Notes on the Book of Job

Here is a book which has for its subject not this or that remote question which touches us only in idle or careless moods; it is book which deals directly with one of the deepest problems which have occupied the mind of man.

We are a long way towards understanding anything under our consideration when we have properly laid it open, even without comment. Job is a wealthy and blameless man in whom God takes pride, and when Satan presents himself before God, God asks him whether he has considered Job. God thinks Job something worth consideration. Satan stands for the sceptic. He sneers at Job’s virtue. Job is well paid for his piety. It is easy for a pious man to be good, but if his prosperity departs he will curse; his creed is the product of his circumstances. God, who is Job’s Maker, is, on the other hand, a believer. He stands by Job, puts a stake on him, and authorises Satan to try him. Job loses all his children and his property, and he knows not what is intended by the loss. He is ignorant of what has passed between God and Satan; the secret transactions of the high heavens are unrevealed to him, but nevertheless he is steadfast. What he loses was not his, and in the depths of his sorrow he blesses the name of the Lord. Satan again presents himself before God, and God justly claims the victory⁠—“he holdeth fast his integrity.” Satan replies that Job as yet has not known the worst, and that sickness is the test of all tests. With health a man may endure anything, but if that fail, it will be seen what becomes of his religion. God is still confident, and Job is smitten with sore boils from head to foot. The torment cannot be surpassed, for not only is it extreme taken by itself, but it is aggravated by the contrast with his former condition. Death of course presents itself to him as the welcome end, and he thinks of suicide, suggested to him by his wife. If he could have but a word of explanation he could bear all with patience. But no word comes; the sky gives no sign. Separation from those he has loved, loathsome disease infecting him up to his very brain, are terrible, but the real agony is the silence, the ignorance of the why and the wherefore, the sphinx-like imperturbability which meets his prayers. Nevertheless he sins not. “What! we have received good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” God had been gracious to him; he recollects all the benefits bestowed on him, and he refuses to turn upon Him because of present reverses. He submits; he is unable to explain, but still he submits.

His three friends forsake him not, but visit him. When they see him afar off they rend their mantles, sprinkle dust upon their heads, and coming near to him, say nothing for seven days and seven nights, for they see that his grief is very great. The consolation offered by these three men to Job has passed into a proverb; but who that knows what most modern consolation is can prevent a prayer that Job’s comforters may be his? They do not call upon him for an hour, and invent excuses for the departure which they so anxiously await; they do not write notes to him and go about their business as if nothing had happened; they do not inflict on him meaningless commonplaces. They honour him by remaining with him, and by their mute homage; and when they speak to him, although they are mistaken, they offer him the best that they have been able to think. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, sitting in the dust with Job, not daring to intrude upon him, are forever an example of what man once was and ought to be to man.

After a while, Job “opened his mouth and cursed his day,” in words which are so vital that they are an everlasting formula for all those of the sons of men whose only hope is their last sleep. There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master. One touch, that in the twenty-fifth verse of the third chapter, is so intense, that it must be the record of a very vivid experience. “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me,” or more correctly, “For I fear a fear; it meets me; and what I shudder at comes to me.” The object of the dread which haunts us does not generally become real to us, but to Job the horror of all his worst dreams had become actual.

