweth evil." In his case, then, the conditions on which modern scep- ticism builds its hopes for the race were fulfilled : without a supernatural revelation, he was nevertheless possessed of a morality as pure and high as can well be conceived. He ought, therefore, on this hypothesis, not only to have been content, but to have felt that he was infinitely better off than if a Divine Revelation had been added to the pure and unim- paired treasure of his morality. Was he content with his treasure, then ? did he feel that it met and satisfied every craving of his spirit ? On the contrary, his whole soul goes INTRODUCTION. 21 fortli in a piercing cry for the very Revelation which our modern sceptics pronounce utterly superfluous. What they would contemptuously " abandon " he passionately craves and insists upon. He is tortured by the very longing which they assure us it was impossible he should ever experience, and knew no rest until he saw for himself the God of whom he had heard with the hearing of the ear, and in the light of that great Revelation learned how " vile " he was. For purposes of study the Poem is most conveniently divided into nine parts : (1) The Proem, or Prologue, in which the Problem about to be discussed is stated : Chapters I and ii. (2) The Curse pronounced by Job on his Day — the occasion from which the discussion springs up : Chapter iii. (3) The First Colloquy of the great Argument : Chapters iv.- xiv. (4) The Second Colloquy: Chapters xv.-xxi. (5) The Third Colloquy : Chapters xxii.-xxvi. (6) The Soliloquy of Job : Chapters xxvii.-xxxi. (7) The Intervention of Elihu : Chapters xxxii.-xxxvii. (8) The Theophany, or the Inter- vention of Jehovah : Chapters xxxviii.-xlii. 6. And, (9) The Epilogue, in which the issue of this great controversy is recorded : Chapter xlii. 7-17. SECTION I. THE PROLOGUE. ChAPTEKS I AND II. The Book of Job has, as we have seen, a double purpose or intention. Its higher intention is to shew that God is capable of inspiring, by shewing that man is capable of cherishing, that genuine and disinterested affection which is the very soul of goodness: this is the fact which Satan challenges and which Jehovah undertakes to prove. Its second, but hardly secondary, intention is like unto the first, viz., to shew that, while the goodness of which man is capable has a natural tendency, under the rule and providence of a righteous God, to secure for him a full measure of temporal prosperity and happiness, it is nevertheless independent of such a reward, that it can dispense with it ; or, in other words, that man is capable of loving right simply because it is right, and of hating wrong purely because it is wrong, even though he should not gain by it, but lose. In this aspect of it, the Poem is an emphatic condemnation of the "utilitarian" theory of morals, which assumes that men follow after that which is good only because they find goodness to be profitable for all the uses of this present world ; an emphatic condemnation also of that religious selfishness which cannot do good hoping for nothing again, but demands its "pour-boire" for every act of duty, if not in this world, at least in that which is to come. At the outset Job is placed before us as the model of a perfect man, — "the very paragon of his age," "without his peer in all the earth." His outward conditions are large and prosperous : he has seven sons and three daughters, who seem to have been not unworthy of even such a father as he, and Chaps. I., IT. 2 THE PROLOGUE. 23 are united to each other, and to him, by a singularly close and cordial attachment. He is not a nomad, but a settled and wealthy landed proprietor, with a vast estate and immense possessions, and he is recognized as " the greatest of the Sons of the East," probably, that is, as the wisest and noblest, as well as the wealthiest, man of his age. So far he presents that combination of personal goodness with happy outward conditions which the ancients regarded as the normal and invariable result of the righteous rule of God. Such a com- bination, however, was sure to give rise, sooner or later, to the suspicion that the goodness which had prosperity for its result might also have it for its motive ; that the righteousness even of the best of men might prove to be only a subtle and refined selfishness. That this question might be raised in its most searching and crucial form, and answered in a manner the most complete, authoritative, final, it is carried up into heaven, where alone the profound mysteries of life can be adequately handled; and it is argued out — nay, fought out — there. A fallen angel, a " son of God," who has sunk from his first estate, challenges the reality of human goodness : " Is it for nought that Job fears God ? Is not his piety simply a matter of profit and loss ? Does he not do right only for the gain he may get thereby ? Take away the gain, and what will become of his goodness?" Confident in the sincerity of his servant Job, assured that he at least is not one of those — Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty, Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves, Jehovah accepts the challenge. He consents that Job shall be stripped of all that he has ; that all his gains shall be taken from him, and only his goodness left. Nor need any man question either the justice or the kindness of God in exposing him to what seems so cruel an experiment. The path of danger is the path of honour. Could Job have known, as Jehovah did know, that he was being put to the proof in order both that all the hierarchy of heaven might be convinced of man's capacity for a sincere and genuine piety, and that all subsequent generations of men, looking back on the trial of his faith, might find it pregnant with incentives to courage. 24 THE PKOLOGUE. [Chaps. I., II. and patience, and liope — could he have foreseen this " end of the Lord," we may be very sure he would have rejoiced that he was counted worthy to suffer for an end so large and so noble. Tiiat, however, he did not, and could not, know. Never- theless " he endured" and entered into the blessedness of the man who, when tried, is found constant. Deprived of flocks and herds, his faithful servants and his loving children, in a single day ; deprived of them with a suddenness and in forms which would inevitably mark him out as a man " smitten of God and afflicted," he nevertheless retained his integrity, and possessed his soul in patience. So far from renouncing God because his gains were gone, and all That made him happy at one stroke was taken For ever from the world, he fell on his face before Him and Avorshipped Him. The Adversary has only one device left ; for, among other features which distinguish the "Adversary" of this Poem from the " Satan " of later inspired authors is the fact that he is repre- sented as using only outward means, that he has no recourse to those inward spiritual suggestions by which we, are most keenly tempted; these are left to the wife of Job and his friends. J ob has lost much, but not all : his health remains, and, with his health, the possibility of recovering what he has lost. Of this too, therefore, Satan seeks, and is permitted, to despoil him. He smites Job with the most loathsome and monstrous form of disease known among men, a form, too, which was universally regarded as the revenge taken by an insulted Heaven on some heinous and enormous sin. And now, in the fullest and extremest sense. Job is stripped of all that he had gained by loving and serving God ; nay, and even to his own mind, he is stripped of it by the very hand of God Himself Nevertheless, he submits without a murmur, and shews himself as ready to accept evil from the hand of the Lord as good. His very wife turns upon him, and counsels him to utter the exact words which Satan had flattered him- self that he could wring from his lips (comp. Chap. i. 11, final clause, with final clause of Chap. ii. 9). And, still, Job shined Chaps. I., II.] THE PKOLOGUE. 