Expositor's Bible: The Book of Job
by Robert A. Watson · English · Gutenberg #40470 · 679,846 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Expositor's Bible: The Book of Job
Author: Robert A. Watson
Release date: August 10, 2012 [eBook #40470]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE BOOK OF JOB ***
THE BOOK OF JOB.
BY
ROBERT A. WATSON, D.D.,
AUTHOR OF
"JUDGES AND RUTH," "GOSPELS OF YESTERDAY," ETC.
NEW YORK
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
LAFAYETTE PLACE
1900
CONTENTS.
_PROLOGUE._
I.
PAGE
THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK 3
II.
THE OPENING SCENE ON EARTH 19
III.
THE OPENING SCENE IN HEAVEN 33
IV.
THE SHADOW OF GOD'S HAND 50
V.
THE DILEMMA OF FAITH 67
_THE FIRST COLLOQUY._
VI.
THE CRY FROM THE DEPTH 85
VII.
THE THINGS ELIPHAZ HAD SEEN 99
VIII.
MEN FALSE: GOD OVERBEARING 116
IX.
VENTURESOME THEOLOGY 135
X.
THE THOUGHT OF A DAYSMAN 141
XI.
A FRESH ATTEMPT TO CONVICT 154
XII.
BEYOND FACT AND FEAR TO GOD 162
_THE SECOND COLLOQUY._
XIII.
THE TRADITION OF A PURE RACE 187
XIV.
"MY WITNESS IN HEAVEN" 201
XV.
A SCHEME OF WORLD-RULE 215
XVI.
"MY REDEEMER LIVETH" 222
XVII.
IGNORANT CRITICISM OF LIFE 243
XVIII.
ARE THE WAYS OF THE LORD EQUAL? 253
_THE THIRD COLLOQUY._
XIX.
DOGMATIC AND MORAL ERROR 269
XX.
WHERE IS ELOAH? 281
XXI.
THE DOMINION AND THE BRIGHTNESS 298
XXII.
THE OUTSKIRTS OF HIS WAYS 302
XXIII.
CHORAL INTERLUDE 313
XXIV.
AS A PRINCE BEFORE THE KING 320
_ELIHU INTERVENES._
XXV.
POST-EXILIC WISDOM 341
XXVI.
THE DIVINE PREROGATIVE 361
_THE VOICE FROM THE STORM._
XXVII.
"MUSIC IN THE BOUNDS OF LAW" 381
XXVIII.
THE RECONCILIATION 392
XXIX.
EPILOGUE 409
INDEX 413
PROLOGUE.
I.
_THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK._
The Book of Job is the first great poem of the soul in its mundane
conflict, facing the inexorable of sorrow, change, pain, and death,
and feeling within itself at one and the same time weakness and
energy, the hero and the serf, brilliant hopes, terrible fears. With
entire veracity and amazing force this book represents the
never-ending drama renewed in every generation and every genuine life.
It breaks upon us out of the old world and dim muffled centuries with
all the vigour of the modern soul and that religious impetuosity which
none but Hebrews seem fully to have known. Looking for precursors of
Job we find a seeming spiritual burden and intensity in the Accadian
psalms, their confessions and prayers; but if they prepared the way
for Hebrew psalmists and for the author of Job, it was not by awaking
the cardinal thoughts that make this book what it is, nor by supplying
an example of the dramatic order, the fine sincerity and abounding art
we find here welling up out of the desert. The Accadian psalms are
fragments of a polytheistic and ceremonial world; they spring from the
soil which Abraham abandoned that he might found a race of strong men
and strike out a new clear way of life. Exhibiting the fear,
superstition, and ignorance of our race, they fall away from
comparison with the marvellous later work and leave it unique among
the legacies of man's genius to man's need. Before it a few notes of
the awakening heart, athirst for God, were struck in those Chaldæan
entreaties, and more finely in Hebrew psalm and oracle: but after it
have come in rich multiplying succession the Lamentations of Jeremiah,
Ecclesiastes, the Apocalypse, the Confessions of Augustine, the Divina
Commedia, Hamlet, Paradise Regained, the Grace Abounding of Bunyan,
the Faust of Goethe and its progeny, Shelley's poems of revolt and
freedom, Sartor Resartus, Browning's Easter Day and Rabbi Ben Ezra,
Amiel's Journal, with many other writings, down to "Mark Rutherford"
and the "Story of an African Farm." The old tree has sent forth a
hundred shoots, and is still full of sap to our most modern sense. It
is a chief source of the world's penetrating and poignant literature.
But there is another view of the book. It may well be the despair of
those who desire above all things to separate letters from theology.
The surpassing genius of the writer is seen not in his fine calm of
assurance and self-possession, nor in the deft gathering and arranging
of beautiful images, but in his sense of elemental realities and the
daring with which he launches on a painful conflict. He is convinced
of Divine sovereignty, and yet has to seek room for faith in a world
shadowed and confused. He is a prophet in quest of an oracle, a poet,
a maker, striving to find where and how the man for whom he is
concerned shall sustain himself. And yet, with this paradox wrought
into its very substance, his work is richly fashioned, a type of the
highest literature, drawing upon every region natural and
supernatural, descending into the depths of human woe, rising to the
heights of the glory of God, never for one moment insensible to the
beauty and sublimity of the universe. It is literature with which
theology is so blended that none can say, Here is one, there the
other. The passion of that race which gave the world the idea of the
soul, which clung with growing zeal to the faith of the One Eternal
God as the fountain of life and equally of justice, this passion in
one of its rarest modes pours through the Book of Job like a torrent,
forcing its way towards the freedom of faith, the harmony of intuition
with the truth of things. The book is all theology, one may say, and
all humanity no less. Singularly liberal in spirit and awake to the
various elements of our life, it is moulded, notwithstanding its
passion, by the artist's pleasure in perfecting form, adding wealth of
allusion and ornament to strength of thought. The mind of the writer
has not hastened. He has taken long time to brood over his torment and
seek deliverance. The fire burns through the sculpture and carved
framework and painted windows of his art with no loss of heat. Yet, as
becomes a sacred book, all is sobered and restrained to the rhythmic
flow of dramatic evolution, and it is as if the eager soul had been
chastened, even in its fieriest endeavour, by the regular procession
of nature, sunrise and sunset, spring and harvest, and by the sense of
the Eternal One, Lord of light and darkness, life and death. Built
where, before it, building had never been reared in such firmness of
structure and glow of orderly art, with such design to shelter the
soul, the work is a fresh beginning in theology as well as literature,
and those who would separate the two must show us how to separate them
here, must explain why their union in this poem is to the present
moment so richly fruitful. An origin it stands by reason of its
subject no less than its power, sincerity, and freedom.
A phenomenon in Hebrew thought and faith--to what age does it belong?
No record or reminiscence of the author is left from which the least
hint of time may be gathered. He, who by his marvellous poem struck a
chord of thought deep and powerful enough to vibrate still and stir
the modern heart, is uncelebrated, nameless. A traveller, a master of
his country's language, and versed no less in foreign learning,
foremost of the men of his day whensoever it was, he passed away as a
shadow, though he left an imperishable monument. "Like a star of the
first magnitude," says Dr. Samuel Davidson, "the brilliant genius of
the writer of Job attracts the admiration of men as it points to the
Almighty Ruler chastening yet loving His people. Of one whose sublime
conceptions, (mounting the height where Jehovah is enthroned in light,
inaccessible to mortal eye), lift him far above his time and
people--who climbs the ladder of the Eternal, as if to open heaven--of
this giant philosopher and poet we long to know something, his
habitation, name, appearance. The very spot where his ashes rest we
desire to gaze upon. But in vain." Strange, do we say? And yet how
much of her great poet, Shakespeare, does England know? It is not
seldom the fate of those whose genius lifts them highest to be
unrecognised by their own time. As English history tells us more of
Leicester than of Shakespeare, so Hebrew history records by preference
the deeds of its great King Solomon. A greater than Solomon was in
Israel, and history knows him not. No prophet who followed him and
wrought sentences of his poem into lamentation or oracle, no
chronicler of the exile or the return, preserving the names and
lineage of the nobles of Israel, has mentioned him. Literary
distinction, the praise of service to his country's faith could not
have been in his mind. They did not exist. He was content to do his
work, and leave it to the world and to God.
And yet the man lives in his poem. We begin to hope that some
indication of the period and circumstances in which he wrote may be
found when we realise that here and there beneath the heat and
eloquence of his words may be heard those undertones of personal
desire and trust which once were the solemn music of a life. His own,
not his hero's, are the philosophy of the book, the earnest search for
God, the sublime despondency, the bitter anguish, and the prophetic
cry that breaks through the darkness. We can see that it is vain to go
back to Mosaic or pre-Mosaic times for life and thought and words like
his; at whatever time Job lived, the poet-biographer deals with the
perplexities of a more anxious world. In the imaginative light with
which he invests the past no distinct landmarks of time are to be
seen. The treatment is large, general, as if the burden of his subject
carried the writer not only into the great spaces of humanity, but
into a region where the temporal faded into insignificance as compared
with the spiritual. And yet, as through openings in a forest, we have
glimpses here and there, vaguely and momentarily showing what age it
was the author knew. The picture is mainly of timeless patriarchal
life; but, in the foreground or the background, objects and events are
sketched that help our inquiry. "His troops come together and cast up
their way against me." "From out of the populous city men groan, and
the soul of the wounded crieth out." "He looseth the bond of kings,
and bindeth their loins with a girdle; He leadeth priests away
spoiled, and overthroweth the mighty.... He increaseth the nations and
destroyeth them; He spreadeth the nations abroad and bringeth them
in." No quiet patriarchal life in a region sparsely peopled, where the
years went slow and placid, could have supplied these elements of the
picture. The writer has seen the woes of the great city in which the
tide of prosperity flows over the crushed and dying. He has seen, and,
indeed, we are almost sure has suffered in, some national disaster
like those to which he refers. A Hebrew, not of the age after the
return from exile,--for the style of his writing, partly through the
use of Arabic and Aramaic forms, has more of rude vigour and
spontaneity on the whole than fits so late a date,--he appears to have
felt all the sorrows of his people when the conquering armies of
Assyria or of Babylon overran their land.
The scheme of the book helps to fix the time of the composition. A
drama so elaborate could not have been produced until literature had
become an art. Such complexity of structure as we find in Psalm cxix.
shows that by the time of its composition much attention was paid to
form. It is no longer the pure lyric cry of the unlearned singer, but
the ode, extremely artificial notwithstanding its sincerity. The
comparatively late date of the Book of Job appears in the orderly
balanced plan, not indeed so laboured as the psalm referred to, but
certainly belonging to a literary age.
Again, a note of time has been found by comparing the contents of Job
with Proverbs, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, and other books. Proverbs, chaps.
iii. and viii., for example, may be contrasted with chap. xxviii. of
the Book of Job. Placing them together we can hardly escape the
conclusion that the one writer had been acquainted with the work of
the other. Now, in Proverbs it is taken for granted that wisdom may
easily be found: "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man
that getteth understanding.... Keep sound wisdom and discretion; so
shall they be life unto thy soul and grace to thy neck." The author of
the panegyric has no difficulty about the Divine rules of life. Again,
Proverbs viii. 15, 16: "By me kings reign, and princes decree justice.
By me princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth." In
Job xxviii., however, we find a different strain. There it is: "Where
shall wisdom be found?... It is hid from the eyes of all living, and
kept close from the fowls of the air;" and the conclusion is that
wisdom is with God, not with man. Of the two it seems clear that the
Book of Job is later. It is occupied with questions which make wisdom,
the interpretation of providence and the ordering of life, exceedingly
hard. The writer of Job, with the passages in Proverbs before him,
appears to have said to himself: Ah! it is easy to praise wisdom and
advise men to choose wisdom and walk in her ways. But to me the
secrets of existence are deep, the purposes of God unfathomable. He is
fain, therefore, to put into the mouth of Job the sorrowful cry,
"Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?
Man knoweth not the price thereof.... It cannot be gotten for gold."
Both in Proverbs and Job, indeed, the source of Hokhma or wisdom is
ascribed to the fear of Jehovah; but the whole contention in Job is
that man fails in the intellectual apprehension of the ways of God.
Referring the earlier portions of Proverbs to the post-Solomonic age
we should place the Book of Job at a later date.
It is not within our scope to consider here all the questions raised by
parallel passages and discuss the priority and originality in each case.
Some resemblances in Isaiah may, however, be briefly noticed, because we
seem on the whole to be led to the conclusion that the Book of Job was
written between the periods of the first and second series of Isaian
oracles. They are such as these. In Isaiah xix. 5, "The waters shall
fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and become
dry,"--referring to the Nile: parallel in Job xiv. 11, "As the waters
fail from the sea, and the river decayeth and drieth up,"--referring to
the passing of human life. In Isaiah xix. 13, "The princes of Zoan are
become fools, the princes of Noph are deceived; they have caused Egypt
to go astray,"--an oracle of specific application: parallel in Job xii.
24, "He taketh away the heart of the chiefs of the people of the earth,
and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way,"--a
description at large. In Isaiah xxviii. 29, "This also cometh forth from
Jehovah of Hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in
wisdom": parallel in Job xi. 5, 6, "Oh that God would speak, and open
His lips against thee; and that He would show thee the secrets of
wisdom, that it is manifold in effectual working!" The resemblance
between various parts of Job and "the writing of Hezekiah when he had
been sick and was recovered of his sickness," are sufficiently obvious,
but cannot be used in any argument of time. And on the whole, so far,
the generality and, in the last case, somewhat stiff elaboration of the
ideas in Job as compared with Isaiah are almost positive proof that
Isaiah went first. Passing now to the fortieth and subsequent chapters
of Isaiah we find many parallels and much general similarity to the
contents of our poem. In Job xxvi. 12, "He stirreth up the sea with His
power, and by His understanding He smiteth through Rahab": parallel in
Isaiah li. 9, 10, "Art thou not it that cut Rahab in pieces, that
pierced the dragon? Art thou not it which dried up the sea, the waters
of the great deep?" In Job ix. 8, "Which alone stretcheth out the
heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea": parallel in Isaiah xl.
