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Introduction
to Job
This summary of the book of Job provides information about the
title, author(s), date of writing, chronology, theme, theology, outline, a
brief overview, and the chapters of the Book of Job.
Although most of the book consists of the words of Job and his
friends, Job himself was not the author. We may be sure that the author was an
Israelite, since he (not Job or his friends) frequently uses the Israelite
covenant name for God (Yahweh; NIV "the Lord"). In the prologue (chs.
1
- 2;
), divine discourses (38:1 -- 42:6)
and epilogue (42:7-17) "Lord" occurs a total of 25
times, while in the rest of the book (chs. 3
- 37)
it appears only once (12:9).
This unknown author probably had access to a tradition (oral or
written) about an ancient righteous man who endured great suffering with
remarkable "perseverance" (Jas
5:11; see note there) and without turning against God (see Eze 14:14,20), a tradition he put to use for his
own purposes. While the author preserves much of the archaic and non-Israelite
flavor in the language of Job and his friends, he also reveals his own style as
a writer of wisdom literature. The book's profound insights, its literary
structures and the quality of its rhetoric display the author's genius.
Two dates are involved: (1) that of Job himself and (2) that of
the composition of the book. The latter could be dated anytime from the reign
of Solomon to the time of Israel's exile in Babylonia. Although the author was
an Israelite, he mentions nothing of Israel's history. He had an account of a
non-Israelite sage Job (1:1) who probably lived in the second millennium
b.c. (2000-1000). Like the Hebrew patriarchs, Job lived more than 100 years (42:16).
Like them, his wealth was measured in livestock and servants (1:3),
and like them he acted as priest for his family (1:5).
The raiding of Sabean (1:15) and Chaldean (1:17)
tribes fits the second millennium, as does the mention of the k e ́s i ̣t a h, "a
piece of silver," in 42:11
(see Ge 33:19; Jos 24:32). The discovery of a Targum (Aramaic paraphrase) on
Job dating to the first or second century b.c. (the earliest written Targum yet
discovered) makes a very late date for composition highly unlikely.
In many places Job is difficult to translate because of its many
unusual words and its style. For that reason, modern translations frequently
differ widely. Even the pre-Christian translator(s) of Job into Greek (the
Septuagint) seems often to have been perplexed. The Septuagint of Job is about
400 lines shorter than the accepted Hebrew text, and it may be that the
translator(s) simply omitted lines he (they) did not understand. The early
Syriac (Peshitta), Aramaic (Targum) and Latin (Vulgate) translators had similar
difficulties.
While it may be that the author intended his book to be a
contribution to an ongoing high-level discussion of major theological issues in
an exclusive company of learned men, it seems more likely that he intended his
story to be told to godly sufferers who like Job were struggling with the
crisis of faith brought on by prolonged bitter suffering. He seems to sit too
close to the suffering -- to be more the sympathetic and compassionate pastor
than the detached theologian or philosopher. He has heard what the learned
theologians of his day have been saying about the ways of God and what brings
on suffering, and he lets their voices be heard. And he knows that the godly sufferers
of his day have also heard the "wisdom" of the learned and have
internalized it as the wisdom of the ages. But he also knows what
"miserable comfort" (16:2)
that so-called wisdom gives -- that it ony rubs salt in the wounds and creates
a stumbling-block for faith. Against that wisdom he has no rational arguments
to marshal. But he has a story to tell that challenges it at its very roots and
speaks to the struggling faith of the sufferer. In effect he says to the godly
sufferer, "Forget the logical arguments spun out by those who sit together
at their ease and discuss the ways of God, and forget those voices in your own
heart that are little more than echoes of their pronouncements. Let me tell you
a story."
When good people (those who "fear God and shun evil," 1:1)
suffer, the human spirit struggles to understand. Throughout recorded history
people have asked: How can this be? If God is almighty and "holds the
whole world in his hands" and if he is truly good, how can he allow such
an outrage? The way this question has often been put leaves open three
possibilities: (1) God is not almighty after all; (2) God is not just (is not
wholly good but has a demonic streak in him); (3) humans may be innocent. In
ancient Israel, however, it was indisputable that God is almighty, that he is
perfectly just and that no human is pure in his sight. These three assumptions
were also fundamental to the theology of Job and his friends. Simple logic then
dictated the conclusion: Every person's suffering is indicative of the measure
of their guilt in the eyes of God. In the abstract, this conclusion appeared
inescapable, logically imperative and theologically satisfying.
But what thus appeared to be theologically self-evident and
unassailable in the abstract was often in radical tension with actual human
experience. There were those whose godliness was genuine, whose moral character
was upright and who had kept themselves from great transgression, but who
nonetheless were made to suffer bitterly (see, e.g., Ps
73). For these the self-evident theology brought no consolation and
offered no guidance. It only gave rise to a great enigma. And the God to whom
the sufferer was accustomed to turn in moments of need himself became the
overwhelming enigma. This theology left innocent sufferers imprisoned in
windowless cells to agonize over their crisis of faith. In the speeches of chs.
3
- 37,
we hear on the one hand the flawless logic but wounding thrusts of those who
insisted on the traditional theology, and on the other hand the writhing of
soul of the righteous sufferer struggling with the great enigma even while
being wounded by his well-intended, theologically orthodox friends (see note on
5:27).
Their learned theology had no helpful, encouraging or comforting word for a
truly godly sufferer.
The author of the book of Job broke out of the tight, logical mold
of the traditional orthodox theology of his day. He saw that it led to a dead
end, that it had no way to cope with the suffering of godly people. It could
only deny the reality of the experienced anomaly and add to the pain and inner
turmoil of the sufferer. Instead of logical arguments, he tells a story. And in
his story he shifts the angle of perspective. All around him, among theologians
and common people alike, were those who attempted to solve the "God
problem" in the face of human suffering (are the ways of God just?) at the
expense of humans (they must all deserve what they get). Even those who were
suffering were told they must see matters in that light. The author of Job, on
the other hand, gave encouragement to godly suffers by showing them that their
suffering provided an occasion like no other for exemplifying what true
godliness is for human beings.
He begins by introducing a third party into the equation. The
relationship between God and humans is not exclusive and closed. Among God's
creatures there is the great adversary (see chs. 1
- 2).
Incapable of contending with God hand to hand, power pitted against power, he
is bent on frustrating God's creation enterprise centered on God's relationship
with the creature that bears his image. As tempter he seeks to alienate humans
from God (see Ge 3; Mt
4:1); as accuser (one of the names by which he is called, ́s a ̣t a n, means
"accuser") he seeks to alienate God from humans (see Zec 3:1; Rev 12:9-10). His all-consuming purpose is to
drive an irremovable wedge between God and humans to effect an alienation that
cannot be reconciled.
In his story, the author portrays this adversary in his boldest
and most radical assault on God and godly people in the special and intimate
relationship that is dearest to them both. When God calls up the name of Job
before the accuser and testifies to his righteousness -- this creature in whom
God takes special delight -- Satan attempts with one crafty thrust both to
assail God's beloved and to show up God as a fool. True to one of his modes of
operation, he accuses Job before God. He charges that Job's godliness is evil.
The very godliness in which God takes such delight lacks all integrity; it is a
terrible sin. Job's godliness is mere self-serving; he is righteous only
because it pays. If God will only let Satan tempt Job by breaking the link
between righteousness and blessing, he will expose this man and all righteous
people as the frauds they are.
It is the adversary's ultimate challenge. He is sure he has found
an opening to accomplish his purpose in the very structure of creation. Humans
are totally dependent on God for their very lives and well-being. That fact can
occasion one of humankind's greatest temptations: to love the gifts rather than
the Giver, to try to please God merely for the sake of his benefits, to be
"religious" and "good" only because it pays. Satan's
accusation of Job is that this is the deep truth concerning his apparently
godly and upright conduct -- that this is, in fact, the deep truth about the
godliness of all righteous people. If he is right, if the godliness of the
righteous in whom God delights can be shown to be evil, then a chasm of
alienation stands between God and human beings that cannot be bridged. Then
even the redemption of human beings is unthinkable, for the godliest among them
would be shown to be the most ungodly. God's whole enterprise in creation and
redemption would be shown to be radically flawed, and God can only sweep it all
away in awful judgment.
The accusation, once raised, cannot be ignored, and it cannot be
silenced -- not even by destroying the accuser; it strikes too deeply into the
very structure of creation and is rooted too deeply in the human condition
within that structure. So God lets the adversary have his way with Job (within
specified limits) so that God and righteous Job may be vindicated and the great
accuser silenced. From this comes Job's profound anguish, robbed as he is of
every sign of God's favor so that God becomes for him the great enigma. And his
righteousness is also assailed on earth through the logic of the orthodox
theology of his friends. Alone he agonizes. But he knows in the depths of his
heart that his godliness has been authentic and that someday he will be
vindicated (see 13:18; 14:13-17; 16:19;
19:25-27). And in spite of all, though he may
curse the day of his birth (ch. 3)
and chide God for treating him unjustly (9:28-35) -- the uncalculated outcry of a
distraught spirit -- he will not curse God (as his wife, the human nearest his
heart, proposed; see 2:9). In fact, what pains him most is God's
apparent alienation from him.
So the adversary is silenced, and God's delight in the godly is
vindicated. Robbed of every sign of God's favor, Job refuses to repudiate his
Maker. He faces toward God with anguish, puzzlement, anger and bitter
complaints, but never turns his back on him to march off -- godless -- into the
dark night. His whole being yearns, not for God's gifts as such, but for a sign
of God's favor (cf. Ps 42). Godly Job, dependent creature that he
is, passes the supreme test occasioned by his creaturely condition and the
adversary's accusation.
