JOB, BOOK OF, so called from the name of the patriarch whose inner history and outward fate it depicts. Various questions have been agitated in regard to it, and, from its almost isolated position in the Scriptures, these have afforded ground for much ingenious and plausible conjecture. The points of principal interest are—the reality or fiction of the history, the age of the author, and the nature of the piety and ethics which the book is designed to inculcate. All these questions are very much interwoven with each other; and so clearly do the various answers reflect the mind and foregone conclusions of the critic, that the treatment of the book may be regarded as a testing-point, not only in criticism, but in religion. In regard to the nature of the book, as historical or dramatic, Spanheim has expressed the extreme on one side, when he said, that "unless it contained a true history, the author was guilty of deception" (in historia sit, fraud scriptoris). Luther has expressed the golden mean of opinion, when he said "that he counted Job to be a true history; but that everything happened and was said just as it is represented, he did not believe; but, on the contrary, he held that some able, pious, and learned man had reduced it to its present order." Numerous later critics, however, recoiling from its exhibition of the supernatural, even under circumstances of pain and desertion which render God and invisible agency a necessity of the human mind, have resolved the narrative into a pure poetic fiction. The same anti-supernatural spell which dissolves the superhuman agencies into mists of the brain, constrains them at the same time to witch away Job (the assailed) and his assembled comforters out of the world of history. The first of these views involves us in too many unnatural suppositions; but
Job.
the last—irreconcilable as it is with the spirit of ancient times, in which every myth had at least its nucleus in a man—is totally irreconcilable with the personal allusions to the patriarch in other portions of Scripture, where he is classed with Noah and Daniel,—they victorious over the destructive forces of nature, he a conqueror in the alembic of spiritual powers. That much has been done by the author in the grouping of the materials of the old tradition, and in moulding the conversation of the speakers into their present dramatic form, so that each shall typify a distinct mode of human thought, and that their opinions shall stand out in clear contrast with the address of Elihu and of God, need not be denied. This leads directly to the question of the author, his age and country. There are four groups of hypotheses on this subject which claim to be considered. By some the author is supposed to have lived in patriarchal times, before the establishment of the Mosaic economy; by others he is regarded as contemporary with Solomon; while a third school fixes his floruit in the time of the exile; and a fourth professes to detect indications of modes of thinking prevalent in an age still later. The first of these, viz., the critics who assign the composition to anti-Mosaic times, err in too rashly confounding the author with his hero. They found their argument chiefly on the spirit and life of patriarchal times which animate the book, on the peculiar aspect which the religious teaching exhibits, and especially the absence of all reference to sacrifice or the Mosaic ritual. What may be called the Arabism of the language has also been adduced in support of this view; and, from the occurrence of quaint old phrases, the book has been thought to recede back to the early times when the separation of the dialects had only begun, but was far from being complete. To this latter argument, however, it is enough to answer that these antique phrases were ever the cream and sparkle of Hebrew poetry, if anything can be called antique in languages which exhibit so little of progress or of decay. To the former argument it seems sufficient to urge the possibility of an author, with the fixed habits of the nomad Arabs before his eyes, thoroughly to catch and appreciate the distinctive features of patriarchal life, if not also of patriarchal religion. In strange contrast with this opinion stands the estimate of those who hold the author to have been some prophet of the exile, or one flourishing after the restoration. Of course, to maintain such a theory the reference to Job in Ezekiel must be rejected as spurious; but it is not so easy to destroy the marks of imitation in passages copied from this book into the pages of Jeremiah, and even found in a number of the early psalms. On philological grounds, this theory is singularly inappropriate. If written in the exile, its composition is unique in the history of ancient literature, being pure in an age of Chaldaism, and vigorously masculine in an age of sinking nationality and of poetry still plaintive and touching, but essentially artistic and feeble. The main defence of such a notion rests in the supposed Persian origin of the doctrine given in Job in regard to Satan and the angels. It has, however, been abundantly shown that the representation there given is not necessarily Persian; but, on the contrary, so thoroughly consistent with the whole teaching of Hebrew Scripture, that it is scarcely possible to tell who are most in the wrong,—those who, assuming Job to have been written in the days of Solomon or the exile, detect points at variance with the world's earlier beliefs; or those who, with Herder, Eichhorn, and Ewald, grant the antiquity of the book, but challenge the orthodoxy of its Satanology on the ground of later revelations. In favour of the only remaining opinion, which assigns the composition of the book to the days of Solomon, very much may be adduced, although there is little in the evidence that comes home to the mind with anything like resistless force. The spirit and power of its poetry marks a time of general vigour, and the age of David
