THE SECOND CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XV.-XXI.)
The three narrow-minded but well-meaning friends have exhausted their
arsenal of arguments. Each with his own favourite receipt has tried to
cure Job of his miserable illusion, and failed. Now begins a new cycle
of speeches, in which our sympathy is still more with Job than before.
His replies to the three friends ought to have shown them the
incompleteness of their argument and the necessity of discovering some
way of reconciling the elements of truth on both sides. _They_ can teach
him nothing, but the facts of spiritual experience which _he_ has
expounded ought to have taught them much. But all that they have learned
is the impossibility of bringing Job to self-humiliation by dwelling
upon the Divine attributes. No doubt their excuse lies in the
irreverence of their friend’s manner and expressions. It is a part of
the tragedy of Job that the advice which was meant for practical
sympathy only resulted in separating Job for a time both from God and
from his friends. The narrow views of the latter drove Job to
irreverence, and his irreverence deprived him of the lingering respect
of his friends and seemed to himself at times to cut off the slender
chance of a reconciliation with God. From this point onwards the friends
cease to offer their supposed ‘Divine consolations’ (xv. 11)—such as the
gracious purpose of God’s ways and the corrective object of affliction
(v. 8-27)—and content themselves with frightening Job by lurid pictures
of the wicked man’s fate, leading up, in the third cycle of speeches, to
a direct accusation of Job as a wicked man himself. And yet, strange to
say, as the tone of the friends becomes harsher and more cutting, Job
meets their vituperation with growing calmness and dignity. Disappointed
in his friends, he clings with convulsive energy to that never quite
surrendered postulate of his consciousness a God who owns the moral
claims of a creature on the Creator. Remarkable indeed is the first
distinct expression of this faith of the heart, of which an antiquated
orthodoxy sought to deprive him. He has just listened to the
personalities, the cruel assumptions, and the shallow commonplaces of
Eliphaz (who treats Job as an arrogant pretender and a self-convicted
blaspheming sinner), and with a few words of utter contempt he turns his
back on his ‘tormenting[27] comforters’ (xvi. 2). (Soon, however, he
will appeal to them for sympathy; so strong is human nature! See xix.
21.) Left to his own melancholy thoughts, he repeats the sad details of
his misery and of God’s hostility (and again we feel that the poet
thinks of suffering humanity in general[28]), and reasserts his
innocence in language afterwards used of the suffering Servant of
Jehovah (xvi. 17; comp. Isaiah liii. 9). Then in the highest excitement
he demands vengeance for his blood. But who is the avenger of blood but
God (xix. 25; comp. Ps. ix. 12)—the very Foe who is bringing him to
death? And hence the strange but welcome thought that behind the God of
pitiless force and undiscriminating severity there must be a God who
recognises and returns the love of His servants, or, in the fine words
of the Korán, ‘that there is no refuge from God but unto Him.’[29] ‘Even
now,’ as he lies on the rubbish-heap—
Even now, behold, my Witness is in heaven,
and he that vouches for me is on high.
My friends (have become) my scorners;
mine eye sheds tears unto God—
that he would right a man against God,
and a son of man against his friend (xvi. 20, 21).
It is a turning-point in the mental struggles of Job. He cannot indeed
account for his sufferings, but he ceases to regard God as an unfeeling
tyrant. He has a germ of faith in God’s goodwill towards him—only a
germ, but we are sure, even without the close of the story, that it will
grow up and bear the fruit of peace. And now, perhaps, we may qualify
the reproach addressed above to Job’s friends. It is true that they have
driven Job to irreverent speeches respecting God, but they have also
made it possible for him to reach the intuition (which the prophetic
Eliphaz has missed) of an affinity between the Divine nature and the
human. In an earlier speech (ix. 32-35) he has already expressed a
longing for an arbiter between himself and God. That longing is now
beginning to be gratified by the certitude that, though the God in the
world may be against him, the God in heaven is on his side. Not that
even God can undo the past; Job requests no interference with the
processes of nature. (Did the writer think that Job lived outside the
sphere of the age of miracles?) All that he asks is a pledge from God,
his Witness, to see his innocence recognised by God, his Persecutor
(xvii. 3). So far we are listening to Job the individual. But
immediately after we find the speaker exhibiting himself as the type of
a class—the class or representative category of innocent sufferers. Job,
then, has a dual aspect, like his God.
