contemporary of the Judges, or of Solomon, or of Nebuchadnezzar, or of Ezra, etc. (comp. below 5, the remarks on the time when the book was composed). It is evident that most of these attempts at determining the time, and especially those which presuppose the absolute historical reality of the material, without any legendary or poetic drapery, are altogether arbitrary. It may be urged, however, in general that the following reasons make it probable that Job lived and suffered in the time of the patriarchs, and consequently before Moses:

1. The extreme age, extending far beyond one hundred and forty years, to which he lived, according to ch. xlii. 16.

2. The mention of the gold coin, P. (ch. xlii. 11), with which we are made acquainted through the histories of Jacob and Joshua (Gen. xxxiii. 19; Josh. xxiv. 32), which is the only coin anywhere mentioned in the book, and which is accordingly a witness to the probability that it belongs to the patriarchal age.

3. The mention of the musical instruments, 2, flute,, guitar, and, tymbal (ch. xxi. 12; xxx. 31), the only instruments recognized in Genesis (Gen. iv. 21; xxxi. 27), which accordingly are of the most ancient sort.

4. The mention-which also carries us back into the age of Genesis-of writing on stone, by means of an iron stylus, or chisel (ch. xix. 23 seq.); along with which, indeed in the same passage, and in ch. xxxi. 35, mention is also made of writing on parchment or in a book (a), a mode of writing, however, which indisputably belongs to the pre-Mosaic age, as a glance at the monuments of Ancient Egypt will show.

5. The act of Job in officiating as priest in the family circle, offering an atoning sacrifice (ch. i. 5), which reminds us decidedly of the same act on the part of Noah (Gen. viii. 20), and of Jacob (Gen. xxxv. 2; comp. on the other side Ex. xix. 10; Num. xi. 18; Josh. vii. 13). 6. The number seven, which was so characteristic of the worship of antiquity, and which appears in the bullocks and rams offered by Job (comp. ch. xlii. 8 with Num. xxiii. 1; also Gen. vii. 2 seq; viii. 19 seq., etc.).

7. The reference, characteristic of the religious physiognomy of the pre- Mosaic age, to the idolatrous adoration of the sun and moon, and to the worship of the stars, or Sabaism (see ch. xxxi. 26; and comp. Deut. iv. 19; xvii. 3).

These are the arguments which are usually urged to prove that Job was a contemporary of the pre-Mosaic patriarchs. Granting that some of them, particularly those cited under 6 and 7, are of less force, and are equally applicable to a later period, they yield in the main a considerable degree of probability that the time fixed on above is approximately correct. An approximate estimate, however, is all that can be reached by such an investigation into the age of a point of history wrapped in the mist of a poetic legend. Comp. still further our remarks on the concluding verses of the Epilogue, ch. xlii. 12-17, where additional traces may be found of Job's having belonged to the patriarchal age.

23. THE POETIC ART-FORM OF THE BOOK.

The task which lay before the author as respects the artistic treatment of his material, was essentially two-fold. First he was to put his material in narrative form, in a style of poetic description, elevating and transfiguring the concrete historic fact into the ideal truth of transactions of eternal significance. Next he was to discuss reflectively the problem which constitutes the religious and ethical kernel of these transactions, touching the possibility and the divinely ordained purpose of unmerited suffering on the part of men. The first part of his task he accomplishes in the sections of prose narrative, the Prologue and the Epilogue, which open and close the book. The second part receives the author's attention in the discourses of the book, which are far more extensive and elaborate, which in form and language are thoroughly poetic, and in which alone direct expression is given to that which is obviously the scope and purpose of the work as a whole-the discourses, to wit, of Job, of his three friends, of Elihu, and also of Jehovah, who personally appears to give to the conflict its final solution. These discourses exhibit to the last detail a high degree of elaboration and poetic art. The opening discourse by Job în ch. iii., which contains the theme of the discussion,

