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to the Avor, the Speech of Elihu, xxxii., xxxvii.; 7th. The Solution in the Consciousness, xxxviii. 42; 8th. The Solution in outward Actuality, Job's Restoration to Prosperity, xlii. 7-17. This is Zöckler's. In the scheme of Delitzsch we have 1st. The Introduction; 2d. The Opening; 3d. The Entanglement; 4th. The Transition to the Unravelment; 5th. The Unravelment Divided into 6th. The Unravelment in the Consciousness; 7th. The Unravelment in outward Reality. There is no need of giving the Divisions of Umbreit, Ewald, etc. They are all marked by the same artificialness. They may be an assistance to the memory; but the reader feels that he is getting little or no help from them in regard to the governing idea of the Book, or the meaning of particular passages. The very fact of the differences existing between them detracts from their reliability. Thus regarded, they may be in the way of a true appreciation of the Book, whatever aid they may seem to give in its critical study; for almost any division furnishes some facility in that respect. If, however, the old author really had no such scheme mapped out in his own mind,-if, under the influence of some divine enthusiasm, he was simply giving vent, irregularly it may be, to thoughts of which his soul was full, -or was truthfully relating a story which he had heard, and which was firmly believed in his day, then all reasonings from such artistic divisions would be " a darkening counsel by words without knowledge," leading farther and farther from the actual fact, and from the divine thought. It all proceeds upon the fixed idea that the object of the Book is solely a debate, dramatically presented and dramatically concluded. There is a problem to be solved, a décis, or an entanglement first to be made, as intricate as possible, and then to be untied. For this purpose, God dramatically appears at the end, like a Deus ex machina, and closes the debate by deciding in favor of one of the parties, and against the others.

The Reality of the Theophany-Compared with other Theophanies in the Bible.

It is a clear answer to the above dramatic view, that the divine speech itself decides nothing, though Job may be regarded as afterwards commended for the humbling and penitence-producing effect it had upon him. We may say this without irreverence. That most sublime address hardly takes notice of any of the points about which they had been wrangling, whether regarded as matters of fact, or of abstract truth. It had a higher purpose, a grander lesson to teach, that lesson of unconditional submission, without the learning of which all solutions of problems, whether higher or lower, would be of no avail. God "makes His glory to pass before them," as He did before Moses when hidden in the cleft of the rock, or before Elijah, in Horeb, when "he wrapped his face in his mantle at the presence of the Lord." So Job fell on his face before God, whilst the others stood speechless in bewildered astonishment. To him the vision presented itself in its most interior aspect. He saw something in it beyond the eye of sense,- he heard something, as he himself seems to affirm, beyond "the hearing of the ear." They stood ivveoì, like Paul's companions on the journey to Damascus, ἀκούοντες μὲν θεωροῦντες δ' ού, hearing the outward sounds, distinguishing the words, it may be, in their lexical and logical sense, but having no spiritual perception. Perhaps they, too, had they fallen on their faces, might have had their inward eye opened, as Job's was, and with the same spiritual effect. But he alone "made confession unto righteousness;" therefore, he was justified and they were condemned. We are not attaching too much importance to this divine appearance in making it the central idea as well as the central fact, of the Book. Why should it be turned into a poetical drama, any more than other similar manifestations recorded in the Scriptures? There is no other part of the Bible in which the theophany so belongs to the very essence of the revelation. It is here the very lesson taught. It is something given for its own sake, and not merely as a scenic means to something else. It is that to which all the parts of the wondrous narrative are preparatory, and in which all its words, and all its ideas, all its arguments, true or false, have their culminating significance. Though formally solving no problems, it is not a mere barren display. What more instructive than such an announcement of a personal divine presence challenging to itself the homage of all rational beings? And such is the very idea of revelation. It is not primarily to teach us

doctrines, or to give us moral precepts, or to solve questions of ethical or even theological casuistry, but to bring nigh to us the divine power, and right, and vivid personality. All revelation, in short, is the revelation of the glory of God. To those who say that this seems a harsh and arbitrary teaching, the answer is, that it is most intimately connected with the loftiest human well-being. For men to see it is, in fact, their most satisfying knowledge, to confess and feel it is their highest blessedness.

SPEECH OF ELIHU.

The chasm its rejection would leave between the last words of Job, chap. xxix.-xxxi., and the Divine Appearance.