Job’s three friends begin their reply, and Eliphaz is the first. He asserts generally the just rule of God, and the connection between doing good and prosperity on the one hand, and between evil doing and adversity on the other, ending with an amplification of the text that the man is happy whom God correcteth, for by chastisement are we redeemed. Nothing that Eliphaz says is commonplace, although it has no direct bearing on Job’s case. If he had been a fool he would never have been dear to Job, nor would he have been one of the three amongst all Job’s acquaintances who came to him from afar. We must remember, too, that in a simple, honest society righteousness and temporal prosperity, sin and poverty, may be more immediately conjoined than they are with ourselves, and that Eliphaz may have felt that much that he said was true, although to us it is mere talk. Eliphaz is partly a rhetorician, and, like all persons with that gift, he is frequently carried off his feet and ceases to touch the firm earth. His famous vision in the night, which caused the hair of his flesh to stand up, is an exaggeration, and does nothing but declare what might as well have been declared without it, that man is not just in the eyes of perfect purity. On the other hand, his eloquence assists him to golden sayings which will never be forgotten. Such, for example, are the verses: “Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue; neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh. At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh; neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth. For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.” The main moments of the oration of Eliphaz are these. Rest upon thy piety; no one who is innocent has perished. In the eyes of God the purest is impure; His angels He charges with folly. The fool may take root, but suddenly his habitation is cursed. Commit your cause unto God who doeth great things and unsearchable, and think yourself happy in His correction. Doing this He will deliver you; you shall come to a good old age and die in peace.

It will be seen that there is here no direct imputation of crime against Job. Eliphaz holds generally nevertheless to the belief that crime is followed by punishment. A certain want of connection and pertinence is observable in Eliphaz. A man who is made up of what he hears or reads always lacks unity and directness. Confronted by any difficulty or by any event which calls upon him, he answers, not by an operation of his intellect on what is immediately before him, but by detached remarks which he has collected, and which are never a fused homogeneous whole. In conversation he is the same, and will first propound one irrelevant principle and then another⁠—the one, however, not leading to the other, and sometimes contradicting it. The transition from Eliphaz to Job in this respect is very remarkable. The sixth and seventh chapters are molten from end to end, and run in one burning stream. He complains that Eliphaz is beside the mark. “How forcible are right words! but what doth your arguing reprove?” Eliphaz is like the torrent which the caravans expected, but, when they came to it, it had been consumed out of its place, and they were ashamed. Barren sand was all that was offered instead of the living water. Everything which can be said by a sick man against life is in these chapters. The whole of a vast subsequent literature is summed up here, and he who has once read it may fairly ask never to be troubled with anything more on that side. Death to Job is as the shadow for which he looks as an hireling looks for the reward of his work. He calls upon God to remember that his life is wind; that as a cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more; and therefore he prays for consideration. What is man, too, that the Almighty should set Himself against him? “Supposing I have sinned, what can I do unto Thee? Why set me up as a mark against Thee? Why dost Thou not pardon my transgression?” There is nothing in all poetry more sublime than this: it was a complete answer to Eliphaz, and is a complete answer to all those who suppose that God, after the fashion of a man, proposes to punish man deliberately for his trivial misdeeds, and to punish him, too, not that he may be cured, but because the dignity of the Maker has received an affront.

Bildad, unaffected by what he has heard, referring to it in no way whatever, reiterates the old tale. It is the testimony of the fathers. We are but of yesterday, and know nothing. Age after age has declared that although the wicked may be green before the sun, and his branch shoot forth in his garden, he will be destroyed, and God will not cast away a perfect man. The confidence of Bildad and his friends upon this point is very remarkable. It must have been based upon something. Such a creed did not grow up without some root; and it is equally curious if it was the result of a philosophy, a felt impossibility to consider God as unjust, or if it was an induction from observed facts. If it was due to a philosophy, it at least bears testimony to the authority of the ought in the minds of these men and the depth of the distinction between justice and injustice; injustice being so hateful to them, that in spite of everything which seems to prove the contrary, they were unable to ascribe it to God. If it was an induction from the facts⁠—an induction which, as I have before observed, might in those times be perfectly valid⁠—then it is no less remarkable that such a theocracy should ever have existed.

