The poet brings the problem before us in the Prologue in the guise of historical facts. Job has witness to his exemplary piety from God Himself (18.23), And yet measureless woe has fallen upon him. Why? The reader is told in the Prologue :— the torture of Job rests on the permission extended by Jahweh to the Satan, with the object of proving that there does exist a piety which no temptation can cause to waver. The suffering of Job, accord- ingly, is in no way a manifestation of God’s anger, but rather of His love; it is a martyrdom for the honour of God and human fidelity towards God. The fact that the reader is put in possession of accurate knowledge on this point from the first, and therefore can quietly watch the controversy as from a watchtower, is one of the poet’s finest strokes of art. The other dramatis persone, how- ever, know nothing of this solution of the problem, and are therefore groping in the darkness. They carry on the controversy only as human judgment and knowledge best can.
Job, with heroic devotion, offers a steadfast resistance to the repeated assaults of evil, in spite of his being sorely tempted by his own wife. But the mute reproach which he perceives in the silence of his friends, together with his awful, excruciat- ing, and hopeless malady, finally breaks down the courage of his faith. With the monologue in which he curses the day of his birth (ch. 3), he opens the threefold cycle of speeches and counter- speeches, in which the problem, instead of drawing nearer to solution, becomes ever more complicated. The standpoint of the friends is that of the old doctrine of retribution—that false inversion of the fact declared in Ex 20°, that the fear of God brings a blessing, while sin brings ruin. The friends deny the existence of any problem at all: all suffering is punishment ; monstrous suffering is punishment for monstrous, and very specially for secret, guilt. The happiness of the ungodly, how- ever, is never more than apparent, and is destined to sudden destruction.
Job does not in the least deny (144 19%) his participation in the universality of human sin as affirmed by the friends (417154). But he repudiates in the strongest way any such guilt as would even come near explaining his fate. On the other hand, he is never weary of pointing to the facts of actual life (cf., especially, 21” and 24'*), the infinite enigmas created by the hopeless suffering of the godly, and the untroubled happiness of the wicked. This does not lead him, it is true, to doubt the omnipotence of God (9°* 12158 26°. 2614), but he can recognize only its incalculable and destructive effects. He rejects, with justifiable indignation (2118-), the expedient, which was plainly in high favour in his day, of saying that God lays up the punishment of the godless for their children. For this theory was in fact nothing but a desperate device, which overthrew the principle of the current doctrine of retribution — otherwise so eagerly defended—that each receives according to his deserts.
Still, his doubts regarding the justice of God (cf., especially, 9”8:) are gradually overcome by his better faith. He begins to distinguish between
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the wise and righteous God, whose image lives-on indelibly in his heart, and the enigmatical God of his trial, and appeals to the first for help against the second (16*),. Nay, he has the adamantine assurance that God Himself will at the end arise for him, and bring his innocence to the light (19°), But, even though with all this he gradu- ally silences the contradictions of the friends, he himself, in view of the enigmas that confront him, attains to no more than a painful renunciation of the hope of their solution. The moving delinea- tion of his former happiness (ch. 29), of his present misery (ch. 30), and of his pious life (ch. 31), closes (31°58) with the solemn demand addressed to God, to afford him the opportunity of defending his cause in a regular judicial trial.
And indeed Jahweh does appear (38%). But not, as Job had requested and hoped, to enter into a controversy with him, —anything of the kind had been utterly unworthy of Him,—but in order, by means of the tempest and with withering irony, to make him feel the absolute foolishness and childishness of what he expected from God. And the whole arrangement of the poem forbids us to doubt that only in these speeches of Jahweh (chs. 38-41), with their Divine irony, and nowhere else have we to seek the solution of the problem in- tended by the poet himself. In all conceivable simplicity it runs thus: God, who has made known His unfathomable omnipotence and wisdom in the multiform wonders of creation, and His goodness in His loving care for the animal world (38**), rules likewise over the fortunes of men, and here too all His action can flow only from wisdom and love, whether much or little of it be comprehen- sible by man.
It has been said that this is no solution of the
roblem, but a compulsory abandonment of it. But in both his answers (40% and 425) Job him- self takes quite another view. He humbles him- self to the very dust; not, however, in painful resignation, but in the elevating assurance that his God has acknowledged him, and that he must regard all the elements of his lot as evidences of an all-wise and loving will. While, then, the justi- fication of Job as against the friends in the Epi- logue, and the return of his prosperity, may only be meant to satisfy so-called ‘ poetic’ justice, yet they were indispensable for the harmonious solu- tion of all difficulties for the reader, who in the Prologue had been enlightened as to the inner- most connexion of events.