Had the Book of Job ended with the speech of Elihu, the reader would have had good grounds for regarding this portion as containing the solution of the problem of which so much has been said. Suffering, as intended for purification and discipline, and therefore consistent with the goodness of God, and a general righteousness in the sufferer; this is the main idea it enforces, and in a way to bring out some of the best practical ethics to be found in this or any other book. No part of Job is, in this respect, better adapted to the moralist or the preacher. Chapter xxxiii., especially, is a mine of precious instruction, clear and practical, full of consolations to good men amid all the trials of life, and of strength for the performance of its duties.* He comes the nearest, too, to the speech of Jehovah, so far as any approach can be made to it, in the descriptions of the divine power as exhibited in the greater natural phenomena. This seems to be done, too, for a similar purpose; to show that God is hindered by no physical fatality; every thing that takes place is by the divine decree, or the divine permission. "He hath done it," and therefore (not as a reason in itself, but as demanding the assent of the finite intelligence) is it holy, just and good. "Why dost thou strive with Him (^^"", litigate, reason, argue); for He giveth no account (. He maketh no answer) in respect to His matters" (xxxiii. 13). We have already dwelt on a few of the arguments for the genuineness of this portion of the Book, and especially on the difficulty that would be occasioned by having nothing between the noble vindication of Job xxix.xxxi. and the sudden mention of thef whirlwind out of which Jehovah speaks. But there are also internal evidences in its favor. As before said, it is remarkably characteristic, and, in fact, the very traits that are urged against it should commend themselves to those who claim so much critical insight. It is true that Elihu hesitates and repeats, but for this there is a fair and natural explanation. He gives us the impression of one personally diffident in the presence of the older and the wiser, so esteemed, yet conscious of having important and timely truth, the utterance of which he cannot suppress (xxxii. 18-20). He asks pardon of

The substance of the argument for and against the much controverted genuineness of the Elihu passage, is briefly yet clearly given by Rev. A. B. Davidson, in his excellent Commentary on Job, the first volume of which was published in 1862. After presenting the main objections in the text, with very satisfactory answers of his own, as well as from Stickel and others, he gives, in a note to page xli., some others which he justly styles "examples, less of reason than of critical petulance": "As the following, (1) That Elihu does not appear in the Prologue. But Job's three friends are not named as coming to debate with him; their object was condolence. (2) Elihu is not named in the Epilogue. But there was really nothing to say of him; so far as he agreed with Job he is commended in his commendation; so far as he agreed with the words of God, he has his reward in hearing his own sentiments repeated by the divine lips. The reference made even to the friends of Job, in the Epilogue, is but casual; for the drama concerns Job only, and takes end with him; and even Satan, who should have come before the curtain humbled and' prostrate, to receive the jeers of an assembled world, nowhere appears. (3) Job makes no answer to Elihu. And for the best of reasons: His heart is stricken by Elihu's words. (4) Elihu addresses Job by name, as the original disputants do not. But Elihu comes in as an arbiter, and must use names to distinguish between both parties whom he addresses; and God Himself adopts the same mode of addressing Job in opposition to the friends." The objection arising from Elihu's alleged Aramaisms, is well answered by Stickel (cited by Davidson), in saying: "that Elihu is himself an Aramean (ch. xxxii. 2, of the family of Ram, that is, Aram), and naturally spoke in that dialect." But these Aramaisms are greatly overstated. There is evidence in several places of other persons being present during parts, at least, of this long discussion-some to pity, some to mock Job, and some as silent spectators.

The article (the storm) is very natural, if we take it in connection with those strong premonitory symptoms of an approaching tempest that marked the close of Elihu's speech. In the other supposed connection it is far from being easy, though possibly allowable.

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ten, as Eliphaz had done in the beginning, but with a good grace, manifesting reverence for age, and respect for suffering, but still more respect for what he deems true and right. The higher criticism," as Davidson says, "cannot maintain its gravity over these peculiarities, and discharges at them a great amount of bad language." "His speeches," it says, are filled with gemachtes Pathos, and erfolglos Forcirtes," with other charges of a similar kind. Now, nothing is less reliable, or more uncertain, than this kind of jaunty remark in respect to an ancient composition. It is a pretentiousness worse than any that can be imputed to Elihu, which would pretend to judge thus of words, and style, and the genuineness of certain kinds of phraseology, in a literature affording such scanty means of comparison. Besides, it is very easy to imagine some critical theory of the Rationalists in which these very peculiarities, or similar ones, would probably be cited as all-important. Striking Arabian circumlocutions, they might be called, such as marked the old seances, and were regarded as a literary excellence, or marked Kohelethisms, or any thing else that might be thought to have a critical interest, or a bearing upon the question of some supposed place or time of authorship.