This first test of Job's godliness inescapably involves a second
that challenges his godliness at a level no less deep than the first. For the
test that sprang from Satan's accusation to be real, Job has to be kept in the
dark about the goings-on in God's council chamber. But Job belongs to a race of
creatures endowed with wisdom, understanding and insight (something of their
godlikeness) that cannot rest until it knows and understands all it can about
the creation and the ways of God. For that reason, Job's sudden loss of all
that makes life good -- every good gift from God -- cries out for explanation
and puts human wisdom to a supreme test. Job's friends confidently assume that
the logic of their theology can account for all God's ways. However, Job's
experience makes bitterly clear to him that their "wisdom" cannot
fathom the truth of his situation. Yet Job's wisdom is also at a loss to
understand. Still, he demands of God an explanation; he wants to reason matters
out with God as his equal. When the dialogue between Job and his three wise
friends finally stalemates, and before Job's last defense (chs. 29
- 31),
the vain attempt of a brash younger voice to explain Job's plight, and Yahweh's
own breaking-in on the scene, the author introduces a poetic essay on wisdom
(ch. 28) that exposes the limits of all human wisdom.
The wisdom God has given human beings can indeed understand creaturely things,
but from these creaturely things humans cannot learn all of God's ways. For
them the supreme wisdom is to "fear�the Lord�and to shun evil" (see v. 28) -- the
very wisdom that had marked Job's life all the while (see 1:8).
Standing as it does at a major juncture between the dialogue and the final
major speeches, this authorial commentary on what has been going on in the
stalemated dialogue anticipates God's final word to Job, which silences his
arguments and defenses. In the end Job passes the second supreme test of his
godliness -- of all true godliness -- namely, to live by the wisdom God gave
him (28:28) even while acknowledging the limits of
human wisdom. But that insight and Job's acceptance of it came only after the
long night of suffering and a new hearing of the voice of the Creator speaking
from behind the glory curtain of the creation.
In the end the adversary is silenced. Job's friends are silenced.
Job is silenced. But God is not. And when he speaks, it is to the godly Job
that he speaks, bringing the silence of regret for hasty words in days of
suffering and the silence of repose in the ways of the Almighty (see 38:1
-- 42:6). Furthermore, as his heavenly friend, God
hears Job's intercessions for his associates (42:8-10), and he restores Job's blessed state (42:10-17).
In summary, the author's pastoral word to godly sufferers is that
God treasures their righteousness above all else. And Satan knows that if he is
to thwart the all-encompassing purpose of God, he must assail the godly
righteousness of human beings (see 1:21-22; 2:9-10; 23:8,10; cf. Ge 15:6). At stake in the suffering of the truly godly is the
outcome of the titanic struggle between the great adversary and God. At the
same time the author gently reminds the godly sufferer that true godly wisdom
is to reverently love God more than all his gifts and to trust the wise
goodness of God even though his ways are at times past the power of human
wisdom to fathom. So here is presented a profound, but painfully practical,
drama that wrestles with the wisdom and justice of the Great King's rule.
Righteous sufferers must trust in, acknowledge, serve and submit to the
omniscient and omnipotent Sovereign, realizing that some suffering is the
result of unseen, spiritual conflicts between the kindgom of God and the
kingdom of Satan -- between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness
(cf. Eph 6:10-18).
Like some other ancient compositions, the book of Job has a
sandwich literary structure: prologue (prose), main body (poetry), and epilogue
(prose), revealing a creative composition, not an arbitrary compilation. Some
of Job's words are lament (cf. ch. 3
and many shorter poems in his speeches), but the form of lament is unique to
Job and often unlike the regular format of most lament psalms (except Ps
88). Much of the book takes the form of legal disputation. Although
the friends come to console him, they end up arguing over the reason for Job's
suffering. The argument breaks down in ch. 27,
and Job then proceeds to make his final appeal to God for vindication (chs. 29
- 31).
The wisdom poem in ch. 28 appears to be the words of the author, who
sees the failure of the dispute as evidence of a lack of wisdom. So in praise
of true wisdom he centers his structural apex between the three cycles of
dialogue-dispute (chs. 3 - 27)
and the three monologues: Job's (chs. 29
- 31),
Elihu's (chs. 32 - 37)
and God's (38:1 -- 42:6).
Job's monologue turns directly to God for a legal decision: that he is innocent
of the charges his counselors have leveled against him. Elihu's monologue --
another human perspective on why people suffer -- rebukes Job but moves beyond
the punishment theme to the value of divine chastening and God's redemptive
purpose in it. God's monologue gives the divine perspective: Job is not
condemned, but neither is a logical or legal answer given to why Job has
suffered. That remains a mystery to Job, though the readers are ready for Job's
restoration in the epilogue because they have had the heavenly vantage point of
the prologue all along. So the literary structure and the theological
significance of the book are beautifully tied together.
A.
Job's Happiness (1:1-5)
II. Dialogue-Dispute
(chs. 3-27)
III.
Interlude on Wisdom (ch.
28)
V.
Epilogue (42:7-17)
──《New
International Version》
Introduction to Job
This book is so called from Job, whose
prosperity, afflictions, and restoration, are here recorded. He lived soon
after Abraham, or perhaps before that patriarch. Most likely it was written by
Job himself, and it is the most ancient book in existence. The instructions to
be learned from the patience of Job, and from his trials, are as useful now,
and as much needed as ever. We live under the same Providence, we have the same
chastening Father, and there is the same need for correction unto
righteousness. The fortitude and patience of Job, though not small, gave way in
his severe troubles; but his faith was fixed upon the coming of his Redeemer,
and this gave him stedfastness and constancy, though every other dependence,
particularly the pride and boast of a self-righteous spirit, was tried and
consumed. Another great doctrine of the faith, particularly set forth in the
book of Job, is that of Providence. It is plain, from this history, that the
Lord watched over his servant Job with the affection of a wise and loving
father.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Job》
Job General Review INTRODUCTION
The Book of Job has long been praised as a masterpiece of literature.Consider these quotes: "Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left tome to retain one work only, I should save Job." (Victor Hugo)
"...the greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature." (Tennyson) "The Book of Job taken as a mere work of literary genius, is one ofthe most wonderful productions of any age or of any language."
(Daniel Webster) What is it about the book that prompts such praise? Most Christians Iknow don't feel that way about the Book of Job. Perhaps it is becausemany tend to neglect the Old Testament altogether. Yet Paul wrote ofthe value of the Old Testament scriptures: For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. (Ro 15:4)
Note that the Old Testament was written for our learning, that it provides patience and comfort, and as such can be a source of hope. This is especially true with the story of Job, to whom James referred when seeking to instill patience (cf. Ja 5:10-11). Because the Book ofJob is so often neglected, yet presents a valuable lesson and is sohighly praised by even people of the world, Christians should certainlytake the time to study this portion of God's Word! THE PLACE OF JOB IN THE OLD TESTAMENT: Job is the first of five books
commonly referred to as "The Books Of Poetry". These include Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. Called suchbecause they are written in poetic style in contrast to the narrativestyle of most other books, they are also often referred to as "WisdomLiterature" (especially Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). Oswald
Chambers (1874-1917) offered this concise summary of the five books: * Job - How to suffer * Psalms - How to pray * Proverbs - How to act * Ecclesiastes - How to enjoy * Song of Solomon - How to love Now let's take a look at the Book of Job in particular... AUTHOR AND DATE OF WRITING: Who wrote the book, and when? No one
really knows. Jewish tradition attributes the book to Moses, and otherauthors have been suggested (Job, Elihu, Solomon, Isaiah, Hezekiah, andBaruch, Jeremiah's scribe). "All that can be said with certainty isthat the author was a loyal Hebrew who was not strictly bound by thepopular creed that assumed suffering was always the direct result ofsin" (Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown). Because the author is unknown,
it's date has been hotly debated among scholars. Some think it was written before Moses (pre 1500 B.C.). Others put it at the time of Solomon (ca. 900 B.C.), and some even as late as the Babylonian Exileor later (post 600 B.C.). The uncertainty of author and date does not nullify the book's inspiration, for it is affirmed in the New Testament. Paul quotes fromit on several occasions in his writings (cf. 1 Co 3:19 with Job 5:13;and Ro 11:35 with Job 4:11). For the Christian who accepts the inspiration of the New Testament, such evidence is sufficient. THE HISTORICITY OF THE BOOK: Even though inspired, are we to take the
events described in it as historically true? There are several reasonsfor believing that they are: * The style of the opening and close of the book certainly conform to other Biblical narratives that are historical (cf. 1:1 with 1 Sam 1:1 and Lk 1:5). * In Ezekiel 14:14, Job is mentioned along with Noah and Daniel, two other figures of history. * James, the Lord's brother, refers to Job as an example of perseverance (Ja 5:11). THE SETTING OF THE BOOK: The historical events appear to be set in
the "Patriarchal" period (i.e., sometime between Noah and Moses). Thereare no allusions to the Law of Moses in the book, but there is amention of a flood (22:16). Job functions as a priest in offering sacrifices for his family (1:5), similar to what we find with Abraham(cf. Gen 12:7). His longevity is typical of the patriarchs (42:16; cf. Gen 11:22-26,32). For such reasons I would place him somewhatcontemporary with Abraham (i.e., ca 2000 B.C.). THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK: It is common to suggest that the purpose of
the book is to answer the age-old question, "Why does God allow therighteous to suffer?" That is certainly the question Job raises, butit is worthy to note that he himself never receives a direct answer.Nor is one given by the author, other than to answer Satan's challenge,"Does Job fear God for nothing?". We are privileged to know of thechallenge of Satan, and that God allows Job to suffer in answer to thatchallenge, but Job is never told of this. Therefore, I suggest that the purpose of the book is: To answer the question, "How should the righteous suffer?" While Job's questions and complaints often come close to charging Godwith wrong, he never crosses the line and humbly submits to God when told that the answers to his questions are beyond his ability to understand. Thus the book shows us how the righteous should bear up under suffering ("You have heard of the perseverance of Job" - Ja 5:11)
SOME LESSONS FROM THE BOOK: In his study on the book (The Book Of
Job, Quality Pub.), Wayne Jackson offers the following lessons to be gleaned: * The book defends the absolute glory and perfection of God - It sets forth the theme echoed in Ps 18:3 ("I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised"). God is deserving of our praise simply on the basis of who He is, apart from the blessings He bestows. Satan denied this (1:9-11), but Job proved him wrong (1:20-22; 2:10). * The question of suffering is addressed - Why do we suffer? Who or what causes it? Why doesn't God do something? Not all questions are answered, but some important points are made: - Man is unable to subject the painful experiences of human existence to a meaningful analysis - God's workings are beyond man's ability to fathom. Man simply cannot tie all the "loose ends" of the Lord's purposes together. We must learn to trust in God, no matter the circumstances. - Suffering is not always the result of personal sin - The erroneous conclusion drawn by Job's friends is that suffering is always a consequence of sin. Job proves this is not the case. - Suffering may be allowed as a compliment to one's spirituality - God allowed Job to suffer to prove to Satan what kind of man he really was. What confidence God had in Job! * The book paints a beautiful picture of "patience" - The Greek word is "hupomone", which describes the trait of one who is able to abide under the weight of trials. From the "patience of Job", we learn that it means to maintain fidelity to God, even under great trials in which we do not understand what is happening. * The book also prepares the way for the coming of Jesus Christ! - His coming is anticipated in several ways. Job longs for a mediator between him and God (9:33; 33:23), and Jesus is one (1 Ti 2:5). Job confessed his faith in a Redeemer who would one day come (19:25); Christ is that Redeemer (Ep 1:7)! BRIEF OUTLINE (adapted from Warren Wiersbe)
I. JOB'S DISTRESS (1-3)
A. HIS PROSPERITY (1:1-5) B. HIS ADVERSITY (1:6-2:13) C. HIS PERPLEXITY (3) II. JOB'S DEFENSE (4-37)
A. THE FIRST ROUND (4-14) 1. Eliphaz (4-5)_Job's reply (6-7) 2. Bildad (8)_Job's reply (9-10) 3. Zophar (11)_Job's reply (12-14) B. THE SECOND ROUND (15-21) 1. Eliphaz (15)_Job's reply (16-17) 2. Bildad (18)_Job's reply (19) 3. Zophar (20)_Job's reply (21) C. THE THIRD ROUND (22-37) 1. Eliphaz (22)_Job's reply (23-24) 2. Bildad (25)_Job's reply (26-31) D. YOUNG ELIHU SPEAKS (32-37) 1. Contradicting Job's friends (32) 2. Contradicting Job himself (33) 3. Proclaiming God's justice, goodness, and majesty (34-37) III. JOB'S DELIVERANCE (38-42)
A. GOD HUMBLES JOB (38:1-42:6) 1. Through questions too great to answer (38:1-41:34) 2. Job acknowledges his inability to understand (42:1-6) B. GOD HONORS JOB (42:7-17) 1. God rebukes his critics (42:7-10) 2. God restores his wealth (42:11-17) REVIEW QUESTIONS FOR THE INTRODUCTION
1) What are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, often called?
