sincere in religion or one who served God for what he got, prepare us
to understand why his integrity is made the hinge of the debate. To
Job his upright obedience was the heart of his life, and it alone made
his indefeasible claim on God. But faith, not obedience, is the only
real claim a man can advance. And the connection is to be found in
this way. As a man perfect and upright, who feared God and eschewed
evil, Job enjoyed the approval of his conscience and the sense of
Divine favour. His life had been rooted in the steady assurance that
the Almighty was his friend. He had walked in freedom and joy cared
for by the providence of the Eternal, guarded by His love, his soul at
peace with that Divine Lawgiver whose will he did. His faith rested
like an arch on two piers--one, his own righteousness which God had
inspired; the other, the righteousness of God which his own reflected.
If it were proved that he had not been righteous, his belief that God
had been guarding him, teaching him, filling his soul with light,
would break under him like a withered branch. If he had not been
righteous indeed, he could not know what righteousness is, he could
not know whether God is righteous or not, he could not know God nor
trust in Him. The experience of the past was, in this case, a
delusion. He had nothing to rest upon, no faith. On the other hand, if
those afflictions, coming why he could not tell, proved God to be
capricious, unjust, all would equally be lost. The dilemma was that,
holding to the belief in his own integrity, he seemed to be driven to
doubt God; but if he believed God to be righteous he seemed to be
driven to doubt his own integrity. Either was fatal. He was in a
narrow strait between two rocks, on one or other of which faith was
like to be shattered.
But his integrity was clear to him. That stood within the region of
his own consciousness. He knew that God had made him of dutiful heart
and given him a constant will to be obedient. Only while he believed
this could he keep hold of his life. As the one treasure saved out of
the wreck, when possessions, children, health were gone, to cherish
his integrity was the last duty. Renounce his conscience of goodwill
and faithfulness? It was the one fact bridging the gulf of disaster,
the safeguard against despair. And is this not a true presentation of
the ultimate inquiry regarding faith? If the justice we know is not an
adumbration of Divine justice, if the righteousness we do is not
taught us by God, of the same kind as His, if loving justice and doing
righteousness we are not showing faith in God, if renouncing all for
the right, clinging to it though the heavens should fall, we are not
in touch with the Highest, then there is no basis for faith, no link
between our human life and the Eternal. All must go if these deep
principles of morality and religion are not to be trusted. What a man
knows of the just and good by clinging to it, suffering for it,
rejoicing in it, is indeed the anchor that keeps him from being swept
into the waste of waters.
The woman's part in the controversy is still to be considered; and it is
but faintly indicated. Upon the Arab soul there lay no sense of woman's
life. Her view of providence or of religion was never asked. The writer
probably means here that Job's wife would naturally, as a woman,
complicate the sum of his troubles. She expresses ill-considered
resentment against his piety. To her he is "righteous over much," and
her counsel is that of despair. Was this all that the Great God whom he
trusted could do for him? Better bid farewell to such a God. She can do
nothing to relieve the dreadful torment and can see but the one possible
end. But it is God who is keeping her husband alive, and one word would
be enough to set him free. Her language is strangely illogical, meant
indeed to be so,--a woman's desperate talk. She does not see that,
though Job renounced God, he might yet live on, in greater misery than
ever, just because he would then have no spiritual stay.
Well, some have spoken very strongly about Job's wife. She has been
called a helper of the Devil, an organ of Satan, an infernal fury.
Chrysostom thinks that the Enemy left her alive because he deemed her a
fit scourge to Job by which to plague him more acutely than by any
other. Ewald, with more point, says: "Nothing can be more scornful than
her words which mean, 'Thou, who under all the undeserved sufferings
which have been inflicted on thee by thy God, hast been faithful to Him
even in fatal sickness, as if He would help or desired to help thee who
art beyond help,--to thee, fool, I say, Bid God farewell, and die!'"
