RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Job, Book of
These and similar cases, of which many might be adduced, show that the Septuagint is an independent and close equivalent, and that, no matter how changed it may be, the translator exercised thought and criticism upon the text which lay before him, which was in very close relationship with that which is now in our possession. This is shown in vi. 6 in which the difficult phrase in the present Hebrew text niDPn T"Q was read in the text before the translator of the 2. Possible Septuagint JTlO-T! "H^l. It is to be Explana- recognized that alongside of the prestions of ent Hebrew text, which may be called Difference Palestinian, there was in the fatherof Text, land of the Septuagint a second to which the name Egyptian may be applied, and that these had the same parentage. For both of these, the Septuagint in rather extended form, have prologue and epilogue, the omission of the third speech of Zophar for which another by Job is substituted; and both have the speech of Elihu and the same plan of dialogue. In the translation, even when paraphrastic, the correspondence of the Greek with the Hebrew is so close that the text out of which the translation arose can be restored. On the other hand, the Hebrew text has often a longer reading of which at most the rudiments appear in the Egyptian. No a priori decision can be made in either case, for it is a possibility both that the Palestinian text has received additions and that the Egyptian has been abbreviated. It is possible to solve the question in one of two ways. Our Palestinian text may be considered as the last edition of an archetype meant for the Palestinian community, which became the ancestor of the Egyptian Job. The fact that it has certain parts which the Egyptian lacks may be emphasized without attempting to make it a characteristic of the whole. The second way is to discriminate in the Greek Job, after eliminating the corruptions of the Greek as such, between the translation of the Hebrew and the expansion of the translator and to try the resulting text with reference to its congruency and to the impression it makes of deficiency and fragmentariness. Of the Hexapla there are only fragments, and there is no text which gives the Septuagint and that alone; the Sahidic and the Old-Latin Job were translated from Greek manuscripts more or less exactly, but from them it can not be deduced how they were related to the original. Moreover, it appears that the Alexandrian translator was influenced in his understanding by an Aramaic targum (cf . F Buhl, Kanon und Text, p. 171; TLB, 1899, pp. 446- 447), a fact which further complicates the problem. Another help to the recovery of the text is the poetic form based upon the principle of parallelism. The clearly apprehended structure of a first line is a sure indication of the sense and the content of the second, when couplets are in question; but when one passes from the distich and possibly the tristich to the strophe of four, five, or more lines, this canon fails as a help to the recovery of the text or as a test upon which to decide upon the correctness of the text. Moreover, the question of the transmission of the author's text arises, since the task of the editor was to present a text intelligible and instruc-
tive to the community, in which it is probable that
the matter of metrical and strophical structure was
disregarded. Modern studies, also,
3. Parallel- have too inexact a basis, since the proism as an nunciation and accent of Hebrew is all
Aid to Text- but unknown, and schemes of strophes Criticism, presented differ greatly. Moreover, it is improbable that the author would present a uniform meter and strophe in the varying parts of the poem. Thus in chap. iii. the " why " and " wherefore " of verses 11 and 20 divide that chapter into three parts, 3-10, 11-19, 20-26, the first of which has eighteen lines, the second eighteen, but the third only fourteen; further, when in verse 6 " that day " is restored for " that night " (as the sense requires), verses 4-6 give nine lines in three tristichs, devoted to the cursing of the day, while verses 7-10 give as many lines devoted to the cursing of the night, but in distichs, except verse 9 which is a tristich. This change from the tristich to the distich seems to be grounded in the nature of the contents, and Bickell's attempt to do away with the tristich of verse 9 has no basis outside of his preconception. On the other hand, the balance of the first two parts of the chapter raises the question why the last part has only fourteen lines. The answer that we do not know may possibly be deemed sufficient. But on exegetical grounds verse 23 can not be connected with verse 20 and the abrupt introduction of the first person and of the idea of eating in verses 24-26 suggests a loss of two couplets from the text, though neither in the Palestinian text nor in the Egyptian is there a trace that their ancestor possessed them.
The punctuation of the Masoretic text is a most valuable commentary upon Job, and, in view of the great difficulties, an extremely significant one. The passages are many in which the punctuation is indicative of difficulties which the Masorites resolved by seeing in the consonantal text the teJ^r scoping of words, as minlam in xv. 29 is taken i-6r min lahern. The fact that the Masorites made so many mistakes may be explained either as due to false divisions of the unseparated words or to defect in the text as it lay before them. Examples explicable from both causes are at hand.
The older consonantal text is to be regarded as the edition, (established by an authority of the community) of a text still older which existed in a number of manuscripts, fidelity to which was traversed by a desire to furnish to the community an intelligible text, and, where the exemplar was meaningless or corrupt, to set carefully aside possible shocks to the religious feeling of the reader. Examples of this are found in i. 16-18, where in the exemplar a defective IJJ was changed to the fully written "Iiy, while in xxxiv. 23, *1}j», having lost
4. Corrup- its initial sound through the effect of tions of the closing syllable of the preceding Conso- D,K''', was protected against the pos-
nantal Text sible meaning 1]} " witness." A false
Explained. division m xviji. 20 has been mediated
by the introduction of a 1 in ICvJJ,
which was then separated into the two words iDi,-?y
The short or abbreviated form of the suffixes and
Job, Book of