- Books of Poetry - Wisdom Literature 2) Who wrote the book, and when?
- We do not know 3) What evidence is there that this book describes an event that actually occurred?
- It both starts and ends like other books of history in the Old Testament - Job is included with Noah and Daniel, as figures of history, in Ezek 14:14 - James refers to the example of Job in teaching on perseverance (Ja 5:11) 4) In what historical time frame is the story of Job possibly set?
- During the period of the patriarchs, perhaps contemporary with Abraham 5) What is the purpose of this book, as suggested in the introduction?
- To answer the question, "How should the righteous suffer?" 6) According to the outline suggested above, what are the three maindivisions of the book?
- Job's Distress (1-3) - Job's Defense (4-37) - Job's Deliverance (38-42)
－－《Executable Outlines》
00 Overview
JOB
INTRODUCTION
Interpretation of the Book of Job
We purpose to give a concise view of our reasons for maintaining--
I. The existence
and reality of Job.
II. The patriarchal
antiquity, origin, and authorship of the Book.
III. Its references
to a future state and the way of salvation; and
IV. Its Divine
inspiration and canonical authority.
1. That Job is not a poetical or imaginary, but an historic
character, appears from the mention of him in connection with Noah and Daniel,
in Ezekiel 14:14; Ezekiel 14:20; and the allusion of St. James,
James 5:10-11. Here we think it may be
inferred that Job was among, “the prophets who have spoken in the name of the
Lord,” and who, he says, “were to be taken for an example of suffering and
patience”; for he immediately adds, “Behold we count them happy who endure”
(itself a reference to Job 5:17). “Ye have heard of the patience
of Job, etc., and seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful and
of tender mercy.” It has been suggested that this quotation does not refer to
Job’s faith, but his patience. But surely faith is the foundation of patience;
and the Divine writer would not have cited him, even as an instance of
suffering, if he had not been a real character. We find no such
personifications of our Lord’s parables in the Epistles. It has also been
objected that Job is not among the instances of faith in the eleventh chapter
of Hebrews. But this was probably because the apostle was addressing arguments
derived from the law and the writings of the Hebrews; and an objector might
have refused to bow to Job who would yield to Moses and Samuel. But even if it
were otherwise, he shares the omission together with Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther,
and Ruth, whose books are placed by the Jews, with Job and Daniel, among the
Hagiographae, not with the prophets. Very little, indeed, can be argued from
omission, as Paley has shown, with reference to historical facts. The
particularity of names and circumstances, the very dramatis personae, are
before our eyes in all the individuality of real characters. “There was a man
in the land of Uz, whose name was Job,” is not less definite or historical in
style than, “Now it came to pass in the days when the Judges ruled, that there
was a famine in the land; and a certain man of Bethlehem Judah,” etc., with
which the Book of Ruth opens.
2. With reference to the patriarchal antiquity of the times and
history of Job, we remark, that the Book contains no allusion to any of the
historical facts or even ceremonies of the Israelites, or to any events later
than their sojourn in Egypt; even if some reference to the deluge, or the fate
of Sodom and Gomorrah, may be traced. The language also of the body of the work
(chaps. 3 to 12) is indeed as distinct from the introductory and concluding
chapters as the style of AEschylus from that of Xenophon, or Milton from
Goldsmith. It is poetical and archaic; that is, not only elevated in style, but
also has many ancient forms of expression, brief and obscure; words of Chaldaic
or Aramaean origin, such as we meet with in those parts of the Book of Genesis
which refer to the affairs of Jacob and Laban in Padan Aram, and some whereof
the roots are only to be found in Arabic. There is no reference to an
established priesthood, or to the worship of images; but to that most ancient
form of idolatry, the worship of the sun, moon, and stars; much less to any of
the peculiar ordinances of the Jewish ritual. The frequent use of the name of
God in the singular (Eloah), and of El-Shaddai, the Almighty, are marks of a
primitive age; while the sacred name of Jehovah is only once used except in the
prologue and epilogue. But here it corresponds with the language used, which is
pure Hebrew. Hence the conjecture of Kennicott, Michaelis, and Lee (adopted
also by Mr. Titcomb) is, that Moses, finding the poem among the Midianites,
when he was with his father-in-law Jethro, committed it to writing, with an
introduction and conclusion, for the comfort of the Israelites, Job himself
being the original author; whether or not it was committed to writing, or
existed only in floating recitations, like the songs of the Celtic nations, or
perhaps only in fragments, as the poems of Homer before the time of
Pisistratus, almost every subsequent writer of the Old Testament will be found
to have borrowed from the Book of Job. Job is said to have lived in the land of
Uz; and from this it has been concluded that he was a descendant, either of Uz,
the son of Aram, or of Huz, the son of Nahor (if they were not the same person,
spoken of by anticipation, as the names are the same in Hebrew). There was a
place in Idumea named Uz, as appears from Jeremiah (Jeremiah 23:20; Lamentations 4:23). The greater number of
writers, ancient and modern, incline to the land of Edom as the dwelling place
of the illustrious patriarch, “the greatest of the sons of the East,” who
stands forth amidst a system of theology which has nothing in common with any
of the relics of subsequent times among the nations surrounding Judea. Of
contemporary times there are no other relics. Arabia itself has no literature
earlier than the Koran of Mohammed; but the doctrine of Job is perfectly
accordant with the glimpses which we gather from the writings of Moses of the
state of those nations in patriarchal times, when an Abimilech in Syria, a
Pharaoh in Egypt, a Jethro in Midian, a Johab (who by many, including the
Septuagint writers, is supposed to be the same with Job), and even Balaam, in
the mountains of the East, had some reverence for true religion--“the fear of
the Lord.” Even the subsequent corruptions and idolatrous rites point to a
primitive state of things such as we find in the Book of Job; when the nomadic
tribes went everywhere “lifting up holy hands” to God; looking for some great
deliverer--an avenger--to overcome the power of the serpent; practising burnt
sacrifices, and worshipping the Supreme on hills and in groves; cherishing the
tradition of an invisible world of spirits, and a future eternal judgment.
3. We do not wonder, therefore, at the indications of an eternal
world, or the way of salvation--the Christology--which the Church of the Jews,
as well as of the Christians, have found in this sublime Book. Were there, in
fact, no traces of these primitive truths, we should have found a system of
mere Theism existing amidst a world possessed with supernatural convictions;
and this is just that conclusion to which the school of modern infidelity would
fain conduct us, and reduce this Book to its own negation of revealed truth.
For the glorious hope of a final reward, which made Job so confident, they
would “fill themselves with the east wind” of a stoical endurance of evil for
virtue’s sake; or a mystic love of God, without reference to any past or future
experience of His loving kindness--a system at once at variance with what we
know practically and experimentally of ourselves, as agents influenced by hope
and fear, and opposed to all the discoveries of His dealings with us.