belongs to the preparatory part of the book, in which the foundations of the problem are laid down, in connection with the introductory information conveyed by the Prologue concerning the events which befel Job, and the supra-mundane occasions of the same as consisting in God's permissive agency and Satan's agency as tempter (chs. i., ii.). The discourses of Job's three friends, or rather opponents, together with the replies which the object of their attacks makes to each one individually (ch. iv.-xxviii.), carry on the entanglement of the conflict to be described. This consists in a three-fold series of unjust accusations of Job, proceeding from the standpoint of an external and one-sided conception of the legal doctrine of retribution, corresponding to which we have a series of arguments by Job, which are not less one-sided, which in part are violently passionate and morally unsound, in which he asserts his innocence, and casts suspicions on the justice of God's ways. Job himself prepares the way for the final solution of the conflict in the exhibition which he makes of genuine theocratic piety in the monologue appended to the three acts of the colloquy, where he appears as one who has been brought back to a more thoughtful appreciation of his condition, and for that same reason as triumphing over the reproaches of his three friends (ch. xxix.-xxxi.; comp. above p. 6). The solution receives its completion indeed only in the three following stages of the conclusion; the first of which is signalized by the appearance of Elihu, who exhibits the utmost that human wisdom can contribute by way of answer to the difficult questions which arise in respect to the significance of the sufferings of the innocent (ch. xxxii.-xxxvii.); the second by the long address of Jehovah to Job which sets forth the adjudication of the point in controversy in accordance with the divine point of view, the argument here being general in its character (ch. xxxviii.-xli.); the third finally by the concrete actual decision rendered between the contending parties by the distribution of punishment and reward to the one and the other respectively (ch. xlii.).*

According to the views here expressed, it may seem doubtful with which of the varieties of poetry familiar and current among ourselves this book should be classified; for it evidently exhibits characteristics which belong to several. In its Prologue and Epilogue we find the objective description and the childlike naïveté in narrative which distinguish the epic style. Not a few parts of the discourses have a lyric, and in particular an elegiac tone. In its special object and its general scope, it is indisputably didactic. But it is as a drama, more especially a drama pre-eminently earnest in tone and pervaded by a religious philosophy as to its contents, as a tragedy of religious philosophy, that it exhibits itself at first sight to

Such in substance is the plan of the poem as conceived by most moderns, who maintain the genuineness of Elihu's disc.urses, especially Hahn, p. 4 seq.; Delitzsch, I., p. 15; Schlottmann, p. 20 seq. If the genuineness of the discourses referred to be controverted, the analysis of the whole poem would receive only one unessential modification, to wit, that one of the constituents which prepare the way for the final solution must be omitted, a constituent, however, which is highly conspicuous and influential. Compare e. g. the following analysis by Dillmann (p. xviii. seq.), which is on the whole closely related to that given above: "Forasmuch as the history here set forth is the history of a controversy, the whole resolves itself into three divisions: the opening, the entanglement, the solution. In the opening of the problem (ch. i.-iii.), the piety and the prosperity of the hero are briefly set forth, a glance is given at a transaction taking place in heaven between God and Satan, in which a decision is formed affecting Job's destiny, and then in rapid succession are described the calamities which swept away his prosperity, and the believing resignation of the sufferer, which does not give way under the sneers of his wife, and which only after the advent of the three friends and their gloomy silence is driven into an expression of captious complaint and doleful despair.-The entanglement (ch. iv.-xxviii.), by virtue of the fact that the friends now enter into a colloquy with Job, shapes itself into a controversial discussion between him and them. On the part of Job, however, this discussion reveals at the same time an inward soul-struggle, in which he must work his way up out of the errors of superstition and unbelief back again to sobriety of thought and a right belief. Not until he has brought⚫ his faith and his religion out of this struggle, not only unharmed, but inwardly strengthened, can the solution follow. Here we have, as the first step, the hero on whom the burden of his sad destiny still presses heavily, setting forth in a long discourse, or soliloquy, the perplexing enigma, that he should have been cast down out of his former state of favor and prosperity into his present misery, although he could solemnly affirm that he had not permitted himself any, not even the slightest departure from God's ways in thought, word or deed, and earnestly yearning for a ray of divine light, aud for deliverance (ch. xxix.-xxxi.). Whereupon God then appears to the tried sufferer, at first, however, only in order, through the majesty of His divine appearance, and His lofty divine discourse, to lead him freely and voluntarily to take back and repent of his presumptuous sinful speeches, which he had delivered in the heat of the struggle (ch. xxxviii.-xlii. 6). Only when thus humbled and purified by penitence, does God now expressly vindicate him as against the friends, deliver him, and endow him anew with greater prosperity (ch. xlii. 7-17). This decision in actual life carries with it also the solution of the theoretical questions involved: it is proved that even an innocent man may suffer for his own good, and for the furtherance of his spiritual life."-So also Ewald in his elaborate exhibition of the inward progress of the poem (p. 25 seq.).