22, "That stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them
out as a tent to dwell in." In these and other cases the resemblance is
clear, and on the whole the simplicity and apparent originality lie with
the Book of Job. Professor Davidson claims that Job, called by God "My
servant," resembles in many points the servant of Jehovah in Isaiah
liii., and the claim must be admitted. But on what ground Kuenen can
affirm that the writer of Job had the second portion of Isaiah before
him and painted his hero from it one fails to see. There are many
obvious differences.
It has now become almost clear that the book belongs either to the
period (favoured by Ewald, Renan, and others) immediately following
the captivity of the northern tribes, or to the time of the captivity
of Judah (fixed upon by Dr. A. B. Davidson, Professor Cheyne, and
others). We must still, however, seek further light by glancing at the
main problem of the book, which is to reconcile the justice of Divine
providence with the sufferings of the good, so that man may believe in
God even in sorest affliction. We must also consider the hint of time
to be found in the importance attached to personality, the feelings
and destiny of the individual and his claim on God.
Taking first the problem,--while it is stated in some of the psalms
and, indeed, is sure to have occurred to many a sufferer, for most
think themselves undeserving of great pain and affliction,--the
attempt to grapple with it is first made in Job. The Proverbs,
Deuteronomy, and the historical books take for granted that prosperity
follows religion and obedience to God, and that suffering is the
punishment of disobedience. The prophets also, though they have their
own view of national success, do not dispense with it as an evidence
of Divine favour. Cases no doubt were before the mind of inspired
writers which made any form of the theory difficult to hold. But these
were regarded as temporary and exceptional, if indeed they could not
be explained by the rule that God sends earthly prosperity to the
good, and suffering to the bad in the long run. To deny this and to
seek another rule was the distinction of the author of Job, his bold
and original adventure in theology. And the attempt was natural, one
may say necessary, at a time when the Hebrew states were suffering
from those shocks of foreign invasion which threw their society,
commerce, and politics into the direst confusion. The old ideas of
religion no longer sufficed. Overcome in war, driven out of their own
land, they needed a faith which could sustain and cheer them in
poverty and dispersion. A generation having no outlook beyond
captivity was under a curse from which penitence and renewed fidelity
could not secure deliverance. The assurance of God's friendship in
affliction had to be sought.
The importance attached to personality and the destiny of the
individual is on two sides a guide to the date of the book. In some of
the psalms, undoubtedly belonging to an earlier period, the personal
cry is heard. No longer content to be part and parcel of the class or
nation, the soul in these psalms asserts its direct claim on God for
light and comfort and help. And some of them, the thirteenth for
example, insist passionately on the right of a believing man to a
portion in Jehovah. Now in the dispersion of the northern tribes or
the capture of Jerusalem this personal question would be keenly
accentuated. Amidst the disasters of such a time those who are
faithful and pious suffer along with the rebellious and idolatrous.
Because they are faithful to God, virtuous and patriotic beyond the
rest, they may indeed have more affliction and loss to endure. The
psalmist among his own people, oppressed and cruelly wronged, has the
need of a personal hope forced upon him, and feels that he must be
able to say, "The Lord is _my_ shepherd." Yet he cannot entirely
separate himself from his people. When those of his own house and
kindred rise against him, still they too may claim Jehovah as their
God. But the homeless exile, deprived of all, a solitary wanderer on
the face of the earth, has need to seek more earnestly for the reason
of his state. The nation is broken up; and if he is to find refuge in
God, he must look for other hopes than hinge on national recovery. It
is the God of the whole earth he must now seek as his portion. A unit
not of Israel but of humanity, he must find a bridge over the deep
chasm that seems to separate his feeble life from the Almighty, a
chasm all the deeper that he has been plunged into sore trouble. He
must find assurance that the unit is not lost to God among the
multitudes, that the life broken and prostrate is neither forgotten
nor rejected by the Eternal King. And this precisely corresponds with
the temper of our book and the conception of God we find in it. A man
who has known Jehovah as the God of Israel seeks his justification,
cries for his individual right to Eloah, the Most High, the God of
universal nature and humanity and providence.
Now, it has been alleged that through the Book of Job there runs a
constant but covert reference to the troubles of the Jewish Church in
the Captivity, and especially that Job himself represents the
suffering flock of God. It is not proposed to give up entirely the
individual problem, but along with that, superseding that, the main
question of the poem is held to be why Judah should suffer so keenly
and lie on the _mezbele_ or ash-heap of exile. With all respect to
those who hold this theory one must say that it has no substantial
support; and, on the other hand, it seems incredible that a member of
the Southern Kingdom (if the writer belonged to it), expending so much
care and genius on the problem of his people's defeat and misery,
should have passed beyond his own kin for a hero, should have set
aside almost entirely the distinctive name Jehovah, should have
forgotten the ruined temple and the desolate city to which every Jew
looked back across the desert with brimming eyes, should have let
himself appear, even while he sought to reassure his compatriots in
their faith, as one who set no store by their cherished traditions,
their great names, their religious institutions, but as one whose
faith was purely natural like that of Edom. Among the good and true
men who, at the taking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, were left in
penury, childless and desolate, a poet of Judah would have found a
Jewish hero. To his drama what embellishment and pathos could have
been added by genius like our author's, if he had gone back on the
terrible siege and painted the Babylonian victors in their cruelty and
pride, the misery of the exiles in the land of idolatry. One cannot
help believing that to this writer Jerusalem was nothing, that he had
no interest in its temple, no love for its ornate religious services
and growing exclusiveness. The suggestion of Ewald may be accepted,
that he was a member of the Northern Kingdom driven from his home by
the overthrow of Samaria. Undeniable is the fact that his religion has
more sympathy with Teman than with Jerusalem as it was. If he belonged
to the north this seems to be explained. To seek help from the
priesthood and worship of the temple did not occur to him. Israel
broken up, he has to begin afresh. For it is with his own religious
trouble he is occupied; and the problem is universal.
Against the identification of Job with the servant of Jehovah in
Isaiah liii. there is one objection, and it is fatal. The author of
Job has no thought of the central idea in that passage--vicarious
suffering. New light would have been thrown on the whole subject if
one of the friends had been made to suggest the possibility that Job
was suffering for others, that the "chastisement of their peace" was
laid on him. Had the author lived after the return from captivity and
heard of this oracle, he would surely have wrought into his poem the
latest revelation of the Divine method in helping and redeeming men.
The distinction of the Book of Job we have seen to be that it offers a
new beginning in theology. And it does so not only because it shifts
faith in the Divine justice to a fresh basis, but also because it
ventures on a universalism for which indeed the Proverbs had made way,
which however stood in sharp contrast to the narrowness of the old state
religion. Already it was admitted that others than Hebrews might love
the truth, follow righteousness, and share the blessings of the
heavenly King. To that broader faith, enjoyed by the thinkers and
prophets of Israel, if not by the priests and people, the author of the
Book of Job added the boldness of a more liberal inspiration. He went
beyond the Hebrew family for his hero to make it clear that man, as man,
is in direct relation to God. The Psalms and the Book of Proverbs might
be read by Israelites and the belief still retained that God would
prosper Israel alone, at any rate in the end. Now, the man of Uz, the
Arabian sheikh, outside the sacred fraternity of the tribes, is
presented as a fearer of the true God--His trusted witness and servant.
With the freedom of a prophet bringing a new message of the brotherhood
of men our author points us beyond Israel to the desert oasis.
Yes: the creed of Hebraism had ceased to guide thought and lead the
soul to strength. The Hokhma literature of Proverbs, which had become
fashionable in Solomon's time, possessed no dogmatic vigour, fell
often to the level of moral platitude, as the same kind of literature
does with us, and had little help for the soul. The state religion, on
the other hand, both in the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, was
ritualistic, again like ours, clung to the old tribal notion, and
busied itself about the outward more than the inward, the sacrifices
rather than the heart, as Amos and Isaiah clearly indicate. Hokhma of
various kinds, plus energetic ritualism, was falling into practical
uselessness. Those who held the religion as a venerable inheritance
and national talisman did not base their action and hope on it out in
the world. They were beginning to say, "Who knoweth what is good for
man in this life--all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a
shadow? For who can tell a man what shall be after him under the
sun?" A new theology was certainly needed for the crisis of the time.
The author of the Book of Job found no school possessed of the secret
of strength. But he sought to God, and inspiration came to him. He
found himself in the desert like Elijah, like others long afterwards,
John the Baptist, and especially Saul of Tarsus, whose words we
remember, "Neither went I up to Jerusalem, ... but I went into
Arabia." There he met with a religion not confined by rigid ceremony
as that of the southern tribes, not idolatrous like that of the north,
a religion elementary indeed, but capable of development. And he
became its prophet. He would take the wide world into council. He
would hear Teman and Shuach and Naamah; he would also hear the voice
from the whirlwind, and the swelling sea, and the troubled nations,
and the eager soul. It was a daring dash beyond the ramparts.
Orthodoxy might stand aghast within its fortress. He might appear a
renegade in seeking tidings of God from the heathen, as one might now
who went from a Christian land to learn from the Brahman and the
Buddhist. But he would go nevertheless; and it was his wisdom. He
opened his mind to the sight of fact, and reported what he found, so
that theology might be corrected and made again a handmaid of faith.
He is one of those Scripture writers who vindicate the universality of
the Bible, who show it to be a unique foundation, and forbid the
theory of a closed record or dried-up spring, which is the error of
Bibliolatry. He is a man of his age and of the world, yet in
fellowship with the Eternal Mind.
An exile, let us suppose, of the Northern Kingdom, escaping with his
life from the sword of the Assyrian, the author of our book has taken
his way into the Arabian wilderness and there found the friendship of
some chief and a safe retreat among his people. The desert has become
familiar to him, the sandy wastes and vivid oases, the fierce storms
and affluent sunshine, the animal and vegetable life, the patriarchal
customs and legends of old times. He has travelled through Idumæa, and
seen the desert tombs, on to Midian and its lonely peaks. He has heard
the roll of the Great Sea on the sands of the Shefelah, and seen the
vast tide of the Nile flowing through the verdure of the Delta and
past the pyramids of Memphis. He has wandered through the cities of
Egypt and viewed their teeming life, turning to the use of imagination
and religion all he beheld. With a relish for his own language, yet
enriching it by the words and ideas of other lands, he has practised
himself in the writer's art, and at length, in some hour of burning
memory and revived experience, he has caught at the history of one
who, yonder in a valley of the eastern wilderness, knew the shocks of
time and pain though his heart was right with God; and in the heat of
his spirit the poet-exile makes the story of that life into a drama of
the trial of human faith,--his own endurance and vindication, his own
sorrow and hope.
II.
_THE OPENING SCENE ON EARTH._
CHAP. i. 1-5.
The land of Uz appears to have been a general name for the great
Syro-Arabian desert. It is described vaguely as lying "east of
Palestine and north of Edom," or as "corresponding to the _Arabia
Deserta_ of classical geography, at all events so much of it as lies
north of the 30th parallel of latitude." In Jer. xxv. 20, among those
to whom the wine-cup of fury is sent, are mentioned "all the mingled
people and all the kings of the land of Uz." But within this wide
region, extending from Damascus to Arabia, from Palestine to Chaldæa,
it seems possible to find a more definite locality for the
dwelling-place of Job. Eliphaz, one of his friends, belonged to Teman,
a district or city of Idumæa. In Lam. iv. 21, the writer, who may have
had the Book of Job before him, says, "Rejoice and be glad, O daughter
of Edom, that dwellest in the land of Uz"; a passage that seems to
indicate a habitable region, not remote from the gorges of Idumæa. It
is necessary also to fix on a district which lay in the way of the
caravans of Sheba and Tema, and was exposed to the attacks of lawless
bands of Chaldæans and Sabeans. At the same time there must have been
a considerable population, abundant pasturage for large flocks of
camels and sheep, and extensive tracts of arable land. Then, the
dwelling of Job lay near a city at the gate of which he sat with
other elders to administer justice. The attention paid to details by
the author of the book warrants us in expecting that all these
conditions may be satisfied.
A tradition which places the home of Job in the Hauran, the land of
Bashan of Scripture, some score of miles from the Sea of Galilee, has
been accepted by Delitzsch. A monastery, there, appears to have been
regarded from early Christian times as authentically connected with
the name of Job. But the tradition has little value in itself, and the
locality scarcely agrees in a single particular with the various
indications found in the course of the book. The Hauran does not
belong to the land of Uz. It was included in the territory of Israel.
Nor can it by any stretch of imagination be supposed to lie in the way
of wandering bands of Sabeans, whose home was in the centre of Arabia.
But the conditions are met--one has no hesitation in saying, fully
met--in a region hitherto unidentified with the dwelling-place of Job,
the valley or oasis of Jauf (Palgrave, _Djowf_), lying in the North
Arabian desert about two hundred miles almost due east from the modern
Maan and the ruins of Petra. Various interesting particulars regarding
this valley and its inhabitants are given by Mr. C. M. Doughty in his
"Travels in Arabia Deserta." But the best description is that by Mr.
Palgrave, who, under the guidance of Bedawin, visited the district in
1862. Travelling from Maan by way of the Wadi Sirhan, after a difficult
and dangerous journey of thirteen days, their track in the last stage
following "endless windings among low hills and stony ledges," brought
them to greener slopes and traces of tillage, and at length "entered a
long and narrow pass, whose precipitous banks shut in the view on
either side." After an hour of tedious marching in terrible heat,
turning a huge pile of crags, they looked down into the Jauf.