God has never required us to love Him merely from an adoration of His abstract
excellencies, independent of all experience of His mercy. When we find the
woman praised who gave much because “she loved much,” and set forth as an
example of a true motive of action, we perceive only a reflexive exercise of
the same principle,--a grateful sense of favours already received,--she had
been forgiven much. Those writers, therefore, who deny to Job, under his
troubles, the hope of a restitution in the eternal world (he certainly expected
none in this life), and would set him forth as an instance of that love which
disregards alike reward and punishment, describe a creature as fabulous as the
centaur or the griffin, the offspring of their own vain imagination, wedded to
an ignorance of human nature, or a hatred of evangelical truth. But can it be
shown that either prophets or apostles, martyrs or warriors, had no “regard to
the recompense of the reward”? Such, indeed, we are told, was a motive not
unworthy of our Saviour’s own consideration, whom even these moralists would
exalt at least as our example--“for the joy that was set before Him, He endured
the Cross, despising the shame.” To have found, therefore, in Job a patient
sufferer, without a hope of deliverance or reward, in time or eternity, would
have been a greater contradiction of experience than any of the miracles of the
New Testament, and would have required a stronger force of evidence to support
its existence. A priori, therefore, in any record, or even parabolic
narrative, which affected to describe man as he is, much more in one which did
contain such august truths relative to God, angels, true wisdom, human
corruption, the fear of the Lord, the Jehovah of the patriarchs, propitiated by
sacrifice, and interfering in human affairs, we should be warranted in
expressing surprise did we not learn “that there is a judgment”; that the
universally looked for Avenger or Redeemer were introduced; and that, while
“the hope of the hypocrite was as the spider’s web,” he who relied on the Lord,
and who, even in death, would not let go his integrity, should find spiritual
deliverance, filling his heart with hope, and his lips with praise. An attempt
is made to get rid of the testimony of Elihu, by asserting that “it is now
decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be genuine.” This decision we
deny, both as to its critical truth and intrinsic justice. What manuscript or
version wants this integral part of the Book? Does Kennicott or De Rossi
intimate any such deficiency? Lightfoot, indeed, and Rosenmuller, attribute the
Book itself to Elihu. And though it stands apart from the other interlocutions,
it is introductory in its arguments to the grand conclusion; when not only the
three mistaken friends are reproved, but both Job and Elihu silenced by the
awful voice of God repeating and expanding, in magnificent language, the
Abrahamic sentence, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” With
reference to the principal passage, “The Testament of Job” (Job 19:23-29), little that is new can be
brought forward either for or against the received interpretation; the
difficulties of which occurred to Grotius and Warburton, and have only been
repeated by modern sceptics. There stands the oracle--“I know that my Redeemer
liveth”--introduced by the most solemn announcement of an all-important truth,
worthy of perpetual and durable record. On the translation of the introductory
sentences there seems to be no substantial difference of opinion--
“Would
that, now, my words were recorded;
Would
that in a book they were engraven;
With
an iron style and lead;
Forever
on the rock, that they were hewn!”
Now, would such an exordium be fitting for any general assurance
of a return of prosperity, which Job nowhere intimates; or of an exhibition of
his righteousness in this life? Would such a hope be worthy of such a
magniloquent expression? On the other hand, if the prophet were suddenly
possessed with a Divine confidence in that hope of future things, which is not
built “on transitory promises,” what more sublime or suitable introduction? And
we know that the rocks of the Arabian desert are full of such inscriptions! We
have similar asseverations or demands for attention, in Scripture, when
important enunciations are about to follow. “Verily, verily I say unto you”;
“This is a faithful saying”; “The voice said, Cry”; “I heard a voice from
heaven, saying, Write.” All these precede important announcements. The exact
meaning of the prophecy itself has found a variety of interpreters; but there
can be no doubt that the words are very emphatic, brief, and pregnant.
“I
assuredly know that my Deliverer liveth,
And
hereafter, upon the dust shall He arise;
And
(though) after my skin, they pierce this (body),
Yet
from my flesh shall I see God.
Which
I, and not another, shall see for me,
And
mine eyes shall have beheld;
My
reins have been consumed within me,
For
ye shall say, ‘Why have they persecuted him.’
And
the root of the matter shall have been found in me.
Withdraw
ye from the presence of the sword,
For
the anger which is due to transgression, is the sword;
Know
ye, therefore, that there is a judgment.”
But this famous text is far from the only one in the Book which is
an evidence of the faith of Job. What can be clearer, on the hypothesis of a
future state, than Job 13:15 : “Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him,” reading as in the text (Kethib), or, “Though He slay me, shall
I not hope?” as in the margin (Keri). The sense is the same, as Calvin
remarked, and the whole context agrees: “How could I risk my life, and rush
into His presence, if I were not innocent? Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him. I am prepared to argue my ways in His presence; and even this trial
shall turn to my salvation (although) no hypocrite can come before Him.” Here
he maintains his appeal to the Searcher of hearts, the final and eternal Judge;
even beyond the bounds of time and sense. And this is also agreeable with other
passages, in which he declares (Job 16:19) that “his Witness is in
heaven, his record is on high.” While assured of his ultimate deliverance from
the grave, he exclaims (Job 14:13-15), “Oh, that Thou wouldest
hide me in the grave, that Thou wouldest keep me secret, until Thy wrath be
past, that Thou wouldest appoint me a time, and remember me!” “If a man die,
shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait until my
change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer. Thou wilt have a desire to the
work of Thine hands.’“ Here he will, as a soldier at his post, await the
release of his spirit, by the arrival of the relief guard. He feels assured
that God will not forget him, even in the dust; but will, in His own time, have
a longing, as it were, a parental “desire to the work of His hands.” Many other
expressions, indeed Job’s general confidence in his integrity, his readiness of
appeal to the Supreme Tribunal on all occasions, in reply to the mistaken
judgments of his friends, can only be reconciled by an inward consciousness of
a future, infallible decision. The speech of Elihu next demands attention. It
has been assailed as “not genuine,” upon mere supposition that it is “the work
of a different hand,” which even if maintained would not amount to a diversity
greater than that existing between the historical and poetical portions. But
the argument of Elihu, though not void of infirmity, is certainly in advance of
the previous speakers, and prepares the mind of the reader, as it may have done
that of Job, for the voice of the Almighty, silencing rather than convincing
the gainsayers. Elihu intimates that he is animated with a desire to direct Job
to the true source of comfort: that he should humble himself, and not justify
himself before God; that he speaks (Job 33:22-25), as none of the others had
done, of the Messenger, or Interpreter, one of a thousand, to show man the
Divine righteousness; of the ransom provided, and of the return of the sinner
to the moral condition of a little child. That there should be some glimpses of
the Gospel in patriarchal times is demanded by what we know from other sources,
Jewish and Gentile, as well as the general economy of God, who left Himself not
without a witness, either to His own being and attributes, or the remedy that
He had provided for the sin of man,--the Great Deliverer or Avenger, on the
head of the serpent, of the ruin of the primitive race; that Daystar whom
Balaam, probably a countryman and descendant of Job, should “see, but not know;
should behold, but not nigh”; and who, thus seen dimly by the blessed chain of
ancient witnesses, stood out at last plainly revealed in the One Victorious
Mediator and future Eternal Judge.
4. If we have at all established these Divine references we have gone
far towards maintaining, from internal evidence, the inspiration of the Book of
Job. And we are not without other Scriptural proof. The apostle Paul, referring
to Job 5:13, says, “It is written, He taketh
the wise in their own craftiness.” And again (referring to Psalms 92:11), “The Lord knoweth the
thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.” Making no difference between the
authority of one and the other. This kind of quotation confers equal weight, as
part of the sacred canon, on the Book of Job, with that ascribed to the Book of
Psalms. The same expression, “It is written,” occurring frequently; but only
where the words cited are those of Divine inspiration, as in the account of the
temptation of our Lord. Unacknowledged quotations may be found in the Psalms,
Proverbs, and most of the Prophets; seeming to show that although the history
of Job formed no part of the national records of Israel, nor indeed of the
history of the line of the promised seed, or of the people of God, as marked
out by any special designation; yet that it formed the subject of thought and
study to the devout and inspired among the Jews, while it was a mirror of the
best days of Gentile religion among those who maintained the institutions of
Noah. Its views of the invisible world, and the humbling discipline of God; the
necessity of true repentance, and the duty of propitiatory sacrifices; “the end
of the Lord,” and the blessedness of His service, pure from the idolatrous
leaven of the Canaanitish nations, point to a Divine hand, guiding the poet and
the historian to the record of true facts and the utterance of true doctrine.
And this appears, not only in the calm language of the early chapters, but even
in his own distracted effusions, under the pressure of extreme calamity, and
when irritated by the injudicious treatment of his friends. To have gone so
far, and then stopped short, is one of the proofs, as well of the genuineness
as of the inspiration of the Book. It conducts us back to the manners of the
patriarchal age, and the morals prevalent among the people of God, who were
even then “scattered abroad,” inheriting the blessing of Shem, Melchisedeck,
Abraham, Ishmael, and Edom, though not the specialities of the covenant sealed
to Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. Tribes sustained, under the pressure of Satan’s
temptations, by the hope of a Deliverer, and testifying, wherever they went,
that they were pilgrims, having an eternal home beyond the shadowy region of
the grave. In this faith they lived; in this faith they died Each could say
with dying Jacob, “I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord!” Like him, they
gathered around them their houses, and, with “holy Job,” sanctified them by
prayer and sacrifice, while they delivered to them their testimony, to be
treasured up for unborn generations; and their wish has been granted: their
“words are written, as with an iron pen and lead upon the rocks forever,” in
wisdom that is older than the pyramids, and which shall survive unwasted when
they have mouldered in the dust. (Christian Observer.)
The Date and Origin of the Book of Job
Nothing can be safely inferred from the Aramaean words which are
frequently employed in it; and that, not simply because the Aramaisms occur
chiefly in the speech of Elihu, and are appropriate in his mouth, since he
himself was an Aramaean; nor simply because all Hebrew poetry, of whatever age,
is more or less Aramaic; but also and mainly because the presence of Aramaean
words in any Scripture may indicate either its extreme antiquity or its
comparatively modern date. For these Aramaisms--as “Rabbi” Duncan tersely puts
the 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, therefore, which
is based on the use of these words cuts both ways. 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. There is in it a noble universality, “as if it were not
Hebrew.” It does not contain a single allusion to the Mosaic laws and 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. But to this there is 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. “Job” belongs to the Chokmah both in spirit and in form.
(Samuel Cox, D. D.)
Arguments against the earlier Date of the Book of Job
It is not merely that the language in which the Book is written is
not, we are assured, that of the oldest extant form of Hebrew, but, at the very
earliest, that not of the morning, but of the high noon, of Jewish literature.
