RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Job, Book of
the soul which is created by and for God. Job does not regret his lost sheep and camels as if they were the due of his piety; but he longs for a gracious God. The poet has placed Job outside the region where God's promises held and in a realm where individual faith was compelled to overcome the obstacles of experience and a view beyond death was not possible. Satan's plea is that if God cuts Job loose from ancestral rules of guidance, Job will cast God under his feet. But Job's entire course of action proves that his fear of God was rooted in his inner life. The death of Job would have convicted Satan of lying, but would have left a puzzle for Job's contemporaries. But the poet has not introduced a third scene in heaven corresponding to the two first in which Satan might be represented as saying that a living dog is better than a dead lion (Eccles. ix. 4). The poem would have needed then to deal with the world beyond the grave, which would have been against poetic canons. The makers of the catena remarked that God had left room on this side for the rehabilitation of his pious sufferer before the resurrection.
The trial of Job is not in order that he may turn away from his wife's suggestion of impiety and patiently depend upon the divine, nor that he may disown his first outbreak of impatience. A severer trial Comes when authorities upon faith and religion, teachers of it as he had been a teacher (iv. 3), decide that his sorrows are the result of his own wrong-doing; the very faith in which he had lived and of which he had been an exponent is turned against himself as a proof of his own 7. 'Organic impiety. According to the common Intercon- belief implied in the poem, the narrow nection of part of the universe within the ken of Dialogue mortals makes clear the righteousness and of the world-ruler, while the result of Narrative, man's life is the expression of man's worth before God. Job could not deny his own godly fear and fidelity; similarly God had not changed without right reasons. If, as the friends might maintain, God had formerly seemed favorable, only to emphasize and intensify his real disfavor to be manifested later, Job only sighed the more for a gracious God whose image he cherished in his heart, whose truth had been his guaranty in Job's early blessedness. He can not dismiss the idea of a righteous God who knows his innocence; the sharper the argument of his adversaries, the more necessary that idea became. It is incomprehensible how one can assert (with Laue) that in his speeches Job has completed his apostasy in view of the fact that when, at the end of the dialogue, the friends are confounded, the poet has put into Job's mouth a solemn oath that he will hold fast to that virtue and righteousness in which he had felt himself blessed, even though he had not solved the riddle of his suffering (xxvii. 2 sqq.).
The prophetic idea of a theophany or vision is employed by the poet to exhibit the divine counsel in intelligible form. Job lives in a region not of revealed but of natural religion where man sees in a glance the totality of natural phenomena in their living eternal basis, and, uplifted by this intuition of the movement of these phenomena, becomes
aware of the voice of God. But this could not explain Job's experience; the plot forbade this, since
Satan must not be permitted to call
8. Result "foul play." Job's sufferings must be
of the endured under the same conditions as
Divine Ad- those in which his aspersed piety had
monitions, existed. He experienced nothing which
might not have come in the natural course of things; but the combination of events brought before him God's all-power in the world (xlii. 2 sqq.). Then God reestablished him in the position of a servant and witness of the truth, with which fact and with Job's intercession he bound up the exemption of the three friends from punishment, a significant indication that their sin consisted in their persecution of Job. Job acted as the intimate friend of God when he prayed for the friends; as such they recognized him whom they had previously regarded as a rebel from God. Job, too, learned that God was far greater and mightier and more an object of faith than he had supposed in the exercise of his earlier faith.
In chap. vi. Job explains his wild outburst in chap. iii. as due to the unendurable weight of his visitation which robs his soul of peace because the hope of coming alleviation which belongs to faith is made impossible by the unchecked diminution of his physical strength. He can not therefore regard his sorrows as those of a short period which will be superseded by a period of restoration, as his piety had hitherto bidden him do. To the impossibility of restoration on this side the grave is added the consideration that death withdraws man from the eye and hand of God (vii. 6-10). Yet the experience of faith teaches that God's wrath exhausts itself and the mood of pity for the creature finds place. Will not the approach of death wake up this pity in God (vii. 8, 21) for the work of his hand (x. 8-13)? Can God, who has created man
and who knows him thoroughly and 9. Job's his sin, refuse to exercise forgiveness Attempt (vii. 21), and will he demand absolute to Compre- responsibility (xiv. 3) of so poor a hend His creature? What value for God must Misfor- a being have for whose purification he tunes. has so great concern? Shall not man
think that, when death has completed his penance and God's wrath is exhausted (xiv. 13), God's yearning for his creation will cause him to awaken that creation to new life in communion with him (xiv. 7, 8, 13-15)? In that case Job's hope would make him endure to the very end (xiv. 14). It may be thought that Job is on the way here to extend his old faith to the point where death itself is included in the region of suffering after which God's help comes, and not merely in his particular case, but as a general fact (cf. xiv. 10, 12 with 14a). But this idea must give way in the face of his postulate that death is a final judgment which excludes man from fellowship with God (xiv. 20, cf. Gen. iii. 23). The poet has let Job discover a better ground of hope for the conquest of death than the thought of the philosophers from Plato to Leibnitz, who found basis for such a hope in the indestructibility of the indivisible and immaterial soul. Job's reason is the ethical yearning
Job, Book of ■ Joel