"A broad, deep valley, descending ledge after ledge till its innermost
depths are hidden from sight amid far-reaching shelves of reddish
rock, below everywhere studded with tufts of palm groves and
clustering fruit trees in dark green patches, down to the farthest end
of its windings; a large brown mass of irregular masonry crowning a
central hill; beyond, a tall and solitary tower overlooking the
opposite bank of the hollow, and farther down, small round turrets and
flat house-roofs, half buried amid the garden foliage, the whole
plunged in a perpendicular flood of light and heat; such was the first
aspect of the Djowf as we now approached it from the west." The
principal town bears the name of the district, and is composed of
eight villages, once distinct, which have in process of time coalesced
into one. The principal quarter includes the castle, and numbers about
four hundred houses. "The province is a large oval depression, of
sixty or seventy miles long by ten or twelve broad, lying between the
northern desert that separates it from Syria and Euphrates, and the
southern Nefood, or sandy waste." Its fertility is great and is aided
by irrigation, so that the dates and other fruits produced in the Jauf
are famed throughout Arabia. The people "occupy a half-way position
between Bedouins and the inhabitants of the cultivated districts."
Their number is reckoned at about forty thousand, and there can be no
question that the valley has been a seat of population from remote
antiquity. To the other points of identification may be added this,
that in the Wadi Sirhan, not far from the entrance to the Jauf, Mr.
Palgrave passed a poor settlement with the name Oweysit, or Owsit,
which at least suggests the εν χὡρα τη Αυσἱτιδι of the Septuagint, and
the Outz, or Uz, of our text. With population, an ancient city,
fertile fields and ample pasturage in the middle of the desert, the
nearest habitable region to Edom, in the way of caravans, generally
safe from predatory tribes, yet exposed to those from the east and
south that might make long expeditions under pressure of great need,
the valley of the Jauf appears to correspond in every important
particular with the dwelling-place of the man of Uz.
The question whether such a man as Job ever lived has been variously
answered, one Hebrew rabbi, for example, affirming that he was a mere
parable. But Ezekiel names him along with Noah and Daniel, James in
his epistle says, "Ye have heard of the patience of Job"; and the
opening words of this book, "There was a man in the land of Uz," are
distinctly historical. To know, therefore, that a region in the
Arabian desert corresponds so closely with the scene of Job's life is
to be reassured that a true history forms the basis of the poem. The
tradition with which the author began his work probably supplied the
name and dwelling-place of Job, his wealth, piety, and afflictions,
including the visit of his friends, and his restoration after sore
trial from the very gate of despair to faith and prosperity. The rest
comes from the genius of the author of the drama. This is a work of
imagination based on fact. And we do not proceed far till we find,
first ideal touches, then bold flights into a region never opened to
the gaze of mortal eye.
Job is described in the third verse as one of the Children of the East
or Bene-Kedem, a vague expression denoting the settled inhabitants of
the North Arabian desert, in contrast to the wandering Bedawin and the
Sabeans of the South. In Genesis and Judges they are mentioned along
with the Amalekites, to whom they were akin. But the name as used by the
Hebrews probably covered the inhabitants of a large district very little
known. Of the Bene-Kedem Job is described as the greatest. His riches
meant power, and in the course of the frequent alternations of life in
those regions one who had enjoyed unbroken prosperity for many years
would be regarded with veneration not only for his wealth, but for what
it signified--the constant favour of Heaven. He had his settlement near
the city, and was the acknowledged emeer of the valley, taking his place
at the gate as chief judge. How great a chief one might become who added
to his flocks and herds year by year and managed his affairs with
prudence we learn from the history of Abraham; and to the present day,
where the patriarchal mode of living and customs continue, as among the
Kurds of the Persian highland, examples of wealth in sheep and oxen,
camels and asses almost approaching that of Job are sometimes to be met
with. The numbers--seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five
hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred she-asses--are probably intended
simply to represent his greatness. Yet they are not beyond the range of
possibility.
The family of Job--his wife, seven sons, and three daughters--are
about him when the story begins, sharing his prosperity. In perfect
friendliness and idyllic joy the brothers and sisters spend their
lives, the shield of their father's care and religion defending them.
Each of the sons has a day on which he entertains the others, and at
the close of the circle of festivities, whether weekly or once a
year, there is a family sacrifice. The father is solicitous lest his
children, speaking or even thinking irreverently, may have dishonoured
God. For this reason he makes the periodic offering, from time to time
keeping on behalf of his household a day of atonement. The number of
the children is not necessarily ideal, nor is the round of festivals
and sacred observances. Yet the whole picture of happy family life and
unbroken joy begins to lift the narrative into an imaginative light.
So fine a union of youthful enjoyment and fatherly sympathy and
puritanism is seldom approached in this world. The poet has kept out
of his picture the shadows which must have lurked beneath the sunny
surface of life. It is not even suggested that the recurring
sacrifices were required. Job's thoughtfulness is precautionary: "It
may be that my sons have sinned, and renounced God in their hearts."
The children are dear to him, so dear that he would have nothing come
between them and the light of heaven.
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. But he never joined in it,
even by kissing his hand when the splendid lights of heaven moved with
seeming Divine majesty across the sky. For him there was but One God,
unseen yet ever present, to whom, as the Giver of all, he did not fail
to offer thanksgiving and prayer with deepening faith. In his worship
of this God the old order of sacrifice had its place, simple,
unceremonious. Head of the clan, he was the priest by natural right,
and offered sheep or bullock that there might be atonement, or
maintenance of fellowship with the Friendly Power who ruled the world.
His religion may be called a nature religion of the finest
type--reverence, faith, love, freedom. There is no formal doctrine
beyond what is implied in the names Eloah, the Lofty One, Shaddai,
Almighty, and in those simple customs of prayer, confession, and
sacrifice in which all believers agreed. Of the law of Moses, the
promises to Abraham, and those prophetical revelations by which the
covenant of God was assured to the Hebrew people Job knows nothing.
His is a real religion, capable of sustaining the soul of man in
righteousness, a religion that can save; but it is a religion learned
from the voices of earth and sky and sea, and from human experience
through the inspiration of the devout obedient heart. The author makes
no attempt to reproduce the beliefs of patriarchal times as described
in Genesis, but with a sincere and sympathetic touch he shows what a
fearer of God in the Arabian desert might be. Job is such a man as he
may have personally known.
In the region of Idumæa the faith of the Most High was held in
remarkable purity by learned men, who formed a religious caste or
school of wide reputation; and Teman, the home of Eliphaz, appears to
have been the centre of the cultus. "Is wisdom no more in Teman?"
cries Jeremiah. "Is counsel perished from the prudent? Is their wisdom
(hokhma) vanished?" And Obadiah makes a similar reference: "Shall I
not in that day, saith the Lord, destroy the wise men out of Edom, and
understanding out of the mount of Esau?" In Isaiah the darkened wisdom
of some time of trouble and perplexity is reflected in the "burden of
Dumah," that is, Idumæa: "One calleth unto me out of Seir," as if with
the hope of clearer light on Divine providence, "Watchman, what of the
night? Watchman, what of the night?" And the answer is an oracle in
irony, almost enigma: "The morning cometh, and also the night. If ye
will inquire, inquire; turn, come." Not for those who dwelt in
shadowed Dumah was the clear light of Hebrew prophecy. But the wisdom
or hokhma of Edom and its understanding were nevertheless of the kind
in Proverbs and elsewhere constantly associated with true religion and
represented as almost identical with it. And we may feel assured that
when the Book of Job was written there was good ground for ascribing
to sages of Teman and Uz an elevated faith.
For a Hebrew like the author of Job to lay aside for a time the thought
of his country's traditions, the law and the prophets, the covenant of
Sinai, the sanctuary, and the altar of witness, and return in writing
his poem to the primitive faith which his forefathers grasped when they
renounced the idolatry of Chaldæa was after all no grave abandonment of
privilege. The beliefs of Teman, sincerely held, were better than the
degenerate religion of Israel against which Amos testified. Had not that
prophet even pointed the way when he cried in Jehovah's name--"Seek not
Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba.... Seek Him
that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into
the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the
waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth;
Jehovah is His name"? Israel after apostasy may have needed to begin
afresh, and to seek on the basis of the primal faith a new atonement
with the Almighty. At all events there were many around, not less the
subjects of God and beloved by Him, who stood in doubt amidst the
troubles of life and the ruin of earthly hopes. Teman and Uz were in the
dominion of the heavenly King. To correct and confirm their faith would
be to help the faith of Israel also and give the true religion of God
fresh power against idolatry and superstition.
The book which returned thus to the religion of Teman found an
honourable place in the roll of sacred Scriptures. Although the canon
was fixed by Hebrews at a time when the narrowness of the post-exilic
age drew toward Pharisaism, and the law and the temple were regarded
with veneration far greater than in the time of Solomon, room was made
for this book of broad human sympathy and free faith. It is a mark at
once of the wisdom of the earlier rabbis and their judgment regarding
the essentials of religion. To Israel, as St. Paul afterwards said,
belonged "the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving
of the law, and the service of God, and the promises." But he too shows
the same disposition as the author of our poem to return on the
primitive and fundamental--the justification of Abraham by his faith,
the promise made to him, and the covenant that extended to his family:
"They which be of faith, the same are sons of Abraham"; "They which be
of faith are blessed with the faithful Abraham"; "Not through the law
was the promise to Abraham or to his seed"; "That the blessing of
Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ." A greater
than St. Paul has shown us how to use the Old Testament, and we have
perhaps misunderstood the intent with which our Lord carried the minds
of men back to Abraham and Moses and the prophets. He gave a religion to
the whole world. Was it not then the spiritual dignity, the religious
breadth of the Israelite fathers, their sublime certainty of God, their
glow and largeness of faith for which Christ went back to them? Did He
not for these find them preparers of His own way?
From the religion of Job we pass to consider his character described
in the words, "That man was perfect and upright, and one that feared
God, and eschewed evil." The use of four strong expressions,
cumulatively forming a picture of the highest possible worth and
piety, must be held to point to an ideal life. The epithet _perfect_
is applied to Noah, and once and again in the Psalms to the
disposition of the good. Generally, however, it refers rather to the
scheme or plan by which conduct is ordered than to the fulfilment in
actual life; and a suggestive parallel may be found in the
"perfection" or "entire sanctification" of modern dogma. The word
means _complete_, built up all round so that no gaps are to be seen in
the character. 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. Then is it meant that
he had no infirmity of will or soul, that in him for once humanity
stood absolutely free from defect? Scarcely. The perfect man in this
sense, with all moral excellences and without weakness, would as
little have served the purpose of the writer as one marred by any
gross or deforming fault. The course of the poem shows that Job was
not free from errors of temper and infirmities of will. He who is
proverbially known as the most patient failed in patience when the
bitter cup of reproach had to be drained. But undoubtedly the writer
exalts the virtue of his hero to the highest range, a plane above the
actual. In order to set the problem of the book in a clear light such
purity of soul and earnest dutifulness had to be assumed as would by
every reckoning deserve the rewards of God, the "Well done, good and
faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
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. Enjoying unbounded
respect in his own country, he is known beyond the desert to a circle
of friends who admire him as a man and honour him as a servant of God.
His steps are washed with butter, and the rock pours him out rivers of
oil. The lamp of God shines upon his head, and by His light he walks
through darkness. His root is spread out to the waters, and the dew
lies all night upon his branch.
Now let us judge this life from a point of view which the writer may
have taken, which at any rate it becomes us to take, with our
knowledge of what gives manhood its true dignity and perfectness.
Obedience to God, self-control and self-culture, the observance of
religious forms, brotherliness and compassion, uprightness and purity
of life, these are Job's excellences. But all circumstances are
favourable, his wealth makes beneficence easy and moves him to
gratitude. His natural disposition is towards piety and generosity; it
is pure joy to him to honour God and help his fellow-men. The life is
beautiful. But imagine it as the unclouded experience of years in a
world where so many are tried with suffering and bereavement, foiled
in their strenuous toil and disappointed in their dearest hopes, and
is it not evident that Job's would tend to become a kind of
dream-life, not deep and strong, but on the surface, a broad stream,
clear, glittering with the reflection of moon and stars or of the blue
heaven, but shallow, gathering no force, scarcely moving towards the
ocean? When a Psalmist says, "Thou hast set our iniquities before
Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy countenance. For all our
days are passed away in Thy wrath: we bring our years to an end as a
tale that is told," he depicts the common experience of men, a sad
experience, yet needful to the highest wisdom and the noblest faith.
No dreaming is there when the soul is met with sore rebuffs and made
aware of the profound abyss that lies beneath, when the limbs fail on
the steep hills of difficult duty. But a long succession of prosperous
years, immunity from disappointment, loss, and sorrow, lulls the
spirit to repose. Earnestness of heart is not called for, and the
will, however good, is never braced to endurance. Whether by subtle
intention or by an instinctive sense of fitness, the writer has
painted Job as one who with all his virtue and perfectness spent his
life as in a dream and needed to be awakened. He is a Pygmalion's
statue of flawless marble, the face divinely calm and not without a
trace of self-conscious remoteness from the suffering multitudes,
needing the hot blast of misfortune to bring it to life. Or, let us
say, he is a new type of humanity in paradise, an Adam enjoying a
Garden of Eden fenced in from every storm, as yet undiscovered by the
enemy. We are to see the problem of the primitive story of Genesis
revived and wrought out afresh, not on the old lines, but in a way
that makes it real to the race of suffering men. The dream-life of Job
in his time of prosperity corresponds closely with that ignorance of
good and evil which the first pair had in the garden eastward in Eden
while as yet the forbidden tree bore its fruit untouched, undesired,
in the midst of the greenery and flowers.
When did the man Job live? Far back in the patriarchal age, or but a
short time before the author of the book came upon his story and made it
immortal? We may incline to the later date, but it is of no importance.
For us the interest of the book is not antiquarian but humane, the
relation of pain and affliction to the character of man, the righteous
government of God. The life and experiences of Job are idealised so that
the question may be clearly understood; and the writer makes not the
slightest attempt to give his book the colour of remote antiquity.
But we cannot fail to be struck from the outset with the genius shown
in the choice of a life set in the Arabian desert. For breadth of
treatment, for picturesque and poetic effect, for the development of a
drama that was to exhibit the individual soul in its need of God, in
the shadow of deep trouble as well as the sunshine of success, the
scenery is strikingly adapted, far better than if it had been laid in
some village of Israel. Inspiration guided the writer's choice. The
desert alone gave scope for those splendid pictures of nature, those
noble visions of Divine Almightiness, and those sudden and tremendous
changes which make the movement impressive and sublime.