If Elihu is the last speaker, then the words, "who is this that darkens counsel," &c., might be regarded as spoken of him incidentally, or as first disposing of what had just preceded, although the address, generally, is to Job. There might be assigned reasons for this, consistent with the favorable view we have taken of him. The confusion of speech, before alluded to as occasioned by the appalling approach of the storm, and which, he himself confesses, would furnish a ground for it. These opening words resemble very much his own language, as though echoed back to him from the thunder-cloud: "Is it told Him that I am speaking? ( tense of description) we cannot order our speech in the presence of (?), or by reason of the darkness." Or, again, it might be called a "darkening of counsel," not in respect to its abstract truth, but when presented as a solution of the great problem, to the exclusion of other grounds in the proceedings of Him who, according to Elihu himself, "giveth no account of His ways.”

THE BOOK NOT A SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.

One might be led to think, at first view, that the great matter worthy of such a sublime Book as this, would be the solution of the problem of evil-how sin came into the world, and man is held accountable. It is the question of the ages, to the settling of which not even the Critical Philosophy makes an approach. There is, however, no allusion to it in the divine allocution, except as comprehended in that awful declaration of power and sovereignty, seeming to say, as the voice said to Moses: "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious— forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin-visiting iniquities unto the third and fourth generation, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments." Beyond this, no solution is offered, and Merx is right in saying, however irreverent it may seem, that if any clearing up of this dark problem had been the design of the Book, it must certainly be regarded as a failure;-that question stands just as it did before.

The Divine Address, and the modern Natural Theology. No argument from Design. It has been said that this speech of Jehovah contains an implied argument similar in substance to the one offered by our modern Natural Theology. So MERX, Das Gedicht von Hiob, pa. xxx.: "It is to exhibit the theology of nature, and that the rational aims visible therein furnish proof that God has like rational aims in all His government, moral as well as physical." With this he connects what Job says about Wisdom,* ch. xxviii., etc., as a preparatory or transition step in the Lösung or Solution of the Problem. The argument may be thus stated: The divine speech is an exhibition of God's wisdom in nature; therefore must we re

It is in respect to this that Job is assigned, by many commentators, to what they call the Chokma portion of the Bible, making it coeval with the Proverbs, or the time of Solomon, a little earlier or a little later. Delitzsch supposes the Wisdom of the Proverbs to be an advance development, and therefore later. Merx, on the other hand, regards the author of Job as "polemizing " against the Proverbs writer. But why not the other way, if there is a difference, the author of Prov. viii. "polemizing" against the older author of Job?

gard it as intended to show that He must be equally wise in His spiritual government. But that would not be a solution. It would be simply an assertion, on a grander scale, of what is assumed by all the speakers throughout the Book, all of whom seem to vie with each other in lauding the divine wisdom. Job especially dwells upon its greatness and unsearchableness (xxviii. 20, &c.), leaving to man, as his peculiar and highest wisdom, the duty of reverencing it (ver. 28), acknowledging it, and “ departing from evil." Architectural excellence is, indeed, a pervading idea of this divine address; but that power, almighty power, is the predominant one, is shown not only in the general style of its thunder tones, but also in its effect on Job, whose first words in reply are: "I know that Thou canst do all things," as before cited: Now I know it, whatever misgiving thought of some fatality I may have betrayed in former words now wholly renounced. It does not tell us in general that God acts solely from moral reasons; there is something in the language that gives the idea of artistic purposes regarded as having a value in themselves, aside from any moral or utilitarian considerations. He may make worlds, and lesser works, such as some of the great animals, for the glory and beauty of them, irrespective of any benefit* to man, or to other rational beings.

The Divine Ways Transcending and Ineffable. Eph. iii. 10; John ix. 3.

There may be æsthetic reasons. And then, again, there may be others altogether ineffable, whose explanations man could not receive if God, or super-human beings, should offer them. What right have we to apply the measure of our Ethics, or our Psychology, or our Ontology, to Him "whose ways are above our ways, and whose thinking is above our thinking, even as the heavens are high above the earth," that is, immeasurably and inconceivably beyond us? Sober Scripture sanctions such a representation. As before intimated, the designs of God, in His dealings with men, may be connected with effects to be produced in higher spheres (Eph. iii. 10, before cited); and so what He does, or permits to be done, to individuals may have relations, wise and just, extending far beyond them, whether in the present world or in any other. We are safe here in simply receiving the teaching of our Saviour (John ix. 2) when "the disciples asked him: Rabbi, who sinned, this man himself, or his parents, that he was born blind?" It was for the sin of neither, is the answer, "but that the works of God might be made manifest in him." Here is no throwing it upon nature, as the Rationalist would have done, but a positive assertion of a Divine purpose, and yet that that purpose had respect to something altogether separate from any punishment, discipline, or general wellbeing of the individual sufferer. “Who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say unto him who formed it, Why hast thou made me thus ?" Such is the idea that is brought to us by this voice from the thunder-cloud. It is that of a personal omnipotence unchallengeable, doing all things wisely, all things well, yet giving no account (x, answering not) to any who demand the reason of its ways. It is the first great truth for man to learn the predominant truth to take rank before all others—the fundamental truth, not for the infancy of the world merely, but most especially needed in this age of naturalism, of scientific boasting, of godless spiritualism.