There can be no doubt that she appears as the temptress of her husband,
putting into speech the atheistic doubt which the Adversary could not
directly suggest. And the case is all the worse for Job that affection
and sympathy are beneath her words. Brave and true life appears to her
to profit nothing if it has to be spent in pain and desolation. She does
not seem to speak so much in scorn as in the bitterness of her soul. She
is no infernal fury, but one whose love, genuine enough, does not enter
into the fellowship of his sufferings. It was necessary to Job's trial
that the temptation should be presented, and the ignorant affection of
the woman serves the needful purpose. She speaks not knowing what she
says, not knowing that her words pierce like sharp arrows into his very
soul. As a figure in the drama she has her place, helping to complete
the round of trial.
The answer of Job is one of the fine touches of the book. He does not
denounce her as an instrument of Satan nor dismiss her from his
presence. In the midst of his pain he is the great chief of Uz and the
generous husband. "Thou speakest," he mildly says, "as one of the
foolish, that is, godless, women speaketh." It is not like thee to say
such things as these. And then he adds the question born of sublime
faith, "Shall we receive gladness at the hand of God, and shall we not
receive affliction?"
One might declare this affirmation of faith so clear and decisive that
the trial of Job as a servant of God might well close with it. Earthly
good, temporal joy, abundance of possessions, children, health,--these
he had received. Now in poverty and desolation, his body wrecked by
disease, he lies tormented and helpless. Suffering of mind and
physical affliction are his in almost unexampled keenness, acute in
themselves and by contrast with previous felicity. His wife, too,
instead of helping him to endure, urges him to dishonour and death.
Still he does not doubt that all is wisely ordered by God. He puts
aside, if indeed with a strenuous effort of the soul, that cruel
suggestion of despair, and affirms anew the faith which is supposed to
bind him to a life of torment. Should not this repel the accusations
brought against the religion of Job and of humanity? The author does
not think so. He has only prepared the way for his great discussion.
But the stages of trial already passed show how deep and vital is the
problem that lies beyond. The faith which has emerged so triumphantly
is to be shaken as by the ruin of the world.
Strangely and erroneously has a distinction been drawn between the
previous afflictions and the disease which, it is said, "opens or
reveals greater depths in Job's reverent piety." One says: "In his
former trial he blessed God who took away the good He had added to naked
man; this was strictly no evil: now Job bows beneath God's hand when He
inflicts positive evil." Such literalism in reading the words "shall we
not receive evil?" implies a gross slander on Job. If he had meant that
the loss of health was "evil" as contrasted with the loss of children,
that from his point of view bereavement was no "evil," then indeed he
would have sinned against love, and therefore against God. It is the
whole course of his trial he is reviewing. Shall we receive "good"--joy,
prosperity, the love of children, years of physical vigour, and shall we
not receive pain--this burden of loss, desolation, bodily torment?
Herein Job sinned not with his lips. Again, had he meant moral evil,
something involving cruelty and unrighteousness, he would have sinned
indeed, his faith would have been destroyed by his own false judgment of
God. The words here must be interpreted in harmony with the distinction
already drawn between physical and mental suffering, which, as God
appoints them, have a good design, and moral evil, which can in no way
have its source in Him.
And now the narrative passes into a new phase. As a chief of Uz, the
greatest of the Bene-Kedem, Job was known beyond the desert. As a man
of wisdom and generosity he had many friends. The tidings of his
disasters and finally of his sore malady are carried abroad; and after
months, perhaps (for a journey across the sandy waste needs
preparation and time), three of those who know him best and admire him
most, "Job's three friends," appear upon the scene. To sympathise with
him, to cheer and comfort him, they come with one accord, each on his
camel, not unattended, for the way is beset with dangers.
They are men of mark all of them. The emeer of Uz has chiefs, no
doubt, as his peculiar friends, although the Septuagint colours too
much in calling them kings. It is, however, their piety, their
likeness to himself, as men who fear and serve the True God, that
binds them to Job's heart. They will contribute what they can of
counsel and wise suggestion to throw light on his trials and lift him
into hope. No arguments of unbelief or cowardice will be used by them,
nor will they propose that a stricken man should renounce God and die.
