THE THIRD CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XXII.-XXXI.)
It is not wonderful that the gulf between Job and his friends should
only be widened by such a direct contradiction of the orthodox tenet.
The friends, indeed, cannot but feel the force of Job’s appeal to
experience, as they show by the violence of their invective. But they
are neither candid nor, above all, courageous enough to confess the
truth; they speak, as the philosopher Kant observes, as if they knew
their powerful Client was listening in the background. And so a third
cycle of speeches begins (chaps. xxii.-xxxi.), in which the friends
grasp the only weapon left them and charge Job directly with being a
great sinner. True to his character, however, Eliphaz even here seeks to
soften the effect of his accusations by a string of most enticing
promises, partly worldly and partly other-worldly in their character,
and which in a different context Job would have heartily appreciated
(xxii. 21-30).
But Job cares not to reply to those charges of Eliphaz; his mind is
still too much absorbed in the painful mystery of his own lot and that
of all other righteous sufferers. He longs for God to set up his
tribunal, so that Job and his fellows might plead their cause (xxiii.
3-7, xxiv. 1). What most of all disturbs him is that he cannot see
God—that is cannot detect the operation of that moral God in whom his
heart cannot help believing. ‘I may go forward, but he is not there; and
backward, but I cannot perceive him’ (xxiii. 8). With the ardour of a
pessimist he depicts this failure of justice in the darkest colours
(chap. xxiv.), and is as powerless as ever to reconcile his deep sense
of what God ought to be and must be and the sad realities of life. Upon
this Bildad tries to frighten Job into submission by a picture of God’s
irresistible power, as exhibited not only in heaven and earth, but even
beneath the ocean depths in the realm of the shades (xxv., xxvi. 5-14).
Not a very comforting speech, but fine in its way (if Bildad may really
be credited with all of it), and the speaker frankly allows its
inadequacy.
Lo! these are the outskirts of his ways,
and how faintly spoken is that which we hear!
but the thunder of his power who can understand? (xxvi. 14.)
In a speech, the first which is described as a _mashal_,[37] Job
demolishes his unoriginal and rhetorical opponent, and with dignity
reasserts his innocence (xxvi. 1-4, xxvii. 1-7). He may have said more;
if so, it has been lost. But, in fact, all that was argumentative in
Bildad’s speech was borrowed from Eliphaz, and though Job had the power
(see chaps. ix., xii.), he had not the will to compete with his friends
in rhetoric. The only speaker who is left is Zophar, and, as it is
unlikely that the poet left one of his triads of speeches imperfect, we
may conjecture that xxvii. 8-10, 10-23 belongs to the third speech of
Zophar.[38] Certainly they are most inappropriate in the mouth of Job,
being in direct contradiction to all that he has yet said. If so it
seems very probable that besides the introductory formula a few opening
verses have dropped out of the text. The verses which now stand at the
head of the speech transport us to the disputes of those rival schools
of which Job and his friends were only the representatives. Hence the
use of the plural in ver. 12, of which an earlier instance occurs in the
second speech of Bildad (xviii. 2). What Zophar says is in effect this:
Job’s condition is desperate, for he is an ‘impious’ or ‘godless’ man.
It is too late for any one to attempt to pray when overtaken by a fatal
calamity. For how can he feel that ‘deep delight’ in God which enables a
man to pray, with the confidence of being heard, ‘in every season’ of
life, whether prosperous or the reverse? The rest of the speech is
substantially a repetition of Zophar’s former description of the
retribution of the wicked. It was not to be expected that Job should
reply to this, and accordingly we find that in continuing his _mashal_
(xxix. 1) he utterly ignores his opponents. But unhappily he is almost
as far as ever from a solution of his difficulty. His friends, we may
suppose, have left him, and he is at liberty to revive those melancholy
memories which are all that remain to him of his prosperity.
In chap. xxix. (a fine specimen of flowing, descriptive Hebrew poetry)
Job recalls the honour in which he used to be held, and the beneficent
acts which he was enabled to perform. Modesty were out of place, for he
is already in the state of ‘one turned adrift among the dead’ (Ps.
lxxxviii. 5). The details remind us of many Arabic elegies in the
_Hamâsa_ (e.g. No. 351 in Rückert’s adaptation, vol. i., or 97 in
Freytag). In chaps. xxx., xxxi. he laments, with the same pathetic
self-contemplation, his ruined credit and the terrible progress of his
disease. Then, by a somewhat abrupt transition,[39] he enters upon an
elaborate profession of his innocence, which has been compared to the
solemn repudiation of the forty-two deadly sins by the departed souls of
the good in the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead.’ The resemblance, however,
must not be pressed too far. Job’s morality, even if predominantly
‘legal,’ has a true ‘evangelical’ tinge. Not merely the act of adultery,
but the glance of lust; not merely unjust gain, but the confidence
reposed in it by the heart; not merely outward conformity to
idol-worship, but the inclination of the heart to false gods, are in his
catalogue of sins. His last words are a reiteration of his deeply
cherished desire for an investigation of his case by Shaddai. With what
proud self-possession he imagines himself approaching the Divine Judge!
