_Each writing having an intrinsic unity should, by such aids, be studied
as a whole._
Every intelligent Christian ought to have a clear conception of the
general scope of thought in each great Bible-book. Whatever fragmentary
use of these books for direct devotional purposes may be made, he who
would count himself as one of "the men of the Bible," ought to know as
much about them as he knows about his favorite authors.
Who that pretends to be a lover of Shakespeare is content with a scrappy
reading of his immortal plays? To enjoy them fully, even in fragmentary
readings, he seeks to have a foundation of critical knowledge, such as
Shakespearian scholars place within the easy mastery of any one. After
such a study of a play he can pick it up in leisure hours and see new
beauties every time he reads it. How many Bible Christians know their
Bible thus?
What a revelation such a study makes! It is an alchemist's touch, turning
many a leaden book into finest gold.
The oldest book, as a whole, in the Bible, is the Song of Songs.
Attributed by later ages to Solomon, it was probably written by some
unknown author, anywhere from the tenth to the eighth century before
Christ.[34] The poem is dramatic in form, though imperfectly constructed
according to our canons. Its scenes shift, and its speakers change with
true dramatic movement. It is the closest approach to the drama preserved
to us in Hebrew literature, whose genius never favored this highly organic
form. There is needed but the usual indication of the _dramatis personæ_
to clear the movement of the plot, and to reveal the force and beauty of
the poem.
A maiden, her royal admirer, ladies of the court, the girl's brother and
her shepherd lover, appear and disappear in animated conversation. The
country maiden is wooed away from her shepherd lad by the allurements of a
royal admirer, who employs all the resources of fervid flattery and
passionate persuasion to win her as a new attraction for his harem. He is
foiled, however, by her simple, steadfast loyalty to her absent lover, to
whom she at length returns, triumphant in her virtue. In a corrected
version, the sensuousness of our English translation disappears in the
ordinary richness of Eastern imagery, and the poem becomes a pure picture
of loyal love. It reveals thus the healthy moral tone of Jewish society in
that early age. This sound domestic virtue of the people, which looked
with abhorrence on the licentiousness of the court, becomes all the more
striking in contrast with the polygamous customs of the surrounding
nations. We see the social foundation on which Israel builded such a noble
structure of ethical religion. The people whose literature opens with such
a laud of loyal love might well rise into the pure splendors of a Second
Isaiah.
Such a poem fitly introduces the canon of Scripture; since, into whatever
heights Religion aspires to lift the fabric of civilization, she must lay
its corner-stone in the marriage bond, and rear the church and the state
upon the family.
Perhaps we may also find in this Hebrew Song of Songs that mystic meaning,
not uncommon in Eastern love-songs, at least in later readings of them,
which Edwin Arnold has so vividly brought out in the Hindoo Song of Songs;
and may understand how the Church came to take it as a parable of the love
of the soul for its Heavenly Ideal, seen in the Christ.
Job, thus read, becomes a semi-dramatic poem, in which the problem of the
disconnection of goodness and good-fortune, the lack of any just ordering
of individual life, is discussed in the persons of an upright and sorely
afflicted patriarch and his three friends, who come to condole and counsel
with him. Through their interchanging colloquies, that bring up one after
another the stock theories of the age of the author, the argument moves
along without really getting on. No solution is found for the perplexing
puzzle, in which man's moral instincts beat vainly against the hard facts
of life. Once, for a moment, the thought of a future life flashes up, as
the true solution of the injustice of earth, in that thrilling cry of the
tortured soul:
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,
Yet out of my flesh shall I see God;
Whom I shall see for myself,
And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.
But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does
not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine.
All the light that he can discern is in Nature's manifestations of power
and order and wisdom. From a wide range of knowledge, the poet draws
together upon the stage the wonders of creation, which, with daring
freedom, he introduces God himself as describing; until at length Job
humbles himself in an awe not uncheered by trust:
Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.
Things too wonderful for me which I knew not.
* * * * *
I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
But now mine eye seeth Thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
By dropping out the episode of Elihu, as an insertion of some later hand,
the movement of the poem becomes sustained and progressive. The arguments
of the Jewish theology are cleverly presented, while the swift, sure sense
of justice in the sufferer pierces all sophisms, and riddles all pious
conventionalities. The descriptions of Nature are graphic and eloquent.
The _motif_ of the drama is one that voices the thought and feeling of our
far-off age, in which many men again vainly thresh the old arguments of
conventional theology, in trying to solve the "godless look of earth," and
take refuge anew in the manifestations of power and law in nature; not
without the ancient lesson, let us trust, of an awe which silences and
purifies, and leaves them in the light as of a mystery of meaning on the
sphynx's face, breaking into the dawning of a day which "uttereth speech."
Scientific agnosticism, in so far as it is an humble confession of human
ignorance, has its worship scored in this noble poem, ringing the changes
on the strain, at once plaint and praise:
Canst thou by searching find out God?
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?
It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?
Deeper than hell; what canst thou know?
Curiously enough, as showing the power of conventionalism, the author
winds up with a prose epilogue of the genuine story-book fashion, in which
all things are set right by Job's restoration to his lost wealth, in
multiplied possessions. Pathetic persuasion of the poor human heart that
all things must come right in the end!
What the Epistle to the Romans, that affrighting _vade mecum_ of
theological disputants, becomes when read thus reasonably as a whole, with
critical discernment of its real aim, I will not try to tell you; but will
content myself with sending you where you may see it beautifully told,
with Paul's own upspringing inspiration of righteousness in Matthew
Arnold's "St. Paul and Protestantism."