Eliphaz is from Teman, that centre of thought and culture where men
worshipped the Most High and meditated upon His providence. Shuach,
the city of Bildad, can scarcely be identified with the modern
Shuwak, about two hundred and fifty miles south-west from the Jauf
near the Red Sea, nor with the land of the Tsukhi of the Assyrian
inscriptions, lying on the Chaldæan frontier. It was probably a city,
now forgotten, in the Idumæan region. Maan, also near Petra, may be
the Naamah of Zophar. It is at least tempting to regard all the three
as neighbours who might without great difficulty communicate with each
other and arrange a visit to their common friend. From their
meeting-place at Teman or at Maan they would, in that case, have to
make a journey of some two hundred miles across one of the most barren
and dangerous deserts of Arabia,--clear enough proof of their esteem
for Job and their deep sympathy.
The fine idealism of the poem is maintained in this new act. Men of
knowledge and standing are these. They may fail; they may take a false
view of their friend and his state; but their sincerity must not be
doubted nor their rank as thinkers. Whether the three represent
ancient culture, or rather the conceptions of the writer's own time,
is a question that may be variously answered. The book, however, is so
full of life, the life of earnest thought and keen thirst for truth,
that the type of religious belief found in all the three must have
been familiar to the author. These men are not, any more than Job
himself, contemporaries of Ephron the Hittite or the Balaam of
Numbers. They stand out as religious thinkers of a far later age, and
represent the current Rabbinism of the post-Solomonic era. The
characters are filled in from a profound knowledge of man and man's
life. Yet each of them, Temanite, Shuchite, Naamathite, is at bottom a
Hebrew believer striving to make his creed apply to a case not yet
brought into his system, and finally, when every suggestion is
repelled, taking refuge in that hardness of temper which is peculiarly
Jewish. They are not men of straw, as some imagine, but types of the
culture and thought which led to Pharisaism. The writer argues not so
much with Edom as with his own people.
Approaching Job's dwelling the three friends look eagerly from their
camels, and at length perceive one prostrate, disfigured, lying on the
_mezbele_, a miserable wreck of manhood. "That is not our friend,"
they say to each other. Again and yet again, "This is not he; this
surely cannot be he." Yet nowhere else than in the place of the
forsaken do they find their noble friend. The brave, bright chief they
knew, so stately in his bearing, so abundant and honourable, how has
he fallen! They lift up their voices and weep; then, struck into
amazed silence, each with torn mantle and dust-sprinkled head, for
seven days and nights they sit beside him in grief unspeakable.
Real is their sympathy; deep too, as deep as their character and
sentiments admit. As comforters they are proverbial in a bad sense. Yet
one says truly, perhaps out of bitter experience, "Who that knows what
most modern consolation is can prevent a prayer that Job's comforters
may be his? They do not call upon him for an hour and invent excuses for
the departure which they so anxiously await; they do not write notes to
him, and go about their business as if nothing had happened; they do not
inflict upon him meaningless commonplaces."[1] It was their misfortune,
not altogether their fault, that they had mistaken notions which they
deemed it their duty to urge upon him. Job, disappointed by-and-by, did
not spare them, and we feel so much for him that we are apt to deny
them their due. Yet are we not bound to ask, What friend has had equal
proof of our sympathy? Depth of nature; sincerity of friendship; the
will to console: let those mock at Job's comforters as wanting here who
have travelled two hundred miles over the burning sand to visit a man
sunk in disaster, brought to poverty and the gate of death, and sat with
him seven days and nights in generous silence.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "Mark Rutherford."
THE FIRST COLLOQUY.
VI.
_THE CRY FROM THE DEPTH._
JOB SPEAKS. CHAP. iii.
While the friends of Job sat beside him that dreary week of silence,
each of them was meditating in his own way the sudden calamities which
had brought the prosperous emeer to poverty, the strong man to this
extremity of miserable disease. Many thoughts came and were dismissed;
but always the question returned, Why these disasters, this shadow of
dreadful death? And for very compassion and sorrow each kept secret
the answer that came and came again and would not be rejected.