Job makes no direct answer. “How shall I contend with Him? I cannot answer one of His thousand questions!” The conception of God in Job’s mind has greatly enlarged, and he dwells upon His incomprehensibility. He is the maker of Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades, of that which is farthest from us. “He goeth by me, and I see Him not; He passeth on also, but I perceive Him not.” He is forever before me and about me; what He does I see perpetually, but I know Him not. How can I plead with such a Being? “If I had called, and He had answered me, yet I would not believe that He had hearkened unto my voice.” One thing Job knows. “He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked⁠ ⁠… the earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covereth the faces of the judges thereof; if not, who is it?” What is the use of debating with Him? “For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both,” or as the Vulgate says, “Non est qui utrumque valeat arguere, etponere manum suam in ambobus”⁠—a saying which has in it a grandeur as of some mountain summit “holding dark communion with the cloud.” Nevertheless can God carelessly cast aside the work of His hands?⁠—so much care apparently has been bestowed upon it. “Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews. Thou hast granted me life and favour, and Thy visitation hath preserved my spirit. And these things hast thou hid in thy heart: I know that this is with Thee,” i.e., was intended by Thee. This book in a sense is terribly modern, for this is a question which is continually but resultlessly asked by us all. A woman of seven-and-twenty died the other day. She was German, and had been in England five or six years. She had applied herself with such diligence to learning English, that she spoke it without the least perceptible accent. She knew French just as well, and her general training, the result of years of most strenuous work, was most accurate. She was handsome, and had been married to an English husband two years. One child was born, and her friends rejoiced at the chances it would have with a German mother in England. It was a preternaturally bright child, and it was destroyed⁠—a year old. Three months before its death the mother began to show signs of consumption, and now she has gone. As I stood by her grave, the thought came into my mind⁠—His hands had made and fashioned her: why then did He kill her? Why was all this carefully, drop-by-drop collected store, precious beyond calculation, emptied on the ground? I know not. I cannot answer Him one of a thousand!

The example of Job protects us from the charge of blasphemy in not suppressing our doubts. Nothing can be more daring than his interrogations. There is no impiety whatever in them, nor are they recognised as impious in the final chapters of the book. The question is put to us directly by Him⁠—it is no creation of ours⁠—and shall we be thought irreverent because we hear it?

Zophar now ventures to express in plain words what before had been merely a hint. “God exacteth of thee less,” says he, “than thy iniquity deserveth.” What was observed to be true of Eliphaz is true of Zophar. He is made up of disjointed propositions accumulated from time to time, and now inappropriately vented on Job. For example: “Thou hast said, my doctrine is pure, and I am clean in Thine eyes. But oh that God would speak, and open His lips against thee; and that He would show thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are double to that which is (double thine own⁠—et quod multiplex esset lex ejus: Vulg.); know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth. Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” All this about the incomprehensibility of God is true and great, but what has it to do with the preceding assertion of Job’s sin? It is something gathered, something Zophar had been told, and something he has had the wit to feel and admire, but it is not Zophar himself.

Job holds fast to the evidence of his own eyes. “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you.” Zophar had appealed to antiquity. Job appeals to the beasts, “and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.” Of all that happens God is the cause. “With Him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are His.” It is curious to see what the image of this book becomes after it has passed through the refracting glass of orthodoxy. In the heading to the twelfth chapter we are told, as a summary of the seventh and following verses, that Job acknowledgeth the general doctrine of God’s omnipotency, and so the texts, “the deceived and the deceiver are His,” “He removeth away the speech of the trusty” (i.e. of the confident), “and taketh away the understanding of the aged. He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way. They grope in the dark without light, and He maketh them to stagger like a drunken man”⁠—words tremendous and dangerous⁠—are smothered up under the decent formula of the general doctrine of God’s omnipotency. It is in fact a very particular doctrine, and not by any means the harmless platitude of the theologians. The difference is great between the preacher in gown and bands acknowledging the general doctrine of God’s omnipotency, and Job, who is forced to break away from the faith of his church, sacred through the testimony of ages of miracle and prophecy⁠—Job, who feels the ground shake under him as he is compelled to admit that He whom he worshipped holds both cheat and victim in His hand, smites the eloquent with paralytic stammerings, turns the old man into a melancholy childish driveller, and causes nations to swerve aside over precipices, under the guidance of leaders whom He has blinded. Job is the type of those great thinkers who cannot compromise; who cannot say but yet; who faithfully follow their intellect to its very last results, and admit all its conclusions. They are better to a man so constituted than living in a fool’s paradise, however paradisaical it may be. “For,” translating the twelfth verse of the thirteenth chapter into intelligibility by the help of the German Version, “your sayings are sayings of ashes; your ramparts are ramparts of mud”⁠—mere mud before the attack, thinks Job, although the fool may dwell behind them in placid content, believing them to be granite.

