Chapter II

THE SECOND CYCLE OF SPEECHES.
(CHAPS. XV.-XXI.)

The three narrow-minded but well-meaning friends have exhausted their arsenal of arguments. Each with his own favourite receipt has tried to cure Job of his miserable illusion, and failed. Now begins a new cycle of speeches, in which our sympathy is still more with Job than before. His replies to the three friends ought to have shown them the incompleteness of their argument and the necessity of discovering some way of reconciling the elements of truth on both sides. _They_ can teach him nothing, but the facts of spiritual experience which _he_ has expounded ought to have taught them much. But all that they have learned is the impossibility of bringing Job to self-humiliation by dwelling upon the Divine attributes. No doubt their excuse lies in the irreverence of their friend’s manner and expressions. It is a part of the tragedy of Job that the advice which was meant for practical sympathy only resulted in separating Job for a time both from God and from his friends. The narrow views of the latter drove Job to irreverence, and his irreverence deprived him of the lingering respect of his friends and seemed to himself at times to cut off the slender chance of a reconciliation with God. From this point onwards the friends cease to offer their supposed ‘Divine consolations’ (xv. 11)—such as the gracious purpose of God’s ways and the corrective object of affliction (v. 8-27)—and content themselves with frightening Job by lurid pictures of the wicked man’s fate, leading up, in the third cycle of speeches, to a direct accusation of Job as a wicked man himself. And yet, strange to say, as the tone of the friends becomes harsher and more cutting, Job meets their vituperation with growing calmness and dignity. Disappointed in his friends, he clings with convulsive energy to that never quite surrendered postulate of his consciousness a God who owns the moral claims of a creature on the Creator. Remarkable indeed is the first distinct expression of this faith of the heart, of which an antiquated orthodoxy sought to deprive him. He has just listened to the personalities, the cruel assumptions, and the shallow commonplaces of Eliphaz (who treats Job as an arrogant pretender and a self-convicted blaspheming sinner), and with a few words of utter contempt he turns his back on his ‘tormenting[27] comforters’ (xvi. 2). (Soon, however, he will appeal to them for sympathy; so strong is human nature! See xix. 21.) Left to his own melancholy thoughts, he repeats the sad details of his misery and of God’s hostility (and again we feel that the poet thinks of suffering humanity in general[28]), and reasserts his innocence in language afterwards used of the suffering Servant of Jehovah (xvi. 17; comp. Isaiah liii. 9). Then in the highest excitement he demands vengeance for his blood. But who is the avenger of blood but God (xix. 25; comp. Ps. ix. 12)—the very Foe who is bringing him to death? And hence the strange but welcome thought that behind the God of pitiless force and undiscriminating severity there must be a God who recognises and returns the love of His servants, or, in the fine words of the Korán, ‘that there is no refuge from God but unto Him.’[29] ‘Even now,’ as he lies on the rubbish-heap—

Even now, behold, my Witness is in heaven,
and he that vouches for me is on high.
My friends (have become) my scorners;
mine eye sheds tears unto God—
that he would right a man against God,
and a son of man against his friend (xvi. 20, 21).

It is a turning-point in the mental struggles of Job. He cannot indeed account for his sufferings, but he ceases to regard God as an unfeeling tyrant. He has a germ of faith in God’s goodwill towards him—only a germ, but we are sure, even without the close of the story, that it will grow up and bear the fruit of peace. And now, perhaps, we may qualify the reproach addressed above to Job’s friends. It is true that they have driven Job to irreverent speeches respecting God, but they have also made it possible for him to reach the intuition (which the prophetic Eliphaz has missed) of an affinity between the Divine nature and the human. In an earlier speech (ix. 32-35) he has already expressed a longing for an arbiter between himself and God. That longing is now beginning to be gratified by the certitude that, though the God in the world may be against him, the God in heaven is on his side. Not that even God can undo the past; Job requests no interference with the processes of nature. (Did the writer think that Job lived outside the sphere of the age of miracles?) All that he asks is a pledge from God, his Witness, to see his innocence recognised by God, his Persecutor (xvii. 3). So far we are listening to Job the individual. But immediately after we find the speaker exhibiting himself as the type of a class—the class or representative category of innocent sufferers. Job, then, has a dual aspect, like his God.

