Satan and God alone know, his heart is perfect and upright too. We must also bear in mind that Job himself is perfectly certain of two facts: (1) God is, and is good; (2) his own innocence. But how to reconcile a righteous God's justice with a righteous Job's undeserved sufferings, this he does not see. In the ground of his heart he feels that there is a solution of this problem; he is trying hard to understand God's righteous rule; he clings to the belief that God is more just than His dealings with him suggest, but he candidly owns that he is floundering in deep waters and utterly in the dark.

Thus Job is a religious protest against the shallow traditional interpretation of Providence which has broken down in actual life-experience; a plea for a wider, deeper, truer solution. The old answer will not do, and may even drive a godly man to the denial of God's justice altogether. Job's own experience gives conventional orthodoxy the lie direct; rest in the Church dogma that all suffering is retributive he cannot and will not. He chooses the darkness of doubt rather than give the lie to his convictions and conscience. Indeed, he is very outspoken with God. He frankly spreads out all his doubts before God. He goes further. He openly questions God's justice in a way that shocks his three friends as rank blasphemy.

For Job the old conventional answer has gone clean overboard. But he does not go to the other extreme and say: "I do not believe the old answer; what is more, I do not think there is any answer at all; therefore I shall just cease troubling about it altogether." He will not be dishonest with God or himself by whittling down the new facts till they fit into the old conventional creed, but neither will he lightly deny God or surrender his faith in God's goodness. He stands by his own experience, but he stands also by his trust in God. Heart and head tug hard in opposite directions. The position for Job is

awful. Egypt with its flesh-pots of conventional orthodoxy he has left behind him; the Promised Land of peace and conviction he sees very dimly in sight with the eye of faith, but he cannot win through to it; the wilderness of doubt and uncertainty between the two is an awful place, yet make it his home he must or give the lie to life as he sees it and knows it.2

Does Job succeed in solving the great point at issue, or does he leave it a riddle? Is the whole poem one note of interrogation? Even if it were, its loud protest against the shallow current orthodoxy in itself marks a stage in the history of religious thought vastly in advance of anything that preceded it. The inspired author himself stresses this point. He shows, not only that doubting Job pleads as truly for God as his conventionally orthodox friends, but that he pleads ten times more truly for God. For he shows us God Himself siding, not with the facile advocates of a Tradition which has eyes and will not see, but wholeheartedly with the maligned sufferer who honestly pours out his soul and will not lie: "And the Lord said to Eliphaz, My wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath" (xlii. 7).

The protest in itself is of immense value. And is Job's patient endurance in his close walk with God, apart from all outward tokens of His favour, and

1

"Job is an untamed eagle, dashing himself against the bars of his cage ; he rages and flings himself against the moral iniquities of Providence; the Preacher (Eccles.) looks out with a lustreless eye on the glorious heavens, where, if he was free, he might soar, and only mourns and moralises " (Cheyne).

Job and Eccles. are the most intensely modern of Hebrew creations, they so typically anticipate the fearless honesty and sincerity which is the spirit of our own age. What J. M. Wilson said in his sermon to the British (scientific) Association of the scientific temper of our own day might be said of them. They "feel that truthfulness of mind is of vital importance not only to knowledge, but to character; that to fear investigation even in matters of faith, to conceal difficulties, to slur over inconsistencies, or to overstate convictions, to become, in short, an advocate instead of a truth-seeker, are faults which darken and degrade the soul."

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sustained only by the witness of his conscience-is this to count for little in estimating the positive value of Job? Unaided, unconsoled, merely "holding fast by truth and his great soul," Job, with all the odds against him, has won, and helps us to win, through. With all reverence be it said, yet say it we must, there is truer and more heroic faith in a Job who, face to face with such a problem and no light whatever to pierce the gloom of the grave, still clings to God and wins through, than in St. Paul's: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (cf. 2 Cor. 417; but see Note p. 288).

But the book of Job carries us much further than the protest, or the heroic faith, in the way of a solution. In the earlier chapters Job had spoken to God with fearless frankness, accused God of making Himself both accuser and judge in the case, with no umpire for Job to appeal to as against his Almighty Antagonist in the suit: "He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him and we should come together in judgment; neither is there any daysman (= umpire, R.V.) between us that might lay his hand. on us both. Let Him take His rod away from me, and let His terror not make me afraid. Then would I speak and not fear Him" (ix. 32 sqq.). Here Job openly arraigns God's justice, accuses Him of acting in this unequal controversy even as an Oriental despot whose almighty power overrides, without hope of redress, his weak subjects' claims, even though all the right is on the weaker side. Exactly in the same spirit, when Job's friends, voicing the view of divine retribution which was the orthodoxy of their day, outspokenly accuse him of being, as his afflictions prove, a great sinner, Job indignantly repudiates their insinuations and their charges. He goes further. He declares point-blank that, if they insist on calling this God's justice, he will say straight in God's face that He is an almighty tyrant, who unjustly destroys an innocent man, even though God

slay him for it: "Behold, He will slay me; I wait for Him" (Job xiii. 15 R.V.m.).1