him who regards its plan as a whole and its arrangement, the division of its principal dialogue into three acts or movements, the increase of the entanglement toward the end, and the purely dramatic solution by the appearance and judicial intervention of God Himself. No wonder therefore that the attempt has been made to subject the poem in a one-sided and exclusive manner to one or another of these classifications. It has been viewed as an epic poem by Stuss (De Epopæia Jobæa, Commentatt. III., Goth., 1753), Lichtenstein (Num liber Jobi cum Odyssea Homeri comparari possit, Helmst., 1773), Ilgen (Jobi antiquissimi carminis hebraici natura atque virtus, Lips., 1789), Augusti (Einleitung ins A. Test., p. 268), Good (Version of Job, Introductory Dissertation, sect. 2), etc. Its lyric character has been specially emphasized by Stuhlmann, Keil (the former of whom calls it a "religious poem," the latter a "lyric aphoristic poem "), and several others; while J. D. Michaelis (who in his Prolegomena zum Hiob endeavors with unusual zeal to exhibit the practical utility of the doctrinal contents of this "moral poem"), Herder (who calls it the "most ancient and exalted didactic poem of all nations"), and others, look at it chiefly in the light of a didactic poem; so also Diedrich (Das B. Hiob kurz erklärt, etc., Leipzig, 1858), who calls it a "parable" (against which see Vilmar, Past.-theolog. Blatt., Vol. XI., p. 59 seq.). The book was already recog nized as a drama by Luther, who after his homely striking fashion says of it: "It is just like what you see in a play;" and by Leibnitz, whom it strikes as being a musical drama, as being indeed altogether operatic (comp. Schmidt's Zeitschr. f. Geschichte, 1847, for May, p. 436); so also Brentius, Joh. Gerhard, Beza, Mercier, Cocceius, and others, who have spoken of it as a "tragedy," and have undertaken to compare with it those works of Eschylus and Sophocles, which describe conflicts similar to those of our book carried on by suffering heroes against the dark powers of destiny, or against the wrath of the gods (thus recently A. Vogel in the Inaugural Dissertation: Quid de fato senserint Judæi et Græci, Jobo et Sophocli Philoctete probatur, Gryphisw. 1869, in which an interesting parallel is drawn between Job and Philoctetes). Most moderns also recognize this dramatic character, especially Umbreit (Introd. to his Commy., p. xxxiii.), Ewald who calls it "the divine drama of the ancient Hebrews" (Dichter des A. Bundes, III. p. 56), Hupfeld (Deutsche Zeitschr. f. christliche Wis senschaft, 1850, No. 35 seq.), Davidson (Introduction to the O. T., II., p. 179), Delitzsch (Art. "Job" in Herzog's Realencykl. VI., p. 123 [and Commy. I., p. 15 seq. See also Schlottmann, p. 40 seq.; A. B. Davidson, I., p. 16 seq.; Lowth, Lectures XXXII.-XXXIV.; Dillmann, Introd. to Commy., p. 21; Froude, Westminster Review, 1853, reprinted in Short Studies on Great Subjects, p. 228 seq.]). The objections urged to this view by G. Baur (Das B. Hiob und Dante's Göttl Komödie, eine Parallele, in the Studd u Kritiken, 1856, Part. III.) are valid only in so far as they deny that the poem was intended for actual scenic representation, and thus justify the use of the word drama only in the wider sense, that of an epico-dramatic poem, of the same class with Dante's masterpiece.* In this more general sense, however, it deserves beyond question, and with scarcely less right than the Song of Solomon, to be called a drama; especially seeing that it introduces characters which are clearly defined and sharply discriminated, and consistently maintains their several individualities down to the final absolute adjudication by God. Even the attempt to exhibit in detail the principal scenes or acts of this epic or didactic religious drama, which Deliizsch has made (I., p. 15), cannot be condemned, so far at least as the principle is concerned. That writer, agreeing