THE TRUTHFULNESS OF THE NARRATIVE.

Is Job a truthful narrative, a legend with a dim nucleus of fact, or a pure fiction? In answer to the first of these questions, some would deem it sufficient to say, that the book is a poem on its very face. But this does not settle the matter. It may be so called unquestionably; and yet it may well be doubted whether, at the date of its authorship, even assigning it to the Solomonic period, there was that clear line of distinction between prose and poetry that afterwards existed. All high and animating thought has a tendency to measured language, to some kind of formal emphasis or repetition called parallelism, and which, in the Shemitic tongues, at least, is the beginning of rhythmical movement. It seems to be a demand of strong emotion, or of some strong interest in the thought expressed, whether devotional,

* The modern Natural Theology has very little like it in the Bible. It may be said, too, in general, to be out of the line of the ancient thinking, Pythagorean and Platonic, as well as Shemitic. Ideas, divine thoughts, as having in themselves an artistic or intellectual excellence, in a word, the glory of God, take precedence of mere utilitarian final causes.

prophetic, or sententious. There is reason, too, for thinking that the more animated colloquial style among the Hebrews and other Shemitic peoples had much of this parallelism or germinal poetry; as in the language of Abigail to David, 1 Sam. xxv. 28, 29, or in the pleadings of the widow of Tekoah, 2 Sam. xiv. 13, 15, and other places that might be cited, where just in proportion as the thought or feeling rises in earnestness, do the words also seem to rise into a species of parallelism, and take on more and more of a rhythmical aspect. Thus viewed, the style of the speeches in Job may be held to be the natural one for the expression of such thoughts, requiring neither study nor artifice. That was the way men talked when deeply earnest, or under the influence of strong emotion, or when the gravity of the ideas discussed seemed to demand something corresponding to it in the style of utterance, some measured cadence, be it of the simplest kind, that might mark them as grave and emphatic. The exact prose style, on the other hand, may have been, in fact, the more artificial, as carefully avoiding this kind of sententious, emotional utterance, so ill adapted to statistical narrative, though suiting well the thoughtful soliloquy, or some forms of animated colloquialism. There is, therefore, really nothing unnatural, nothing artificial-rather the reverse-in the fact that these speeches in Job have this easy rhythmical cadence, which the reader, if he have taste and feeling, must acknowledge to be in perfect harmony with the gravity of the subjects discussed. Far removed as we are from this Oriental style, we should have been a little surprised, nevertheless, had the lamentations of Job, and the responses of his friends, been carried on in the same kind of talk we have in the prologue and other narrative Scripture.*

*Instead of a sense of artificialness, it is truly with something like a feeling of ease and freedom that we emerge from the curt, statistical dialect into these more spontaneous utterances, in whatever parts of the Bible they may occur. As when Moses, as though weary of his lawgiving, breaks out into song:

Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak;

And hear, O Earth, the words of my mouth.

Equally unconscious of anything artificial was Isaiah when he opens his prophecy with similar language, or predicts that men

Shall beat their swords into ploughshares,

Their spears into pruning-hooks;

Or the sententious Solomon thus falling into measure in the utterance of his prudential wisdom:

My son, hear the instructions of thy father,

And forsake not the law of thy mother.

It is found everywhere in Scripture, and in the mouths of all classes, whatever may be their variety of character:

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So in Luke, Elizabeth, and Mary, and Simeon, break out spontaneously in this same rapt measured language; and in like manner does John in the Revelation rise into poetry, if we choose to give it that name. It is, however, nothing essentially different from what we have in the Psalms and Job, and even in Ecclesiastes. Those who made such utterances did not think they were speaking or writing poetry as a studied or artificial language. The state of soul, as caused by the moving circumstances, made it spontaneous; usage made it easy; it was a natural speaking—not an improvising as some might be inclined to call it; for that implies something like knack or skill, however acquired, and has, besides, but little of value or significance beyond the mere surprise it occasions. It need only be said, that we have something of an echo of this old style in the Koranic rhymes and cadences, though there the artifice is clearly visible.

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