THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
of God for man, who is worthful to God as the work of his hand.
The vexed soul of Job makes still other attempts in the consciousness that he may not hope for restoration here, since he counts himself as alreadybelonging to the world of the dead whither his hopes and his expectations may not accompany him (xvii. 13-16). His friends charge him with demanding that the course of nature be changed for his benefit (xviii. 4), but his thoughts, when allowed full course, do change night into day. He protests anew bis innocence, while exhausting the category of his sufferings in which nevertheless he seems to have been treated as actually the sinner his friends believe he must be (xvii. 7-17), in spite of the witness he has within the mystery of heaven (19-21). God might, he thinks, at the end of io. Job's life, halt the processes of decomposi- Ultimate tion and disintegration in order by Position, this unusual phenomenon to arouse the thought that Job's case was special and so an explanation of his lot be brought about. But he remembers that he has already become to mankind a sort of monstrosity which confounds the pious (xvii. 6). His final appeal must be to God, confidence in whom still remains in his breast (xix. 23-27). A connection is conceived between what God does here on earth in order to purify the thought of the pious and the state of the soul abiding in Hades (verses 28-29). There is a living religious certainty of a righteous God and of a personal relationship to him possessed by the pious. Account must be taken of the criticism which is exercised upon the dogma of a visible justification of a righteous God on this side of death. The apparent good fortune of the wicked is not requited through the eventual misfortune of his descendants; he himself ought to bear his punishment, but he is snatched away before evil comes upon his children (xxi. 7-21). When the same lot of death befalls the lucky tyrant and [the unfortunate poor, how can man affirm that through their hap God teaches men what is right (xxi. 22-34)? By the question in xxiv. 1 and in the reflections suggested Job intimates that he would be able to understand the inactive watching by deity of the raging of tyrants and the suffering of the innocent if human history ran in cycles in which exact requital was discerned. But this the Israelite could do, having the compensations of the " day of Yahweh " in view — a thought to which Job's heart instinctively turns. And the poet attempted to widen and deepen the old faith in God when he allowed God to decide that Job, in contrast with his friends, had spoken the thing that was right, meaning by this not Job's affirmations of innocence, but the considerations which led him to hold that not even the world of the dead and the burial of man therein could deprive man of the proof of that God who is man's final blessedness.
IV. The Author and the Time of Composition: The book neither names its author nor gives data regarding its authorship, and there is no independent tradition respecting either. Its date has been placed all the way along the ages from Moses to the Persian times. The apocryphal conception made
Job and the Edomitic king Jobab the same person and made Moses the author. The thought that the book belonged to Solomonic times, entertained from Chrysostom to Delitzsch, rests upon the statement that the wisdom of the Israel of that time exceeded the wisdom of the East with which Job is connected (i. 3) and upon correspondences between Job's thought and that of Solomonic proverbs; but such wisdom did not die with Solomon. Attempts have been made to prove Job the personification of suffering Israel in Assyrian times or under Manasseh. Neither the orthography of the book nor the linguistic features give sure indications of the date, since emendations and changes have appeared in so great numbers as to vitiate the argument, and there is also no history of the Hebrew language sufficiently minute to make the language a criterion. And the relation of the religious ideas of the book afford no better test, since the date when certain notions became dominant does not exclude the possibility that such ideas were held at other times. The supposed datum, given by the connection of the idea of Satan with the same idea in two other passages of Scripture, loses sight of the fact that Biblical literature is the remains of a larger literature which, if extant, might give a different basis. The only means which might enable one to fix the date of the book would be its literary relationship to other dated books. Undated Scriptures, like the introduction to Proverbs or the Hexateuch or its parts, must be left out of account. To the dated books belong Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Between the way in which Jeremiah curses his birth (xx. 14) and the expressions in Job iii. there is an indisputable connection. But the decision as to priority may lie in subjective considerations. Note, however, that Ezekiel speaks of Job as being as well known to his companions as Noah and Daniel. Here again some say that not our book but a Job of folk-lore is referred to. It is noticeable, however, that Ezekiel is concerned with the problem of the righteous judgment of God, which is one of the problems of Job. In any case it is not forbidden to assume that Malachi had this book in his eye (iii. 16), that Ezekiel knew it, and that Jeremiah had the bitter complaint of Job in his mind. Delitzsch has emphasized the touching wail of the leper of Ps. lxxxviii. (cf. Job vi. 8) ascribed to Heman of whom I Chron. xxv. 5 says that he was seer to the king and that God gave him fourteen sons and five daughters. It has seemed strange that those who argue for an old folk-book have not connected the two, especially since the doubling of Job's possessions implied fourteen and not seven sons. But the Chronicler has made no such connection, and the fact that Heman wrote a poem which strikes the same note as the book of Job does not warrant the assumption that our book is the expansion of it. It may be said, however, that the origin of the book of Job lies on this side of Heman and in close relationship with that which is said of him; nothing further can be affirmed respecting the author nor can the time of its origin be closely defined.
(August Klostermann.)
Bibliography: Texts of value are by A. Merx, Jena, 1871; S. Baer, Leipsic, 1875; G. Bickell, in Carmina veteru