In his hands are the accusations of his friends and his own reply.
Holding them forth, he exclaims—
Here is my signature—let Shaddai answer me—
and the indictment which mine adversary has written.
Surely upon my shoulder will I carry it,
and bind it as chaplets about me.
The number of my steps will I declare unto him;
as a prince will I come near unto him (xxxi. 35-37).[40]
We must here turn back to a passage which forms one of the most admired
portions of the Book of Job as it stands—the _mashal_ on Divine Wisdom
in chap. xxviii. The first eleven verses are at first sight most
inappropriate in this connection. The poet seems to take a delight in
working into them all that he knows of the adventurous operations of the
miners of his day—probably those carried on for gold in Upper Egypt, and
for copper and turquoises in the Sinaitic peninsula (both skilfully
introduced by Ebers into his stories of ancient Egypt). How vividly the
superiority of reason to instinct is brought out to vary the technical
description of the miners’ work in vv. 7, 8.
A path the eagle knows not,
nor has the eye of the vulture scanned it;
the sons of pride have not trodden it,
nor hath the lion passed over it.
No earthly treasures lie too deep for human industry; but—here we see
the use of the great literary feat (Prov. i.-ix.) which has gone
before—‘where can wisdom be found, and where is the place of
understanding?’ And then follows that fine passage in which language is
strained to the uttermost (with another of those pictorial inventories
in which poets delight, vv. 15-19) to convey at once the preciousness
and the unattainableness of the higher wisdom. The moral of the whole,
however, is not revealed till the last verse.
And unto man he said,
‘Behold, the fear of the Lord is wisdom,
and to turn aside from evil is understanding’ (xxviii. 28).
Thus there is no allusion whatever to Job’s problem, and it is only the
present position of the _mashal_ in the Book of Job which suggests a
possible relation for it to that problem.
And now, looking at the passage by itself, is it conceivable that it was
originally written to stand where it now does? Is it natural that the
solemn contents of chap. xxvii. (even if we allow the first seven verses
only to be Job’s) should leave Job in a mood for an elaborate poetical
study of mining operations, or that after agonising so long over the
painful riddles of Divine Providence he should suddenly acquiesce in the
narrow limits of human knowledge, soon, however, to relapse into his old
inquisitiveness? Is it not, on the other hand, very conceivable (notice
the opening word ‘For’) that it was transferred to its present position
from some other work? In a didactic poem on Wisdom (i.e. the plan of the
universe), similar to Prov. i.-ix., it would be as much in place as the
hymn on Wisdom in Prov. viii. To this great work indeed it presents more
than one analogy, both in its subject and its recommendation of
religious morality (or moral religion) as the branch of wisdom suitable
to man. The only difference is that the writer of Job xxviii. expressly
says that this is the only wisdom within human ken, whereas the writer
of Prov. viii. does not touch on this point. But, whether an extract
from a larger work or written as a supplement to the poem of Job, the
passage in its present position is evidently intended to have a
reference to Job’s problem. The author, or the extractor, regarded the
foregoing debates much as Milton regarded those of the fallen angels,
who ‘found no end, in wandering mazes lost;’ in short, he could only
solve the problem by pronouncing it insoluble.[41] Verses 11 and 12 of
chap. xxvii. have very much the appearance of an artificial bridge
inserted by the new author or the extractor.
Footnote 37:
On this characteristic word for parallelistic poetry, see on Proverbs.
Footnote 38:
Note that xxvii. 13 is repeated from an earlier speech of Zophar (xx.
29). There it concludes a sketch of the ‘impious’ man’s fate; here it
begins a similar description. Verses 11 and 12 of the same chapter
would stand more properly (Bickell and virtually Hirzel) immediately
before chap. xxviii. Mr. B. Wright is very near doing the same;
following Eichhorn, he takes vv. 13-23 as a specimen quoted by Job of
the friends’ ‘inconsequential’ style of argument (a less natural
hypothesis than that adopted here).
Footnote 39:
It seems clear that chap. xxii. was not written as the sequel of chap.
xxx. Since, however, it bears such a strong impress of originality,
one can only suppose that the author placed it here by an
afterthought, and omitted to construct a connecting link with the
preceding chapter.
Footnote 40:
These verses have been misplaced in the Massoretic text (as Isa.
xxxviii. 21, 22). They clearly ought to stand at the end of the
chapter. So Kennicott, Eichhorn, Merx, Delitzsch.
Footnote 41:
But for this tendency of the poem one might follow Delitzsch (art.
‘Hiob’ in _Herzog-Plitt_, vi. 133) and regard chap. xxviii. as
inserted by the author of _Job_ from his ‘portfolio.’