THE BOOK OF JOB
[Illustration: And his sons went and feasted in their houses, every one
his day; and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and drink
with them.]
[Illustration:
THE
BOOK OF JOB
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
By G. K. CHESTERTON
& ILLUSTRATED IN COLOUR
By C. MARY TONGUE
LONDON:
CECIL PALMER & HAYWARD
OAKLEY HOUSE BLOOMSBURY ST. WC
]
The text of this Reprint of the
Book of Job is that of the
authorized version, with
certain differences in
the manner of
printing.
FIRST
EDITION
1916
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
I. And his sons went and feasted in their
houses, everyone his day; and sent and
called for their three sisters to eat and
drink with them Frontispiece
II. And it was so, when the days of their
feasting were gone about, that JOB rose
up early in the morning, and offered
burnt offerings Page 13
III. And there came a messenger unto Job Page 21
IV. Then said his wife unto him, “Dost thou
still retain thine integrity? Curse God
and die.” Page 29
V. ... the Lord gave, and the Lord
hath taken away; blessed be the name
of the Lord Page 45
VI. “Suffer me that I may speak; and after
that I have spoken, mock on.” Page 61
VII. Then the Lord answered Job out of
the whirlwind Page 77
VIII. So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job Page 93
INTRODUCTION
The Book of Job is among the other Old Testament Books both a
philosophical riddle and a historical riddle. It is the philosophical
riddle that concerns us in such an introduction as this; so we may
dismiss first the few words of general explanation or warning which
should be said about the historical aspect. Controversy has long raged
about which parts of this epic belong to its original scheme and which
are interpolations of considerably later date. The doctors disagree,
as it is the business of doctors to do; but upon the whole the trend
of investigation has always been in the direction of maintaining that
the parts interpolated, if any, were the prose prologue and epilogue
and possibly the speech of the young man who comes in with an apology
at the end. I do not profess to be competent to decide such questions.
But whatever decision the reader may come to concerning them, there
is a general truth to be remembered in this connection. When you deal
with any ancient artistic creation do not suppose that it is anything
against it that it grew gradually. The Book of Job may have grown
gradually just as Westminster Abbey grew gradually. But the people who
made the old folk poetry, like the people who made Westminster Abbey,
did not attach that importance to the actual date and the actual
author, that importance which is entirely the creation of the almost
insane individualism of modern times. We may put aside the case of Job,
as one complicated with religious difficulties, and take any other, say
the case of the Iliad. Many people have maintained the characteristic
formula of modern scepticism, that Homer was not written by Homer, but
by another person of the same name. Just in the same way many have
maintained that Moses was not Moses but another person called Moses.
But the thing really to be remembered in the matter of the Iliad is
that if other people did interpolate the passages, the thing did not
create the same sense of shock as would be created by such proceedings
in these individualistic times. The creation of the tribal epic was to
some extent regarded as a tribal work, like the building of the tribal
temple. Believe then, if you will, that the prologue of Job and the
epilogue and the speech of Elihu are things inserted after the original
work was composed. But do not suppose that such insertions have that
obvious and spurious character which would belong to any insertions
in a modern individualistic book. Do not regard the insertions as you
would regard a chapter in George Meredith which you afterwards found
had not been written by George Meredith, or half a scene in Ibsen
which you found had been cunningly sneaked in by Mr. William Archer.
Remember that this old world which made these old poems like the Iliad
and Job, always kept the tradition of what it was making. A man could
almost leave a poem to his son to be finished as he would have finished
it, just as a man could leave a field to his son, to be reaped as he
would have reaped it. What is called Homeric unity may be a fact or
not. The Iliad may have been written by one man. It may have been
written by a hundred men. But let us remember that there was more unity
in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man.
Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war.