Job renews his desire to speak with God. He renews also his request for death; and yet death, the passing of life like a shadow, is to him most pathetic, although the pathos in his case had never been sharpened by the loss of a hope in immortality. “His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn.” He is shut out from all sympathy with the joys and the sorrows of the children whom he has so much loved. He lies cold and dead, when they are exulting in love, in marriage, in well-deserved gratulations from their fellows. He is cold and dead, when they are in complicated difficulty or distress from which he could save them!

The three friends, having each said what they had to say, and Job having answered, begin again, Eliphaz taking the lead as before. His position is unaltered. How should it be altered? It is not possible for a man committed, as Eliphaz and his companions are committed, to alter, whatever the facts may be, and the same argument returns with little variation. Eliphaz condemns Job because his talk can do no good. Always has this been urged against those who, with no thought of consequences, cannot but utter that which is in them; and it is held to be especially pertinent against the man who, like Job, challenges the constitution under which he lives, and “has no remedy to propose.” It is incredible to Eliphaz that there should be anything in Job’s case which had not been anticipated. “Art thou the first man that was born? Hast thou heard the secret of God?” This was supposed to be conclusive in Job’s day, and has been thought to be conclusive ever since.

Although there must necessarily be a certain monotony in the continuous counter-statements of Job, there is not a single dead repetition. For example, in this second answer to Eliphaz, Job, after the retort that he, too, “could heap up words” if he pleased, adds “my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart.” Happy is the man, no matter what his lot may be otherwise, who sees some tolerable realisation of the design he has set before him in his youth or in his earlier manhood. Many there are who, through no fault of theirs, know nothing but mischance and defeat. Either sudden calamity overturns in tumbling ruins all that they had painfully toiled to build, and success forever afterwards is irrecoverable; or, what is most frequent, each day brings its own special hindrance, in the shape of ill-health, failure of power, or poverty, and a fatal net is woven over the limbs preventing all activity. The youth with his dreams wakes up some morning, and finds himself fifty years old with not one solitary achievement, with nothing properly learned, with nothing properly done, with an existence consumed in mean, miserable, squalid cares, and his goal henceforth is the grave in which to hide himself ashamed.

Bildad’s second response travels over the old ground. “The light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine,” etc. etc., and Job reiterates that all this is nothing but clatter. “Know now that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with His net. Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and He hath set darkness in my paths.” Into the much-disputed question of the meaning of the famous verses at the end of the 19th chapter, which have been so generally supposed to refer to the resurrection, I cannot enter. I do not know what they mean, and it is a pity that commentators, where there is no certain light, cannot say there is none, but feel themselves compelled to give an interpretation. I will only go so far as to admit that if there is any allusion to future life here, much of what goes before and comes after is obscured. We are at a loss to know why Job should have dwelt upon the finality of death if he had immortality before him. It is inconsistent with the thought that he was about to go “whence he should not return,” and it destroys the parallel between the flower, which revives at the scent of water, and man who “giveth up the ghost, and where is he?”⁠—man who “lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more they shall not awake nor be raised out of their sleep.” It is curious, too, that Job’s friends do not allude to the doctrine, as one would think they would certainly do, at least after having seen Job’s reliance upon it. Zophar’s speech in the 20th chapter does not refer to it. He contents himself with the affirmation that in this life the avenger of the wicked will appear: “The increase of his house shall depart⁠—shall flow away in the day of his wrath. This is the portion of a wicked man from God, and the heritage appointed unto him by God.”