It is not merely that the author, when speaking in his own person, speaks
invariably of God by the name in which He was revealed to Moses as the covenant
God of the people of Israel; nor merely that he seems to have been familiar, if
not with many other portions of the Old Testament, certainly with at least one
Psalm; or that expressions occur, such as Ophir, as the recognised name for
gold, which would have been inconceivable before, at the very earliest, the
reign of Solomon. It is more than this. The very problem which the Book
discusses, the riddle which vexes the soul of Job, is not one which springs into
full life, or would form the subject of a long and studied and intensely argued
and elaborate discussion, in any early or simple stage of a nation’s progress.
The work is clearly by a Hebrew. It bears no signs of being a translation. The
stamp of originality is on every page. When, or where, could a Hebrew have
found a place for such a work in the infancy of his nation? The struggle
between a traditional creed which told him that all suffering was a penalty for
actual sin, all prosperity a reward for goodness, and the spectacle of
undeserved suffering as seen in the world of a more complex experience--the
question of the inherent value and sacredness of goodness in itself, as apart
from the outward or inward happiness which it brings,--the very character of
the awful Ruler of the universe, His justice and His goodness, as distinct from
His sovereignty and goodness--these are scarcely problems which would force
themselves, like armed intruders, on the human soul in the simpler and earlier
stages of social or national progress. We smile as we read the assertions of
doctor after doctor of the Jewish or Christian Church, that the awful
questionings, which you and I have faced and shall face in the words of the
tortured Job, were read to comfort oppressed and ignorant bondsmen in the slave
gangs of Egypt; or to cheer the “stiff-necked” tribes of half-civilised
wanderers in the forty years of their desert life. How little can those who
tell us so have faced the full meaning of the largest and the central portion of
the Book. The elements, doubtless, of such perplexities may have existed from
the day when the blood of some unavenged successor of righteous Abel cried in
vain for retribution. But we can hardly imagine that their full and elaborate
discussion would have found voice, or echo, or hearing, still less enshrined
itself in a nation’s literature, till a sadder and more perplexing experience
had opened men’s eyes to darker and more tangled thoughts than come to the
childhood of nations. God’s Spirit does not transport men out of their own
epoch. Great men may mould their age, may see further than their
contemporaries, but they are moulded also by, are the children of, their age.
Great and lofty as are the utterances, they would have been born out of due
time, till the problems with which they deal had been brought home to the
hearts of thinkers by familiarity with much unexplained and inexplicable
suffering, by long and painful musing over the mysteries and riddles of human
life. (Dean Bradley.)
The Book of Job a Poem
The Book of Job is, in its main portion, a poem, not a narrative
or history. It is as truly and certainly a poem as the Paradise Lost or
the Iliad are poems of England or of Greece. To what class of poems does
it belong? It is not, like the Book of Psalms, a series of detached hymns,
embodying the very highest meditative outpourings, glad or sorrowful, of the
human heart, national or individual, to its God. Nor do we find in its pages
the common sense of the many, framed in verse by the wisdom of one or more, as
in so large a portion of the Book of Proverbs. It is as different as possible
from the poetry, idyllic or mystic, of the Song of Solomon; or from the
meditations on life, placed on the borderland of prose and poetry, in the Book
of Ecclesiastes. It resembles Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as dealing with the
practical and the speculative interests of human life. But it differs, in other
respects, fundamentally from both. First, it gathers all its teaching round a
single personage, the hero of the poem, who from the beginning to the end forms
the one centre of interest. And secondly, whatever problems it raises, or
whatever lessons it teaches, comes to us, when once we have read the first line
of the actual poem, through the lips, never of the author himself, but of the
speakers, human or Divine or other, whom he places on the stage. Hence men have
called it an epic poem, or a drama. Like epic poems, it has a hero, a struggle,
and a conquest. It is so far a drama, that it consists almost entirely of dialogue,
and that the author will speak to us only to introduce the different speakers
to whose words we shall listen. Yet we cannot without reserve call that a drama
in which there is no change of scene, no movement, no event, no action. It has
been called also a parable, and there is a sense, no doubt, in which the word,
however vaguely and loosely used, may well be applied to it. I make no attempt
to bring the book, the poem, under any special class or denomination. It stands
alone in the Bible, alone in the literature of the world, as the very flower of
inspired Hebrew poetry; and as such let us accept it, seeking for its true
teaching and its true import in its contents, and in these only. (Dean
Bradley.)
The Problem of the Book of Job
The problem of the Book is not one but many. No doubt the poet
intended to vindicate the ways of God to 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 providence of God, the burden of this unintelligible world, was
obviously making itself profoundly felt. Unquestionably the Book of Job does
show, in the most tragic and pathetic way, that good no less than wicked men
lie open to the most cruel losses and sorrows; that these losses and sorrows
are not always signs of the Divine anger against sin; “that they are intended
to correct and perfect the righteousness of the righteous,--or, in our Lord’s
figure, that they are designed to purge the trees which already hear 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? A door
is opened into heaven. The King sits on His throne; His ministers gather round
Him, and sit in session; among them appears a spirit, here simply named the
“Adversary” or “Accuser,” whose function is to scrutinise 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 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 beforehand his conviction that it will be found
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 except 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 challenge, 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. On the one
hand, the poem 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, to relieve the mystery of human life by showing 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. (Samuel Cox, D. D.)
The Book of Job
It seems to me that the highest critical authorities must be right
in thinking that the drama of Job is nearly the latest, as well as the only
formally artistic product of the poetic genius of the Jews. This, at least, is
in intention, as well as in fact, a literary effort--an attempt to present, and
perhaps more or less to solve, in a dramatic form, some of the highest problems
of man’s spiritual life. It is the only important Book in the Old Testament
which is not closely interwoven with the real history and life of the
nation,--which stands apart as a conscious effort of imagination. No
doubt the Book of Job marks in many ways the culmination of the national
genius, and the transition from the exclusively Divine centre of the Hebrew
poetic thought to the wider range of insight into nature and man, from the
natural as well as the supernatural side, which was to succeed it. The very
treatment of a Divine theme under the human conditions of an imaginary drama
would alone appear to indicate this. The conflict with the narrowly Jewish
conceptions of Providence which it contains would also indicate it. The contemplative
delight which the wonders of nature and the mysteries of animal life arouse in
the writer’s mind, and the naturalistic minuteness with which they are painted,
as well as the delineations of the inward perplexities of the spiritual life,
all point to an origin in an age when that more genial appreciation of nature
and man which we perceive in the later prophecies bearing the name of Isaiah
had been carried even further. Moreover, as regards man himself, the whole
argument turns on the subtle distinction between that part of his nature which,
finite and short-sighted though he is, yet gives him a right to claim a real
affinity with God, and that part which, finite and limited as it is,
necessarily obscures his power of judgment. This is not a point which could
well have been discussed in an early period of the Jewish literature. There is
an evident effort throughout the drama to distinguish the “creature” in Job
from that “spirit” in him which gives him a right to plead with God. The drama
is usually understood as a mere exposure of the false view which makes calamity
a certain index of the wrath of God, and therefore of guilt. This, no doubt, it
is; but it is much more. It is a discussion of the mystery of God’s relation to
man, and to the lower universe. There is an effort, I believe, in the poem to
show that man is related to God in two ways,--as a spiritual being, and as a
creature. As a spiritual being, he may justify himself, and speak what God
Himself cannot override, and will certainly affirm; as a creature, he is in
complete ignorance of the lot it may be right for the Ruler of the universe to
assign him, since he only can judge who sees the universe as a whole, who moves
the very springs of its life. Man cannot and ought not to accuse Providence of injustice
in any external lot He may send, unless he could undertake to wield the whole
scheme of Providence in His place; then, and then only, might he “disannul”
God’s judgment, and condemn Him in order to “establish his own righteousness.”
The ignorant creature is wrong in criticising the acts of the Creator;
but the spirit of the man is right in asserting the absolute character
of his highest spiritual convictions against any array of external argument.
Job is sustained in his assertion that though his body should be destroyed, yet
a living Redeemer should vindicate his inward purity; he is sustained in
reiterating, “God forbid that I should justify you till I die; I will not
remove my integrity from me; my righteousness will I hold fast, and will not let
it go”; he is sustained in holding fast by the judgment of his spirit on his
own actions, for that is a judgment with full knowledge; but he is condemned
for judging God’s outward conduct to him by any standard whatever; since in
doing so he judges by “words without knowledge,” seeing that the knowledge
requisite for such judgment would be the omniscience of the Creator Himself.
The argument is illustrated with the fullest delineation of the mystery of
nature, the broadest contrast between the narrow circle of spiritual knowledge
and independence really reserved to man, and to man alone, and the utter
incompetence of man to wield a single attribute of Providence either over His
own world or that of the lower creation The Hebrew poet had already distinguished
between the direct knowledge of God’s Spirit, which spiritual communion gives,
and the indirect knowledge of His mysterious ways which can only be gained by a
study of those ways. It shows that he had mastered the conviction, that to
neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe leads to an arrogant
and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions into a different
world,--in a word, to the false inferences of Job’s friends as to his guilt,
and his own equally false inference as to the injustice of God. (Richard
Holt Hutton, M. A.)
The General Lessons of the Book
1. To command the virtue of patience.
2. To maintain the Providence of God.
3. To encourage the hopes of the believer. There shall be no mistake
at last: his person will be justified, his integrity manifested, and his
holiness perfected in the day or end of the Lord.
4. To promote humility. This was the peculiar lesson which Job had to
learn.
5. Love to God as a gracious Father. This is the character in which
He was not known to the heathen.
6. Charity to man. It teaches that the people of God are not to be
censorious and ready to judge one another, or interpret misfortunes as peculiar
proofs of His wrathful indignation towards those who, in their general walk and
conversation, bear the marks of His family. “Charity thinketh no evil.”
7. A lesson in knowledge. This is put last in order, because it is
probably rather incidental than primary. The great truths of Revelation, from
Genesis to the Apocalypse, are briefly disclosed, glancing out as if by
accident in this Divine Book. Greenfield says, “The Church of God has been
greatly enriched by having bequeathed to it the vast treasury of Divine truth
which is found in the Book of Job,--a Book containing the purest morality, the
sublimest philosophy, the simplest ritual, and the most majestic creed.” In the
spiritual Church, patience hath its perfect work; faith learns to walk as
seeing Him who is invisible; hope rests on Him as an anchor, sure and
steadfast, fast bound to the eternal shore, entering into that which is within
the vail; humility becomes conformed to Him; perfect love casteth out fear;
charity suffereth long, and is kind; and wisdom acquaints itself with God, and
is at peace. (Charles Augustus Hulbert, M. A.)