Without going, therefore, into questions of unity as understood by the
scholars, we may say of the scholarly riddle that the book has unity
in the sense that all great traditional creations have unity; in the
sense that Canterbury Cathedral has unity. And the same is broadly
true of what I have called the philosophical riddle. There is a real
sense in which the Book of Job stands apart from most of the books
included in the canon of the Old Testament. But here again those are
wrong who insist on the entire absence of unity. Those are wrong who
maintain that the Old Testament is a mere loose library; that it has
no consistency or aim. Whether the result was achieved by some supernal
spiritual truth, or by a steady national tradition, or merely by an
ingenious selection in after times, the books of the Old Testament
have a quite perceptible unity. To attempt to understand the Old
Testament without realizing this main idea is as absurd as it would be
to study one of Shakespeare’s plays without realizing that the author
of them had any philosophical object at all. It is as if a man were
to read the history of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, thinking all the
time that he was reading what really purported to be the history of an
old Danish pirate prince. Such a reader would not realize at all that
Hamlet’s procrastination was on the part of the poet intentional. He
would merely say, “How long Shakespeare’s hero does take to kill his
enemy.” So speak the Bible smashers, who are unfortunately always at
bottom Bible worshippers. They do not understand the special tone and
intention of the Old Testament; they do not understand its main idea,
which is the idea of all men being merely the instruments of a higher
power.
Those, for instance, who complain of the atrocities and treacheries of
the judges and prophets of Israel have really got a notion in their
head that has nothing to do with the subject. They are too Christian.
They are reading back into the pre-Christian scriptures a purely
Christian idea--the idea of saints, the idea that the chief instruments
of God are very particularly good men. This is a deeper, a more daring,
and a more interesting idea than the old Jewish one. It is the idea
that innocence has about it something terrible which in the long
run makes and re-makes empires and the world. But the Old Testament
idea was much more what may be called the common-sense idea, that
strength is strength, that cunning is cunning, that worldly success
is worldly success, and that Jehovah uses these things for His own
ultimate purpose, just as He uses natural forces or physical elements.
He uses the strength of a hero as He uses that of a Mammoth--without
any particular respect for the Mammoth. I cannot comprehend how it
is that so many simple-minded sceptics have read such stories as the
fraud of Jacob and supposed that the man who wrote it (whoever he
was) did not know that Jacob was a sneak just as well as we do. The
primeval human sense of honour does not change so much as that. But
these simple-minded sceptics are, like the majority of modern sceptics,
Christians. They fancy that the patriarchs must be meant for patterns;
they fancy that Jacob was being set up as some kind of saint; and in
that case I do not wonder that they are a little startled. That is
not the atmosphere of the Old Testament at all. The heroes of the Old
Testament are not the sons of God, but the slaves of God, gigantic and
terrible slaves, like the genii, who were the slaves of Aladdin.
The central idea of the great part of the Old Testament may be called
the idea of the loneliness of God. God is not the only chief character
of the Old Testament; God is properly the only character in the Old
Testament. Compared with His clearness of purpose all the other wills
are heavy and automatic, like those of animals; compared with His
actuality all the sons of flesh are shadows. Again and again the
note is struck, “With whom hath he taken counsel?” “I have trodden
the wine press alone, and of the peoples there was no man with me.”
All the patriarchs and prophets are merely His tools or weapons; for
the Lord is a man of war. He uses Joshua like an axe or Moses like a
measuring-rod. For Him Samson is only a sword and Isaiah a trumpet. The
saints of Christianity are supposed to be like God, to be, as it were,
little statuettes of Him. The Old Testament hero is no more supposed
to be of the same nature as God than a saw or a hammer is supposed
to be of the same shape as the carpenter. This is the main key and
characteristic of the Hebrew scriptures as a whole. There are, indeed,
in those scriptures innumerable instances of the sort of rugged humour,
keen emotion, and powerful individuality which is never wanting in
great primitive prose and poetry. Nevertheless the main characteristic
remains; the sense not merely that God is stronger than man, not merely
that God is more secret than man, but that He means more, that He knows
better what He is doing, that compared with Him we have something
of the vagueness, the unreason, and the vagrancy of the beasts that
perish. “It is he that sitteth above the earth, and the inhabitants
thereof are as grasshoppers.” We might almost put it thus. The book
is so intent upon asserting the personality of God that it almost
asserts the impersonality of man. Unless this gigantic cosmic brain has
conceived a thing, that thing is insecure and void; man has not enough
tenacity to ensure its continuance. “Except the Lord build the house
their labour is but lost that build it. Except the Lord keep the city
the watchman watcheth but in vain.”