And he hath set me for a byword of peoples,
and I am one in whose face men spit.
At this the upright are appalled,
and the innocent stirs himself up against the impious;
but the righteous holds on his way,
and he who has clean hands waxes stronger and stronger
(xvii. 6, 7, 9).
Here it is difficult not to see that the circumstances of the poet’s age
are reflected in his words. The whole Jewish nation became ‘a byword of
peoples’ during the exile,[30] and the mutual sympathy of its members
was continually taxed. It was a paradox which never lost its strangeness
that a ‘Servant of Jehovah’ should be trampled upon by unbelievers, and
the persecutor was rewarded by the silent indignation of all good Jews.
That this is the right view is shown by the depression into which Job
falls in vv. 11-16, in spite of the elevating passage quoted above.
Bildad’s speech, with its barbed allusions to Job’s sad history, had a
twofold effect. First of all it raised the anguish of Job to its highest
point, and, secondly, it threw the sufferer back on that great
intuition, already reached by him, of a Divine Witness to his integrity
in the heavens. It is a misfortune which can scarcely be appraised too
highly that the text of the famous declaration in xix. 25-27 is so
uncertain. ‘The embarrassment of the English translators,’ remarks Prof.
Green, of Princeton,[31] ‘is shown by the unusual number of italic
words, and these of no small importance to the meaning, which are heaped
together in these verses.’ It is scarcely greater, however, than that of
the ancient versions, and we can hardly doubt that the text used by the
Septuagint translator was already at least as corrupt as that which has
descended to us from the Massoretic critics.[32] This would the more
easily be the case since, as Prof. Green says again, ‘Job is speaking
under strong excitement and in the language of lofty poetry; he uses no
superfluous words; he simply indicates his meaning in the most concise
manner.’ Without now entering on a philological discussion, we have, I
think, to choose between these alternatives, one of which involves
emending the text, the other does not. Does Job simply repeat what he
has said in xvi. 18, 19 (viz. that God will avenge his blood and make
reparation, as it were, for his death by testifying to his innocence),
without referring to any consequent pleasure of his own, or does he
combine with this the delightful thought expressed in xiv. 13-15 of a
conscious renewal of communion with God after death?[33] The context, it
seems to me, is best satisfied by the former alternative. Job’s mind is
at present occupied with the cruelty, not of God (as when he said, ‘O
that thou wouldst appoint me a term and then remember me,’ xiv. 13), but
of his friends. His starting-point is, ‘How long will ye (my friends)
pain my soul?’ &c. (xix. 2.) We may admit that the best solution of
Job’s problem would be ‘the beatific vision’ in some early and not
clearly defined form of that deep idea; but if Job can say that he not
merely dreams but _knows_ this (‘I _know_ that ... I shall see God,’
xix. 25, 26), the remainder of the colloquies ought surely to pursue a
very different course; as a matter of fact, neither Job nor his friends,
nor yet Jehovah Himself, refers to this supposed newly-won truth, and
the only part of ‘Job’s deepest saying’ which the next speaker fastens
upon (xx. 3) is the threatening conclusion (xix. 29). Ewald himself has
drawn attention to this, without remarking its adverse bearing on his
own interpretation.[34]
Here, side by side, are Dr. A. B. Davidson’s and Dr. W. H. Green’s
translations of the received text of vv. 25-27, and Dr. Bickell’s
version of his own emended text.
But I know that my redeemer liveth,
and in after time he shall stand upon the dust[35]
and after this my skin is destroyed
and without my flesh I shall see God:
whom I shall see for myself,
and mine eyes shall behold, and not another—
my reins consume within me!
And I know my redeemer liveth, and last on earth shall he arise; and
after my skin, which has been destroyed thus, and out of my flesh [i.e.
when my vital spirit shall be separated from my flesh] shall I see
God....