[The same may be said of the criticisms of Renan, Hengstenberg and Merx, which otherwise are interesting and suggestive. "The Shemites," says the former, "were unacquainted with those species of poetry which are founded on the development of an action, the epopee, the drama, as well as with those forms of speculation which are founded on the experimental or rational method, philosophy, science. Their poetry is the canticle; their philosophy is the parable (Mashal). Their style lacks the period, as their thought lacks the syllogism. Enthusiasm, and reflection as well, express themselves with them in brief and vivid strokes, for which it is needless to seek anything analogous in the rhetorical arrangement of the Greeks and the Latins. The poem of Job is beyond contradiction the most ancient chef-d'œuvre of that rhetoric, as on the contrary the Koran is the specimen which stands nearest to us. We must abandon all comparison between forms of treatment and movement so far removed from our taste, and the solid and continuous texture of classic works. The action, the regular march of the thought, which are the life of Greek compositions, are here wanting entirely. But a vivacity of imagination, a force of concentrated passion, to which nothing can be compared, shoot forth, if I may say so, into a thousand scintillations, and make every line a discourse or a thesis (philosophème) complete in itself." Le Livre de Job, introductory Etude, p. 63 seq.]

substantially with the arrangement and partition of the poem, which we have given above, distinguishes eight parts, or acts of the dramatic action, as follows:

1. Chap. i.-iii.: The opening [Anknüpfung, which may also be rendered: The tying of the knot].

2. Chap. iv.-xiv.: The first course of the controversy; or the entanglement beginning. 3. Chap. xv.-xxi.: The second course of the controversy; or the entanglement increasing.

4. Chap. xxii.—xxvi.: The third course of the controversy; or the entanglement at its height.

5. Chap. xxvii.-xxxi.: The transition from the entanglement to the unravelment (from the déos to the 2vois): Job's monologues.

6. Chap. xxxii.-xxxvii.: The completion of the transition from the dois to the vois ; the discourses of Elihu.

7. Chap. xxxviii.-xlii. 6: The unravelment in the consciousness.

8. Chap. xlii. 7—17: The unravelment in outward reality.

In this enumeration of eight acts too little prominence is given to the threefold division on which the author unmistakably founds his arrangement of the book, and that intentionally, a division which is observable not only in the three movements of the colloquy between Job and his friends, but also in the threefold groups of discourses which follow, to wit, those of Job, of Elihu, and of Jehovah (on this triadic arrangement of the poem comp. Baur, l. c., p. 642 seq.). [“ The ruling number three is most visible in all its parts. (1) The whole book falls into three sections: Prologue, Poem, Epilogue. (2) The poem strictly, also into three parts: Job and the Friends, Elihu, God. (3) The discussion between Job and the friends again into three cycles. (4) Each cycle falls into three pairs: Eliphaz and Job, Bildad and Job, Zophar and Job; only in the last cycle Zophar fails to appear, and Job speaks twice. (5) Job sustains three temptations. (6) Elihu makes three speeches. (7) And, finally, very many of the speeches fall into three strophes." A. B. Davidson.-To which add that in the interim between the controversy with the friends, and the appearance of Elihu, Job utters three monologues]. For this reason it is more correct to regard the two epic narrative sections, the Prologue and Epilogue (1 and 8 according to Delitzsch), as standing outside of the partition of the poem proper, and forming, as it were, only its outer frames. We shall then have for the dramatic kernel of the whole (chap. iii.-xli.) six scenes or acts, the same number which Delitzsch has assumed for the Canticles (see Vol. X. of the Old Testament Series in this Comm'y., p. vi., of Introd. to Cant.). Comp. below, 11, the more detailed outline of the contents.

It must not of course be forgotten in this connection that our book is an essentially oriental poem, exhibiting only an incomplete and partial analogy to the various forms of poetic art produced by the classic nations of the West. Draw if you will a parallel, reaching to the minutest detail, between the most famous products of the ancient, and of the modern occidental drama; look on the idea of a hero struggling with the divine destiny as pre-eminently Eschylean or Sophoclean; compare the Prologue, with its predominance of narrative, and the presence of the dialogue as only a partial element, with the prologues of Euripides, which also form "epic introductions" to the accompanying dramas; be it that the description of the celestial council in this Prologue anticipates the famous "Prologue in Heaven" of Goethe's Faust ;* or be it that in another sense, in that namely which concerns the representation of spiritual conflicts and physical movements as themes of dramatic art, we should be justified in comparing it rather with the Iphigenia and Tasso of our greatest poet, and in saying with Delitzsch that, as in those poems, "the deficiency of external action is compensated by the richness and precision with which the characters are drawn:"-it must not be

* Comp. Ewald, p. 57: “Whether Goethe's Faust is to be compared with this book or not, does not need to be considered here; so much however is clear that without the Book of Job its brilliant opening scene would never have been what it is." See also Baur, l. c., p. 588 seq. [and for a comparison of the two poems, see Merx, xxxiii.-xxxiv. and Froude, Short Studies, p. 268 seq.]