The modern analogue in literature is the philosophic novel. But Job is
far more intense, more operatic, as Ewald says, and the elements are
even simpler. Isolation is secured. Life is bared to its elements. The
personality is entangled in disaster with the least possible machinery
or incident. The dramatising altogether is singularly abstract. And
thus we are enabled to see, as it were, the very thought of the
author, lonely, resolute, appealing, under the widespread Arabian sky
and the Divine infinitude.
III.
_THE OPENING SCENE IN HEAVEN._
CHAP. i. 6-12.
With the presentation of the scene in heaven, the genius, the pious
daring, and fine moral insight of the writer at once appear--in one
word, his inspiration. From the first we feel a sure yet deeply
reverent touch, a spirit composed in its high resolve. The thinking is
keen, but entirely without strain. In no mere flash did the over-world
disclose itself and those decrees that shape man's destiny. There is
constructive imagination. Wherever the idea of the heavenly council
was found, whether in the vision Micaiah narrated to Jehoshaphat and
Ahab, or in the great vision of Isaiah, it certainly was not unsought.
Through the author's own study and art the inspiration came that made
the picture what it is. The calm sovereignty of God, not tyrannical
but most sympathetic, is presented with simple felicity. It was the
distinction of Hebrew prophets to speak of the Almighty with a
confidence which bordered on familiarity yet never lost the grace of
profound reverence; and here we find that trait of serious naïveté.
The writer ventures on the scene he paints with no consciousness of
daring nor the least air of difficult endeavour, but quietly, as one
who has the thought of the Divine government of human affairs
constantly before his mind and glories in the majestic wisdom of God
and His friendliness to men. In a single touch the King is shown, and
before Him the hierarchies and powers of the invisible world in their
responsibility to His rule. Centuries of religious culture are behind
the words, and also many years of private meditation and philosophic
thought. To this man, because he gave himself to the highest
discipline, revelations came, uplifting, broad, and deep.
In contrast to the Almighty we have the figure of the Adversary, or
Satan, depicted with sufficient clearness, notably coherent,
representing a phase of being not imaginary but actual. He is not, as
the Satan of later times came to be, the head of a kingdom peopled with
evil spirits, a nether world separated from the abode of the heavenly
angels by a broad, impassable gulf. He has no distinctive hideousness,
nor is he painted as in any sense independent, although the evil bent of
his nature is made plain, and he ventures to dispute the judgment of the
Most High. This conception of the Adversary need not be set in
opposition to those which afterwards appear in Scripture as if truth
must lie entirely there or here. But we cannot help contrasting the
Satan of the Book of Job with the grotesque, gigantic, awful, or
despicable fallen angels of the world's poetry. Not that the mark of
genius is wanting in these; but they reflect the powers of this world
and the accompaniments of malignant human despotism. The author of Job,
on the contrary, moved little by earthly state and grandeur, whether
good or evil, solely occupied with the Divine sovereignty, never dreams
of one who could maintain the slightest shadow of authority in
opposition to God. He cannot trifle with his idea of the Almighty in the
way of representing a rival to Him; nor can he degrade a subject so
serious as that of human faith and well-being by painting with any
touch of levity a superhuman adversary of men.
Dante in his _Inferno_ attempts the portraiture of the monarch of
hell:--
"That emperor who sways
The realm of sorrow, at mid-breast from the ice
Stood forth; and I in stature, am more like
A giant than the giants are to his arms....
... If he were beautiful
As he is hideous now, and yet did dare
To scowl upon his Maker, well from him
May all our misery flow."
The enormous size of this figure is matched by its hideousness; the
misery of the arch-fiend, for all its horror, is grotesque:
"At six eyes he wept; the tears
Adown three faces rolled in bloody foam."
Passing to Milton, we find sublimity in his pictures of the fallen
legions, and it culminates in the vision of their king:--
"Above them all the archangel; but his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion, to behold
The fellows of his crime, ...
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of heaven, and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt."
The picture is magnificent. It has, however, little justification from
Scripture. Even in the Book of Revelation we see a kind of contempt of
the Adversary where an angel from heaven with a great chain in his
hand lays hold on the dragon, that old serpent which is the devil, and
Satan, and binds him a thousand years. Milton has painted his Satan
largely, as not altogether unfit to take arms against the Omnipotent,
grown gigantic, even sublime, in the course of much theological
speculation that had its source far back in Chaldæan and Iranian
myths. Perhaps, too, the sympathies of the poet, playing about the
fortunes of fallen royalty, may have unconsciously coloured the vision
which he saw and drew with such marvellous power, dipping his pencil
"in the hues of earthquake and eclipse."
This splendid regal arch-fiend has no kinship with the Satan of the Book
of Job; and, on the other hand, the Mephistopheles of the "Faust,"
although bearing an outward resemblance to him, is, for a quite
different reason, essentially unlike. Obviously Goethe's picture of a
cynical devil gaily perverting and damning a human mind is based on the
Book of Job. The "Prologue in Heaven," in which he first appears, is an
imitation of the passage before us. But while the vulgarity and
insolence of Mephistopheles are in contrast to the demeanour of the
Adversary in presence of Jehovah, the real distinction lies in the kind
of power ascribed to the one and the other. Mephistopheles is a cunning
tempter. He receives permission to mislead if he can, and not only
places his victim in circumstances fitted to ruin his virtue, but plies
him with arguments intended to prove that evil is good, that to be pure
is to be a fool. No such power of evil suggestion is given to the
Adversary of Job. His action extends only to the outward events by which
the trial of faith is brought about. Cynical he is and bent on working
evil, but not by low cunning and sophistry. He has no access to the
mind. While it cannot be said that Goethe has descended beneath the
level of possibility, since a contemporary and friend of his own,
Schopenhauer, might almost have sat for the portrait of Mephistopheles,
the realism in Job befits the age of the writer and the serious purpose
he had in view. Faust is a work of genius and art, and succeeds in its
degree. The author of Job succeeds in a far higher sense, by the charm
of simple sincerity and the strength of Divine inspiration, keeping the
play of supernatural agency beyond human vision, making the Satan a mere
instrument of the Divine purpose, in no sense free or intellectually
powerful.
The scene opens with a gathering of the "sons of the Elohim" in
presence of their King. Professor Cheyne thinks that these are
"supernatural Titanic beings who had once been at strife with Jehovah,
but who now at stated times paid him their enforced homage"; and this
he illustrates by reference to Chap. xxi. 22 and Chap. xxv. 2. But the
question in the one passage, "Shall any teach God knowledge? seeing He
judgeth those that are high" [רמִימ, the heights of heaven,
highnesses], and the affirmation in the other, "He maketh peace in His
high places," can scarcely be held to prove the supposition. The
ordinary view that they are heavenly powers or angels, willing
servants not unwilling vassals of Jehovah, is probably correct. They
have come together at an appointed time to give account of their
doings and to receive commands, and among them the Satan or Adversary
presents himself, one distinguished from all the rest by the name he
bears and the character and function it implies. There is no hint that
he is out of place, that he has impudently forced his way into the
audience chamber. Rather does it appear that he, like the rest, has to
give his account. The question "Whence comest thou?" expresses no
rebuke. It is addressed to the Satan as to the others. We see,
therefore, that this "Adversary," to whomsoever he is opposed, is not
a being excluded from communication with God, engaged in a princely
revolt. When the reply is put into his mouth that he has been "going
to and fro in the earth, and pacing up and down in it," the impression
conveyed is that a certain task of observing men, perhaps watching for
their misdeeds, has been assumed by him. He appears a spirit of
restless and acute inquiry into men's lives and motives, with a keen
eye for the weaknesses of humanity and a fancy quick to imagine evil.
Evidently we have here a personification of the doubting,
misbelieving, misreading spirit which, in our day, we limit to men and
call pessimism. Now Koheleth gives so finished an expression to this
temper that we can hardly be wrong in going back some distance of time
for its growth; and the state of Israel before the northern captivity
was a soil in which every kind of bitter seed might spring up. The
author of Job may well have drawn from more than one cynic of his day
when he set his mocking figure in the blaze of the celestial court.
Satan is the pessimist. He exists, so far as his intent goes, to find
cause against man, and therefore, in effect, against God, as man's
Creator. A shrewd thinker is this Adversary, but narrowed to one line
and that singularly like some modern criticism of religion, the
resemblance holding in this that neither shows any feeling of
responsibility. The Satan sneers away faith and virtue; the modern
countenances both, and so has an excellent reason for pronouncing them
hollow; or he avoids both, and is sure there is nothing but emptiness
where he has not sought. Either way, all is _habēl habalim_--vanity of
vanities. And yet Satan is so held and governed by the Almighty that
he can only strike where permission is given. Evil, as represented by
him, is under the control of Divine wisdom and goodness. He appears as
one to whom the words of Christ "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God,
and Him only shalt thou serve," would bring home a sense neither of
duty nor privilege, but of a sheer necessity, to be contested to the
last. Nevertheless he is a vassal of the Almighty. Here the touch of
the author is firm and true.
So of pessimistic research and philosophy now. We have writers who
follow humanity in all its base movements and know nothing of its
highest. The research of Schopenhauer and even the psychology of
certain modern novelists are mischievous, depraving, for this reason,
if no other, that they evaporate the ideal. They promote generally
that diseased egotism to which judgment and aspiration are alike
unknown. Yet this spirit too serves where it has no dream of serving.
It provokes a healthy opposition, shows a hell from which men recoil,
and creates so deadly ennui that the least gleam of faith becomes
acceptable, and even Theosophy, because it speaks of life, secures the
craving mind. Moreover, the pessimist keeps the church a little
humble, somewhat awake to the error that may underlie its own glory
and the meanness that mingles too often with its piety. A result of
the freedom of the human mind to question and deny, pessimism has its
place in the scheme of things. Hostile and often railing, it is
detestable enough, but needs not alarm those who know that God takes
care of His world.
The challenge which begins the action of the drama--by whom is it
thrown out? By the Almighty. God sets before the Satan a good life:
"Hast thou considered My servant Job? that there is none like him in the
earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth
evil." The source of the whole movement, then, is a defiance of unbelief
by the Divine Friend of men and Lord of all. There is such a thing as
human virtue, and it is the glory of God to be served by it, to have His
power and divinity reflected in man's spiritual vigour and holiness.
Why does the Almighty throw out the challenge and not wait for Satan's
charge? Simply because the trial of virtue must begin with God. This is
the first step in a series of providential dealings fraught with the
most important results, and there is singular wisdom in attributing it
to God. Divine grace is to be seen thrusting back the chaotic falsehoods
that darken the world of thought. They exist; they are known to Him who
rules; and He does not leave humanity to contend with them unaided. In
their keenest trials the faithful are supported by His hand, assured of
victory while they fight His battles. Ignorant pride, like that of the
Adversary, is not slow to enter into debate even with the All-wise.
Satan has the question ready which implies a lie, for his is the voice
of that scepticism which knows no reverence. But the entire action of
the book is in the line of establishing faith and hope. The Adversary is
challenged to do his worst; and man, as God's champion, will have to do
his best,--the world and angels looking on.
And this thought of a Divine purpose to confound the falsehoods of
scepticism answers another inquiry which may readily occur. From the
first the Almighty knows and asserts the virtue of His servant,--that
he is one who fears God and eschews evil. But why, then, does He
condescend to ask of Satan, "Hast thou considered My servant Job?"
Since He has already searched the heart of Job and found it faithful,
He does not need for His own satisfaction to hear Satan's opinion. Nor
are we to suppose that the expression of this Adversary's doubt can
have any real importance. But if we take the Satan as representing all
those who depreciate faith and undermine virtue, the challenge is
explained. Satan is of no account in himself. He will go on cavilling
and suspecting. But for the sake of the race of men, its emancipation
from the miserable suspicions that prey on the heart, the question is
proposed. The drama has its prophetical design; it embodies a
revelation; and in this lies the value of all that is represented.
Satan, we shall find, disappears, and thereafter the human reason is
alone addressed, solely considered. We pass from scene to scene, from
controversy to controversy, and the great problem of man's virtue,
which also involves the honour of God Himself, is wrought out that our
despondency and fear may be cured; that we may never say with
Koheleth, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
To the question of the Almighty, Satan replies by another: "Doth Job
fear God for nought?" With a certain air of fairness he points to the
extraordinary felicity enjoyed by the man. "Hast Thou not made an
hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath, on
every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance
is increased in the land." It is a thought naturally arising in the
mind that very prosperous people have all on the side of their virtue,
and may be less pure and faithful than they seem. Satan adopts this
thought, which is not only blameless, but suggested by what we see of
God's government. He is base and captious in using it, and turns it
with a sneer. Yet on the surface he only hints that God should employ
His own test, and so vindicate His action in making this man so
prosperous. For why should Job show anything but gratitude towards God
when all is done for him that heart can desire? The favourites of
kings, indeed, who are loaded with titles and wealth, sometimes
despise their benefactors, and, being raised to high places, grow
ambitious of one still higher, that of royalty itself. The pampered
servant becomes an arrogant rival, a leader of revolt. Thus too great
bounty is often met with ingratitude. It does not, however, suit the
Adversary to suggest that pride and rebellion of this kind have begun
to show themselves in Job, or will show themselves. He has no ground
for such an accusation, no hope of proving it true. He confines
himself, therefore, to a simpler charge, and in making it implies that
he is only judging this man on general principles and pointing to what
is sure to happen in the case. Yes; he knows men. They are selfish at
bottom. Their religion is selfishness. The blameless human fear is
that much may be due to favourable position. The Satan is sure that
all is due to it.