Three Friends and only one Job
The friends represent nothing but the early faith, as it has
already become a delusion and superstition. This faith is from its nature that
which more commonly prevails, which seeks to maintain itself with emphasis and
earnestness against every innovation and variation. With profound insight the
poet introduces several friends in contrast with the solitary Job. Unusual
calamities and unusual experiences are the lot of but a few; endurance under
unexpected trials, and steady resistance of current narrower views, founded
upon fresh and certain experience, is still more uncommon; but most uncommon of
all is the hero who successfully brings out triumphantly a new truth which is
still weak and little understood. Accordingly the poet must bring forward Job
alone, without human help or stay, as every great truth can at first by one man
only be felt and defended so keenly and powerfully that the one acts decisively
for all. Job must by himself wage the whole conflict, and refute the antiquated
views by means of his own personal experience, which is peculiar to himself in
this degree. On the opposite side stands the great multitude with its
prepossessions, consciously or unconsciously combating the man that revolts
against them. The poet accordingly causes the representative personality
hostile to Job to divide into a number of separate persons, bringing forward
three old sympathetic friends of Job, who, on visiting him and considering more
closely his misfortunes, soon become his opponents. (Heinrich August Von
Ewald.)
.
JOB
INTRODUCTION
Interpretation of the Book of Job
We purpose to give a concise view of our reasons for maintaining--
I. The existence
and reality of Job.
II. The patriarchal
antiquity, origin, and authorship of the Book.
III. Its references
to a future state and the way of salvation; and
IV. Its Divine
inspiration and canonical authority.
1. That Job is not a poetical or imaginary, but an historic
character, appears from the mention of him in connection with Noah and Daniel,
in Ezekiel 14:14; Ezekiel 14:20; and the allusion of St.
James, James 5:10-11. Here we think it may be
inferred that Job was among, “the prophets who have spoken in the name of the
Lord,” and who, he says, “were to be taken for an example of suffering and
patience”; for he immediately adds, “Behold we count them happy who endure”
(itself a reference to Job 5:17). “Ye have heard of the patience
of Job, etc., and seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very pitiful and of
tender mercy.” It has been suggested that this quotation does not refer to
Job’s faith, but his patience. But surely faith is the foundation of patience;
and the Divine writer would not have cited him, even as an instance of
suffering, if he had not been a real character. We find no such
personifications of our Lord’s parables in the Epistles. It has also been
objected that Job is not among the instances of faith in the eleventh chapter
of Hebrews. But this was probably because the apostle was addressing arguments
derived from the law and the writings of the Hebrews; and an objector might
have refused to bow to Job who would yield to Moses and Samuel. But even if it
were otherwise, he shares the omission together with Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther,
and Ruth, whose books are placed by the Jews, with Job and Daniel, among the
Hagiographae, not with the prophets. Very little, indeed, can be argued from
omission, as Paley has shown, with reference to historical facts. The
particularity of names and circumstances, the very dramatis personae, are
before our eyes in all the individuality of real characters. “There was a man
in the land of Uz, whose name was Job,” is not less definite or historical in
style than, “Now it came to pass in the days when the Judges ruled, that there
was a famine in the land; and a certain man of Bethlehem Judah,” etc., with
which the Book of Ruth opens.
2. With reference to the patriarchal antiquity of the times and
history of Job, we remark, that the Book contains no allusion to any of the historical
facts or even ceremonies of the Israelites, or to any events later than their
sojourn in Egypt; even if some reference to the deluge, or the fate of Sodom
and Gomorrah, may be traced. The language also of the body of the work (chaps.
3 to 12) is indeed as distinct from the introductory and concluding chapters as
the style of AEschylus from that of Xenophon, or Milton from Goldsmith. It is
poetical and archaic; that is, not only elevated in style, but also has many
ancient forms of expression, brief and obscure; words of Chaldaic or Aramaean
origin, such as we meet with in those parts of the Book of Genesis which refer
to the affairs of Jacob and Laban in Padan Aram, and some whereof the roots are
only to be found in Arabic. There is no reference to an established priesthood,
or to the worship of images; but to that most ancient form of idolatry, the
worship of the sun, moon, and stars; much less to any of the peculiar
ordinances of the Jewish ritual. The frequent use of the name of God in the
singular (Eloah), and of El-Shaddai, the Almighty, are marks of a primitive
age; while the sacred name of Jehovah is only once used except in the prologue
and epilogue. But here it corresponds with the language used, which is pure
Hebrew. Hence the conjecture of Kennicott, Michaelis, and Lee (adopted also by
Mr. Titcomb) is, that Moses, finding the poem among the Midianites, when he was
with his father-in-law Jethro, committed it to writing, with an introduction
and conclusion, for the comfort of the Israelites, Job himself being the
original author; whether or not it was committed to writing, or existed only in
floating recitations, like the songs of the Celtic nations, or perhaps only in
fragments, as the poems of Homer before the time of Pisistratus, almost every
subsequent writer of the Old Testament will be found to have borrowed from the
Book of Job. Job is said to have lived in the land of Uz; and from this it has
been concluded that he was a descendant, either of Uz, the son of Aram, or of
Huz, the son of Nahor (if they were not the same person, spoken of by
anticipation, as the names are the same in Hebrew). There was a place in Idumea
named Uz, as appears from Jeremiah (Jeremiah 23:20; Lamentations 4:23). The greater number of
writers, ancient and modern, incline to the land of Edom as the dwelling place
of the illustrious patriarch, “the greatest of the sons of the East,” who
stands forth amidst a system of theology which has nothing in common with any
of the relics of subsequent times among the nations surrounding Judea. Of
contemporary times there are no other relics. Arabia itself has no literature
earlier than the Koran of Mohammed; but the doctrine of Job is perfectly
accordant with the glimpses which we gather from the writings of Moses of the
state of those nations in patriarchal times, when an Abimilech in Syria, a
Pharaoh in Egypt, a Jethro in Midian, a Johab (who by many, including the
Septuagint writers, is supposed to be the same with Job), and even Balaam, in
the mountains of the East, had some reverence for true religion--“the fear of
the Lord.” Even the subsequent corruptions and idolatrous rites point to a
primitive state of things such as we find in the Book of Job; when the nomadic
tribes went everywhere “lifting up holy hands” to God; looking for some great
deliverer--an avenger--to overcome the power of the serpent; practising burnt
sacrifices, and worshipping the Supreme on hills and in groves; cherishing the
tradition of an invisible world of spirits, and a future eternal judgment.
3. We do not wonder, therefore, at the indications of an eternal
world, or the way of salvation--the Christology--which the Church of the Jews,
as well as of the Christians, have found in this sublime Book. Were there, in
fact, no traces of these primitive truths, we should have found a system of
mere Theism existing amidst a world possessed with supernatural convictions;
and this is just that conclusion to which the school of modern infidelity would
fain conduct us, and reduce this Book to its own negation of revealed truth.
For the glorious hope of a final reward, which made Job so confident, they
would “fill themselves with the east wind” of a stoical endurance of evil for
virtue’s sake; or a mystic love of God, without reference to any past or future
experience of His loving kindness--a system at once at variance with what we
know practically and experimentally of ourselves, as agents influenced by hope
and fear, and opposed to all the discoveries of His dealings with us.
God has never required us to love Him merely from an adoration of His abstract
excellencies, independent of all experience of His mercy. When we find the
woman praised who gave much because “she loved much,” and set forth as an
example of a true motive of action, we perceive only a reflexive exercise of
the same principle,--a grateful sense of favours already received,--she had
been forgiven much. Those writers, therefore, who deny to Job, under his
troubles, the hope of a restitution in the eternal world (he certainly expected
none in this life), and would set him forth as an instance of that love which
disregards alike reward and punishment, describe a creature as fabulous as the
centaur or the griffin, the offspring of their own vain imagination, wedded to
an ignorance of human nature, or a hatred of evangelical truth. But can it be
shown that either prophets or apostles, martyrs or warriors, had no “regard to
the recompense of the reward”? Such, indeed, we are told, was a motive not
unworthy of our Saviour’s own consideration, whom even these moralists would
exalt at least as our example--“for the joy that was set before Him, He endured
the Cross, despising the shame.” To have found, therefore, in Job a patient
sufferer, without a hope of deliverance or reward, in time or eternity, would
have been a greater contradiction of experience than any of the miracles of the
New Testament, and would have required a stronger force of evidence to support
its existence. A priori, therefore, in any record, or even parabolic
narrative, which affected to describe man as he is, much more in one which did
contain such august truths relative to God, angels, true wisdom, human
corruption, the fear of the Lord, the Jehovah of the patriarchs, propitiated by
sacrifice, and interfering in human affairs, we should be warranted in
expressing surprise did we not learn “that there is a judgment”; that the
universally looked for Avenger or Redeemer were introduced; and that, while
“the hope of the hypocrite was as the spider’s web,” he who relied on the Lord,
and who, even in death, would not let go his integrity, should find spiritual
deliverance, filling his heart with hope, and his lips with praise. An attempt
is made to get rid of the testimony of Elihu, by asserting that “it is now
decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be genuine.” This decision we
deny, both as to its critical truth and intrinsic justice. What manuscript or
version wants this integral part of the Book? Does Kennicott or De Rossi
intimate any such deficiency? Lightfoot, indeed, and Rosenmuller, attribute the
Book itself to Elihu. And though it stands apart from the other interlocutions,
it is introductory in its arguments to the grand conclusion; when not only the
three mistaken friends are reproved, but both Job and Elihu silenced by the
awful voice of God repeating and expanding, in magnificent language, the
Abrahamic sentence, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” With
reference to the principal passage, “The Testament of Job” (Job 19:23-29), little that is new can be
brought forward either for or against the received interpretation; the
difficulties of which occurred to Grotius and Warburton, and have only been
repeated by modern sceptics. There stands the oracle--“I know that my Redeemer
liveth”--introduced by the most solemn announcement of an all-important truth,
worthy of perpetual and durable record. On the translation of the introductory
sentences there seems to be no substantial difference of opinion--
“Would
that, now, my words were recorded;
Would
that in a book they were engraven;
With
an iron style and lead;
Forever
on the rock, that they were hewn!”