25 not with his lips. True, a curse does fly from them at last ; the silent sympathy of the Friends evokes from him what no pressure of loss and misery could extort from his constant soul : but when he opens his lips he curses, — not God, but — himself, and the day which gave him birth. Jehovah, then, has already gained the victory over the Adversary. Satan has exhausted his resources; he has nothing more that he can do ; and he sullenly acknowledges his defeat by flight. His baneful figure vanishes from the Poem. We see him no more ; no, not even at the end of the Drama, when the other persons of the Story come forward to receive the final sentence of Jehovah. For God and for us, to heaven and to earth, the patient Job has demonstrated that a genuine and unselfish goodness, a goodness which can not only dispense with reward but can also endure every form of loss, indignity, pain, is possible to man even here upon the earth and under the inauspicious conditions of time. Chapter i. — There ivas a man in the land of TJz ivhose name was Job. This man icas perfect and upright, and one who feared God and eschewed evil. 2. And there were horn unto him seven sons and three daughters. 3. Eis cattle also were seven tliousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yolce of oxen, and five hundred she- asses, and [he bad] a very large household ; so that this man ivas great before all the Sons of the East. 4. Now his S071S were icont to mahe a banquet each of them at his house on his day ; and they used to send and bid their three sisters to eat and to drink ivith them. 5. And so it was, lohen the days of the banquet had gone round. Job sent for them, and hallowed them ; and he gat him up early in the morning, and offered up burnt offerings according to their number : for Job said. Haply, my sons have sinned and renounced God in their hearts. Thus did Job alivay. 0. Noiv it happened on a day, ivhen the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, that Satan also came among them. 7. And the Lord said to Satan, Whence comest thou ? And Satan answered the Lord and said, From hurrijing to and fro in the earth, and from going up and down in it. 8. Then said the Lord to Satan, Hast thou con- sidered my servant Job f for there is none like him on the earth, a per/ect man and an upright, one that feareth God and escheiveth evil. 9. And Satan answered the Lord and said, Is it for nought that Job feareth God? 10. Thou, hast Thou not made a fence round him, and round his house, and round all that he hath? Thou hast blessed the work of his 26 THE PKOLOGUE. [CifAPs. L, ri hands, and his cattle spread themselves abroad over the land. 11. But only put forth thine hand and touch all that he hath,^ [and then see] if he will not renounce Thee to thy /ace, 12. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thine hand ; only ujpon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord. 13. Noiv it happened on a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the first born, (14) there came a messenger to Job and said, The oxen tvere ploioing, and the asses grazing close by, (15) when the Sabseans fell upon them, and carried them off ; and they smote the young men with the edge of the sivord ; and 2 am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 16. While he was yet speaJcing, there came another, and said, A fire of God fell from heaven, and burned the flocJcs and the young men, and consumed them ; and I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 17. While he was yet speaJcing, there came another, and said. The Chasdim formed three hands, and rushed upon the camels, and carried them off, and smote the young men with the edge of the sword ; and L am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 18. While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the first born, (19) when, lo, there came a great wind from across the desert, and smote the four corners of the house, so that it fell on the young folk, and they are dead ; and I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 20. Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head ; and he fell on the ground and worshipped, (21) saying : Naked came I from my mother's loomb, and naked shall I return thither. TJie Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken ; blessed be the name of the Lord. 22. Ln all this Job sinned not, nor charged God with wrong. Chapter ii. — Again it happened on a day, when the Sons of God came to present themselves before tlie Lord, that Satan also came to ^ The ellipsis of verse 11 requires to be filled up with some such words as " and see," or, " then see." Similar ellipses are not uncommon in Oriental literature. Thus in the Goran we read (Sura xxv. verses 9 and 22) : " They say. What sort of apostle is this ? He eateth food and walketh the streets. Unless an angel be sent down and take part in his warnings, or a treasure be thrown down to him, or he have a garden that supplieth him with food, . . . and these unjust persons say. Ye follow but a man enchanted." And again : ** They who look not forward to meet us say. If the angels be not sent down to us, or unless we behold our Lord. . . . Ah, they are proud of heart, and exceed with great excess." In each of these cases we must supply the words "we will not believe," in order to complete the sense. Many snch ellipses may be found in the Goran nlone. Chaps. I., 11.] THE PROLOGUE. 27 present himself before the Lord. Then said the Lord to Satan, Whence comest thou f 2. And Satan answered the Lord and said, From hurry- ing to and fro in the earth, and from going up and down in it. 3. And the Lord said to Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none lilce him on earth, a perfect man and an upright, one that feareth God and escheweth evil ? And still he holdeth fast his integrity, al- though thou didst move me against him, to swalloio him up without cause. A, And Satan answered the Lord and said, A skin for a shin, and all that a man hath will he give up for his life: (5) but only put forth thine hand, and touch his bone and his flesh, [and then see] if he ivill not renounce Thee to thy face. 6. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold him in thine hand ; only spare his life. 7. So Satan loent forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with a grievous ulcer from the sole of his foot even to his crown. 8. And he took him a sherd to scrape himself withal as he sat among the ashes. 9. And his wife said to him, Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? Benounce God, and die! 10. But Job said to her, Thou speakest as one of the impious women speaJceth. Shall we, then, accept the good from God, and shall we not accept the evil f In all this Job sinned not with his lips. 11. Now three of Job's f riends heard of all this evil that had befallen him ; and they came each from his place — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuchite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had concerted together to come and condole ivith him and to comfort him. 12. But ichen they lifted up their eyes from afar and hnew him not, they lifted up their voice and ivept ; and they rent their mantles, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. 