Now, the singular thing here is the fact that the Adversary's
accusation turns on Job's enjoyment of that outward felicity which the
Hebrews were constantly desiring and hoping for as a reward of
obedience to God. The writer comes thus at once to show the peril of
the belief which had corrupted the popular religion of his time, which
may even have been his own error once, that abundant harvests, safety
from enemies, freedom from pestilence, such material prosperity as
many in Israel had before the great disasters, were to be regarded as
the evidence of accepted piety. Now that the crash has fallen and the
tribes are scattered, those left in Palestine and those carried into
exile alike sunk in poverty and trouble, the author is pointing out
what he himself has come to see, that Israel's conception of religion
had hitherto admitted and may even have gendered a terrible mistake.
Piety might be largely selfishness--was often mingled with it. The
message of the author to his countrymen and to the world is that a
nobler mind must replace the old desire for happiness and plenty, a
better faith the old trust that God would fill the hands that served
Him well. He teaches that, whatever may come, though trouble after
trouble may fall, the great true Friend is to be adored for what He
is, obeyed and loved though the way lies through storm and gloom.
Striking is the thought that, while the prophets Amos and Hosea were
fiercely or plaintively assailing the luxury of Israel and the lives
of the nobles, among those very men who excited their holy wrath may
have been the author of the Book of Job. Dr. Robertson Smith has shown
that from the "gala days" of Jeroboam II. to the fall of Samaria there
were only some thirty years. One who wrote after the Captivity as an
old man may therefore have been in the flush of youth when Amos
prophesied, may have been one of the rich Israelites who lay upon beds
of ivory and stretched themselves upon their couches, and ate lambs
out of the flock and calves out of the midst of the stall, for whose
gain the peasant and the slave were oppressed by stewards and
officers. He may have been one of those on whom the blindness of
prosperity had fallen so that the storm-cloud from the east with its
vivid lightning was not seen, who held it their safety to bring
sacrifices every morning and tithes every three days, to offer a
sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which was leavened, and proclaim
freewill offerings and publish them (Amos iv. 4, 5). The mere
possibility that the author of Job may have had this very time of
prosperity and religious security in his own past and heard Hosea's
trumpet blast of doom is very suggestive, for if so he has learned how
grandly right the prophets were as messengers of God. By the way of
personal sorrow and disaster he has passed to the better faith he
urges on the world. He sees what even the prophets did not fully
comprehend, that desolation might be gain, that in the most sterile
wilderness of life the purest light of religion might shine on the
soul, while the tongue was parched with fatal thirst and the eye
glazed with the film of death. The prophets looked always beyond the
shadows of disaster to a new and better day when the return of a
penitent people to Jehovah should be followed by a restoration of the
blessings they had forfeited--fruitful fields and vineyards, busy and
populous cities, a general distribution of comfort if not of wealth.
Even Amos and Hosea had no clear vision of the prophetic hope the
first exile was to yield out of its darkness to Israel and the world.
The question, then, "Doth Job fear God for nought?" sending a flash of
penetrating light back on Israel's history, and especially on the
glowing pictures of prosperity in Solomon's time, compelling all to look
to the foundation and motives of their faith, marks a most important era
in Hebrew thought. It is, we may say, the first note of a piercing
strain which thrills on to the present time. Taking rise here, the
spirit of inquiry and self-examination has already sifted religious
belief and separated much of the chaff from the wheat. Yet not all. The
comfort and hope of believers are not yet lifted above the reach of
Satan's javelin. While salvation is thought of mainly as self-enjoyment,
can we say that the purity of religion is assured? When happiness is
promised as the result of faith, whether happiness now, or hereafter in
heavenly glory, the whole fabric of religion is built on a foundation
insecure, because it may be apart from truth, holiness, and virtue. It
does not avail to say that holiness is happiness, and so introduce
personal craving under cover of the finest spiritual idea. To grant that
happiness is in any sense the distinctive issue of faith and
faithfulness, to keep happiness in view in submitting to the restraints
and bearing the burdens of religion, is to build the highest and best on
the shifting sand of personal taste and craving. Make happiness that for
which the believer is to endure and strive, allow the sense of personal
comfort and immunity from change to enter into his picture of the reward
he may expect, and the question returns, Doth this man serve God for
nought? Life is not happiness, and the gift of God is everlasting life.
Only when we keep to this supreme word in the teaching of Christ, and
seek the fulness and liberty and purity of life, apart from that
happiness which is at bottom the satisfaction of predominant desires,
shall we escape from the constantly recurring doubt that threatens to
undermine and destroy our faith.
If we look further, we find that the very error which has so long
impoverished religion prevails in philanthropy and politics, prevails
there at the present time to an alarming extent. The favourite aim of
social meliorists is to secure happiness for all. While life is the
main thing, everywhere and always, strength and breadth and nobleness
of life, their dream is to make the warfare and service of man upon
the earth so easy that he shall have no need for earnest personal
endeavour. He is to serve for happiness, and have no service to do
that may even in the time of his probation interfere with happiness.
The pity bestowed on those who toil and endure in great cities and on
bleak hillsides is that they fail of happiness. Persons who have no
conception that vigour and endurance are spiritually profitable, and
others who once knew but have forgotten the benefits of vigour and the
gains of endurance, would undo the very order and discipline of God.
Are human beings to be encouraged to seek happiness, taught to doubt
God because they have little pleasure, given to understand that those
who enjoy have the best of the universe, and that they must be lifted
up to this level or lose all? Then the sweeping condemnation will hang
over the world that it is following a new god and has said farewell to
the stern Lord of Providence.
Much may be justly said in condemnation of the jealous, critical
spirit of the Adversary. Yet it remains true that his criticism
expresses what would be a fair charge against men who passed this
stage of existence without full trial. And the Almighty is represented
as confirming this when He puts Job into the hands of Satan. He has
challenged the Adversary, opening the question of man's fidelity and
sincerity. He knows what will result. It is not the will of some
eternal Satan that is the motive, but the will of God. The Adversary's
scornful question is woven into God's wise ordinance, and made to
subserve a purpose which completely transcends the base hope involved
in it. The life of Job has not yet had the difficult and strenuous
probation necessary to assured faith, or rather to the consciousness
of a faith immovably rooted in God. It would be utterly inconsistent
with the Divine wisdom to suppose God led on and beguiled by the sneer
of His own creature to do what was needless or unfair, or indeed in
any sense opposed to His own plan for His creation. And we shall find
that throughout the book it is assumed by Job, implied by the author,
that what is done is really the doing of God Himself. The Satan of
this Divine poem remains altogether subsidiary as an agent. He may
propose, but God disposes. He may pride himself on the keenness of his
intellect; but wisdom, compared to which his subtlety is mere
blundering, orders the movement of events for good and holy ends.
The Adversary makes his proposal: "Put forth now Thine hand, and touch
all that he hath, and he will bid Thee farewell." He does not propose to
make use of sensual temptation. The only method of trial he ventures to
suggest is deprivation of the prosperity for which he believes Job has
served God. He takes on him to indicate what the Almighty may do,
acknowledging that the Divine power, and not his, must bring into Job's
life those losses and troubles that are to test his faith.
After all some may ask, Is not Satan endeavouring to tempt the Almighty?
And if it were true that the prosperous condition of Job, or any man,
implies God's entire satisfaction with his faith and dutifulness and
with his character as a man, if, further, it must be taken as true that
sorrow and loss are evil, then this proposal of the Satan is a
temptation. It is not so in reality, for "God cannot be tempted to
evil." No creature could approach His holiness with a temptation. But
Satan's intention is to move God. He considers success and happiness to
be intrinsically good, and poverty and bereavement to be intrinsically
evil. That is to say, we have here the spirit of unfaith endeavouring to
destroy God as well as man. For the sake of truth professedly, for his
own pride of will really, he would arrest the righteousness and grace of
the Divine. He would unmake God and orphan man. The scheme is futile of
course. God can allow his proposal, and be no less the Infinitely
generous, wise, and true. The Satan shall have his desire; but not a
shadow shall fall on the ineffable glory.
At this point, however, we must pause. The question that has just
arisen can only be answered after a survey of human life in its
relation to God, and especially after an examination of the meaning of
the term _evil_ as applied to our experiences. We have certain clear
principles to begin with: that "God cannot be tempted with evil, and
He Himself tempteth no man"; that all God does must show not less
beneficence, not less love, but more as the days go by. These
principles will have to be vindicated when we proceed to consider the
losses, what may be called the disasters that follow each other in
quick succession and threaten to crush the life they try.
Meanwhile, casting a glance at those happy dwellings in the land of Uz,
we see all going on as before, no mind darkened by the shadow that is
gathering, or in the least aware of the controversy in heaven so full of
moment to the family circle. The pathetic ignorance, the blessed
ignorance in which a man may live hangs upon the picture. The cheerful
bustle of the homestead goes on, the feasts and sacrifices, diligent
labour rewarded with the produce of fields, the wine and oil of
vineyards and olive gardens, fleeces of the flock and milk of the kine.
IV.
_THE SHADOW OF GOD'S HAND._
CHAP. i. 13-22.
Coming now to the sudden and terrible changes which are to prove the
faithfulness of the servant of God, we must not fail to observe that
in the development of the drama the trial of Job personally is the
sole consideration. No account is taken of the character of those who,
being connected with his fortunes and happiness, are now to be swept
away that he may suffer. To trace their history and vindicate Divine
righteousness in reference to each of them is not within the scope of
the poem. A typical man is taken as hero, and we may say the
discussion covers the fate of all who suffer, although attention is
fixed on him alone.
The writer is dealing with a story of patriarchal life, and himself is
touched with the Semitic way of thinking. A certain disregard of the
subordinate human characters must not be reckoned strange. His
thoughts, far-reaching as they are, run in a channel very different
from ours. The world of his book is that of family and clan ideas. The
author saw more than any man of his time; but he could not see all
that engages modern speculation. Besides, the glory of God is the
dominant idea of the poem; not men's right to joy, or peace, or even
life; but God's right to be wholly Himself and greatly true. In the
light of this high thought we must be content to have the story of one
soul traced with such fulness as might be compassed, the others left
practically untouched. If the sufferings of the man whom God approves
can be explained in harmony with the glory of Divine justice, then
the sudden calamities that fall upon his servants and children will
also be explained. For, although death is in a sense an ultimate
thing, and loss and affliction, however great, do not mean so much as
death; yet, on the other hand, to die is the common lot, and the quick
stroke appears merciful in comparison with Job's dreadful experiences.
Those who are killed by lightning or by the sword do but swiftly and
without protracted pain fall into the hands of God. We need not
conclude that the writer means us to regard the sons and daughters of
Job and his servants as mere chattels, like the camels and sheep,
although the people of the desert would have so regarded them. But the
main question presses; the range of the discussion must be limited;
and the tradition which forms the basis of the poem is followed by the
author whenever it supplies the elements of his inquiry.
We have entirely refused the supposition that the Almighty forgot His
righteousness and grace in putting the wealth and happiness of Job
into the hands of Satan. The trials we now see falling one after the
other are not sent because the Adversary has suggested them, but
because it is right and wise, for the glory of God and for the
perfecting of faith, that Job should suffer them. What is God's doing
is not in this case nor in any case evil. He cannot wrong His servant
that glory may come to Himself.
And just here arises a problem which enters into all religious
thought, the wrong solution of which depraves many a philosophy, while
the right understanding of it sheds a flood of light on our life in
this world. A thousand tongues, Christian, non-Christian, and
neo-Christian, affirm that life is for enjoyment. What gives enjoyment
is declared to be good, what gives most enjoyment is reckoned best,
and all that makes for pain and suffering is held to be evil. It is
allowed that pain endured now may bring pleasure hereafter, and that
for the sake of future gain a little discomfort may be chosen. But it
is evil nevertheless. One doing his best for men would be expected to
give them happiness at once and, throughout life, as much of it as
possible. If he inflicted pain in order to enhance pleasure by and by,
he would have to do so within the strictest limits. Whatever reduces
the strength of the body, the capacity of the body for enjoyment and
the delight of the mind accompanying the body's vigour, is declared
bad, and to do anything which has this effect is to do evil or wrong.
Such is the ethic of the philosophy finally and powerfully stated by
Mr. Spencer. It has penetrated as widely as he could wish; it
underlies volumes of Christian sermons and semi-Christian schemes. If
it be true, then the Almighty of the Book of Job, bringing affliction,
sorrow, and pain upon His servant, is a cruel enemy of man, to be
hated, not revered. This matter needs to be considered at some length.
The notion that pain is evil, that he who suffers is placed at moral
disadvantage, appears very plainly in the old belief that those
conditions and surroundings of our life which minister to enjoyment
are the proofs of the goodness of God on which reliance must be placed
so far as nature and providence testify of Him. Pain and sorrow, it
was held, need to be accounted for by human sin or otherwise; but we
know that God is good because there is enjoyment in the life He gives.
Paley, for example, says that the proof of the Divine _goodness_ rests
upon contrivances everywhere to be seen for the purpose of giving us
pleasure. He tells us that, when God created the human species,
"either He wished them happiness, or He wished them misery, or He was
indifferent and unconcerned about either"; and he goes on to prove
that it must be our happiness He desired, for, otherwise, wishing our
misery, "He might have made everything we tasted, bitter; everything
we saw, loathsome; everything we touched, a sting; every smell, a
stench; and every sound, a discord:" while, if He had been indifferent
about our happiness we must impute all enjoyment we have "to our good
fortune," that is, to bare chance, an impossible supposition. Paley's
further survey of life leads to the conclusion that God has it as His
chief aim to make His creatures happy and, in the circumstances, does
the best He can for them, better far than they are commonly disposed
to think. The agreement of this position with that of Spencer lies in
the presupposition that goodness can be proved only by arrangements
for giving pleasure. If God is good for this reason, what follows when
He appoints pain, especially pain that brings no enjoyment in the long
run? Either He is not altogether "good" or He is not all-powerful.