Meanwhile the silence has weighed upon the sufferer, and the burden of
it becomes at length insupportable. He has tried to read their
thoughts, to assure himself that grief alone kept them dumb, that when
they spoke it would be to cheer him with kindly words, to praise and
reinvigorate his faith, to tell him of Divine help that would not fail
him in life or death. But as he sees their faces darken into inquiry
first and then into suspicion, and reads at length in averted looks
the thought they cannot conceal, when he comprehends that the men he
loved and trusted hold him to be a transgressor and under the ban of
God, this final disaster of false judgment is overwhelming. The man
whom all circumstances appear to condemn, who is bankrupt, solitary,
outworn with anxiety and futile efforts to prove his honour, if he
have but one to believe in him, is helped to endure and hope. But Job
finds human friendship yield like a reed. All the past is swallowed up
in one tragical thought that, be a man what he may, there is no refuge
for him in the justice of man. Everything is gone that made human
society and existence in the world worth caring for. His wife, indeed,
believes in his integrity, but values it so little that she would have
him cast it away with a taunt against God. His friends, it is plain
to see, deny it. He is suffering at God's hand, and they are hardened
against him. The iron enters into his soul.
True, it is the shame and torment of his disease that move him to utter
his bitter lamentation. Yet the underlying cause of his loss of
self-command and of patient confidence in God must not be missed. The
disease has made life a physical agony; but he could bear that if still
no cloud came between him and the face of God. Now these dark,
suspicious looks which meet him every time he lifts his eyes, which he
feels resting upon him even when he bows his head in the attempt to
pray, make religion seem a mockery. And in pitiful anticipation of the
doom to which they are silently driving him, he cries aloud against the
life that remains. He has lived in vain. Would he had never been born!
In this first lyrical speech put into the mouth of Job there is an
Oriental, hyperbolical strain, suited to the speaker and his
circumstances. But we are also made to feel that calamity and
dejection have gone near to unhinging his mind. He is not mad, but his
language is vehement, almost that of insanity. It would be wrong,
therefore, to criticise the words in a matter-of-fact way, and against
the spirit of the book to try by the rules of Christian resignation
one so tossed and racked, in the very throat of the furnace. This is a
pious man, a patient man, who lately said, "Shall we receive joy at
the hand of God, and shall we not receive affliction?" He seems to
have lost all control of himself and plunges into wild untamed speech
filled with anathemas, as one who had never feared God. But he is
driven from self-possession. Phantasmal now is all that brave life of
his as prince and as father, as a man in honour beloved of the
Highest. Did he ever enjoy it? If he did, was it not as in a dream?
Was he not rather a deceiver, a vile transgressor? His state befits
that. Light and love and life are turned into bitter gall. "I lived,"
says one distressed like Job, "in a continual, indefinite, pining
fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it
seemed as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a
devouring monster wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured....
'Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other
possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of
Hope.'" We see Job, "for the present, quite shut out from hope;
looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round into a dim
firmament pregnant with earthquake and tornado."
The poem may be read calmly. Let us remember that it came not calmly
from the pen of the writer, but as the outburst of volcanic feeling
from the deep centres of life. It is Job we hear; the language befits
his despondency, his position in the drama. But surely it presents to
us a real experience of one who, in the hour of Israel's defeat and
captivity, had seen his home swept bare, wife and children seized and
tortured or borne down in the rush of savage soldiery, while he
himself lived on, reduced in one day to awful memories and doubts as
the sole consciousness of life. Is not some crisis like this with its
irretrievable woes translated for us here into the language of Job's
bitter cry? Are we not made witnesses of a tragedy greater even than
his?
"What is to become of us," asks Amiel, "when everything leaves us,
health, joy, affections, when the sun seems to have lost its warmth,
and life is stripped of all charm? Must we either harden or forget?
There is but one answer, Keep close to duty, do what you ought, come
what may." The mood of these words is not so devout as other passages
of the same writer. The advice, however, is often tendered in the name
of religion to the life-weary and desolate; and there are
circumstances to which it well applies. But a distracting sense of
impotence weighed down the life of Job. Duty? He could do nothing. It
was impossible to find relief in work; hence the fierceness of his
words. Nor can we fail to hear in them a strain of impatience almost
of anger: "To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever
the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of
virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of
injustice. What then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but
some passion, some bubble of the blood?... Thus has the bewildered
wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after
question into the sibyl cave of Destiny, and receive no answer but an
echo. It is all a grim desert, this once fair world of his."
Job is already asserting to himself the reality of his own virtue, for
he resents the suspicion of it. Indeed, with all the mystery of his
affliction yet to solve, he can but think that Providence is also
casting doubt on him. A keen sense of the favour of God had been his.