13. So they sat down with him upon the ground for seven days and seven nights ; and none spake a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great. Chapter 1. Verse 1. — The derivation of the word " Job " is still undetermined. Some, deriving it from an Arabic root, contend that it means " the penitent one,'' — a conjecture confirmed, if not suggested, by the fact that, in the Coran, Job is designated, " he that turns or repents." But, with more reason, most Commentators assume it to be derived from a Hebrew verb which signifies to fight against, to persecute : in which case, the word being here used in its passive sense, it would mean " the persecuted one" the man who has known afflictions, in short, the man of sorrows " of the antique world. All we certainly know of it is that the name was borne by a son of Issachar (Gen. xlvi. 13), and by the hero of this great Poem. 28 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Vee. 1- " A man in the land of Uz," i.e. a Hauranite. The catholi- city, or universalism, of the Poet comes out in the very selection of his hero. He saw, as Professor Davidson remarks, "that God was not conJSned to the Jew, but was and must be everywhere the Father of his children, however imperfectly they attained to the knowledge of Him; he saw that the human heart was the same, too, everywhere, that it every- where proposed to itself the same problems, and rocked and tossed under the same uncertainties ; that its intercourse with Heaven was alike, and alike awful, in all places; and away down far in that great Desert, stretching into infinite expanse, where men's hearts draw in from the imposing silence deep still thoughts of God, he lays the scene of his great Poem. He knows, Jew though he be, that there is something deeper far than Judaism, or the mere outward forms of any Dispensation ; that God and man are the great facts, and the great problem " their relation to each other. The description of this Yerse gives a complete view of Job's character. The word translated "perfect" does not imply that he was absolutely without sin, but that he was simple, single-hearted; that his character was woven of one piece throughout, that there was no duplicity in it ; that by confession and sacrifice he had been absolved from such offences as he had committed, so that he was free from conscious, wilful, habitual sin. In short, he was what Shake- speare calls a man of " a clear spirit." The epithet " perfect," as distinguished from and complemented by "upright," signifies that he was inwardly lacking in none of the qualities and attributes of a righteous man, and that this inward righteousness and completeness wrought itself out in a well-balanced and erect life. The first two epithets of the Verse depict him as he was in himself ; the second two in his relation to Heaven. He walked in that " fear of the Lord " which is both the beginning and the end of wisdom, and necessarily, therefore, maintained a stedfast abhorrence of evil in every form. There can be no doubt that the four epithets taken together are intended to set Job before us as an ideally perfect man, a man not only morally blameless but also both sincerely and scrupu- Chap, I. Ver. 3.] THE PROLOGUE. 29 lously religious ; a man whose virtue and piety are beyond suspicion: for this is the fundamental assumption of the Poem, the fact on which the whole Story turns and proceeds ; moreover Jehovah Himself is introduced as attesting and confirming it (Chap. i. 8 ; and Chap. ii. 3). The best com- mentary on the whole verse is contained in Chapters xxix. and xxxi., in which Job depicts himself as he was in the happy days when " the Almighty was yet with him." Verse 3 describes the possessions of J ob. The word rendered " substance " in the Authorized Version, and here rendered " cattle," always means " live stock." Ritter tells us that a Hauranite who now owns five yoke of oxen is held to be a man of station and opulence ; "five hundred yoke " would make a prince of him. As these oxen are, and were, mainly used for ploughing. Job must have held a large landed estate. The " seven thousand sheep " imply, of course, that he was a wealthy sheep -master, as well as a farmer on a large scale. The "three thousand camels" imply, probably, that he was also a princely merchant, sending out large caravans to trade in the cities and among the tribes of the East, — as perhaps we might also infer from the frequent references to these travelling caravans in the body of the Poem.^ The "five hundred she-asses " confirm the impression of vast wealth, — the she-ass being held to be far more valuable than the male, because of the milk she yielded ; this milk, then as now, being greatly prized in the East. The word rendered "household," and in the margin of our English Bible " husbandry," is of somewhat dubious import ; but it probably indicates that, for the various uses of trade and agriculture, Job possessed a vast retinue, a large clan, of ploughmen, shepherds, camel-drivers, with their guards, overseers, traf- fickers, and scribes. If we combine the several items of this enumeration we can well understand how Job may have been reckoned the greatest prince among the heni-Kedem, or " Sons of the East," — a name given to the Arab tribes on the east of Palestine, all of whom claimed, as they still claim, to be Abrahamides, i.e. the sons of Abraham ; the vast " motley race," as Jeremiah calls them, who haunted the wide tracts ^ Cf. Chap. vi. 15—21. 30 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Vek. 3- stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates. We should em- phasize the fact, too, that Job, by the very catalogue of his possessions, is shewn to be not a mere nomad, like many of these Sons of the East. Obviously he had a large settled estate, cultivated by his slaves and the freemen of his clan. The Hauran is still covered with the ruins of ancient cities. And from the constant allusions in the Poem to " the city," the nobles of which did him reverence, and to " the gate " in which he sat and administered justice, gave counsel in emer- gencies, his lightest word or look being eagerly caught up and deferred to,^ we may be sure tliat his estate lay in the immediate vicinity of a populous city, if it did not include it. Verse 4. — Job seems to have been singularly happy in his children. His seven sons each had "his day " for entertaining the rest, whether that day were his birthday, and so occurred only once in the year, or one of the seven days in the annual feasts held in spring and again in autumn, or whether, as seems most probable, it was a day in every week. In any case it is obvious that they lived together in a frank brotherly way. That they invited their three sisters to their feasts implies that there was nothing riotous or ex- cessive in their mirth. And the fact that, on the day on which they all perished while attending the banquet of the first-born, the sheep were out at pasture and the oxen ploughing in the fields, seems to indicate that the feasting was no interruption to the regular work of the estate ; that the banquet, then as now, was given only toward the close of the day. The inference is confirmed by another fact, or, rather, by a reasonable deduction from it. It seems probable that the day on which, " early in the morning," Job assembled his sons for purification and worship, was also the day on the evening of which his eldest son entertained his brothers and sisters in his house ; for he had seven sons, and if each of these "had his day" every week, as the best Com- mentators think they had, clearly the whole week, or at least every evening in the week, would be occupied by the .seven banquets; so that Job would be compelled to take tlie morning of one of those days for his solemn act of worship, » Cf. Chap. xxix. 7—17. Chap. I. Ver. o.] THE PROLOGUE. and would probably take the first of the week, the day of the first-born. So much, indeed, seems implied in the phrases of the next verse, — " early in the morning," and, " when the days of the banquet had gone round." But if this be- so, then the children of Job perished on the very day on which, by sacrifice and worship, they had been purged from all sin. When could they have died more happily ? It is notable, however, that Job himself did not attend these banquets ; for it indicates that there was real mirth at them — a mirth and gaiety more suitable to the young than to the aged. It is also notable that though he did not austerely frown on them, he watched these festivities with some