As the action of the poem proceeds, Job becomes more and more direct. “Mark me,” says he in the 21st chapter, “and be astonished, and lay your hand upon your mouth. Even when I reflect I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold on my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?” They openly defy God. They say, “What is the Almighty that we should serve Him?” and yet “their bull gendereth, and faileth not, their cow calveth, and slippeth not her calf.” His friends, in order to avoid the significance of what is obvious, had explained it away by the assumption that iniquity is laid up for the children of the wicked. “His own eyes,” replies Job, “ought to see his destruction, and he himself ought to drink of the wrath of the Almighty. For what care hath he in his house after him, when the number of his months is cut off in the midst?” Good and evil “lie down alike in the dust, and the worms do cover them.” The closing verses of the chapter must be given as they stand: “Behold, I know your thoughts, and the devices that ye wrongfully imagine against me. For ye say, where is the house of the prince? and where the tent of the dwellings of the wicked? Have ye not asked them that go by the way, and do ye not know their tokens (i.e., do ye not know what travellers will tell you), that the wicked is spared at the day of destruction: they are led away at the day of wrath? who shall declare his way to his face? and who shall repay him what he hath done? He is brought to the grave, and over his tomb is watch kept. The clods of the valley are sweet unto him, and every man draws after him, and innumerable before him. How, then, comfort ye me in vain? Your answers are but falsehood.” Once more Job takes his stand on actual eyesight. He relies, too, on the testimony of those who have travelled. He prays his friends to turn away from tradition, from the idle and dead ecclesiastical reiteration of what had long since ceased to be true, and to look abroad over the world, to hear what those have to say who have been outside the narrow valleys of Uz. Job demands of his opponents that they should come out into the open universe. If they will but lift up their eyes across the horizon which hitherto has hemmed them in, what enlargement will not thereby be given to them! Herein lies the whole contention of the philosophers against the preachers. The philosophers ask nothing more than that the conception of God should be wide enough to cover what we see; that it shall not be arbitrarily framed to serve certain ends; that it shall be inclusive of everything which is discovered beyond Uz and its tabernacles; and if the conclusions we desire cannot be drawn from that conception, so much the worse for them.

Inexpressibly touching is the last verse but one. It is a revelation of the inmost heart striving to be at peace with death. Not one grain of comfort is sought outside, and it is this which makes it so precious. There is not even a hint of a hope. All is drawn from within, and is solid and real. To this we can come when religion, dreams, metaphysics, all fail. The clods of the valley shall be sweet even to us. Why should we complain, why should we be in mortal fear! We do but go the path which the poorest, the weakest, the most timid have all trodden; which the poorest, the weakest, the most timid for millions of years will still tread. Every man draws after us, and innumerable have drawn thither before us. None who have passed have ever rebelled or repented, nor shall we. Job, in building on rest, and on community, has struck the adamant which cannot be shaken.

So strong is the superstition of the friends that Eliphaz now advances to a creation of crimes which Job must have committed. It is more easy to believe him to be a sinner than that their creed can be shaken. “Thou hast taken,” says Eliphaz, “a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the naked of their clothing. Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry. But as for the mighty man, he had the earth; and the honourable man dwelt in it. Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee.” There was no shadow of truth in the accusation. Job seems, on the contrary, to have been remarkable for the virtues which were the very opposite of these sins. It is worth while to notice how our measure of wrong has altered. To Eliphaz, wrong, when he wishes specially to name it, is a class of actions, not one of which is to us accounted an offence, except by certain sentimental persons. A man nowadays may be a good Christian and a good citizen, and do every one of these deeds which in Job’s time were so peculiarly reprehensible, and which are taken, as we shall see afterwards, with Job’s full consent, as the very type of misdoing. Eliphaz, as before observed, is the church. But what a world that must have been, when the church’s anathemas were reserved for him who exacteth pledges from his brother, who neglected the famishing, and who paid undue respect to the great. Job’s answer is an indignant denial of the charge. It is not worth an answer, and again he implores God to speak to him. “Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; on the right hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him: He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.” Job adds to the last repetition, however, of his complaint something which is new⁠—that He is irreversible. He is “in one mind:” more probably the Unexampled, the Unique⁠—“and who can turn Him?” and he proceeds in the next verse to a still plainer exposition. “He performeth the thing that is appointed for me: and many such things are with Him. Therefore am I troubled at His presence: when I consider I am afraid of Him. For God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me.” The temptation is great, when we find anything approaching modern learning in an ancient book, to suppose that we have got hold of an anticipation of it, but we cannot conclude from this passage that Job’s belief in the impossibility of altering the divine decree is our belief in the uniformity of nature. Nevertheless Job’s dejection, because no man can turn Him, and the fear at His presence, because He performeth the thing appointed, are the dejection and the fear of our nineteenth century as certainly as they were those of the seventh century BC.