The author of the Book of Job does not enter into the problem of pain
and affliction with the same deliberate attempt to exhaust the subject
as Paley has made; but he has the problem before him. And in
considering the trial of Job as an example of the suffering and sorrow
of man in this world of change, we find a strong ray of light thrown
upon the darkness. The picture is a Rembrandt; and where the radiance
falls all is sharp and bright. But the shadows are deep; and we must
seek, if possible, to make out what lies in those shadows. We shall
not understand the Book of Job, nor form a just opinion of the
author's inspiration, nor shall we understand the Bible as a whole,
unless we reach a point of view clear of the mistakes that stultify
the reasoning of Paley and plunge the mind of Spencer, who refuses to
be called a materialist, into the utter darkness of materialism.
* * * * *
Now, as to enjoyment, we have the capacity for it, and it flows to us
from many external objects as well as from the operation of our own
minds and the putting forth of energy. It is in the scheme of things
ordained by God that His creatures shall enjoy. On the other hand,
trouble, sorrow, loss, bodily and mental pain, are also in the scheme
of things. They are provided for in numberless ways--in the play of
natural forces causing injuries, dangers from which we cannot escape;
in the limitations of our power; in the antagonisms and
disappointments of existence; in disease and death. They are provided
for by the very laws that bring pleasure, made inevitable under the
same Divine ordinance. Some say it detracts from the goodness of God
to admit that as He appoints means of enjoyment so He also provides
for pain and sorrow and makes these inseparable from life. And this
opinion runs into the extreme dogmatic assertion that "good," by which
we are to understand _happiness_,
"Shall fall
At last far off, at last to all."
Many hold this to be necessary to the vindication of God's goodness.
But the source of the whole confusion lies here, that we prejudge the
question by calling pain evil. The light-giving truth for modern
perplexity is that pain and loss are not _evil_, are in no sense
_evil_.
Because we desire happiness and dislike pain, we must not conclude
that pain is bad and that, when any one suffers, it is because he or
another has done wrong. There is the mistake that vitiates theological
thought, making men run to the extreme either of denying God
altogether because there is suffering in the world, or of framing a
rose-water eschatology. Pain is one thing, moral evil is quite another
thing. He who suffers is not necessarily a wrong-doer; and when,
through the laws of nature, God inflicts pain, there is no evil nor
anything approaching wrong. In Scripture, indeed, pain and evil are
apparently identified. "Shall we receive good at the hands of God, and
shall we not receive evil?" "Is there evil in the city, and the Lord
hath not done it?" "Thus saith the Lord, Behold I will bring upon
Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, all the evil that I
have pronounced against them." In these and many other passages the
very thing seems to be meant which has just been denied, for evil and
suffering appear to be made identical. But human language is not a
perfect instrument of thought, any more than thought is a perfect
channel of truth. One word has to do duty in different senses. Moral
evil, wrongness, on the one hand; bodily pain, the misery of loss and
defeat, on the other hand--both are represented by one Hebrew word
[רַע--root meaning, _displeased_]. In the following passages, where
moral evil is clearly meant, it occurs just as in those previously
quoted: "Wash you, make you clean, cease to do evil, learn to do
well"; "The face of the Lord is against them that do evil." The
different meanings which one Hebrew word may bear are not generally
confused in translation. In this case, however, the confusion has
entered into the most modern language. From a highly esteemed thinker
the following sentence may be quoted by way of example: "The other
religions did not feel evil like Israel; it did not stand in such
complete antagonism to their idea of the Supreme, the Creator and
Sovereign of man, nor in such absolute contradiction to their notion
of what ought to be; and so they either reconciled themselves as best
they could to the evil that was necessary, or invented means by which
men could escape from it by escaping from existence." The singular
misapprehension of Divine providence which underlies a statement like
this can only be got rid of by recognising that enjoyment and
suffering are not the good and evil of life, that both of them stand
quite apart from what is intrinsically good and bad in a moral sense,
and that they are simply means to an end in the providence of God.
It is not difficult, of course, to see how the idea of pain and the idea
of moral evil have been linked together. It is by the thought that
suffering is punishment for evil done; and that the suffering is
therefore itself evil. Pain was simply penalty inflicted by an offended
heavenly power. The evil of a man's doings came back to him, made itself
felt in his suffering. This was the explanation of all that was
unpleasant, disastrous and vexing in the lot of man. He would enjoy
always, it was conceived, if wrong-doing or failure in duty to the
higher powers did not kindle divine anger against him. True, the
wrong-doing might not be his own. The son might suffer for the parent's
fault. Iniquity might be remembered to children's children and fall
terribly on those who had not themselves transgressed. The fates pursued
the descendants of an impious man. But wrong done somewhere, rebellion
of some one against a divinity, was always the antecedent of pain and
sorrow and disaster. And as the other religions thought, so, in this
matter, did that of Israel. To the Hebrew the deep conviction of this,
as Dr. Fairbairn has said, made poverty and disease peculiarly
abhorrent. In Psalm lxxxix. the prosperity of David is depicted, and
Jehovah speaks of the covenant that must be kept: "If his children
forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments; ... then will I visit
their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes." The
trouble has fallen, and out of the depth of it, attributing to past sin
all defeat and disaster from which the people suffer--the breaking down
of the hedges, curtailment of the vigour of youth, overthrow in war--the
psalmist cries, "How long, O Lord, wilt Thou hide Thyself for ever? How
long shall Thy wrath burn like fire? O remember how short my time is:
for what vanity hast Thou created all the children of men?" There is
here no thought that anything painful or afflictive could manifest the
fatherhood of God; it must proceed from His anger, and force the mind
back upon the memory of sin, some transgression that has caused the
Almighty to suspend His kindness for a time.
Here it was the author of Job found the thought of his people. With
this he had to harmonise the other beliefs--peculiarly theirs--that
the lovingkindness of the Lord is over all His works, that God who is
supremely good cannot inflict moral injury on any of His covenanted
servants. And the difficulty he felt survives. The questions are still
urged: Is not pain bound up with wrong-doing? Is not suffering the
mark of God's displeasure? Are they not evil, therefore? And, on the
other hand, Is not enjoyment appointed to him who does right? Does not
the whole scheme of Divine providence, as the Bible sets it forth,
including the prospect it opens into the eternal future, associate
happiness with well-doing and pain with evil-doing? We desire
enjoyment, and cannot help desiring it. We dislike pain, disease, and
all that limits our capacity for pleasure. Is it not in accordance
with this that Christ appears as the Giver of light and peace and joy
to the race of men?
These questions look difficult enough. Let us attempt to answer them.
Pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, are elements of creaturely
experience appointed by God. The right use of them makes life, the wrong
use of them mars it. They are ordained, all of them in equal degree, to
a good end; for all that God does is done in perfect love as well as in
perfect justice. It is no more wonderful that a good man should suffer
than that a bad man should suffer; for the good man, the man who
believes in God and therefore in goodness, making a right use of
suffering, will gain by it in the true sense; he will reach a deeper and
nobler life. It is no more wonderful that a bad man, one who disbelieves
in God and therefore in goodness, should be happy than that a good man
should be happy, the happiness being God's appointed means for both to
reach a higher life. The main element of this higher life is vigour, but
not of the body. The Divine purpose is _spiritual_ evolution. That
gratification of the sensuous side of our nature for which physical
health and a well-knit organism are indispensable--paramount in the
pleasure-philosophy--is not neglected, but is made subordinate in the
Divine culture of life. The grace of God aims at the life of the
spirit--power to love, to follow righteousness, to dare for justice'
sake, to seek and grasp the true, to sympathise with men and bear with
them, to bless them that curse, to suffer and be strong. To promote this
vitality all God appoints is fitted--pain as well as pleasure, adversity
as well as prosperity, sorrow as well as joy, defeat as well as success.
We wonder that suffering is so often the result of imprudence. On the
ordinary theory the fact is inexplicable, for imprudence has no dark
colour of ethical faultiness. He who by an error of judgment plunges
himself and his family into what appears irretrievable disaster, may, by
all reckoning, be almost blameless in character. If suffering is held to
be penal, no reference to the general sin of humanity will account for
the result. But the reason is plain. The suffering is disciplinary. The
nobler life at which Divine providence aims must be sagacious no less
than pure, guided by sound reason no less than right feeling.
And if it is asked how from this point of view we are to find the
punishment of sin, the answer is that happiness as well as suffering is
punishment to him whose sin and the unbelief that accompanies it pervert
his view of truth, and blind him to the spiritual life and the will of
God. The pleasures of a wrong-doer who persistently denies obligation to
Divine authority and refuses obedience to the Divine law are no gain,
but loss. They dissipate and attenuate his life. His sensuous or sensual
enjoyment, his delight in selfish triumph and gratified ambition are
real, give at the time quite as much happiness as the good man has in
his obedience and virtue, perhaps a great deal more. But they are penal
and retributive nevertheless; and the conviction that they are so
becomes clear to the man whenever the light of truth is flashed upon his
spiritual state. We read Dante's pictures of the Inferno, and shudder
at the dreadful scenes with which he has filled the descending circles
of woe. He has omitted one that would have been the most striking of
all,--unless indeed an approach to it is to be found in the episode of
Paolo and Francesca,--the picture of souls self-doomed to seek happiness
and to enjoy, on whose life the keen light of eternity shines, revealing
the gradual wasting away of existence, the certain degeneration to which
they are condemned.
On the other hand, the pains and disasters which fall to the lot of
evil men, intended for their correction, if in perversity or in
blindness they are misunderstood, again become punishment; for they,
too, dissipate and attenuate life. The real good of existence slips
away while the mind is intent on the mere pain or vexation and how it
is to be got rid of. In Job we find a purpose to reconcile affliction
with the just government of God. The troubles into which the believing
man is brought urge him to think more deeply than he has ever thought,
become the means of that intellectual and moral education which lies
in discovery of the will and character of God. They also bring him by
this way into deeper humility, a fine tenderness of spiritual nature,
a most needful kinship with his fellows. See then the use of
suffering. The impenitent, unbelieving man has no such gains. He is
absorbed in the distressing experience, and that absorption narrows
and debases the activity of the soul. The treatment of this matter
here is necessarily brief. It is hoped, however, that the principle
has been made clear.
Does it require any adaptation or under-reading of the language of
Scripture to prove the harmony of its teaching with the view just
given of happiness and suffering as related to punishment? Throughout
the greater part of the Old Testament the doctrine of suffering is
that old doctrine which the author of Job found perplexing. Not
infrequently in the New Testament there is a certain formal return to
it; for even under the light of revelation the meaning of Divine
providence is learnt slowly. But the emphasis rests on _life_ rather
than happiness, and on _death_ rather than suffering in the gospels;
and the whole teaching of Christ, pointed to the truth. This world and
our discipline here, the trials of men, the doctrine of the cross, the
fellowship of the sufferings of Christ, are not fitted to introduce us
into a state of existence in which mere enjoyment, the gratification
of personal tastes and desires, shall be the main experience. They are
fitted to educate the spiritual nature for life, fulness of life.
Immortality becomes credible when it is seen as progress in vigour,
progress towards that profound compassion, that fidelity, that
unquenchable devotion to the glory of God the Father which marked the
life of the Divine Son in this world.
Observe, it is not denied that joy is and will be desired, that
suffering and pain are and will remain experiences from which human
nature must recoil. The desire and the aversion are wrought into our
constitution; and just because we feel them our whole mortal
discipline has its value. In the experience of them lies the condition
of progress. On the one hand pain urges, on the other joy attracts. It
is in the line of desire for joy of a finer and higher kind that
civilisation realises itself, and even religion lays hold of us and
lures us on. But the conditions of progress are not to be mistaken for
the end of it. Joy assumes sorrow as a possibility. Pleasure can only
exist as alternative to the experience of pain. And the life that
expands and reaches finer power and exaltation in the course of this
struggle is the main thing. The struggle ceases to be acute in the
higher ranges of life; it becomes massive, sustained, and is carried
on in the perfect peace of the soul. Therefore the future state of the
redeemed is a state of blessedness. But the blessedness accompanying
the life is not the glory. The glory of the perfected is life itself.
The heaven of the redeemed appears a region of existence in which the
exaltation, enlargement, and deepening of life shall constantly and
consciously go on. Conversely the hell of evil-doers will not be
simply the pain, the suffering, the defeat to which they have doomed
themselves, but the constant attenuation of their life, the miserable
wasting of which they shall be aware, though they find some pitiful
pleasure, as Milton imagined his evil angels finding theirs, in futile
schemes of revenge against the Highest.
Pain is not in itself an evil. But our nature recoils from suffering
and seeks life in brightness and power, beyond the keen pangs of
mortal existence. The creation hopes that itself "shall be delivered
from the bondage of corruption." The finer life is, the more sensible
it must be of association with a body doomed to decay, the more
sensible also of that gross human injustice and wrong which dare to
pervert God's ordinance of pain and His sacrament of death, usurping
His holy prerogative for the most unholy ends. And so we are brought
to the Cross of Christ. When He "bore our sins in His own body to the
tree," when He "suffered for sins once, the Righteous for the
unrighteous," the sacrifice was real, awful, immeasurably profound.
Yet, could death be in any sense degrading or debasing to Him? Could
evil touch His soul? Over its most insolent assumption of the right
to injure and destroy He stood, spiritually victorious in the presence
of His enemies, and rose, untouched in soul, when His body was broken
on the cross. His sacrifice was great because He bore the sins of men
and died as God's atonement. His sublime devotion to the Father whose
holy law was trampled under foot, His horror and endurance of human
iniquity which culminated in His death, made the experience profoundly
terrible. Thus the spiritual dignity and power He gained provided new
life for the world.
* * * * *
It is now possible to understand the trials of Job. So far as the
sufferer is concerned, they are no less beneficent than His joys; for
they provide that necessary element of probation by which life of a
deeper and stronger kind is to be reached, the opportunity of
becoming, as a man and a servant of the Almighty, what he had never
been, what otherwise he could not become. The purpose of God is
entirely good; but it will remain with the sufferer himself to enter
by the fiery way into full spiritual vigour. He will have the
protection and grace of the Divine Spirit in his time of sore
bewilderment and anguish. Yet his own faith must be vindicated while
the shadow of God's hand rests upon his life.