anxiety, lest any sin should blend with and contaminate the mirth. We are not therefore to conceive of him, however, as fearing any grave outward sin, any immorality ; for he knew what the training of his sons had been, and how well-disposed they were, and how truly they loved each other. But he does seem to have feared lest, even if they should escape such wanton, wild, and usual slips As are companions noted and most known To youth and liberty, they might at times let their merriment run to excess, and that, in the gaiety of their hearts, they might forget the Giver of all good, or even cherish the persuasion that a life of self-enjoy- ment was better than a life of duty and obedience. No doubt this incident of the constantly recurring banquets is inserted into the Story — from which so much is necessarily left out — not only, nor mainly, to pave the way for a subse- quent incident, and to shew us how easily and naturally all Job's children might be carried off at one fell swoop ; but also, and chiefly, to indicate how perfect and vigilant was the piety of Job, and to supply us with one of the many forms it assumed. Verse 5. — When the week of banquets was ended. Job invited his sons to his own house that he might " hallow " or " sanctify " them, i.e. see and cause them to go through the ceremonial ablutions by which men in the earliest ages pre- pared themselves for worship : for Joh^s day wa.s a holy day, a 32 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Ver. 6- day devoted to God, whether it were, as some suppose, the seventh day of the week, or, as others with more probability conjecture, the first day of the week. That no hint of " the sabbath " is given here is another indication of the non-Hebraic, the catholic, tone of the Book. And still another such indica- tion is to be found in the form of Job's sacrifice. " Whole burnt offerings," offerings in which the whole victim was con- sumed in the fire, were as familiar in the patriarchal age to the non-Israelitish tribes of the East as to the Israelites them- selves, as we may learn from the colloquy of Balak with Balaam recorded in Numbers xxiii. and in Micah vi. 5-8 ; so that there is no allusion even to the Hebrew ritual in this description of the sacrifice by which Job purified his sons. Strictly patriarchal and un- Jewish, moreover, is the fact that Job was his own priest, the priest of his family ; that the right and power to offer sacrifice are here regarded as a function of mere fatherhood, that as yet we find no trace of a sacerdotal caste. It should be observed, too, before we quit this Verse — for it is very strange and curious — that the sin into which Job feared his children might have fallen is the very sin to which he himself was tempted and from which he escaped only by the skin of his teeth. " Haply, my sons have sinned in re- nouncing God in their hearts." What might have been a momentary and half-unconscious treason in them threatened to become a deliberate and fatal treason with him. And this very fear of Job for the fidelity of his sons indicates, I think, that, even before his trial, he had been debating in his own heart whether human goodness was not very much a matter oi habit, whether it was real and would bear a severe strain, and that he had felt there was much in the providence of God both to quicken and to feed such a doubt. Why should he have dreaded lest his children should fall into this special sin had he not felt that there were doubts in the air and temptations — speculations rife among tlic younger and more thoughtful men of the tribes perhaps — which laid them specially and perilously open to it ? Verses G-12. — That this question of the genuineness, the reality and power, of human virtue may be determined at once Chap. I. Ver. 12.] THE PROLOGUE. 33 and for ever, the scene is changed, and we are admitted into the Cabinet of Heaven. It is a highday and holiday even there. Just as the sons of Job were gathered in their father's house below, so, above, the sons of God, the ministers who do his will, the thousands who at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest, as well those who " serve " as those who only " stand and wait," are gathered round the Father of an infinite Majesty. And with, or among, them comes one who is here designated the "Adversary," or the "Accuser," i.e. the calumniator and detractor.^ The Arabs call this strange hostile being the busy one ; " St. Peter calls him the " peripatetic " (1 Peter v. 8) — names which well accord with the description of him here put into his own mouth. In some respects he is, no doubt, or seems to be, less malignant and less potent than the " devil " of later speakers and authors ; but there can be no doubt, I think, that we are to identify the " Adversary " of Job with the " Satan " of subsequent Scriptures ; with, for example, the Satan whom our Lord Himself charged with having bound an infirm woman, " lo, these eighteen years ; " with the Satan who defeated, or hindered, St. Paul'-s friendly intention of visiting the Thessalonians " once and again," and whose " messenger, sent to buffet him," the same Apostle recognized in his "thorn," or " stake " rather, in the flesh. Nor can there be any doubt that throughout Scripture the existence of myriads of holy spirits, called into being before the creation of the physical universe, who delight to do the will of God, is either assumed or affirmed: or that the existence of an evil and malignant spirit, who seeks to thwart the kind and holy will of the God whom he once obeyed, is implied or even expressly asserted. How far the dramatic representation of this scene in heaven is to be taken as historical is an open question, though it should be remembered that similar scenes are described in other and later books of Scripture, even to the last. (1 Kings xxii. 19- 22 ; Zech. iii. 1,2; Pev. xii. 9.) But, as Professor Davidson * The word " Satan " is not used in the Book of Job as a proper name, as an appellation, although in our Translation it is so used for the sake of clear- ness, but only as an epithet. D 34 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Ver. 6- bas pointed out/ this noble passage will have been written in vain, at least for us, unless we gather from it some such general conceptions as these: — That all the powers of the universe, whether physical or spiritual, whether good or evil, whether their intents be wicked or charitable, are in the hand of God, and subserve the good pleasure of his will : that there is no eternal dualism, no power capable of engaging the Maker and the Ruler of the universe in an endless conflict or of ulti- mately thwarting his designs : that there are pure and happy spirits who, sent by Him, conduct men through this scene of trial and education, ministering to their inward and deepest needs : and that there is an evil spirit, himself a son of God by nature and memory, though not by love and moral determina- tion, who, while he seeks to thwart God and injure men, is compelled to work together with the other sons of God for the ultimate fulfilment of the Divine will, for the ultimate good of man even, and for the ultimate extermination of that sin which he himself perhaps originated. We shall fail to grasp the principles which underlie this dramatic picture unless we are taught by it that the fortunes of men possess an absorbing interest for the inhabitants of heaven; that moral problems are being wrought out here unlike any which have been solved there : and that, therefore, they follow the fluctuations of our fate with a divine curiosity and sympathy of which we have but a faint conception. As our struggles are of the pro- foundest interest to them, so their goodwill or their malevo- lence tell upon us, and further or delay the issue of the conflict. No, this little human world of ours does not float through space isolated and neglected, unrelated to the vast yet orderly system of the universe. It is attracted by the larger orbs around it and trembles under their perturbations. Good angels and evil angels hold us full in view. We may suffer at times for their sake as well as for our own, even as also at times they bring us a spiritual force beyond our own. For a few brief years man passes across the face of the earth ; but above him there bends a broad heaven, not cold and hard and care- ' I am indebted for the substance of tlie rest of this paragraph to a fine passapje in I'rofcssor A. B. Davidson's Commentary on Job, though I have ventured to condense and vary Iho expression. Chap. I. Ver. 12.] THE PROLOGUE. 