Everywhere else, then, the Old Testament positively rejoices in the
obliteration of man in comparison with the divine purpose. The Book of
Job stands definitely alone because the Book of Job definitely asks,
“But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our
miserable humanity? Of course it is easy enough to wipe out our own
paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is
it grander and kinder? Let God use His tools; let God break His tools.
But what is He doing and what are they being broken for?” It is because
of this question that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the
riddle of the Book of Job.
The present importance of the Book of Job cannot be expressed
adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting of ancient
books. We may almost say of the Book of Job that it is the most
interesting of modern books. In truth, of course, neither of the two
phrases covers the matter, because fundamental human religion and
fundamental human irreligion are both at once old and new; philosophy
is either eternal or it is not philosophy. The modern habit of saying,
“This is my opinion, but I may be wrong,” is entirely irrational. If I
say that it may be wrong I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit
of saying “Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy
and its suits me”; the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A
cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy
is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private
religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
The first of the intellectual beauties of the Book of Job is that it
is all concerned with this desire to know the actuality; the desire to
know what is, and not merely what seems. If moderns were writing the
book we should probably find that Job and his comforters got on quite
well together by the simple operation of referring their differences
to what is called the temperament, saying that the comforters were by
nature “optimists” and Job by nature a “pessimist.” And they would be
quite comfortable, as people can often be, for some time at least, by
agreeing to say what is obviously untrue. For if the word “pessimist”
means anything at all, then emphatically Job is not a pessimist. His
case alone is sufficient to refute the modern absurdity of referring
everything to physical temperament. Job does not in any sense look at
life in a gloomy way. If wishing to be happy and being quite ready to
be happy constitute an optimist, Job is an optimist. He is a perplexed
optimist; he is an exasperated optimist; he is an outraged and insulted
optimist. He wishes the universe to justify itself, not because he
wishes it to be caught out, but because he really wishes it to be
justified. He demands an explanation from God, but he does not do it
at all in the spirit in which Hampden might demand an explanation from
Charles I. He does it in the spirit in which a wife might demand an
explanation from her husband whom she really respected. He remonstrates
with his Maker because he is proud of his Maker. He even speaks of the
Almighty as his enemy, but he never doubts, at the back of his mind,
that his enemy has some kind of a case which he does not understand.
In a fine and famous blasphemy he says, “Oh, that mine adversary had
written a book!” It never really occurs to him that it could possibly
be a bad book. He is anxious to be convinced, that is, he thinks that
God could convince him. In short, we may say again that if the word
optimist means any thing (which I doubt) Job is an optimist. He shakes
the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes
the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak.
In the same way we may speak of the official optimists, the Comforters
of Job. Again, if the word pessimist means anything (which I doubt)
the comforters of Job may be called pessimists rather than optimists.
All that they really believe is not that God is good but that God is
so strong that it is much more judicious to call Him good. It would be
the exaggeration of censure to call them evolutionists; but they have
something of the vital error of the evolutionary optimist. They will
keep on saying that everything in the universe fits into everything
else: as if there were anything comforting about a number of nasty
things all fitting into each other. We shall see later how God in the
great climax of the poem turns this particular argument altogether
upside down.
