RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Job, Book of
weighty, and incontrovertible arguments, by which course he prejudices his hearers against himself. While, then, the innovator introduced Elihu with great promises and then let him conclude in terrified fashion with the statement of the unsearchableness of God (xxxvii. 23), whither the approach of the storm appears to bring him (xxxvii. 1), the conclusion of the original Job so returns to the point reached before the introduction of Elihu as to make it clear that the book of Job rightly understood is not affected by the indirect criticism represented by Elihu. In that case the writer of the section was a man of like spirit with the original poet and the speeches of Elihu are as worthy a place in Scripture as are those of the three friends. But, in taking account of the book of Job in its original form, this part must be put out of account. The meaning of the book with Elihu included can best be seen in Budde, who has used great industry and keenness in attempting to vindicate that section.
The real body of the poem is built about the intercourse of the four friends mentioned in ii. 11, from early times regarded as set forth in three sets of speeches (chaps, iii.-xiv., xv.-xxi., xxii.-xxvi.), followed by two addresses of Job (chaps, xxviixxviii., xxix.-xxxi.), after which Yahweh speaks out of the storm (chaps, xxxviii.-xxxix., xl. 6xli.). Since the author has placed Job's cry of pain (which opens and defines the whole discussion) in close connection with the seven days of silence and since the silence of the friends during that time is intelligible only on the ground that Job first broke that silence, it is reasonable to assume that the first round of speeches filled the first day of the second week, and that each of the two next rounds consumed a day. Such a reckoning is implied in xxiii. 2, where a distinct difference in time is expressed. This helps to explain 2. The the similarity of formulas in xxvii. 1 Plan. and xxix. 1, different from that in iii. 1, and also the identity of formulas in xxxviii. 1, xl. 6. The reader was expected to understand that the two speeches of Job in xxvii. xxxi. occupied the fourth and fifth days, while the admonitions of Yahweh occupied the sixth and seventh days. So that the seven days of silence, the tortures of which led Job to curse his life, are carefully balanced against the seven days of speech, at the end of which Job yields humble submission. Theodore of Mopsuestia rightly compared Job to the drama of the Greeks in which the speeches of the characters owe their origin to the art of the poet. To criticisms of the treatment it may be said that the range of the poem reveals to the ear the tones of an inner life, that a stream out of experience is flowing in our presence which at length reaches the appointed end of its course. In vi. 2-7 Job abandons the cry of pain of chap. iii. as an error forced from him by the very fever of his sorrow, that over against the argumentation which had so shocked his friends he protests solemnly in xxvii.-xxviii. his willingness to persevere in piety as the basis of life, and, at the conclusion of the contrast between former happiness and present misfortune (which is in spite of his good conscience toward God and men), he reveals his heart's desire for the living God.
Job is no prophet receiving his instruction direct from God; he gets his religious instruction from men and with it a limitation of thought and judgment from which he is freed only by his experience of God (xlii. 5), through seeing him with his own eyes. His earlier experiences do not appear as falsity, but only as incompleteness. The 3. The religion of Job and his friends is not a
Religion folk-religion, but that of the wise, so of Job far as an orderly view of the world
and His goes, and it may be compared with
Friends, that of (say) Plutarch and Seneca. God is the incomparably wise and mighty one, the creator, the pattern of morals who has ordered life and its penalties for evil. Man who is born of woman is bound up in native sinfulness, his life-course is marked out and comprises a period of growth, of activity in work, and of enjoyment which makes that life worthful. There is implanted in man knowledge of the right way of using life, knowledge also of God as creator and giver of all good. Correct appreciation of this knowledge is the pivot upon which move right and wrong, good fortune and bad, as the direct reaction of righteous or evil acts. And at the end, after the enjoyment of a satisfied life, he is brought to the rest of the grave like the wheat which is gathered to the garner after it has reached the end of its being. ; Such a view tells of a simple mode of life in a primitive community, where the paterfamilias is directly responsible to God for his household and its ordering, and where the complexities of later society and worldempire had not yet entered. Judgment is drawn from standard facts and concatenations of circumstances as to the rule of God over man. Man the individual is brought into connection with his successors in life, and thus the time period in which the heaven of divine righteousness returns is prolonged beyond the death of the individual. The present good fortune of the evil is balanced by the greatness of final loss, the sorrow of the good is compensated by the overbalancing good of man's final end. This conception has close relations with the religion of Israel, and the speeches of the three friends may be put alongside the didactic Psalms. But great elements of the religion of Israel are lacking, those which relate to the world-purpose of Israel's being and the full balancing of the great day of Yahweh. Still there is to be discovered the firm grip of the idea of God as a living personality and of man as being so related to him as to find therein possibilities of joy; there is also a firm faith in God as the one in whom the course of nature is fixed. A limitation which must be observed, however, is the view of death and the life beyond, which seems to place the soul deprived of God for endless time in absolute darkness. Though even here the trust in God which shines through the book points to a possibility of the developments which were reached in other parts of Scripture. «
But how shall the primitive irrational dogma of the end of man's relationship with God at death be shaken and faith be raised to a basis of confident verity ? Clearly by presenting the case of one who has faith, whose conduct in the fear of God, in selfinstruction, righteousness, and charity is univer-
Job, Book of