And now the forces of nature and the wild tribes of the desert gather
about the happy settlement of the man of Uz. With dramatic suddenness
and cumulative terror stroke after stroke descends. Job is seen before
the door of his dwelling. The morning broke calm and cloudless, the
bright sunshine of Arabia filling with brilliant colour the far
horizon. The day has been peaceful, gracious, another of God's gifts.
Perhaps, in the early hours, the father, as priest of his family,
offered the burnt-offerings of atonement lest his sons should have
renounced God in their hearts; and now, in the evening, he is sitting
calm and glad, hearing the appeals of those who need his help and
dispensing alms with a generous hand. But one comes in haste,
breathless with running, scarcely able to tell his tale. Out in the
fields the oxen were ploughing and the asses feeding. Suddenly a great
band of Sabeans fell upon them, swept them away, slew the servants
with the edge of the sword: this man alone has escaped with his life.
Rapidly has he spoken; and before he has done another appears, a
shepherd from the more distant pastures, to announce a second
calamity. "The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up
the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped
to tell thee." They scarcely dare to look on the face of Job, and he
has no time to speak, for here is a third messenger, a camel-driver,
swarthy and naked to the loins, crying wildly as he runs, The
Chaldæans made three bands--fell upon the camels--swept them away--the
servants are slain--I only am left. Nor is this the last. A fourth,
with every mark of horror in his face, comes slowly and brings the
most terrible message of all. The sons and daughters of Job were
feasting in their eldest brother's house; there came a great wind from
the wilderness and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell.
The young men and women are all dead. One only has escaped, he who
tells the dreadful tale.
A certain idealism appears in the causes of the different calamities
and their simultaneous, or almost simultaneous, occurrence. Nothing,
indeed, is assumed which is not possible in the north of Arabia. A
raid from the south, of Sabeans, the lawless part of a nation
otherwise engaged in traffic; an organised attack by Chaldæans from
the east, again the lawless fringe of the population of the Euphrates
valley, those who, inhabiting the margin of the desert, had taken to
desert ways; then, of natural causes, the lightning or the fearful hot
wind which coming suddenly stifles and kills, and the whirlwind,
possible enough after a thunderstorm or simoom,--all of these belong
to the region in which Job lived. But the grouping of the disasters
and the invariable escape of one only from each belong to the dramatic
setting, and are intended to have a cumulative effect. 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. We watch him with silent awe as first he rends
his mantle, the acknowledged sign of mourning and of the
disorganisation of life, then shaves his head, renouncing in his grief
even the natural ornament of the hair, that the sense of loss and
resignation may be indicated. This done, in deep humiliation he bows
and falls prone on the earth and worships, the fit words falling in a
kind of solemn chant from his lips: "Naked came I forth from my
mother's womb, and naked I return thereto. Jehovah gave, and Jehovah
hath taken away. Let Jehovah's name be blessed." The silence of grief
and of death has fallen about him. No more shall be heard the bustle
of the homestead to which, when the evening shadows were about to
fall, a constant stream of servants and laden oxen used to come, where
the noise of cattle and asses and the shouts of camel-drivers made the
music of prosperity. His wife and the few who remain, with bowed
heads, dumb and aimless, stand around. Swiftly the sun goes down, and
darkness falls upon the desolate dwelling.
Losses like these are apt to leave men distracted. When everything is
swept away, with the riches those who were to inherit them, when a man
is left, as Job says, naked, bereft of all that labour had won and the
bounty of God had given, expressions of despair do not surprise us,
nor even wild accusations of the Most High. But the faith of this
sufferer does not yield. He is resigned, submissive. The strong trust
that has grown in the course of a religious life withstands the shock,
and carries the soul through the crisis. Neither did Job accuse God
nor did he sin, though his grief was great. So far he is master of his
soul, unbroken though desolated. The first great round of trial has
left the man a believer still.
V.
_THE DILEMMA OF FAITH._
CHAP. ii.
As the drama proceeds to unfold the conflict between Divine grace in the
human soul and those chaotic influences which hold the mind in doubt or
drag it back into denial, Job becomes a type of the righteous sufferer,
the servant of God in the hot furnace of affliction. All true poetry
runs thus into the typical. The interest of the movement depends on the
representative character of the life, passionate in jealousy,
indignation, grief, or ambition, pressing on exultantly to unheard-of
success, borne down into the deepest circles of woe. Here it is not
simply a man's constancy that has to be established, but God's truth
against the Adversary's lie, the "everlasting yea" against the negations
that make all life and virtue seem the mere blossoming of dust. Job has
to pass through profoundest trouble, that the drama may exhaust the
possibilities of doubt, and lead the faith of man towards liberty.
Yet the typical is based on the real; and the conflict here described
has gone on first in the experience of the author. Not from the
outside, but from his own life has he painted the sorrows and
struggles of a soul urged to the brink of that precipice beyond which
lies the blank darkness of the abyss. There are men in whom the
sorrows of a whole people and of a whole age seem to concentrate. They
suffer with their fellow-men that all may find a way of hope. Not
unconsciously, but with the most vivid sense of duty, a Divine
necessity brought to their door, they must undergo all the anguish and
hew a track through the dense forest to the light beyond. Such a man
in his age was the writer of this book. And when he now proceeds to
the second stage of Job's affliction every touch appears to show
that, not merely in imagination, but substantially he endured the
trials which he paints. It is his passion that strives and cries, his
sorrowful soul that longs for death. Imaginary, is this work of his?
Nothing so true, vehement, earnest, can be imaginary. "Sublime
sorrow," says Carlyle, "sublime reconciliation; oldest choral melody
as of the heart of mankind." But it shows more than "the seeing eye
and the mildly understanding heart." It reveals the spirit battling
with terrible enemies, doubts that spring out of the darkness of
error, brood of the primæval chaos. The man was one who "in this wild
element of a life had to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep abased;
and ever with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, rise again,
struggle again, still onwards." Not to this writer, any more than to
the author of "Sartor Resartus," did anything come in his dreams.
A second scene in heaven is presented to our view. The Satan appears
as before with the "sons of the Elohim," is asked by the Most High
whence he has come, and replies in the language previously used. Again
he has been abroad amongst men in his restless search for evil. The
challenge of God to the Adversary regarding Job is also repeated; but
now it has an addition: "Still he holdeth fast his integrity, although
thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause." The
expression "although thou movedst me against him" is startling. Is it
an admission after all that the Almighty can be moved by any
consideration less than pure right, or to act in any way to the
disadvantage or hurt of His servant? Such an interpretation would
exclude the idea of supreme power, wisdom, and righteousness which
unquestionably governs the book from first to last. The words really
imply a charge against the Adversary of malicious untruth. The saying
of the Almighty is ironical, as Schultens points out: "Although thou,
forsooth, didst incite Me against him." He who flings sharp javelins
of detraction is pierced with a sharper javelin of judgment. Yet he
goes on with his attempt to ruin Job, and prove his own penetration
the keenest in the universe.
And now he pleads that it is the way of men to care more for
themselves, their own health and comfort, than for anything else.
Bereavement and poverty may be like arrows that glance off from
polished armour. Let disease and bodily pain attack himself, and a man
will show what is really in his heart. "Skin for skin, yea, all that a
man hath will he give for himself. But put forth Thine hand now, and
touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce Thee openly."
The proverb put into Satan's mouth carries a plain enough meaning, and
yet is not literally easy to interpret. The sense will be clear if we
translate it "Hide for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for
himself." The hide of an animal, lion or sheep, which a man wears for
clothing will be given up to save his own body. A valued article of
property often, it will be promptly renounced when life is in danger
the man will flee away naked. In like manner all possessions will be
abandoned to keep one's self unharmed. True enough in a sense, true
enough to be used as a proverb, for proverbs often express a
generalisation of the earthly prudence not of the higher ideal, the
saying, nevertheless, is in Satan's use of it a lie--that is, if he
includes the children when he says, "all that a man hath will he give
for himself." Job would have died for his children. Many a father and
mother, with far less pride in their children than Job had in his,
would die for them. Possessions indeed, mere worldly gear, find their
real value or worthlessness when weighed against life, and human love
has Divine depths which a sneering devil cannot see. The portraiture
of soulless human beings is one of the recent experiments in
fictitious literature, and it may have some justification. When the
design is to show the dreadful issue of unmitigated selfishness, a
distinctly moral purpose. If, on the other hand, "art for art's sake"
is the plea, and the writer's skill in painting the vacant ribs of
death is used with a sinister reflection on human nature as a whole,
the approach to Satan's temper marks the degradation of literature.
Christian faith clings to the hope that Divine grace may create a soul
in the ghastly skeleton. The Adversary gloats over the lifeless
picture of his own imagining and affirms that man can never be
animated by the love of God. The problem which the Satan of Job long
ago presented haunts the mind of our age. It is one of those ominous
symptoms that point to times of trial in which the experience of
humanity may resemble the typical affliction and desperate struggle of
the man of Uz.
A grim possibility of truth lies in the taunt of Satan that, if Job's
flesh and bone are touched, he will renounce God openly. The test of
sore disease is more trying than loss of wealth at least. And,
besides, bodily affliction, added to the rest, will carry Job into yet
another region of vital experience. Therefore it is the will of God to
send it. Again Satan is the instrument, and the permission is given,
"Behold, he is in thine hand: only save his life--imperil not his
life." Here, as before, when causes are to be brought into operation
that are obscure and may appear to involve harshness, the Adversary is
the intermediary agent. On the face of the drama a certain formal
deference is paid to the opinion that God cannot inflict pain on those
whom He loves. But for a short time only is the responsibility, so to
speak, of afflicting Job partly removed from the Almighty to Satan. At
this point the Adversary disappears; and henceforth God is
acknowledged to have sent the disease as well as all the other
afflictions to His servant. It is only in a poetic sense that Satan is
represented as wielding natural forces and sowing the seeds of
disease; the writer has no theory and needs no theory of malignant
activity. He knows that "all is of God."
Time has passed sufficient for the realisation by Job of his poverty
and bereavement. The sense of desolation has settled on his soul as
morning after morning dawned, week after week went by, emptied of the
loving voices he used to hear, and the delightful and honourable tasks
that used to engage him. In sympathy with the exhausted mind, the body
has become languid, and the change from sufficiency of the best food
to something like starvation gives the germs of disease an easy hold.
He is stricken with elephantiasis, one of the most terrible forms of
leprosy, a tedious malady attended with intolerable irritation and
loathsome ulcers. The disfigured face, the blackened body, soon reveal
the nature of the infection; and he is forthwith carried out according
to the invariable custom and laid on the heap of refuse, chiefly burnt
litter, which has accumulated near his dwelling. In Arab villages this
_mezbele_ is often a mound of considerable size, where, if any breath
of wind is blowing, the full benefit of its coolness can be enjoyed.
It is the common playground of the children, "and there the outcast,
who has been stricken with some loathsome malady, and is not allowed
to enter the dwellings of men, lays himself down, begging an alms of
the passers-by, by day, and by night sheltering himself among the
ashes which the heat of the sun has warmed." At the beginning Job was
seen in the full stateliness of Oriental life; now the contrasting
misery of it appears, the abjectness into which it may rapidly fall.
Without proper medical skill or appliances, the houses no way adapted
for a case of disease like Job's, the wealthiest pass like the poorest
into what appears the nadir of existence. Now at length the trial of
faithfulness is in the way of being perfected. If the helplessness,
the torment of disease, the misery of this abject state do not move
his mind from its trust in God, he will indeed be a bulwark of
religion against the atheism of the world.
But in what form does the question of Job's continued fidelity present
itself now to the mind of the writer? Singularly, as a question
regarding his integrity. From the general wreck one life has been
spared, that of Job's wife. To her it appears that the wrath of the
Almighty has been launched against her husband, and all that prevents
him from finding refuge in death from the horrors of lingering disease
is his integrity. If he maintains the pious resignation he showed
under the first afflictions and during the early stages of his malady,
he will have to suffer on. But it will be better to die at once.
"Why," she asks, "dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? Renounce
God, and die." It is a different note from that which runs through the
controversy between Job and his friends. Always on his integrity he
takes his stand; against his right to affirm it they direct their
arguments. They do not insist on the duty of a man under all
circumstances to believe in God and submit to His will. Their sole
concern is to prove that Job has not been sincere and faithful and
deserving of acceptance before God. But his wife knows him to have
been righteous and pious; and that, she thinks, will serve him no
longer. Let him abandon his integrity; renounce God. On two sides the
sufferer is plied. But he does not waver. Between the two he stands, a
man who has integrity and will keep it till he die.
The accusations of Satan, turning on the question whether Job was
sincere in religion or one who served God for what he got, prepare us
to understand why his integrity is made the hinge of the debate. To
Job his upright obedience was the heart of his life, and it alone made
his indefeasible claim on God. But faith, not obedience, is the only
real claim a man can advance. And the connection is to be found in
this way. As a man perfect and upright, who feared God and eschewed
evil, Job enjoyed the approval of his conscience and the sense of
Divine favour. His life had been rooted in the steady assurance that
the Almighty was his friend. He had walked in freedom and joy cared
for by the providence of the Eternal, guarded by His love, his soul at
peace with that Divine Lawgiver whose will he did. His faith rested
like an arch on two piers--one, his own righteousness which God had
inspired; the other, the righteousness of God which his own reflected.
If it were proved that he had not been righteous, his belief that God
had been guarding him, teaching him, filling his soul with light,
would break under him like a withered branch. If he had not been
righteous indeed, he could not know what righteousness is, he could
not know whether God is righteous or not, he could not know God nor
trust in Him. The experience of the past was, in this case, a
delusion. He had nothing to rest upon, no faith. On the other hand, if
those afflictions, coming why he could not tell, proved God to be
capricious, unjust, all would equally be lost. The dilemma was that,
holding to the belief in his own integrity, he seemed to be driven to
doubt God; but if he believed God to be righteous he seemed to be
driven to doubt his own integrity. Either was fatal. He was in a
narrow strait between two rocks, on one or other of which faith was
like to be shattered.