In the twenty-fourth chapter Job turns aside from the charge brought by Zophar against him, and points to what cannot be disputed, the success of the wandering savage tribes, which must have made such a figure in the domestic history of the time. They, says Job, go on their desperate way unrebuked, and die as the others die. “Drought and heat consume the snow waters; so doth the grave those which have sinned.” These are they “who are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock for want of a shelter.”

The controversy has now been fully developed. Bildad mumbles in half-a-dozen weak words, what is nothing to the point, that man in God’s sight must be unclean. His short monologue sounds rather as a meditation meant for himself, the only refuge he could find from the difficulty which pressed upon him. Zophar, who ought to have spoken again, is silent. The victory remains with Job, and he sums up his case.

First of all, though, he competes as it were with Bildad in his account of the Almighty. It is as if Job said⁠—I also know Him and what He is. “Hast thou plentifully declared the thing as it is?” and then he describes God as hanging the earth upon nothing, as the Maker of the constellations, and yet these are but the very fringe of His doings; “what a mere whisper of Him do we hear! but the thunder of His power who shall understand?” He holds fast, too, by his integrity. Nothing that his friends have urged will convince him against his own clear conscience. He remains to them in an utterly unconverted and even horribly profane state of mind⁠—“My heart is not ashamed for one of my days.” He casts up his accounts, and refuses to allow any sin, actual or imputed, open or secret. The rest of the 27th chapter is a mystery which is insoluble. It stands in Job’s name, but it is an admission of everything which he had before denied. “This is the portion of a wicked man with God, and the heritage of oppressors, which they shall receive of the Almighty. If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword; and his offspring shall not be satisfied with bread.” In the 21st chapter Job had urged on this very point, “Let his own eyes”⁠—the eyes of the wrongdoer himself⁠—“see his destruction.” Again in the 21st chapter, “Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes.” In the 27th chapter “terrors take hold on him as waters, a tempest stealeth him away in the night.” In the 21st chapter “their houses are safe from fear⁠ ⁠… they spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave. Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us.” Whether in the 27th chapter there is a remnant of a speech by Zophar, from whom one is due, or whether it is an interpolation devised to save Job’s orthodoxy, I have no means of determining, but that it is unintelligible is certain, and the only thing to be done with it is to pass it by. The 28th chapter is not free from difficulty, and both the 27th and 28th are rendered doubly suspicious by the commencement of the 29th. “Moreover, Job continued his parable and said,” the sequel being a reversion to the old pang so authentic and so familiar. “Oh that I were as in months past.” But the 28th chapter is so exquisite, that even if it does not help the development of the poem, or is inharmonious with it, it cannot be neglected. It is a passionate personification of Wisdom, and the desire for her is almost sensuous in its intensity. “It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire.” This is the wisdom by which the world was framed; by which the winds and waters were measured “when He made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder.” This very same wisdom it is which is the fear of the Lord. “Unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” It is wisdom in both cases⁠—the same wisdom. It is not going beyond the text to say that this is what it teaches. What we call morality is no separate science. It is the science by which a decree was made for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder. These immortal words should not be narrowed down to the poverty-stricken conclusion that the sum-total of all wisdom is conformity to half-a-dozen plain rules, and that the divine ambition of man is to be limited within the bounds of departing from evil. Rather do we discover in these words the essential unity of fearing the Lord and wisdom. To be wise is to fear Him. Wisdom, the wisdom searched out by Him in His creation of the universe, when it is brought down to man, is morality. Whatever we may think of the date of this portion of the book, there is no question as to the three following chapters. Job protests, not merely his innocence, but his active righteousness, and remembers his past prosperity. He dwells upon the time when he laughed away his friends’ trouble, and they were not able to darken the cheerfulness