35 less, but full of tender love and eager ministries ; and beneath him there yawns a hell, crowded with hostile and malignant spirits who would fain make him as selfish and as miserable as themselves : while above all, and through all, and in all, God reigns and works, compelling even the disasters and defeats of the conflict to minister to the completeness and glory of the final triumph. Assuredly nothing in tliis Scene in Heaven is more noble and touching than the pride, so to speak, which God takes in the good man, the confidence He reposes in him. Whether with or without some purpose of mercy even for the Adversary himself, whether or not inviting him to consider Job, the perfect man, that he may also consider himself and " take a thought and mend," Jehovah challenges Satan to consider Job, and how good he is, and how happy in his goodness. The way has been opened for the challenge by Satan's report of himself. " Whence comest thou ? " asks Jehovah. And Satan replies, " From hurrying to and fro in the earth, and from pacing up and down in it." According to the Hebrew idiom there is a certain pride and fidelity in the a^nswer ; it implies that he has come from a strict and vigilant discharge of his proper function, — which function has a double aspect, that of rapid and widely-extended inspection, and that of searching and accurate examination. Much of his original glory still clings to him. Obviously, at least to the mind of the man who wrote this Poem, his form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined. He mixes with the other " Sons of God " as their peer. He is evidently expected to present himself before the Lord when they do. No one questions his claim to a seat in the celestial Cabinet, not Jehovah Himself. He is addressed as one who I has a right to be there. He speaks as one fully conscious of I that right, fully conscious, too, that he has faithfully discharged the task assigned him. As we read these Verses, we begin to I suspect that there may be more in our Lord's words than I meets the eye when He said, as though describing an event which had just taken place, " I saw Satan, as lightning, cast 36 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Yer. G- oufc of heaven ; " that the Adversary had deteriorated through long centuries of baleful activity, sinking into a lower deep than that into which he originally fell. And yet, when we read on, and learn that the function of the Adversary is to detect the sins and defects of men, that he has no faith in genuine goodness, that he is eager to do men harm and to rob them of the natural comfort and reward of their virtue, we cannot but believe that even now already he has said to himself and his compeers : But of this be -sure, — ■ To do anght good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. If then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labour must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil ; Which ofttimes may succeed so as perhaps Shall grieve Him. To find evil in good is the very task to which the Adversary of this Poem devotes himself with zest. He hurries up and down the earth, like a spiritual detective, ever on the watch for signs of guilt. He has scrutinized even the perfect man with eyes which cast the shadows they discover, and has arrived at the conclusion that, devout and pious as the man seems, he is no less guilty than others, no less self-centred and selfish than he himself When Jehovah calls Job to his mind, and, as it were, defies him to find any blemish in one so sincere and pure, his response is ready. Job has but the show of piety, not piety itself : he has discovered that to fear God and eschew evil is the best policy. Let Jehovah but put forth his hand and touch, i.e. smite, him, and he will disown, or renounce, God to his face, i.e. openly, shamelessly, insolently. As yet God has set a hedge, or fence, round all that he has, warding off all hostile attack and harmful influence. Who would not serve so liberal and munificent a Lord, and observe oven the austcrcst forms of piety, to become the greatest and richest of the Sons of the East ? Here, then, the true problem of the Book is fairly raised. Does Job serve God for nought, without good reason ? is he Chap. I. Ver. 22.] THE PROLOGUE. 37 capable of a disinterested goodness, an unselfish virtue ? is the very question to be discussed and decided. In so far as it is a question between Jehovah and Satan it is speedily decided. "Job is good," affirms the Adversary, "only because of what he gains by it. Take away his gains, and he will fling his goodness after it." " Will he so ? " replies J ehovah. " Take away his gains, then, and let us see whether his goodness goes with or after them." Two sharp and decisive conflicts suffice to determine the issue of this brief but momentous campaign. In the first. Job's person is reserved from the power of the Enemy, and only his possessions are exposed to it. In the second, his life is reserved, but his person, his health, is exposed. And from this careful and exact limitation of the power of the Adversary we can hardly draw a lesser inference than this : That to the incursions of evil, as to the encroachments of the sea, God has set a bar and gates, and said, " Thus far mayest thou come, but no farther." It implies that good is before evil, and superior to it — at once more universal and more enduring ; that " all things ill " are subservient to good, and will but swell the volume of its final triumph. The first conflict and its issue are recorded in Verses 13-22. It is impossible to read them without being struck by the immense range of power committed to the hands of the Adversary ; or without suspecting that, by the permission of God, the prince of this world, who is also " the prince of the powers of the air," may have far more to do both with what seems to us the frequent cruelty of the great forces of Nature, and with the still deeper injuries which men often inflict on men, than we sometimes suppose. " A world so full of evils cannot be the work and domain of a Being at once good and almighty," says the modern sceptic, not discerning the good uses to which even evil may be put both here and hereafter. But our Poet is redeemed from such a misgiving by the con- viction that evil may, and must, be compelled to lead to greater good. Earth and heaven, man and nature, appear to conspire together against the perfect and upright patriarch the very moment God's " fence " round him, and round his house, and round all that he had, is removed; the lightning and the 39 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Ver. 13- whirlwind are turned against him, no less than the cupidity of alien and freebooting tribes : One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow. Nor can we well fail to note how the horror grows, how the successive strokes which fall on him gather weight, and break on him with accumulated force. First, the Sabteans swoop down on the oxen and carry them off ; then fire flashes from heaven and consumes the sheep, at once more numerous and more widely spread than the oxen ; then the still more costly and precious camels are " lifted " by the roving Chasdim ; and, finally, the cruellest blow of all, rifling his heart of its most sacred treasures, his