And he hath set me for a byword of peoples,
and I am one in whose face men spit.
At this the upright are appalled,
and the innocent stirs himself up against the impious;
but the righteous holds on his way,
and he who has clean hands waxes stronger and stronger
(xvii. 6, 7, 9).

Here it is difficult not to see that the circumstances of the poet’s age are reflected in his words. The whole Jewish nation became ‘a byword of peoples’ during the exile,[30] and the mutual sympathy of its members was continually taxed. It was a paradox which never lost its strangeness that a ‘Servant of Jehovah’ should be trampled upon by unbelievers, and the persecutor was rewarded by the silent indignation of all good Jews. That this is the right view is shown by the depression into which Job falls in vv. 11-16, in spite of the elevating passage quoted above.

Bildad’s speech, with its barbed allusions to Job’s sad history, had a twofold effect. First of all it raised the anguish of Job to its highest point, and, secondly, it threw the sufferer back on that great intuition, already reached by him, of a Divine Witness to his integrity in the heavens. It is a misfortune which can scarcely be appraised too highly that the text of the famous declaration in xix. 25-27 is so uncertain. ‘The embarrassment of the English translators,’ remarks Prof. Green, of Princeton,[31] ‘is shown by the unusual number of italic words, and these of no small importance to the meaning, which are heaped together in these verses.’ It is scarcely greater, however, than that of the ancient versions, and we can hardly doubt that the text used by the Septuagint translator was already at least as corrupt as that which has descended to us from the Massoretic critics.[32] This would the more easily be the case since, as Prof. Green says again, ‘Job is speaking under strong excitement and in the language of lofty poetry; he uses no superfluous words; he simply indicates his meaning in the most concise manner.’ Without now entering on a philological discussion, we have, I think, to choose between these alternatives, one of which involves emending the text, the other does not. Does Job simply repeat what he has said in xvi. 18, 19 (viz. that God will avenge his blood and make reparation, as it were, for his death by testifying to his innocence), without referring to any consequent pleasure of his own, or does he combine with this the delightful thought expressed in xiv. 13-15 of a conscious renewal of communion with God after death?[33] The context, it seems to me, is best satisfied by the former alternative. Job’s mind is at present occupied with the cruelty, not of God (as when he said, ‘O that thou wouldst appoint me a term and then remember me,’ xiv. 13), but of his friends. His starting-point is, ‘How long will ye (my friends) pain my soul?’ &c. (xix. 2.) We may admit that the best solution of Job’s problem would be ‘the beatific vision’ in some early and not clearly defined form of that deep idea; but if Job can say that he not merely dreams but _knows_ this (‘I _know_ that ... I shall see God,’ xix. 25, 26), the remainder of the colloquies ought surely to pursue a very different course; as a matter of fact, neither Job nor his friends, nor yet Jehovah Himself, refers to this supposed newly-won truth, and the only part of ‘Job’s deepest saying’ which the next speaker fastens upon (xx. 3) is the threatening conclusion (xix. 29). Ewald himself has drawn attention to this, without remarking its adverse bearing on his own interpretation.[34]

Here, side by side, are Dr. A. B. Davidson’s and Dr. W. H. Green’s translations of the received text of vv. 25-27, and Dr. Bickell’s version of his own emended text.

But I know that my redeemer liveth,
and in after time he shall stand upon the dust[35]
and after this my skin is destroyed
and without my flesh I shall see God:
whom I shall see for myself,
and mine eyes shall behold, and not another—
my reins consume within me!

And I know my redeemer liveth, and last on earth shall he arise; and after my skin, which has been destroyed thus, and out of my flesh [i.e. when my vital spirit shall be separated from my flesh] shall I see God....