of his countenance. Immovable he was when fear was abroad, and the hearts of men were shaken. “I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners.” The humanities of these chapters reveal the best side of the Semitic race. They are the burden of the prophets⁠—of Micah, who invokes God’s vengeance on those who “covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage;” and they are the soul of the Revolution, which will one day make foolish the modern quarrels over forms of government. Job goes down to the very root of the matter. “Did not He that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb? If I have withheld the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail; or have eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless hath not eaten thereof (for from my youth he was brought up with me, as with a father, and I have guided her from my mother’s womb): if I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering; if his loins have not blessed me, and if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep; if I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: then let mine arm fall from my shoulder-blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone.” Again, let it be laid to heart that the obligations, the breach of which was a “terror” to him, are not one of them legal obligations, and not one of them moral obligations in the modern sense of the word. The races to whom we owe the Bible were cruel in war; they were revengeful; their veins were filled with blood hot with lust; they knew no art, nor grace, nor dialectic, such as Greece knew, but one service they at least have rendered to the world. They have preserved in their prophets and poets this eternal verity⁠—He that made me in the womb made him⁠—and have proclaimed with divine fury a divine wrath upon all those who may be seduced into forgetfulness of it. In discernment of the real breadth and depth of social duty, nothing has gone beyond the book of Job. Much of it ought to be engraved upon brass and set upon pillars throughout the land, as a perpetual reminder of the truth as between man and man. In one of the shires of this country stands, or used to stand, a tablet with a mark on it twenty or thirty feet above the level of the river which runs beneath, and on the tablet it is recorded, incredible almost to all present inhabitants, that on a certain day years ago the water reached that mark. So with the book of Job. It is a monument testifying, although its testimony is now hardly believable, that this was a rich man’s notion of duty; and more extraordinary still, that this was his religion.

As to Elihu’s speech I have nothing to say. Whether there is sufficient philological evidence against it I am unable to determine, but the evidence supplied by the instinct of the ordinary reader is sufficient. Setting apart that it is entirely unnecessary in the progress of the poem, and that it is tame and flat compared with the other portion of it, the omission of Elihu in the prologue and the epilogue is almost decisive.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” He makes no reference whatever to what had passed in heaven. It would have been easy, one would think, to have cleared up all Job’s doubts by telling him at once that his trials were ordained to establish his steadfastness and confound the Accuser. But no; He does not, and cannot allude to that act of the drama which had been enacted unseen. The very first words of the Almighty are the key to the whole of what follows. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare if thou hast understanding? Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched out the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof: when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” The appeal is in no sense whatever to the bare omnipotence of God. He is omnipotent, but not upon His omnipotence does He rely in His divine argument with Job. Listen, for example, to such passages as these: “Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste ground, and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?” Still more noteworthy, there is the ostrich, “which leaveth her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones as though they were not hers; her labour is in vain without fear; because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath He imparted to her understanding.” There are also the hawk and the eagle: “Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom and stretch her wings towards the south? Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make his nest on high? He dwelleth and abideth upon the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place. From thence he seeketh his prey, and his eyes behold afar off. His young ones also suck up blood and where the slain are, there is he.”