Now, would such an exordium be fitting for any general assurance
of a return of prosperity, which Job nowhere intimates; or of an exhibition of
his righteousness in this life? Would such a hope be worthy of such a
magniloquent expression? On the other hand, if the prophet were suddenly
possessed with a Divine confidence in that hope of future things, which is not
built “on transitory promises,” what more sublime or suitable introduction? And
we know that the rocks of the Arabian desert are full of such inscriptions! We
have similar asseverations or demands for attention, in Scripture, when
important enunciations are about to follow. “Verily, verily I say unto you”;
“This is a faithful saying”; “The voice said, Cry”; “I heard a voice from
heaven, saying, Write.” All these precede important announcements. The exact
meaning of the prophecy itself has found a variety of interpreters; but there
can be no doubt that the words are very emphatic, brief, and pregnant.
“I
assuredly know that my Deliverer liveth,
And
hereafter, upon the dust shall He arise;
And
(though) after my skin, they pierce this (body),
Yet
from my flesh shall I see God.
Which
I, and not another, shall see for me,
And
mine eyes shall have beheld;
My
reins have been consumed within me,
For
ye shall say, ‘Why have they persecuted him.’
And
the root of the matter shall have been found in me.
Withdraw
ye from the presence of the sword,
For
the anger which is due to transgression, is the sword;
Know
ye, therefore, that there is a judgment.”
But this famous text is far from the only one in the Book which is
an evidence of the faith of Job. What can be clearer, on the hypothesis of a
future state, than Job 13:15 : “Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him,” reading as in the text (Kethib), or, “Though He slay me, shall
I not hope?” as in the margin (Keri). The sense is the same, as Calvin
remarked, and the whole context agrees: “How could I risk my life, and rush
into His presence, if I were not innocent? Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him. I am prepared to argue my ways in His presence; and even this trial
shall turn to my salvation (although) no hypocrite can come before Him.” Here
he maintains his appeal to the Searcher of hearts, the final and eternal Judge;
even beyond the bounds of time and sense. And this is also agreeable with other
passages, in which he declares (Job 16:19) that “his Witness is in
heaven, his record is on high.” While assured of his ultimate deliverance from
the grave, he exclaims (Job 14:13-15), “Oh, that Thou wouldest
hide me in the grave, that Thou wouldest keep me secret, until Thy wrath be
past, that Thou wouldest appoint me a time, and remember me!” “If a man die,
shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait until my
change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer. Thou wilt have a desire to the
work of Thine hands.’“ Here he will, as a soldier at his post, await the
release of his spirit, by the arrival of the relief guard. He feels assured
that God will not forget him, even in the dust; but will, in His own time, have
a longing, as it were, a parental “desire to the work of His hands.” Many other
expressions, indeed Job’s general confidence in his integrity, his readiness of
appeal to the Supreme Tribunal on all occasions, in reply to the mistaken
judgments of his friends, can only be reconciled by an inward consciousness of
a future, infallible decision. The speech of Elihu next demands attention. It
has been assailed as “not genuine,” upon mere supposition that it is “the work
of a different hand,” which even if maintained would not amount to a diversity
greater than that existing between the historical and poetical portions. But
the argument of Elihu, though not void of infirmity, is certainly in advance of
the previous speakers, and prepares the mind of the reader, as it may have done
that of Job, for the voice of the Almighty, silencing rather than convincing
the gainsayers. Elihu intimates that he is animated with a desire to direct Job
to the true source of comfort: that he should humble himself, and not justify
himself before God; that he speaks (Job 33:22-25), as none of the others had
done, of the Messenger, or Interpreter, one of a thousand, to show man the
Divine righteousness; of the ransom provided, and of the return of the sinner
to the moral condition of a little child. That there should be some glimpses of
the Gospel in patriarchal times is demanded by what we know from other sources,
Jewish and Gentile, as well as the general economy of God, who left Himself not
without a witness, either to His own being and attributes, or the remedy that
He had provided for the sin of man,--the Great Deliverer or Avenger, on the
head of the serpent, of the ruin of the primitive race; that Daystar whom
Balaam, probably a countryman and descendant of Job, should “see, but not know;
should behold, but not nigh”; and who, thus seen dimly by the blessed chain of
ancient witnesses, stood out at last plainly revealed in the One Victorious
Mediator and future Eternal Judge.
4. If we have at all established these Divine references we have gone
far towards maintaining, from internal evidence, the inspiration of the Book of
Job. And we are not without other Scriptural proof. The apostle Paul, referring
to Job 5:13, says, “It is written, He taketh
the wise in their own craftiness.” And again (referring to Psalms 92:11), “The Lord knoweth the
thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.” Making no difference between the
authority of one and the other. This kind of quotation confers equal weight, as
part of the sacred canon, on the Book of Job, with that ascribed to the Book of
Psalms. The same expression, “It is written,” occurring frequently; but only
where the words cited are those of Divine inspiration, as in the account of the
temptation of our Lord. Unacknowledged quotations may be found in the Psalms,
Proverbs, and most of the Prophets; seeming to show that although the history
of Job formed no part of the national records of Israel, nor indeed of the
history of the line of the promised seed, or of the people of God, as marked
out by any special designation; yet that it formed the subject of thought and
study to the devout and inspired among the Jews, while it was a mirror of the
best days of Gentile religion among those who maintained the institutions of
Noah. Its views of the invisible world, and the humbling discipline of God; the
necessity of true repentance, and the duty of propitiatory sacrifices; “the end
of the Lord,” and the blessedness of His service, pure from the idolatrous
leaven of the Canaanitish nations, point to a Divine hand, guiding the poet and
the historian to the record of true facts and the utterance of true doctrine.
And this appears, not only in the calm language of the early chapters, but even
in his own distracted effusions, under the pressure of extreme calamity, and
when irritated by the injudicious treatment of his friends. To have gone so
far, and then stopped short, is one of the proofs, as well of the genuineness
as of the inspiration of the Book. It conducts us back to the manners of the
patriarchal age, and the morals prevalent among the people of God, who were
even then “scattered abroad,” inheriting the blessing of Shem, Melchisedeck,
Abraham, Ishmael, and Edom, though not the specialities of the covenant sealed
to Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. Tribes sustained, under the pressure of Satan’s
temptations, by the hope of a Deliverer, and testifying, wherever they went,
that they were pilgrims, having an eternal home beyond the shadowy region of
the grave. In this faith they lived; in this faith they died Each could say
with dying Jacob, “I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord!” Like him, they
gathered around them their houses, and, with “holy Job,” sanctified them by
prayer and sacrifice, while they delivered to them their testimony, to be
treasured up for unborn generations; and their wish has been granted: their
“words are written, as with an iron pen and lead upon the rocks forever,” in
wisdom that is older than the pyramids, and which shall survive unwasted when
they have mouldered in the dust. (Christian Observer.)
The Date and Origin of the Book of Job
Nothing can be safely inferred from the Aramaean words which are
frequently employed in it; and that, not simply because the Aramaisms occur
chiefly in the speech of Elihu, and are appropriate in his mouth, since he
himself was an Aramaean; nor simply because all Hebrew poetry, of whatever age,
is more or less Aramaic; but also and mainly because the presence of Aramaean
words in any Scripture may indicate either its extreme antiquity or its
comparatively modern date. For these Aramaisms--as “Rabbi” Duncan tersely puts
the 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, therefore, which
is based on the use of these words cuts both ways. 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. There is in it a noble universality, “as if it were not
Hebrew.” It does not contain a single allusion to the Mosaic laws and 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. But to this there is 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. “Job” belongs to the Chokmah both in spirit and in form.
(Samuel Cox, D. D.)
Arguments against the earlier Date of the Book of Job
It is not merely that the language in which the Book is written is
not, we are assured, that of the oldest extant form of Hebrew, but, at the very
earliest, that not of the morning, but of the high noon, of Jewish literature.
It is not merely that the author, when speaking in his own person, speaks
invariably of God by the name in which He was revealed to Moses as the covenant
God of the people of Israel; nor merely that he seems to have been familiar, if
not with many other portions of the Old Testament, certainly with at least one
Psalm; or that expressions occur, such as Ophir, as the recognised name for
gold, which would have been inconceivable before, at the very earliest, the
reign of Solomon. It is more than this. The very problem which the Book
discusses, the riddle which vexes the soul of Job, is not one which springs
into full life, or would form the subject of a long and studied and intensely
argued and elaborate discussion, in any early or simple stage of a nation’s
progress. The work is clearly by a Hebrew. It bears no signs of being a
translation. The stamp of originality is on every page. When, or where, could a
Hebrew have found a place for such a work in the infancy of his nation? The
struggle between a traditional creed which told him that all suffering was a
penalty for actual sin, all prosperity a reward for goodness, and the spectacle
of undeserved suffering as seen in the world of a more complex experience--the
question of the inherent value and sacredness of goodness in itself, as apart
from the outward or inward happiness which it brings,--the very character of
the awful Ruler of the universe, His justice and His goodness, as distinct from
His sovereignty and goodness--these are scarcely problems which would force
themselves, like armed intruders, on the human soul in the simpler and earlier
stages of social or national progress. We smile as we read the assertions of
doctor after doctor of the Jewish or Christian Church, that the awful
questionings, which you and I have faced and shall face in the words of the
tortured Job, were read to comfort oppressed and ignorant bondsmen in the slave
gangs of Egypt; or to cheer the “stiff-necked” tribes of half-civilised
wanderers in the forty years of their desert life. How little can those who
tell us so have faced the full meaning of the largest and the central portion
of the Book. The elements, doubtless, of such perplexities may have existed
from the day when the blood of some unavenged successor of righteous Abel cried
in vain for retribution. But we can hardly imagine that their full and
elaborate discussion would have found voice, or echo, or hearing, still less
enshrined itself in a nation’s literature, till a sadder and more perplexing
experience had opened men’s eyes to darker and more tangled thoughts than come
to the childhood of nations. God’s Spirit does not transport men out of their
own epoch. Great men may mould their age, may see further than their
contemporaries, but they are moulded also by, are the children of, their age.