In the supplement to the poem, God Himself takes up Job's challenge. Suddenly God, whom Job had alternately challenged and implored to appear, comes on the scene and answers him out of the whirlwind (xxxviii.-xli.). He shows Job that His Providence all along is right and man's indictment of it wrong. The line of argument is one that ever appealed to Nature-loving Jews. Nature is called as witness to speak for her Maker. Her evidence clearly proves that, while earthquake and storm may speak only of God's almighty power, yet every star and leaf and bird, summer and winter, rain and sunshine declare God's wisdom and goodness. As Elihu points out, in the heavens above as on the earth beneath everything has its season and function, everything moves according to settled rhythm, law, order. So in the moral realm. But both the natural and moral uni

See p. 229, n. sup., and Driver "Job" ad loc., and R. V. As Driver says: "The rendering, 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him' expresses a thought which is beautiful in itself, but inconsistent with the context, and with the frame of mind in which Job is here speaking.' Whatever the true rendering, whether it means 'He will slay me, I wait for Him' (i.e. for the deathblow), or 'He will slay me; I will not wait (i.e. nothing will stop me from vindicating myself before Him)'-the drift is the same, 'Though He slay me, nevertheless I will argue the case and vindicate my ways before Him.'"

As Montefiore, H.L., 426 (abridged) says, Jews ever saw in "Nature, animate and inanimate, the object of God's perpetual care, a witness to His glory and wisdom as its Creator and Sustainer." "Nature was no lifeless product turned out once and for all from the Craftsman's hands." The Jews might grudge other nations a share in their God, but to the God of Israel they ascribed "a very tender feeling towards beasts and birds, mountains and seas, trees and flowers," and without budging one inch from their firm stand on God's Transcendence, they saw God in Nature as clearly as the most pronounced Immanent-ist. Our scientific idea of "Laws of Nature" they certainly had not, but they instinctively felt something akin to it, seeing in Nature's order and rhythm an expression of God's changeless Will and goodness. "Nature 'red in tooth and claw,' 'shrieking against faith in a living God' these aspects never occurred to the Jews." They saw Nature through the poet's eye, lovingly and not critically.

Many consider the Elihu speeches (xxxii.-xxxvi.) later additions. Elihu is not named in the Prologue (ii. II), and in the Epilogue he is ignored again, though he deserves the same rebuke as the three friends of Job. Again, not a word does Job reply to his provocative speeches; and in xxxviii. I sq. God's reply, "Who is this that darkeneth counsel?" etc. is a direct answer to Job's "O that I had One to hear me," etc. of xxxi. 35, just before Elihu's speeches. Clearly the Elihu section is no organic part of Job.

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verses are far too large and complex for man to be able to gauge the depths of the Wisdom1 which directs it all. Man knows but one tiny corner of one small field in a vast Universe, and knows even this but imperfectly (xxxviii.). Surely the Creator and Preserver of such a cosmos as we see may safely be trusted to steer it morally right.2

The argument may seem to us inconclusive, more apt to awe and silence man than convince him. Our Hebrew poet, like Tennyson or Wordsworth (p. 15, n. sup.), judges otherwise. He represents Job as convinced by what he sees all around him of God's power, goodness, and wisdom, yes, and by the awe, wonder, and mystery of it all. God's majestic Wisdom is beyond puny man's ken, His ways inscrutable. If man cannot grasp God's operations in a Nature which stares him in the face, what folly and presumption to pretend to fathom His dealings in Providence! Here Job acquiesces wholeheartedly. So long as the three friends harped on the retributive or punitive aspect of his sufferings, he rebelled and called God's justice injustice; now that he is called upon, in the light of God's beneficent yet mysterious Providence in Nature, to trust Him though He seems to frown, he at once submits and trusts implicitly. Nay, he bows his head in remorse, shame, adoration. At last his heart has learnt to rest in God, even though he cannot attain unto Him with his understanding. Rapt in God as seen in His wondrous works, with heart all

1 Job xxviii. on the Wisdom of God (cf. Prov. viii.) is a very grand poem. No earthly treasures lie too deep for human industry,-note Job's fine description of ancient mining,-but Wisdom is with God alone. By Wisdom (cf. Logos) is meant the Reason originating and pervading Creation. This passage, again, looks like an interpolation; it is out of place just here.

Behemoth and Leviathan (xl. 15-xli. 34) are the hippopotamus and crocodile. Jastrow (Heb. and Bab. Tradition, p. 114 sq., abridged) seems right in seeing in xli. 1-8, a reference to the Tiamat monster of the Creationstory which Jehovah alone (cf. Marduk) was able to subdue. "The description of the monster strong of fangs, raising himself up to a great height, to whom iron is as straw, suggests in many ways Tiamat and her brood, with whom Yahweh alone can deal. He catches him as one hooks a fish, uses him as a toy, cf. Leviathan's appeal to the powerful Yahweh who has captured him, as Marduk caught Tiamat,-all this is reminiscent of the Tiamat Story."