When, at the end of the poem, God enters (somewhat abruptly), is struck
the sudden and splendid note which makes the thing as great as it
is. All the human beings through the story, and Job especially, have
been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have made God
enter in some sense or other in order to answer the questions. By a
touch truly to be called inspired, when God enters, it is to ask a
number more questions on His own account. In this drama of scepticism
God Himself takes up the rôle of sceptic. He does what all the great
voices defending religion have always done. He does, for instance, what
Socrates did. He turns rationalism against itself. He seems to say that
if it comes to asking questions, He can ask some questions which will
fling down and flatten out all conceivable human questioners. The poet
by an exquisite intuition has made God ironically accept a kind of
controversial equality with His accusers. He is willing to regard it
as if it were a fair intellectual duel: “Gird up now thy loins like a
man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.” The everlasting
adopts an enormous and sardonic humility. He is quite willing to be
prosecuted. He only asks for the right which every prosecuted person
possesses; He asks to be allowed to cross-examine the witness for the
prosecution. And He carries yet further the correctness of the legal
parallel. For the first question, essentially speaking, which He asks
of Job is the question that any criminal accused by Job would be most
entitled to ask. He asks Job who he is. And Job, being a man of candid
intellect, takes a little time to consider, and comes to the conclusion
that he does not know.
This is the first great fact to notice about the speech of God, which
is the culmination of the inquiry. It represents all human sceptics
routed by a higher scepticism. It is this method, used sometimes by
supreme and sometimes by mediocre minds, that has ever since been the
logical weapon of the true mystic. Socrates, as I have said, used it
when he showed that if you only allowed him enough sophistry he could
destroy all the sophists. Jesus Christ used it when He reminded the
Sadducees, who could not imagine the nature of marriage in heaven, that
if it came to that they had not really imagined the nature of marriage
at all. In the break up of Christian theology in the eighteenth
century, Butler used it, when he pointed out that rationalistic
arguments could be used as much against vague religion as against
doctrinal religion, as much against rationalist ethics as against
Christian ethics. It is the root and reason of the fact that men who
have religious faith have also philosophic doubt, like Cardinal Newman,
Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Mallock. These are the small streams of the delta;
the Book of Job is the first great cataract that creates the river.
In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right
method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to
tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day
newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange
enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.
This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine
inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles,
but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken together
with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely
philosophical, is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly
satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable.
Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate
than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of
Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he
feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too
good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a
burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than
the solutions of man.
Thirdly, of course, it is one of the splendid strokes that God rebukes
alike the man who accused, and the men who defended Him; that He
knocks down pessimists and optimists with the same hammer. And it is
in connection with the mechanical and supercilious comforters of Job
that there occurs the still deeper and finer inversion of which I have
spoken. The mechanical optimist endeavours to justify the universe
avowedly upon the ground that it is a rational and consecutive pattern.
He points out that the fine thing about the world is that it can all
be explained. That is the one point, if I may put it so, on which
God in return, is explicit to the point of violence. God says, in
effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men
are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the
inexplicableness of everything; “Hath the rain a father?... Out of
whose womb came the ice?” He goes farther, and insists on the positive
and palpable unreason of things; “Hast thou sent the rain upon the
desert where no man is, and upon the wilderness wherein there is no
man?” God will make man see things, if it is only against the black
background of nonentity. God will make Job see a startling universe if
He can only do it by making Job see an idiotic universe. To startle
man God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that
God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long
panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild
ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of
them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is
a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all
things is astonished at the things He has Himself made.
This we may call the third point. Job puts forward a note of
interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of
proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is
a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. Lastly, the poet
has achieved in this speech, with that unconscious artistic accuracy
found in so many of the simpler epics, another and much more delicate
thing. Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah
in His deliberate declaration, he has contrived to let fall here
and there in the metaphors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and
splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a
sad one--semi-accidental suggestions, like light seen for an instant
through the cracks of a closed door. It would be difficult to praise
too highly, in a purely poetical sense, the instinctive exactitude and
ease with which these more optimistic insinuations are let fall in
other connections, as if the Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that
He was letting them out. For instance, there is that famous passage
where Jehovah with devastating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when
the foundations of the world were laid, and then (as if merely fixing
a date) mentions the time when the sons of God shouted for joy. One
cannot help feeling, even upon this meagre information, that they must
have had something to shout about. Or again, when God is speaking of
snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical cosmos, He speaks
of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day of battle--a
hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last overthrown.