Great and lofty as are the utterances, they would have been born out of due
time, till the problems with which they deal had been brought home to the
hearts of thinkers by familiarity with much unexplained and inexplicable
suffering, by long and painful musing over the mysteries and riddles of human
life. (Dean Bradley.)
The Book of Job a Poem
The Book of Job is, in its main portion, a poem, not a narrative
or history. It is as truly and certainly a poem as the Paradise Lost or
the Iliad are poems of England or of Greece. To what class of poems does
it belong? It is not, like the Book of Psalms, a series of detached hymns,
embodying the very highest meditative outpourings, glad or sorrowful, of the
human heart, national or individual, to its God. Nor do we find in its pages
the common sense of the many, framed in verse by the wisdom of one or more, as
in so large a portion of the Book of Proverbs. It is as different as possible
from the poetry, idyllic or mystic, of the Song of Solomon; or from the
meditations on life, placed on the borderland of prose and poetry, in the Book
of Ecclesiastes. It resembles Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as dealing with the
practical and the speculative interests of human life. But it differs, in other
respects, fundamentally from both. First, it gathers all its teaching round a
single personage, the hero of the poem, who from the beginning to the end forms
the one centre of interest. And secondly, whatever problems it raises, or
whatever lessons it teaches, comes to us, when once we have read the first line
of the actual poem, through the lips, never of the author himself, but of the
speakers, human or Divine or other, whom he places on the stage. Hence men have
called it an epic poem, or a drama. Like epic poems, it has a hero, a struggle,
and a conquest. It is so far a drama, that it consists almost entirely of
dialogue, and that the author will speak to us only to introduce the different
speakers to whose words we shall listen. Yet we cannot without reserve call
that a drama in which there is no change of scene, no movement, no event, no
action. It has been called also a parable, and there is a sense, no doubt, in which
the word, however vaguely and loosely used, may well be applied to it. I make
no attempt to bring the book, the poem, under any special class or
denomination. It stands alone in the Bible, alone in the literature of the
world, as the very flower of inspired Hebrew poetry; and as such let us accept
it, seeking for its true teaching and its true import in its contents, and in
these only. (Dean Bradley.)
The Problem of the Book of Job
The problem of the Book is not one but many. No doubt the poet
intended to vindicate the ways of God to 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 providence of God, the burden of this unintelligible world, was
obviously making itself profoundly felt. Unquestionably the Book of Job does
show, in the most tragic and pathetic way, that good no less than wicked men
lie open to the most cruel losses and sorrows; that these losses and sorrows
are not always signs of the Divine anger against sin; “that they are intended
to correct and perfect the righteousness of the righteous,--or, in our Lord’s
figure, that they are designed to purge the trees which already hear 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? A door
is opened into heaven. The King sits on His throne; His ministers gather round
Him, and sit in session; among them appears a spirit, here simply named the
“Adversary” or “Accuser,” whose function is to scrutinise 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 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 beforehand his conviction that it will be found
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 except 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 challenge, 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. On the one
hand, the poem 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, to relieve the mystery of human life by showing 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. (Samuel Cox, D. D.)
The Book of Job
It seems to me that the highest critical authorities must be right
in thinking that the drama of Job is nearly the latest, as well as the only
formally artistic product of the poetic genius of the Jews. This, at least, is
in intention, as well as in fact, a literary effort--an attempt to present, and
perhaps more or less to solve, in a dramatic form, some of the highest problems
of man’s spiritual life. It is the only important Book in the Old Testament
which is not closely interwoven with the real history and life of the
nation,--which stands apart as a conscious effort of imagination. No
doubt the Book of Job marks in many ways the culmination of the national genius,
and the transition from the exclusively Divine centre of the Hebrew poetic
thought to the wider range of insight into nature and man, from the natural as
well as the supernatural side, which was to succeed it. The very treatment of a
Divine theme under the human conditions of an imaginary drama would alone
appear to indicate this. The conflict with the narrowly Jewish conceptions of
Providence which it contains would also indicate it. The contemplative delight
which the wonders of nature and the mysteries of animal life arouse in the
writer’s mind, and the naturalistic minuteness with which they are painted, as
well as the delineations of the inward perplexities of the spiritual life, all
point to an origin in an age when that more genial appreciation of nature and
man which we perceive in the later prophecies bearing the name of Isaiah had
been carried even further. Moreover, as regards man himself, the whole argument
turns on the subtle distinction between that part of his nature which, finite
and short-sighted though he is, yet gives him a right to claim a real affinity
with God, and that part which, finite and limited as it is, necessarily
obscures his power of judgment. This is not a point which could well have been
discussed in an early period of the Jewish literature. There is an evident
effort throughout the drama to distinguish the “creature” in Job from that
“spirit” in him which gives him a right to plead with God. The drama is usually
understood as a mere exposure of the false view which makes calamity a certain
index of the wrath of God, and therefore of guilt. This, no doubt, it is; but
it is much more. It is a discussion of the mystery of God’s relation to man,
and to the lower universe. There is an effort, I believe, in the poem to show that
man is related to God in two ways,--as a spiritual being, and as a creature. As
a spiritual being, he may justify himself, and speak what God Himself cannot
override, and will certainly affirm; as a creature, he is in complete ignorance
of the lot it may be right for the Ruler of the universe to assign him, since
he only can judge who sees the universe as a whole, who moves the very springs
of its life. Man cannot and ought not to accuse Providence of injustice in any
external lot He may send, unless he could undertake to wield the whole scheme
of Providence in His place; then, and then only, might he “disannul” God’s
judgment, and condemn Him in order to “establish his own righteousness.” The
ignorant creature is wrong in criticising the acts of the Creator; but
the spirit of the man is right in asserting the absolute character of
his highest spiritual convictions against any array of external argument. Job
is sustained in his assertion that though his body should be destroyed, yet a
living Redeemer should vindicate his inward purity; he is sustained in
reiterating, “God forbid that I should justify you till I die; I will not
remove my integrity from me; my righteousness will I hold fast, and will not
let it go”; he is sustained in holding fast by the judgment of his spirit on
his own actions, for that is a judgment with full knowledge; but he is
condemned for judging God’s outward conduct to him by any standard whatever;
since in doing so he judges by “words without knowledge,” seeing that the
knowledge requisite for such judgment would be the omniscience of the Creator
Himself. The argument is illustrated with the fullest delineation of the
mystery of nature, the broadest contrast between the narrow circle of spiritual
knowledge and independence really reserved to man, and to man alone, and the
utter incompetence of man to wield a single attribute of Providence either over
His own world or that of the lower creation The Hebrew poet had already
distinguished between the direct knowledge of God’s Spirit, which spiritual
communion gives, and the indirect knowledge of His mysterious ways which can
only be gained by a study of those ways. It shows that he had mastered the
conviction, that to neglect the study of the natural mysteries of the universe
leads to an arrogant and illicit intrusion of moral and spiritual assumptions
into a different world,--in a word, to the false inferences of Job’s friends as
to his guilt, and his own equally false inference as to the injustice of God. (Richard
Holt Hutton, M. A.)
The General Lessons of the Book
1. To command the virtue of patience.
2. To maintain the Providence of God.
3. To encourage the hopes of the believer. There shall be no mistake
at last: his person will be justified, his integrity manifested, and his
holiness perfected in the day or end of the Lord.
4. To promote humility. This was the peculiar lesson which Job had to
learn.
5. Love to God as a gracious Father. This is the character in which
He was not known to the heathen.
6. Charity to man. It teaches that the people of God are not to be
censorious and ready to judge one another, or interpret misfortunes as peculiar
proofs of His wrathful indignation towards those who, in their general walk and
conversation, bear the marks of His family. “Charity thinketh no evil.”
7. A lesson in knowledge. This is put last in order, because it is
probably rather incidental than primary. The great truths of Revelation, from
Genesis to the Apocalypse, are briefly disclosed, glancing out as if by
accident in this Divine Book. Greenfield says, “The Church of God has been
greatly enriched by having bequeathed to it the vast treasury of Divine truth
which is found in the Book of Job,--a Book containing the purest morality, the
sublimest philosophy, the simplest ritual, and the most majestic creed.” In the
spiritual Church, patience hath its perfect work; faith learns to walk as
seeing Him who is invisible; hope rests on Him as an anchor, sure and
steadfast, fast bound to the eternal shore, entering into that which is within
the vail; humility becomes conformed to Him; perfect love casteth out fear;
charity suffereth long, and is kind; and wisdom acquaints itself with God, and
is at peace. (Charles Augustus Hulbert, M. A.)
Three Friends and only one Job
The friends represent nothing but the early faith, as it has
already become a delusion and superstition. This faith is from its nature that
which more commonly prevails, which seeks to maintain itself with emphasis and
earnestness against every innovation and variation. With profound insight the
poet introduces several friends in contrast with the solitary Job. Unusual
calamities and unusual experiences are the lot of but a few; endurance under
unexpected trials, and steady resistance of current narrower views, founded upon
fresh and certain experience, is still more uncommon; but most uncommon of all
is the hero who successfully brings out triumphantly a new truth which is still
weak and little understood. Accordingly the poet must bring forward Job alone,
without human help or stay, as every great truth can at first by one man only
be felt and defended so keenly and powerfully that the one acts decisively for
all. Job must by himself wage the whole conflict, and refute the antiquated
views by means of his own personal experience, which is peculiar to himself in
this degree. On the opposite side stands the great multitude with its
prepossessions, consciously or unconsciously combating the man that revolts
against them. The poet accordingly causes the representative personality
hostile to Job to divide into a number of separate persons, bringing forward
three old sympathetic friends of Job, who, on visiting him and considering more
closely his misfortunes, soon become his opponents. (Heinrich August Von
Ewald.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》