Book of Job

“ For the Book of Job is an unrivalled masterpiece, the work of one in whom poetry was no mere special faculty cultivated apart from his other gifts, but the outcome of the harmonious wholeness of healthy human nature, in which upright living, untrammelled thought, deep mental vision, and luxuriant imagination combined to form the individual. ”

“ I do not know if attention has ever been drawn to the point, but the author of the Book of Job has always settled for me the literary righteousness of the happy ending. Job, you know—as every hero of every story-book ought to—lives happily ever afterwards. ”

“ The years of Job have passed hitherto in unbroken prosperity. He has long enjoyed the bounty of providence, his children about him, his increasing flocks of sheep and camels, oxen and asses feeding in abundant pastures. The stroke of bereavement has not fallen since his father and mother died in ripe old age. The dreadful simoom has spared his flocks, the wandering Bedawin have passed them by. An honoured chief, he rules in wisdom and righteousness, ever mindful of the Divine hand by which he is blessed, earning for himself the trust of the poor and the gratitude of the afflicted. ”

“ We are asked to think of Job as a man whose uprightness, goodness, and fidelity towards man were unimpeachable, who was also towards God reverent, obedient, grateful, wearing his religion as a white garment of unsullied virtue. ”

“ Dost thou claim Divine inspiration? Job is rancorous; and we are scarcely intended by the writer to justify him. Yet it is galling indeed to hear that calm repetition of the most ordinary ideas when the controversy has been carried into the deep waters of thought. Job desired bread and is offered a stone. ”

“ NOTE ON THE TEXT OF JOB. That the received text of our Hebrew Bible has a long history behind it, is generally recognised; and few will deny that its worst corruptions arose in the pre-Massoretic and pre-Talmudic periods (comp. The Prophecies of Isaiah, vol. ii., Essay vii.) The popularity of the Book of Job may not have been equal to that of many other books, but we have seen reason to suppose that within the circles of the ‘wise men’ it was eagerly studied and imitated. ”

“ The book will not have finally reached its present form before the 4th century B.C. Some scholars believe that it dates entirely from the Greek period (which began 332 B.C.) ; but it may be doubted whether there are sufficient grounds for this conclusion.
Job.—The book of Job deals with a problem of human life; in modern phraseology it is a work of religious philosophy. Job is a righteous man, overwhelmed with undeserved misfortune; and thus the question is raised, Why do the righteous suffer? Is their suffering consistent with the justice of God? ”

“ It also sets forth the longings of the human intellect for a knowledge of first causes; and its crowning success when Nature is studied in connection with the revelations of God’s Word. The Book of Job was evidently the only Scripture that the world had for at least eight hundred years. The introduction shows Job to have been a person adapted to great reverses of fortune, rich, pious, prosperous, happy, and respected. ”

“ The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast. ”

“ To those who deny sin and pooh-pooh anxiety about the soul, the book may well appear an old-world dream, a Hebrew allegory rather than the history of a man. But the language of Job is no outburst of lawlessness; it springs out of deep and serious thought. ”

“ And all his brethren came to him, and all his sisters, and all that knew him before, and they ate bread with him in his house: and bemoaned him, and comforted him upon all the evil that God had brought upon him. And every man gave him one ewe, and one earring of gold.
42:12. And the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning. And he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. ”

“ Job’s friends argue that he must have been guilty of some grave sin; Job himself passionately maintains his innocence; and on the issue thus raised the dialogue of the book turns. The outline of Job’s story was no doubt supplied by tradition; and a later poet has developed this outline, and made it a vehicle for expressing his new thoughts respecting a great moral problem which perplexed his contemporaries. A variety of indications (see Job) combine to show that the book of Job was not written till after the time of Jeremiah—probably, indeed, not till after the return from exile. ”

“ His whole creed about providence and retribution is such that he is on the way to utter confusion of mind. Why, he has said to himself that Job is a wicked and false man—Job whose striking characteristic is outspoken truthfulness, whose integrity is the pride of his Divine Master. ”

“ For the religion of Job, sincere and deep, disclosing itself in these offerings to the Most High, is, above his fatherly affection and sympathy, the distinction with which the poet shows him invested. He is a fearer of the One Living and True God, the Supremely Holy. In the course of the drama the speeches of Job often go back on his faithfulness to the Most High; and we can see that he served his fellow-men justly and generously because he believed in a Just and Generous God. Around him were worshippers of the sun and moon, whose adoration he had been invited to share. ”

“ Job Chapter 40
Of the power of God in the behemoth and the leviathan.
40:1. And the Lord answering Job out of the whirlwind, said:
40:2. Gird up thy loins like a man: I will ask thee, and do thou tell me.
40:3. Wilt thou make void my judgment: and condemn me, that thou mayst be justified?
40:4. And hast thou an arm like God, and canst thou thunder with a voice like him?
40:5. Clothe thyself with beauty, and set thyself up on high, and be glorious, and put on goodly garments.
40:6. Scatter the proud in thy indignation, and behold every arrogant man, and humble him. ”

“ A last indignity offered, last words of hard judgment spoken, Job enters upon a long review of his life, with the sense of being victorious in argument, yet with sorrow rather than exultation because his prayers are still unanswered ”

“ The book recounts how Job, a man of exemplary piety, was overtaken by an unprecedented series of calamities, and it reports the debate between Job and other speakers to which the occasion is supposed to have given rise. ”