forgotten after all that the book is an intellectual creation, the conception and the elaboration of which are thoroughly oriental; that it is the work of one of those profoundly religious sages, endowed with an imagination mighty and lofty in its scope, and with pre-eminent poetic genius, in which the whole East, whether Shemitic or Perso-Indian, so remarkably abounds. If accordingly we are to seek analogies with which to compare the poem as to its idea, character, and plan, we must put in the front Arabic and Hindû poems, such as on the one side the Consessus of the celebrated Makama-poet Hariri, already referred to, which at least exhibits a noteworthy parallel to the dialogue form of the middle divisions of our book (comp. Umbreit, p. XXXI.), and on the other side the ancient Hindû narrative of the sufferer Hariçtschandra, sorely tempted and tried by Çiva, which in its oldest and simplest, as yet undramatized form may be found in the Aitareya-Brahmana, VII. 18, and in the Bhagavata-Purana, IX. 7, 6, but which in its complete artistic development in the form of a religious drama is found only in much more recent sources, as e. g. in the Markandeya,—and Padma-Purâna (out of Sec. 8-10 of our chronology), as also in modern Hindû popular dramas, which are still regarded with favor.* It is indeed a nearer line of comparison to seek for parallels in the religious and poetic literature of the Old Testament people of God. And here we find on the one side Solomon's Song of Songs, which presents itself as a drama, artistically correct, elaborate, and harmoniously complete; on the other side the Solomonic Book of Proverbs, which presents itself as a pearl-like string of numerous ethical and religious apothegms, arranged in part at least in the form of a dramatic dialogue. As to its didactic contents and purpose, our book resembles more the latter of these writings, as to form and composition the former. Nevertheless the profound earnestness of its fundamental thought and of its didactic purpose necessitates important deviations in form and diction from the Song of Solomon, the only representative of a scriptural drama which can be considered along with it. For while the plan of the latter is melo-dramatic, and its principal affinities seem to be with the erotic lyrics of the classic nationalities, Job, especially in view of the narrative character of the prologue and epilogue, bears the stamp of an epic drama, and in its lyric element resembles most closely the elegiac poetry of the Greeks. Comp. the General Introduction to the Solomonic Literature of Wisdom, Vol. X. of this series, p. 12.

Furthermore in respect of its external poetic structure, and especially of the verse and strophe-structure of its discourses, the book may be most nearly compared with the Proverbs and the Song of Solomon. In these its poetic parts it consists throughout of short verses, mostly of two members; each member contains on an average not more than three to four words. This structure is carried out with the most rigid consistency and great skill through all the discourses, so that in many respects we are reminded of the five-feet iambic lines of the modern drama, and we can understand, or at all events we are inclined to excuse the remark which Jerome once made, although as to the main point it is certainly erroneous, that the book is written in versus hexametri (Præfat. in Job, T. IX., Opp. p. 1100; comp. my book on Jerome, p. 347).—It cannot escape the sharp observer, moreover, that a greater or less number of single verses everywhere group themselves together in strophes or stanzas, which coincide with the logical arrangement, or sub-divisions of the thought; and that this strophic division is carried out with tolerable regularity throughout all the discourses. Here and there this strophic structure is indicated even by external signs, e. g. in chap. iii., where the second and third strophes alike begin with eight stichs each, are severally introduced by

; in ch. xxx., where three strophes, of

; in chap. xxxvi. 22-33, where three

*See in Schlottmann, p. 18 seq. an analysis of the legend of Hariçtschandra, according to these more recent sources, and especially of a drama in the modern Hindû popular dialect, extracts from which have been furnished by Roberts (Oriental Illustrations, p. 257 seq.). According to this authority the fundamental idea common to both these productions, the Job-legend and this Hindû poem, seems to be that "the righteous man can obtain the victory with the powers of temptation which advance against him out of the unseen world of spirits." A still more particular point of correspondence lies in the fact that "all the temptations which befall Hariçtschandra aim at extorting from him the one falsehood that he had not promised the high reward for the offering presented to the gods by Viçmâmitra (Çiva);"—precisely as in the Book of Job Satan is ever on the watch for the one word, by which the sorely tried sufferer is to bid God farewell, and to reBounce His service. It is true that our Bible poem represents with incomparably greater depth and purity the inward truth of the sufferer triumphing over these temptations.