Ich weiss, es lebt mein Retter,
Wird noch auf meinem Staub stehn;
Zuletzt wird Gott mein Zeuge,
Lässt meine Unschuld schauen,
Die ich allein jetzt schaun kann,
Mein Auge und kein andres.

Most critics are now agreed that the immediately preceding words (vv. 23, 24) are not an introduction, as if vv. 25-27 composed the rock inscription. Job first of all wishes what he knows to be impossible, and then announces a far better thing of which he is sure. His wish runs thus:

Would then that they were written down—
my words—in a book, and engraved
with a pen of iron, and with lead
cut out for a witness in the rock.[36]

But whatever view we take of the prospect which gladdened the mind of Job, his remaining speeches contain no further reference to it. Henceforth his thoughts appear to dwell less on his own condition, and more on the general question of God’s moral government, and even when the former is spoken of it is without the old bitterness. In his next speech, stirred up by the gross violence of Zophar, Job for the first time meets the assertions of the three friends in this cycle of argument, viz. that the wicked, at any rate, always get their deserts, and, according to Zophar, suddenly and overwhelmingly. He meets them by a direct negative, though in doing so he is as much perturbed as when he proclaimed his own innocence to God’s face. He is familiar now with the thought that the righteous are not always recompensed, but it fills him with horror to think that the Governor of the world even leaves the wicked in undeserved prosperity, as if, in the language of Eliphaz, He could not ‘judge through the thick clouds’ (xxii. 16).

Why do the wicked live on,
become old, yea, are mighty in power?
Their houses are safe, without fear,
neither is Eloah’s rod upon them.
They wear away their days in happiness,
and go down to Sheól in a moment (xxi. 7, 9, 13).

Footnote 27:

Miss E. Smith’s rendering, ‘irksome,’ Renan’s ‘insupportable,’ are not
definite enough. Job means that his would-be comforters do but
aggravate his unease.

Footnote 28:

Notice the expressions in xvi. 10, and comp. Ps. xxii. 7, 12, 13. (Ps.
xxii., like the Book of Job, has some features which belong to an
individual and some to a collection of sufferers.) Job would never
have spoken of his friends in the terms used in xvi. 10, 11.

Footnote 29:

Sur. ix. 119.

Footnote 30:

Comp. Ps. xxii. 6, Isa. xlix. 7, Joel ii. 17 (where we should render
‘make a byword upon them’).

Footnote 31:

_The Argument of the Book of Job_ (1881), p. 200.

Footnote 32:

Dr. Hermann Schultz is an unexceptionable witness, because his tastes
lead him more to Biblical and dogmatic theology than to minute textual
studies. He is convinced, he says, after each fresh examination, of
‘the baffling intricacy and obscurity and the probable corruption of
the text’ (_Alttestamentliche Theologie_, ed. 2 [1878], pp. 661-2).

Footnote 33:

I agree with Dr. W. H. Green that the third view, which ‘conceives Job
to be here looking forward, not to a future state, but to the
restoration of God’s favour and his own deliverance out of all his
troubles in the present life,’ is to be rejected. I do not follow him
in all his reasons, but these two are decisive. 1. Everywhere else Job
‘regards himself as on the verge of the grave.... Every earthly hope
is annulled; every temporal prospect has vanished. He invariably
repels the idea, whenever his friends present it to him, of any
improvement of his condition in this world as plainly impossible.’ 2.
‘If he here utters his expectation that God will interfere to reward
his piety in the present life, he completely abandons his own position
and adopts [that of the friends].’ (_The Argument of Job_, pp. 204-5).

Footnote 34:

Job’s vindication, thinks Ewald, would be incomplete if at least the
spirit of the dead man did not witness it.

Footnote 35:

The dust beneath which Job lies: comp. ‘ye that dwell in dust’ (Isa.
xxvi. 19).

Footnote 36:

On the text see Bickell, Merx, Hitzig; on the use of metal for public
notices see Chabas, quoted by Cook in _Speaker’s Comm._, _ad loc._