Nothing could be better, artistically speaking, than this optimism
breaking through agnosticism like fiery gold round the edges of a
black cloud. Those who look superficially at the barbaric origin of
the epic may think it fanciful to read so much artistic significance
into its casual similes or accidental phrases. But no one who is well
acquainted with great examples of semi-barbaric poetry, as in the Song
of Roland or the old ballads, will fall into this mistake. No one who
knows what primitive poetry is, can fail to realize that while its
conscious form is simple some of its finer effects are subtle. The
Iliad contrives to express the idea that Hector and Sarpedon have a
certain tone or tint of sad and chivalrous resignation, not bitter
enough to be called pessimism and not jovial enough to be called
optimism; Homer could never have said this in elaborate words. But
somehow he contrives to say it in simple words. The Song of Roland
contrives to express the idea that Christianity imposes upon its heroes
a paradox: a paradox of great humility in the matter of their sins
combined with great ferocity in the matter of their ideas. Of course
the Song of Roland could not say this; but it conveys this. In the same
way the Book of Job must be credited with many subtle effects which
were in the author’s soul without being, perhaps, in the author’s mind.
And of these by far the most important remains even yet to be stated.
I do not know, and I doubt whether even scholars know, if the Book of
Job had a great effect or had any effect upon the after development of
Jewish thought. But if it did have any effect it may have saved them
from an enormous collapse and decay. Here in this Book the question
is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial
punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews
had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their after
influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level
of modern well educated society. For when once people have begun to
believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue their next calamity is
obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be
regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of
making good men successful. They will adopt the easier task of making
out successful men good. This, which has happened throughout modern
commerce and journalism, is the ultimate Nemesis of the wicked optimism
of the comforters of Job. If the Jews could be saved from it, the Book
of Job saved them. The Book of Job is chiefly remarkable, as I have
insisted throughout, for the fact that it does not end in a way that is
conventionally satisfactory. Job is not told that his misfortunes were
due to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement. But in the
prologue we see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men, but
because he was the best. It is the lesson of the whole work that man is
most comforted by paradoxes. Here is the very darkest and strangest of
the paradoxes; and it is by all human testimony the most reassuring. I
need not suggest
what a high and strange history awaited this
paradox of the best man in the worst fortune.
I need not say that in the freest and most
philosophical sense there is one Old
Testament figure who is truly a type;
or say what is pre-figured in the
wounds of Job.
THE BOOK OF JOB
CHAPTER 1
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man
was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.
And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. His
substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels,
and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very
great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of
the east. And his sons went and feasted in their houses, every one his
day; and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink
with them. And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone
about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the
morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them
all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God
in their hearts. Thus did Job continually. Now there was a day when
the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan
came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the
earth, and from walking up and down in it. And the Lord said unto
Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him
in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and
escheweth evil? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear
God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his
house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the
work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put
forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse
thee to thy face. And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he
hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So
Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord.
And there was a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and
drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house: and there came a
messenger unto Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses
feeding beside them: and the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them
away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and
I only am escaped alone to tell thee. While he was yet speaking, there
came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven,
and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them;
and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. While he was yet speaking,
there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans made out three bands,
and fell upon the camels, and have carried them away, yea, and slain
the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone
to tell thee. While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and
said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their
eldest brother’s house: and, behold, there came a great wind from the
wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon
the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell
thee. Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and
fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, and said, Naked came I out
of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave,
and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. In all
this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.