Now he becomes aware that while he is still the same man who moved
about in gladness and power, his life has a different look to others;
men and nature conspire against him. His once brave faith--the Lord
gave, the Lord hath taken away--is almost overborne. He does not
renounce, but he has a struggle to save it. The subtle Divine grace
at his heart alone keeps him from bidding farewell to God.
* * * * *
The outburst of Job's speech falls into three lyrical strophes, the
first ending at the tenth verse, the second at the nineteenth, the
third closing with the chapter.
I. "Job opened his mouth and cursed his day." In a kind of wild
impossible revision of providence and reopening of questions long
settled, he assumes the right of heaping denunciations on the day of his
birth. He is so fallen, so distraught, and the end of his existence
appears to have come in such profound disaster, the face of God as well
as of man frowning on him, that he turns savagely on the only fact left
to strike at,--his birth into the world. But the whole strain is
imaginative. His revolt is unreason, not impiety either against God or
his parents. He does not lose the instinct of a good man, one who keeps
in mind the love of father and mother and the intention of the Almighty
whom he still reveres. Life is an act of God: he would not have it
marred again by infelicity like his own. So the day as an ideal factor
in history or cause of existence is given up to chaos.
"_That day, there! Darkness be it.
Seek it not the High God from above;
And no light stream on it.
Darkness and the nether gloom reclaim it.
Encamp over it the clouds;
Scare it blacknesses of the day._"
The idea is, Let the day of my birth be got rid of, so that no other
come into being on such a day; let God pass from it--then He will not
give life on that day. Mingled in this is the old world notion of days
having meanings and powers of their own. This day had proved malign,
terribly bad. It was already a chaotic day, not fit for a man's birth.
Let every natural power of storm and eclipse draw it back to the void.
The night too, as part of the day, comes under imprecation.
"_That night, there! Darkness seize it,
Joy have it none among the days of the year,
Nor come into the numbering of months.
See! That night, be it barren;
No song-voice come to it:
Ban it, the cursers of day
Skilful to stir up leviathan.
Dark be the stars of its twilight,
May it long for the light--find none,
Nor see the eyelids of dawn._"
The vividness here is from superstition, fancies of past generations,
old dreams of a child race. Foreign they would be to the mind of Job in
his strength; but in great disaster the thoughts are apt to fall back on
these levels of ignorance and dim efforts to explain, omens and powers
intangible. It is quite easy to follow Job in this relapse, half wilful,
half for easing of his bosom. Throughout Arabia, Chaldæa, and India went
a belief in evil powers that might be invoked to make a particular day
one of misfortune. The leviathan is the dragon which was thought to
cause eclipses by twining its black coils about the sun and moon. These
vague undertones of belief ran back probably to myths of the sky and the
storm, and Job ordinarily must have scorned them. Now, for the time, he
chooses to make them serve his need of stormy utterance. If any who hear
him really believe in magicians and their spells, they are welcome to
gather through that belief a sense of his condition; or if they choose
to feel pious horror, they may be shocked. He flings out maledictions,
knowing in his heart that they are vain words.
Is it not something strange that the happy past is here entirely
forgotten? Why has Job nothing to say of the days that shone brightly
upon him? Have they no weight in the balance against pain and grief?
"The tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there."
His mind is certainly clouded; for it is not vain to say that piety
preserves the thought of what God once gave, and Job had himself
spoken of it when his disease was young. At this point he is an
example of what man is when he allows the water-floods to overflow him
and the sad present to extinguish a brighter past. The sense of a
wasted life is upon him, because he does not yet understand what the
saving of life is. To be kind to others and to be happy in one's own
kindness is not for man so great a benefit, so high a use of life, as
to suffer with others and for them. What were the life of our Lord on
earth and His death but a revelation to man of the secret he had never
grasped and still but half approves? The Book of Job, a long, yearning
cry out of the night, shows how the world needed Christ to shed His
Divine light upon all our experiences and unite them in a religion of
sacrifice and triumph. The book moves toward that reconciliation which
only the Christ can achieve. As yet, looking at the sufferer here, we
see that the light of the future has not dawned upon him. Only when he
is brought to bay by the falsehoods of man, in the absolute need of
his soul, will he boldly anticipate the redemption and fling himself
for refuge on a justifying God.