The Almighty pauses. “Moreover the Lord answered Job and said, ‘Shall he who censures God contend with Him? He that reproveth God, let Him answer it.’ ” Job humiliates himself: “Behold, too insignificant am I; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” Jehovah again speaks from the storm: “Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto Me. Wilt thou also disannul my right? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like Him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency, and array thyself with glory and beauty! Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold everyone that is proud, and abase him! look on everyone that is proud, and bring him low, and tread down the wicked in their place! Hide them in the dust together, and bind their faces in secret! Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee?” The description of behemoth and the leviathan follows.

There are two observations plain enough but most important to be made upon the Divine oration. One is that God vouchsafes to Job no revelation in order to solve the mystery with which he was oppressed. There is no promise of immortality, nothing but an injunction to open the eyes and look abroad over the universe. Whatever help is to be obtained is to be had, not through an oracle, but by the exercise of Job’s own thought.

In the next place, there is no trace of any admission on the part of Jehovah that the well-meant theories of the friends are correct. On the contrary, His wrath is kindled against them. Jehovah does not admit for a moment that He has established any unvarying connection between righteousness and prosperity, sin and adversity.

What then is God’s meaning? It behoves us to keep close to the text in our interpretation of it. We have not to ascertain what we might imagine or wish Him to say. We have to find out what He did say. Most scrupulously are we to avoid foisting upon Him any idea of our own. It is much easier to impose a meaning upon the Bible, written in an age so unlike our own, than to extract the meaning from it. God reminds us of His wisdom, of the mystery of things, and that man is not the measure of His creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect of man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret, if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is nothing more. Job is to hold fast to the law within; that is his candle which is to light his path; but God is infinite. Job, if he is not satisfied, submits. Henceforth he will be mute⁠—“once have I spoken, but I will not answer; yea twice; but I will proceed no further.” “I have uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” All his thinkings seemed like hearsay. This then was the real God. “Now mine eye seeth Thee.”

It is impossible to neglect the epilogue in which Job is restored to his prosperity. If we do neglect it, we may perhaps turn the book into something more accordant with our own notions, but the book itself we have not got. There is nothing really inconsistent in it. The Almighty has explained Himself, and the explanation stands, but there is no reason why Job should be left in such utter misery. The anguish which completely envelopes the sufferer does break and yield with time, and often disappears. On the other hand, we have no right to demand happiness, and we are not told that Job’s happiness returned to him because he demanded it. It is utterly to mistake the purpose of the last chapter to suppose that in it lies the meaning of all that has gone before, and that it teaches us that we have only to wait and God will reward us. God is great, we know not His ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet, if we possess our souls in patience, we may pass the valley of the shadow and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not. If we had before us a statement of a nineteenth-century philosophy, there would undoubtedly have been no epilogue; but the book is not a philosophy, but a record of an experience.

What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over 2,500 years ago? We have passed through much since that memorable day. We have had new religions which have overspread the world, and yet the sum total of all that we can add is but small. Scientific discovery⁠—astronomy for example⁠—contributes something. The earth is no longer the centre of the starry system, and with the disappearance of that belief much more has disappeared. Man has not become of less importance, but it is seen that all things do not converge to him. We have learned too more intimately God’s infinity. It is this which caused Job to put his hand on his mouth⁠—the truth that even the dry clod and the desert grass are dear to Him though no man is near them. Why should they not be? Why should I say that dew falling on a thorn in a desert is wasted, but falling on my flower shows proper economy? Furthermore, if resources are inexhaustible, there can be no waste. It might be waste if I were to lavish time and treasure on building up the blue succory perfect in its azure, which springs by the wayside, to be smothered by the chalk dust and to be destroyed in its pride by a chance cut from a boy’s stick, but it is no waste to God. In this way the lesson which the whirlwind taught us has been expanded and intensified. We return to it anew after all the creeds, and we say that they are but the hearing of Him, and that this is seeing Him.