“ Others see in it a parable of singular depth, a revelation of the future of the Church to the end of the world." (Seventy's Bible Dictionary, p. 144.)
5. The Age when Job Lived: "Eusebius fixes it two ages before Moses, (i. e., about the time of Isaac) : eighteen hundred years before Christ, and six hundred after the Deluge." (Commentary, critical and Explanatory, p. 308.)
6. Job a Real Person: "It has been supposed by some that the Book of Job is an allegory, not a real narrative, on account of the artificial character of many of its statements. ”

“ We have given sufficient reason to conclude that Job lived at an earlier period still, and as he expresses a wish that his words should be written in a book, and engraven on the rock, the knowledge of reading as well as writing must have been pretty general in his country, or the book and the inscription could not have been a testimony of his faith and hope to his countrymen, as he passionately desired it to be. ”

“ Did Job need these multitudes of camels and sheep to supplement his new faith and his reconciliation to the Almighty will? Is there not something incongruous in the large award of temporal good, and even something unnecessary in the renewed honour among men? To us it seems that a good man will be satisfied with the favour and fellowship of a loving God. Yet, assuming that the conclusion is a part of the history on which the poem was founded, we can justify the blaze of splendour that bursts on Job after sorrow, instruction and reconciliation. ”

“ Still it is plain at the close that the character of Job is idealised. Much may be received as matter of veritable history; but on the whole the life is too fine, pure, saintly for even an extraordinary man. ”

“ In the same manner, as there is a difference between works of nature and productions of human handicraft, so there is a difference between God's rule, providence, and intention in reference to all natural forces, and our rule, providence, and intention in reference to things which are the objects of our rule, providence, and intention. This lesson is the principal object of the whole Book of Job; ”

“ Does the writer neglect the great question his drama has stirred? Or has he not, with art far more subtle than we may at first suppose, introduced into the experience of Job a certain spiritual gain—thoughts and hopes that widen and clear the horizon of his life? ”

“ Here is found the religion of Job. A main element of it was communion with Eloah, an ethical kinship with Him, no arbitrary or merely physical relation, but of the spirit. That is to say, Job has at the heart of his creed the truth as to man's origin and nature. The author of the book is a Hebrew; his own faith is that of the people from whom we have the Book of Genesis; but he treats here of man's relation to God from the ethnic side, such as may be taken now by a reasoner treating of spiritual evolution. ”

“ However unpalatable these final conclusions may appear to pious readers accustomed to seek in the Book of Job for the most striking proofs of some of the principal teachings of the Christian dispensation, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to study the work in its restored form and arrive at any other. ”

“ This is the problem of Job, and of itself suffices to put the book in what is called the post-exilic age. It belongs to the literature of Jewish Wisdom, with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The latter book, one of the latest certainly in the Old Testament, is much concerned with the same conflict of dogma with experience, though in a very different spirit. [243] Job may be a work of the fifth century B.C., or perhaps of the fourth. ”

“ Job is unquestionably the hero of the work, and in his ideas and his history combined we may assume that we find the author himself speaking and teaching. The discussion between Job and his friends of the problem of suffering occupies two-thirds of the book, or, if the space occupied by Elihu be not considered, nearly three-fourths, and in the direction which the author causes this discussion to take we may see revealed the main didactic purpose of the book. ”

“ Priestly office and power are given to Job; his sacrifice and intercession mediate between the friends who traduced him and Eloah who hears His faithful servant's prayer. The epilogue, as a parable of the reward of faithfulness, has deep and abiding truth. Wider opportunity of service, more cordial esteem and affection, the highest office that man can bear, these are the reward of Job ”

“ Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes. The idea that Job is to be understood as a personification of the nation, such as we were led to conceive in the allegory of Jonah and in the Servant of the Lord, can hardly be maintained in face of the perfect detachment from the history and the national hopes that characterises the book.
The book deals with a problem already stirring in the minds of the Prophets and the theme of many of the Psalms, but here stated with an awful daring and intensity and as the subject-matter of an entirely new form of literary composition. ”

“ The rights of those who toiled for him were sacred, not as created by any human law which for so many hours' service might compel so much stipulated hire, but as conferred by God. Job's servants were men and women with an indefeasible claim to just and considerate treatment. ”

“ A sense of the mysterious is produced, of supernatural power, discharging bolt after bolt in some inscrutable mood of antagonism. Job is a mark for the arrows of the Unseen. And when the last messenger has spoken, we turn in dismay and pity to look on the rich man made poor, the proud and happy father made childless, the fearer of God on whom the enemy seems to have wrought his will.
In the stately Oriental way, as a man who bows to fate or the irresistible will of the Most High, Job seeks to realise his sudden and awful deprivations. ”

“ All is said for the ordinary belief that can be said. And three different men reason with Job that it may be understood how popular, how deeply rooted is the notion which the whole book is meant to criticise and disprove. ”

“ The words of Job are ended.
18:032:001 So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was
righteous in his own eyes.
18:032:002 Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram: against Job was his wrath kindled, because he justified himself rather than God. ”

“ These things—the desolate home, the outcast life, the leprosy. Job uses a strange word: "I know that this was with Thee." His conclusion is stated roughly, that nothing can matter in dealing with such a Creator. [Pg 150] The insistence of the friends on the hope of forgiveness, Job's own consciousness of integrity go for nothing. ”

“ He is superior in strength to all that are great and strong amongst living creatures: mystically it is understood of the devil, who is king over all the proud.
Job Chapter 42
Job submits himself. God pronounces in his favour. Job offers sacrifice for his friends. He is blessed with riches and children, and dies happily,
42:1. Then Job answered the Lord, and said:
42:2. I know that thou canst do all things, and no thought is hid from thee.
42:3. Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have spoken unwisely, and things that above measure exceeded my knowledge. ”