Ich weiss, es lebt mein Retter,
Wird noch auf meinem Staub stehn;
Zuletzt wird Gott mein Zeuge,
Lässt meine Unschuld schauen,
Die ich allein jetzt schaun kann,
Mein Auge und kein andres.
Most critics are now agreed that the immediately preceding words (vv.
23, 24) are not an introduction, as if vv. 25-27 composed the rock
inscription. Job first of all wishes what he knows to be impossible, and
then announces a far better thing of which he is sure. His wish runs
thus:
Would then that they were written down—
my words—in a book, and engraved
with a pen of iron, and with lead
cut out for a witness in the rock.[36]
But whatever view we take of the prospect which gladdened the mind of
Job, his remaining speeches contain no further reference to it.
Henceforth his thoughts appear to dwell less on his own condition, and
more on the general question of God’s moral government, and even when
the former is spoken of it is without the old bitterness. In his next
speech, stirred up by the gross violence of Zophar, Job for the first
time meets the assertions of the three friends in this cycle of
argument, viz. that the wicked, at any rate, always get their deserts,
and, according to Zophar, suddenly and overwhelmingly. He meets them by
a direct negative, though in doing so he is as much perturbed as when he
proclaimed his own innocence to God’s face. He is familiar now with the
thought that the righteous are not always recompensed, but it fills him
with horror to think that the Governor of the world even leaves the
wicked in undeserved prosperity, as if, in the language of Eliphaz, He
could not ‘judge through the thick clouds’ (xxii. 16).
Why do the wicked live on,
become old, yea, are mighty in power?
Their houses are safe, without fear,
neither is Eloah’s rod upon them.
They wear away their days in happiness,
and go down to Sheól in a moment (xxi. 7, 9, 13).
Footnote 27:
Miss E. Smith’s rendering, ‘irksome,’ Renan’s ‘insupportable,’ are not
definite enough. Job means that his would-be comforters do but
aggravate his unease.
Footnote 28:
Notice the expressions in xvi. 10, and comp. Ps. xxii. 7, 12, 13. (Ps.
xxii., like the Book of Job, has some features which belong to an
individual and some to a collection of sufferers.) Job would never
have spoken of his friends in the terms used in xvi. 10, 11.
Footnote 29:
Sur. ix. 119.
Footnote 30:
Comp. Ps. xxii. 6, Isa. xlix. 7, Joel ii. 17 (where we should render
‘make a byword upon them’).
Footnote 31:
_The Argument of the Book of Job_ (1881), p. 200.
Footnote 32:
Dr. Hermann Schultz is an unexceptionable witness, because his tastes
lead him more to Biblical and dogmatic theology than to minute textual
studies. He is convinced, he says, after each fresh examination, of
‘the baffling intricacy and obscurity and the probable corruption of
the text’ (_Alttestamentliche Theologie_, ed. 2 [1878], pp. 661-2).
Footnote 33:
I agree with Dr. W. H. Green that the third view, which ‘conceives Job
to be here looking forward, not to a future state, but to the
restoration of God’s favour and his own deliverance out of all his
troubles in the present life,’ is to be rejected. I do not follow him
in all his reasons, but these two are decisive. 1. Everywhere else Job
‘regards himself as on the verge of the grave.... Every earthly hope
is annulled; every temporal prospect has vanished. He invariably
repels the idea, whenever his friends present it to him, of any
improvement of his condition in this world as plainly impossible.’ 2.
‘If he here utters his expectation that God will interfere to reward
his piety in the present life, he completely abandons his own position
and adopts [that of the friends].’ (_The Argument of Job_, pp. 204-5).
Footnote 34:
Job’s vindication, thinks Ewald, would be incomplete if at least the
spirit of the dead man did not witness it.
Footnote 35:
The dust beneath which Job lies: comp. ‘ye that dwell in dust’ (Isa.
xxvi. 19).
Footnote 36:
On the text see Bickell, Merx, Hitzig; on the use of metal for public
notices see Chabas, quoted by Cook in _Speaker’s Comm._, _ad loc._