goodly sons and daughters are destroyed by "a great wind from beyond the desert." And all these blows are struck in a single day. Each messenger of evil enters on the scene while the previous messenger " was yet speaking ; " and each concludes his tale wath the pathetic words, — words rendered unspeakably more pathetic by so many repetitions, — ''And I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee." In the morning of one and the selfsame day Job stands before us the greatest, richest, happiest of men, with his children around him, offering his sacrifice and thanksgiving to the God who has loaded him with benefits ; and in the evening he lies on the ground, with rent mantle and shaven head, stripped of all, naked as when he came from his mother's womb. To him, with his pious habitudes of thought, tracing all events, and in especial all the changes of human life, to the immediate hand of God, it must have seemed that God Him- self had turned to be his enemy. To him, indeed, we know it was the Lord who had " taken away " all that He had given. And, therefore, it would have been nothing wonderful had Satan prevailed against him, and wrung from his despairing heart an emphatic renunciation of all faith and trust in the Friend who, witliout cause, had become his Foe. — But we must examine these verses more closely. Verse 18, — The day on wliich this terrible and increasino- series of calamities fell upon him was the day of the first-born; probably, as we have seen, the very day on the morning ot Chap. I. Ver. 15 ] THE PROLOGUE, 39 which Job had " sanctified " his children : and hence the very last day on which he could anticipate that the God whom he had propitiated, and with whom he felt at peace, would so darkly frown upon him. On Verse 14 Canon Cook remarks : It is important to observe that the ploughing determines very precisely the season of the transaction. In the Hauran this takes place in January. This may account for the very frequent allusions to wintry weather, — cold, snow, ice, swollen streams, and violent storms — which occur throughout the Book, a coinci- dence which has strangely escaped the notice of commentators. It is also to be remarked that all the oxen were at the same time in one district : this too is curiously confirmed by the present custom of the Hauran ; in order to protect themselves from marauders the inhabitants plough the land in succession, bringing all their oxen, with their guards, into the same district," An admirable and instructive note except at one main point. The curious " coincidence " which the Commen- tators have so strangely overlooked is a very questionable one. It fails to make any allowance for the intervals which probably obtained — and these intervals are supposed to have been very considerable — between the first and second trial of Job, between the second trial and the arrival of the Friends, as also for the period consumed in their protracted argument with him. The very frequent allusions to wintry weather " in the body of the Poem — and they are no more frequent than the -similar allusions to summer and autumn — are to be accounted for, I think, not by the assumption that the whole drama was enacted in the month, or months, devoted to ploughing the land, but to the wish and intention of the Poet to paint a complete picture of life in the Hauran through all the changes of the year. Verse 15. — The Sabseans were an Arabian tribe, of which the northern clans were nomadic, wandering through the whole district betv,-een Arabia and the Hauran, and living mainly by plunder ; while the southern clans dwelt in settled habitations, devoted themselves to commerce, and sent their caravans through the whole East. (Chap. vi. 18-20.) Strabo says that even the Sabseans of the south, although a rich 40 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Veu. 15- mercantile people, made occasional raids for plunder in Petrsea and Syria. And as it is likely that Job paid " blackmail " to the clans in his immediate neighbourhood in order to save his lands from their incursions, it is quite possible that his oxen were carried off and their guards slain by the more remote Sabsean clans. The fact that " the young men " of Job were " slain with the edge of the sword " implies that, then as now, the ploughmen of the Hauran were either armed, or protected by armed men, and that these " guards " of his incensed the freebooters by a desperate resistance. Verse 16. — "A fire of God" (compare 2 Kings i. 10-14) can only mean lightning, I think ; and although terrible storms are known in the Hauran, yet a thunder-storm which swept over the vast tracts on Avhich seven thousand sheep found pasture, and which killed them all, and their shepherds, would inevitably be regarded as a portent, as the manifest "judgment" of an offended Heaven. Verse 17. — The Chasdim, or Chaldeans, were originally robber hordes. They were probably the descendants of Ohezed, who, like Uz, was descended from a nephew of Abraham named Nahor. They " retained their old seat and customs down to the time of Xenophon, and are now represented by the Curds." In forming themselves into " three bands " they simply followed the habit which a little experience and reflec- tion has commended to most freebooting tribes, especially when much ground has to be passed over. Thus divided they would find forage and water more easily ; the attack would be more of a surprise and be more likely to cut off all possibility of escape ; and the driving away of the cattle they had lifted would be at once more convenient and safer from pursuit than if the whole troop rode together. That robbers from two opposite quarters, the distant South and the distant North, should fall on Job's possessions in a single day deepens our sense of the wide sweep of the calamity which broke so sud- denly and destructively upon him. But the mere distance traversed by the hostile tribes presents no difficulty. The Arabs, once mounted and with the prospect of booty before them, care little how far they ride. Even at the present day their incursions often take as wide a range as that of the Chap. L Yer. 21.] THE PROLOGUE. 41 Sabseans into the Hauran from Southern Arabia, or that of the " bitter and hasty " Chasdim from the northern plains beyond Babylon. Verse 18. — It is by comparing this Verse with Verse 13 that we are made sure that the whole series of calamities occurred within the limits of a single day, the day on which Job's "sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the first-born." Verse 19. — The "great wind" was evidently a cyclone, or whirlwind, since it smote " the four corners of the house " at once. We are told that it came from across, or beyond, the desert, in order that we may feel how far it had travelled, and what a mighty and voluminous force it had gathered as it flew. And we may safely assume, I think, that it was part of the same great convulsion in the forces of nature by which the sheep and their shepherds had been destroyed. With this last overwhelming blow the tragic series comes to a close, at least for the present. The ruin of Job was completed by the third calamity, the " rapture " of his immense stud of camels. But no loss of mere outward possessions wi'ings a single word of complaint, or apparently a word of any kind, from his lips. With a stoicism and dignity such as many a living Arab sheikh would shew, but also with a pious and cordial acquiescence in the Divine will which only a life of tried and habitual faith can breed, he lets all go without so much as a sigh. It is only when, by the loss of his children, his heart is smitten and torn with an intolerable pang, that he " gives sorrov,^ words." And what words they are ! how simple and strong, and how pathetic in their simplicity ! Naked came I from my mother's womb, A7id I shall return thither naked ; The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken : Messed he