and Solomon was the golden age of Hebrew nationality and song. In the Psalms of David, too, there is a kindred strain of thought and expression (Psalms cii., civ., cvii., xlvii.); and passages are imitated in all the boldness of their original passion—not feebly borrowed or extracted, as in the psalms of the exile and by the later prophets. In the Book of Proverbs, however, we find still closer affinities. The same features in the portrait of Wisdom, and in the representations of the abode of the dead, are to be found prominent and peculiar in both, while a host of common words and phrases point very expressively to a nearly contemporary age. Some weight is also due to the existence in Job of geographical allusions and descriptions of natural history with which the age of Solomon was at least the first to be familiar since the elder and simpler days of the patriarchs. We have thus the materials for fixing within certain wide limits the date of the book. The home and person of the poet are questions that admit of various and almost endless conjecture, since we are not constrained to identify his native country with the scenes which he familiarly depicts. Some have supposed him a foreigner—an Arab, perhaps, who may have wandered into the country, but who still thought and wrote somewhat aside from the ordinary ceremonial life of the Hebrews; and others think it more probable that he was an Israelite who had wandered forth from his native land to settle in Idumæa or Egypt. Why it could not have been written by a Hebrew who remained at home,—marked, as it is, by the peculiar Hebrew ideas in regard to God and the unseen world, and displaying very little knowledge which the keen spirit of a prophet might not easily acquire under the guidance of that God, who not only inspires his servants by his breath but tutors them for their inspiration by his providence,—it is somewhat difficult to see. Several recent critics imagine it to have been written by a philosopher at the court of Solomon. With regard to the ethics of the book, and its relation to the great central doctrines of the cross and immortality, various theories are held according as the solution of the problem discussed is found in the remarks of one or other of the speakers. In consideration, however, of the successful rebuke which Job administers to his friends, and his own deep repentance in the presence of God for the rash words which he had spoken, it is scarcely credible that we should look for anything but broken fragments of truth in the passionate outbursts of folly which too frequently mar the speeches of either party. The knot is first untied in the remarks of Elihu, who, as the forerunner and vindicator of God, stands alone unrebuked. The Divine address adds only majesty and power to his appeal. All agree that the object of the book is the solution of the question how the afflictions of the righteous can be consistent with God's justice, and some regard the knot as not unloosed but merely cut. In cutting it, too, they think the whole doctrine of sacrifice and atonement is snapped in two. Stoic philosophy, according to Ewald, is all that is inculcated, and blind resignation to the will of fate. With the prologue and epilogue before us, in which the veil of God's designs is lifted, it is impossible to acquiesce in such a view. Nor did Job seek or obtain a Stoic's reward. Still it must be confessed that in the disposal of that solemn question of God's government, the Book of Job does not furnish a theodicee for the sufferers of all time. Whatever weight be given to the passage (six., chaps. 23-29) where Job appeals to his Redeemer acquittal, the burden of the doctrine of retribution is throughout more entirely thrown on the present life with its social changes than would be thought of now, when the judgment hereafter has been fully revealed. Nor is it difficult to see how this should happen. The ethics of the future life were then deeply veiled, and the existence of the soul after death was known in too shadowy a form to throw much weight into the balance when high moral problems were to be solved. Hence the mind of the poet is recalled
from wandering into the region of the future in search of a solution; and in the present moral government of God, joined to his eternal existence, the ever-immortal soul finds an equally sure basis on which to rest its hopes. If the existence of God and of the soul after death be granted, then, although Job's language may not disclose a belief in a bodily resurrection, he loses nothing by fixing his faith on the instances, sometimes clouded, but often clear, of God's present retribution. Faith in a moral government hereafter is firmest when the two existences are viewed not in their contrast, but in their similarity. Many commentators, however, and with greater justice, regard this passage as showing Job's confidence in a bodily resurrection. (See article Job, by Delitzsch, in Herzog's Cyclopædia; and for a list of commentators on the book, see Kitto's Biblical Cyclopædia.)