the name of the Lord. Under the impulse of deep emotion his words fall into metrical order and rhythm, as all impassioned speech is apt to do. Even the very gestures which express his grief have a certain stately order and self-restraint in them. He rends his mantle, tearing open his wide outer robe from the neck 42 THE PKOLOGUE. [Chap. I. Ver.21. to the girdle — an act capable, of course, of being done passion- ately and impatiently ; but he also " shaves his head," an act only to be done deliberately and with care : he does not run wild and deafen heaven with his bootless outcries, like Lear ; but with a certain simple and stately dignity he hides his grief under the customary shows of mourning. Nay, more ; he " falls on the ground and wor.ships," prostrating himself in the deepest and most solemn form of adoration known to man : thus silently and unconsciously, and therefore all the more nobly, refuting the charge of the Adversary that, when his gains were gone, he would renounce the God who had ceased to be gracious to him. And yet how much there was even in this first trial of his constancy to shake and betray it. He knew and felt that this destructive avalanche of loss and misery had not been set in motion by any sin which clamoured against him. He felt, and thought he knew, that it had been hurled on him by God, whom he had done nothing to offend. Both his consciousness of innocence and his conviction that his calamity came from God would render the trial a dark and inexplicable mystery to him. As he reflected on it, the mere sense of loss and dis-^ honour, even his profound and irremediable grief for his children causelessly and prematurely snatched away from him would be less painful than the questions and doUbts suggested by so sudden, entire, and causeless a reversal of the usual course of Providence. It must have seemed to him as if the whole world of his established principles and convictions had dropped from under his feet, and he were left floating, falling, in a drear and fathomless abyss. But, happily for us and for him, under the most novel and terrible experiences men get the benefit of their past ; they reap what they have sown. A life of real trust in God, of real fellowship with Him, connects us with Him by attachments so numerous, and strong, and vital, that no shock of change, no rush of doubt or rebellious passion, can sever them all. Because Job had really lived and walked with God, he could not be wholly sundered from Him, could not altogether lose liis trust in Him even when God seemed to be doing him an unmerited and unspeakable wrong. Though his reason, stunned and reeling under so many swift Chap. I. Ver. 21.] THE PROLOGUE. 43 find heavy blows, lost hold of God, his heart clung to Him, and went groping after Him if haply it might so find Him as to vindicate Him even to the inquisitive and sceptical intellect. And so, for a time, he brushes his doubts and fears aside, and refuses to let his faith be darkened, or more than darkened, by questions he cannot answer. If his head says, I cannot find God or justify Him," his heart replies, " I am still sure of Him, and must trust in Him." Nay, even now already his heart begins to plead for God, and to justify his ways with men. It can say, not only, " Blessed be the Lord, though I do not comprehend Him," but also, " God has a right to take away what He has given, even though I can see no reason for his taking it away ; the right to give impKes the right to withhold or to withdraw." This is not a very pro- found solution of the difiiculty indeed ; but it is the deepest and best that Job can reach as yet. It is good so far as it goes, though it does not go very far. But, for the moment, it brought peace to the afflicted patriarch, and the power of worshipping a God he did not understand. And, surely, his noble humility and resignation yield a forcible rebuke to the intellectual narrowness which prompts us to demand that we should comprehend all the ways of Him who has the whole universe on his hands, and to the impatience which prompts us to expect an immediate solution of any problem that painfully affects our life and fate. There would be no need to add another sentence on the first trial of Job were not this a convenient opportunity for explaining the most difficult word in the whole Prologue. The word translated " blessed " in " Blessed be the name of the Lord" (Verse 21), is the very word which is rendered "renounce," or "curse," in Verse 11. That is to say, it is the very word which Satan had pledged himself to extract from the lips of Job. Now, as Job does use the Avord, it might seem that the Adversary had triumphed in his conflict with the Almighty. That conclusion, however, is rendered im- possible by all the other indications of the Story. And, there- fore, we need to remark that the Hebrew verb (barak) is used in a double sense. Usually signifying " to bless," it sometimes 44 THE PKOLOGUE. [Chap. I. Yer. 21. means " to curse." How the same word came to be used iri senses so diametrically opposed can only be explained as we recall some well-known facts and laws of human speech. In general, we may say that, in many languages, the word which signifies " bless " also modulates into the very opposite sense of " curse." Some traces of this strange linguistic habit may be found in our own familiar talk, as when we say, lightly or angrily, " Oh, hless you ! " meaning the exact oppo- site of what we say. And, perhaps, the explanation of this fact may be that all men, and especially the Orientals, shrink a little superstitiously from soiling their lips with words of evil omen and import, words of direct cursing, and prefer to express their anger and ill-will in words capable of a double sense. Many among ourselves who very willingly equivocate with an euphemism would recoil with horror from breaking out into open imprecations. Charles Lamb has pointed out a cognate fact, or habit, in the use of impassioned language in the lively lines in which he speaks of the — Irony and feigned abuse Such as perplex'd lovers use, At a need, when in despair To paint forth their fairest fair. Or in part but to express That exceeding comeliness Which their fancies doth so strike, They borrow language of dislike, And, instead of Dearest Miss, Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss, And those forms of old admiring, Call her Cockatrice and Siren, Basilisk, and all that's evil, Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil, Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor, Monkey, Ape, and twenty more ; Friendly Traitress, loving Foe, — Not that she is truly so. But no other way they knov? A contentment to express. Borders so upon excess. That they do not rightly wot Whether it be pain or not. And hatred is only less ingenious than love, and is very Chap. I. Yeu. 21.] THE PROLOGUE. 45 capable of converting words and formulas of benediction to its own evil and malimant use. More particularly, we may say of this Hebrew word that its original meaning is "to bend the knee," to kneel in prayer, for example : so that it would easily lend itself to a double and ambiguous sense, since if men kneel when they implore a blessing, they may also kneel to invoke a solemn and deliberate curse. But, most probably, the full explanation of the word as used in this Prologue is to be found in the fact that the subjects and courtiers of ancient Eastern princes knelt to them, not only when they entered their presence, but also when they left it, even though they left it in anger and cherishing treasonable designs against them in their hearts. Hence the word for "kneel" came easily and naturally to contain the double meaning of saluting a person, especially a superior, both on meeting him and in parting with him, both on giving him up or renouncing him, and on welcoming him and wishing him good speed. We can hardly suppose that even the Adversary thought to drive Job to an ex- tremity in which, like an angry drab, he would " unpack his heart with words " of cursing and blasphemy ; still less can we suppose Job to have suspected his sons (for the same word is used. Chap. i. 5) of a sin so exceptional and so alien to all the habits in which they had been nurtured: but Job may well have feared that his sons, in their mirth and gaiety, would " take leave " of God, forget Him, renounce Him, by preferring their own ways to His, by taking " the primrose path of dalliance " rather than " the steep and thorny way to heaven;" and Satan may easily have persuaded himself that, when Job was stripped of all he had gained by serving God, he would revolt from his service, and at least tacitly renounce Him. But his hope is defeated. Job does, indeed, utter the very word that Satan had set himself to force from his lips, but he uses it in the good sense, not in the bad, in the very opposite sense, that is, to that in which the Adversary had predicted he would use it. So far from " taking leave " of God, or renouncing Him, he flies to God, not from Him, and renews his homage. 46 THE PROLOGUE. [Chap. I. Ver. 22- " hi all this Job sinned not, nor charged God with wrong." The Second Trial of Job was probably divided from the First by a considerable interval. The Targum places a full year between them ; other authorities place a month : neither the one assumption nor the other, however, has any more solid foundation than the conjecture that the Poet conceived of the heavenly Cabinet as meeting at stated and regular intervals. But though we cannot pretend to determine dates, it is surely reasonable to infer from what we know of the moral history and experience of man that the first temptation would be allowed time to woi^k, to develop its force and bitter- ness, to accumulate its full weight ; and that the heart of Job, rocking to and fro under so amazing a stress of misfortune, would be long before it regained its poise, and so far adjusted itself to its new condition as to be able to say, — - Jehovah gave, and Jehovah ha th taken ; Blessed he the name of Jehovah. Whatever the interval, we may be sure that the second temptation came soon enough ; for, in some respects, it was far more searching and penetrating than the first. Mere physical health does more to sustain the spirit than we sus- pect until our health is seriously impaired. The calamities which had already befallen Job were only too likely to expose him to the suspicion and scorn of the tribes, as a man smitten by God for his sins ; but it was barely possible that they might see unparalleled misfortune in them rather than un- paralleled guilt. When, however, the very person of Job was invaded by a rare and monstrous form of disease, which made him loathsome to all who saw him as well as to himself, his monstrous guilt would be assumed as past all doubt. And, in any case, the loss of health was an additional trial ; it came on the back of all other losses, all other causes for wonder, and sorrow, and resentment. If, in tliis second trial, God's eulogy of the afflicted Patriarch is warmer and his pity for him more profound, on the other liand, the malignity of Satan is sharpened against him by a sense of failure, and he strikes, the very moment he gets permission, with his utmost force. Chap. II. Ver. 4.] THE PROLOGUE. 47 This Trial is recorded in Chapter ii., Verses 1-10. Verses 1-3 are, for the most part, a repetition of Chapter i. Verses 6-8, and call for little remark. But it should be observed that Verse 3 ends with a new phrase, in which Jehovah complains, with a touch of indignant reproach, of the malice of Satan in instigating Him to afflict Job " without cause," and speaks of his faithful servant with even more than his former love and pride. Satan had affirmed that the in- tegrity of Job was bound up with his gains, and that when the gains were taken away he would fling his integrity after them. And, now, Jehovah calls on the Adversary to mark, and to confess, that, although all that he had has been takers away from this perfect man, " he still holds fast his integrity," his whole-hearted devotion to God, and will not let it go. Here already, then, the professed zeal of Satan for the honour of God is detected and exposed. He had aflected to believe that Job was imposing on the generous credulity of Jehovah, and to be indignant that the imposture should succeed. But now, in that ''thou didst move me against him without cause " — a phrase in which a rueful pity for the sufferings of his servant and pride in his constancy are strangely blended — the real hypocrite is unmasked. It was not the honour of the King of Heaven for which Safcan was eager, but the destruction and disgrace of the perfect man whose disinterested fidelity was a standing rebuke to his own infidelity and selfishness. The charge alleged against Job had been proved to be untrue, and therefore it recoiled on the head of him who had advanced it. Verse 4. — This challenge to confess his malice only ex- asperated the malice of Satan. He had been content before to charge Job with impiety; now he charges him also with utter inhumanity. He implies that Job really cared for no one but himself, not even for his sons and daughters ; and that so long as he walked in a whole skin the genuine nature of the man would never be revealed. The proverb in which this atrocious insinuation is conveyed — as if the very devil him- self were a little ashamed of it, and did not choose to be con- sidered the author of it — " Satan's old saw" as Browning, with the quick insiglit of a poet, calls it, has long been dis- 48 THE PKOLOGUE. [Chap. IL Ver. 4- cussed by scholars ; but as yet they are able to agree only in its general import : and that, by the way, is determined for them by the context. " A skin for a skin " (or, as it might be even more literally rendered, " Shin for shin, and all that a man hath, he will give for his life ") bears some resemblance, however, to other proverbs which may help us to explain it. Thus, for example, the Jews have a saying, " Une gives one's shin to save one's shin — i.e. gives a part to save the rest, " hut all to save one's life," which very closely resembles that here quoted. Possibly, " A skin for a skin," in the sense of " A hide for a hide," was an Arab proverb in the time of Job, familiar to the lips of their traders, and was used by the literati to point the selfishness of men who only give when they expect to receive a full equivalent. Perhaps, " Give a hide to catch a hide" would convey its sense to an English ear ; or the rural proverb, " Give an apple to him that has an orchard ; " or, even the vulgar saying, " Give a sprat to catch a herring." Satan, who, in his self-absorption, can recognize nothing unselfish in the whole round of human motives, meant that Job's piety was purely selfish, a mere barter of one good thing against another and a better ; nay, that his very humanity extended only to himself; that he cared little for the loss of his children ; that so long as health was left him, if he believed he owed it to God, he would afiect to serve Him. " Take away that, so that he shall account his very life to be gone from him, and his assumed piety will open and disclose his real and utter selfishness." It is edifying to hear this "pious devil declaiming on the impiety of man, this humane devil, who only longed to do Job harm, declaiming on the inhumanity of man ; or, in one word, this disinterested devil declaiming on the selfishness of man ! Verses 5, 6. — For the greater good and glory of his servant Job, Jehovah permits even this issue to be raised and tried. Satan is authorized so to "touch" Job that he shall account death better than such a life as his (Chap. vii. 15), in order that the trial may be complete ; but he is not allowed to take life itself, in order that, if Job should stand the trial, his faith and patience may receive a due reward. F