But his integrity was clear to him. That stood within the region of
his own consciousness. He knew that God had made him of dutiful heart
and given him a constant will to be obedient. Only while he believed
this could he keep hold of his life. As the one treasure saved out of
the wreck, when possessions, children, health were gone, to cherish
his integrity was the last duty. Renounce his conscience of goodwill
and faithfulness? It was the one fact bridging the gulf of disaster,
the safeguard against despair. And is this not a true presentation of
the ultimate inquiry regarding faith? If the justice we know is not an
adumbration of Divine justice, if the righteousness we do is not
taught us by God, of the same kind as His, if loving justice and doing
righteousness we are not showing faith in God, if renouncing all for
the right, clinging to it though the heavens should fall, we are not
in touch with the Highest, then there is no basis for faith, no link
between our human life and the Eternal. All must go if these deep
principles of morality and religion are not to be trusted. What a man
knows of the just and good by clinging to it, suffering for it,
rejoicing in it, is indeed the anchor that keeps him from being swept
into the waste of waters.
The woman's part in the controversy is still to be considered; and it is
but faintly indicated. Upon the Arab soul there lay no sense of woman's
life. Her view of providence or of religion was never asked. The writer
probably means here that Job's wife would naturally, as a woman,
complicate the sum of his troubles. She expresses ill-considered
resentment against his piety. To her he is "righteous over much," and
her counsel is that of despair. Was this all that the Great God whom he
trusted could do for him? Better bid farewell to such a God. She can do
nothing to relieve the dreadful torment and can see but the one possible
end. But it is God who is keeping her husband alive, and one word would
be enough to set him free. Her language is strangely illogical, meant
indeed to be so,--a woman's desperate talk. She does not see that,
though Job renounced God, he might yet live on, in greater misery than
ever, just because he would then have no spiritual stay.
Well, some have spoken very strongly about Job's wife. She has been
called a helper of the Devil, an organ of Satan, an infernal fury.
Chrysostom thinks that the Enemy left her alive because he deemed her a
fit scourge to Job by which to plague him more acutely than by any
other. Ewald, with more point, says: "Nothing can be more scornful than
her words which mean, 'Thou, who under all the undeserved sufferings
which have been inflicted on thee by thy God, hast been faithful to Him
even in fatal sickness, as if He would help or desired to help thee who
art beyond help,--to thee, fool, I say, Bid God farewell, and die!'"
There can be no doubt that she appears as the temptress of her husband,
putting into speech the atheistic doubt which the Adversary could not
directly suggest. And the case is all the worse for Job that affection
and sympathy are beneath her words. Brave and true life appears to her
to profit nothing if it has to be spent in pain and desolation. She does
not seem to speak so much in scorn as in the bitterness of her soul. She
is no infernal fury, but one whose love, genuine enough, does not enter
into the fellowship of his sufferings. It was necessary to Job's trial
that the temptation should be presented, and the ignorant affection of
the woman serves the needful purpose. She speaks not knowing what she
says, not knowing that her words pierce like sharp arrows into his very
soul. As a figure in the drama she has her place, helping to complete
the round of trial.
The answer of Job is one of the fine touches of the book. He does not
denounce her as an instrument of Satan nor dismiss her from his
presence. In the midst of his pain he is the great chief of Uz and the
generous husband. "Thou speakest," he mildly says, "as one of the
foolish, that is, godless, women speaketh." It is not like thee to say
such things as these. And then he adds the question born of sublime
faith, "Shall we receive gladness at the hand of God, and shall we not
receive affliction?"
One might declare this affirmation of faith so clear and decisive that
the trial of Job as a servant of God might well close with it. Earthly
good, temporal joy, abundance of possessions, children, health,--these
he had received. Now in poverty and desolation, his body wrecked by
disease, he lies tormented and helpless. Suffering of mind and
physical affliction are his in almost unexampled keenness, acute in
themselves and by contrast with previous felicity. His wife, too,
instead of helping him to endure, urges him to dishonour and death.
Still he does not doubt that all is wisely ordered by God. He puts
aside, if indeed with a strenuous effort of the soul, that cruel
suggestion of despair, and affirms anew the faith which is supposed to
bind him to a life of torment. Should not this repel the accusations
brought against the religion of Job and of humanity? The author does
not think so. He has only prepared the way for his great discussion.
But the stages of trial already passed show how deep and vital is the
problem that lies beyond. The faith which has emerged so triumphantly
is to be shaken as by the ruin of the world.
Strangely and erroneously has a distinction been drawn between the
previous afflictions and the disease which, it is said, "opens or
reveals greater depths in Job's reverent piety." One says: "In his
former trial he blessed God who took away the good He had added to naked
man; this was strictly no evil: now Job bows beneath God's hand when He
inflicts positive evil." Such literalism in reading the words "shall we
not receive evil?" implies a gross slander on Job. If he had meant that
the loss of health was "evil" as contrasted with the loss of children,
that from his point of view bereavement was no "evil," then indeed he
would have sinned against love, and therefore against God. It is the
whole course of his trial he is reviewing. Shall we receive "good"--joy,
prosperity, the love of children, years of physical vigour, and shall we
not receive pain--this burden of loss, desolation, bodily torment?
Herein Job sinned not with his lips. Again, had he meant moral evil,
something involving cruelty and unrighteousness, he would have sinned
indeed, his faith would have been destroyed by his own false judgment of
God. The words here must be interpreted in harmony with the distinction
already drawn between physical and mental suffering, which, as God
appoints them, have a good design, and moral evil, which can in no way
have its source in Him.
And now the narrative passes into a new phase. As a chief of Uz, the
greatest of the Bene-Kedem, Job was known beyond the desert. As a man
of wisdom and generosity he had many friends. The tidings of his
disasters and finally of his sore malady are carried abroad; and after
months, perhaps (for a journey across the sandy waste needs
preparation and time), three of those who know him best and admire him
most, "Job's three friends," appear upon the scene. To sympathise with
him, to cheer and comfort him, they come with one accord, each on his
camel, not unattended, for the way is beset with dangers.
They are men of mark all of them. The emeer of Uz has chiefs, no
doubt, as his peculiar friends, although the Septuagint colours too
much in calling them kings. It is, however, their piety, their
likeness to himself, as men who fear and serve the True God, that
binds them to Job's heart. They will contribute what they can of
counsel and wise suggestion to throw light on his trials and lift him
into hope. No arguments of unbelief or cowardice will be used by them,
nor will they propose that a stricken man should renounce God and die.
Eliphaz is from Teman, that centre of thought and culture where men
worshipped the Most High and meditated upon His providence. Shuach,
the city of Bildad, can scarcely be identified with the modern
Shuwak, about two hundred and fifty miles south-west from the Jauf
near the Red Sea, nor with the land of the Tsukhi of the Assyrian
inscriptions, lying on the Chaldæan frontier. It was probably a city,
now forgotten, in the Idumæan region. Maan, also near Petra, may be
the Naamah of Zophar. It is at least tempting to regard all the three
as neighbours who might without great difficulty communicate with each
other and arrange a visit to their common friend. From their
meeting-place at Teman or at Maan they would, in that case, have to
make a journey of some two hundred miles across one of the most barren
and dangerous deserts of Arabia,--clear enough proof of their esteem
for Job and their deep sympathy.
The fine idealism of the poem is maintained in this new act. Men of
knowledge and standing are these. They may fail; they may take a false
view of their friend and his state; but their sincerity must not be
doubted nor their rank as thinkers. Whether the three represent
ancient culture, or rather the conceptions of the writer's own time,
is a question that may be variously answered. The book, however, is so
full of life, the life of earnest thought and keen thirst for truth,
that the type of religious belief found in all the three must have
been familiar to the author. These men are not, any more than Job
himself, contemporaries of Ephron the Hittite or the Balaam of
Numbers. They stand out as religious thinkers of a far later age, and
represent the current Rabbinism of the post-Solomonic era. The
characters are filled in from a profound knowledge of man and man's
life. Yet each of them, Temanite, Shuchite, Naamathite, is at bottom a
Hebrew believer striving to make his creed apply to a case not yet
brought into his system, and finally, when every suggestion is
repelled, taking refuge in that hardness of temper which is peculiarly
Jewish. They are not men of straw, as some imagine, but types of the
culture and thought which led to Pharisaism. The writer argues not so
much with Edom as with his own people.
Approaching Job's dwelling the three friends look eagerly from their
camels, and at length perceive one prostrate, disfigured, lying on the
_mezbele_, a miserable wreck of manhood. "That is not our friend,"
they say to each other. Again and yet again, "This is not he; this
surely cannot be he." Yet nowhere else than in the place of the
forsaken do they find their noble friend. The brave, bright chief they
knew, so stately in his bearing, so abundant and honourable, how has
he fallen! They lift up their voices and weep; then, struck into
amazed silence, each with torn mantle and dust-sprinkled head, for
seven days and nights they sit beside him in grief unspeakable.
Real is their sympathy; deep too, as deep as their character and
sentiments admit. As comforters they are proverbial in a bad sense. Yet
one says truly, perhaps out of bitter experience, "Who that knows what
most modern consolation is can prevent a prayer that Job's comforters
may be his? They do not call upon him for an hour and invent excuses for
the departure which they so anxiously await; they do not write notes to
him, and go about their business as if nothing had happened; they do not
inflict upon him meaningless commonplaces."[1] It was their misfortune,
not altogether their fault, that they had mistaken notions which they
deemed it their duty to urge upon him. Job, disappointed by-and-by, did
not spare them, and we feel so much for him that we are apt to deny
them their due. Yet are we not bound to ask, What friend has had equal
proof of our sympathy? Depth of nature; sincerity of friendship; the
will to console: let those mock at Job's comforters as wanting here who
have travelled two hundred miles over the burning sand to visit a man
sunk in disaster, brought to poverty and the gate of death, and sat with
him seven days and nights in generous silence.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "Mark Rutherford."
THE FIRST COLLOQUY.
VI.
_THE CRY FROM THE DEPTH._
JOB SPEAKS. CHAP. iii.
While the friends of Job sat beside him that dreary week of silence,
each of them was meditating in his own way the sudden calamities which
had brought the prosperous emeer to poverty, the strong man to this
extremity of miserable disease. Many thoughts came and were dismissed;
but always the question returned, Why these disasters, this shadow of
dreadful death? And for very compassion and sorrow each kept secret
the answer that came and came again and would not be rejected.
Meanwhile the silence has weighed upon the sufferer, and the burden of
it becomes at length insupportable. He has tried to read their
thoughts, to assure himself that grief alone kept them dumb, that when
they spoke it would be to cheer him with kindly words, to praise and
reinvigorate his faith, to tell him of Divine help that would not fail
him in life or death. But as he sees their faces darken into inquiry
first and then into suspicion, and reads at length in averted looks
the thought they cannot conceal, when he comprehends that the men he
loved and trusted hold him to be a transgressor and under the ban of
God, this final disaster of false judgment is overwhelming. The man
whom all circumstances appear to condemn, who is bankrupt, solitary,
outworn with anxiety and futile efforts to prove his honour, if he
have but one to believe in him, is helped to endure and hope. But Job
finds human friendship yield like a reed. All the past is swallowed up
in one tragical thought that, be a man what he may, there is no refuge
for him in the justice of man. Everything is gone that made human
society and existence in the world worth caring for. His wife, indeed,
believes in his integrity, but values it so little that she would have
him cast it away with a taunt against God. His friends, it is plain
to see, deny it. He is suffering at God's hand, and they are hardened
against him. The iron enters into his soul.
True, it is the shame and torment of his disease that move him to utter
his bitter lamentation. Yet the underlying cause of his loss of
self-command and of patient confidence in God must not be missed. The
disease has made life a physical agony; but he could bear that if still
no cloud came between him and the face of God. Now these dark,
suspicious looks which meet him every time he lifts his eyes, which he
feels resting upon him even when he bows his head in the attempt to
pray, make religion seem a mockery. And in pitiful anticipation of the
doom to which they are silently driving him, he cries aloud against the
life that remains. He has lived in vain. Would he had never been born!
In this first lyrical speech put into the mouth of Job there is an
Oriental, hyperbolical strain, suited to the speaker and his
circumstances. But we are also made to feel that calamity and
dejection have gone near to unhinging his mind. He is not mad, but his
language is vehement, almost that of insanity. It would be wrong,
therefore, to criticise the words in a matter-of-fact way, and against
the spirit of the book to try by the rules of Christian resignation
one so tossed and racked, in the very throat of the furnace. This is a
pious man, a patient man, who lately said, "Shall we receive joy at
the hand of God, and shall we not receive affliction?" He seems to
have lost all control of himself and plunges into wild untamed speech
filled with anathemas, as one who had never feared God. But he is
driven from self-possession. Phantasmal now is all that brave life of
his as prince and as father, as a man in honour beloved of the
Highest. Did he ever enjoy it? If he did, was it not as in a dream?
Was he not rather a deceiver, a vile transgressor? His state befits
that. Light and love and life are turned into bitter gall. "I lived,"
says one distressed like Job, "in a continual, indefinite, pining
fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it
seemed as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a
devouring monster wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured....
'Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other
possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of
Hope.'" We see Job, "for the present, quite shut out from hope;
looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely all round into a dim
firmament pregnant with earthquake and tornado."
The poem may be read calmly. Let us remember that it came not calmly
from the pen of the writer, but as the outburst of volcanic feeling
from the deep centres of life. It is Job we hear; the language befits
his despondency, his position in the drama. But surely it presents to
us a real experience of one who, in the hour of Israel's defeat and
captivity, had seen his home swept bare, wife and children seized and
tortured or borne down in the rush of savage soldiery, while he
himself lived on, reduced in one day to awful memories and doubts as
the sole consciousness of life. Is not some crisis like this with its
irretrievable woes translated for us here into the language of Job's
bitter cry? Are we not made witnesses of a tragedy greater even than
his?
"What is to become of us," asks Amiel, "when everything leaves us,
health, joy, affections, when the sun seems to have lost its warmth,
and life is stripped of all charm? Must we either harden or forget?
There is but one answer, Keep close to duty, do what you ought, come
what may." The mood of these words is not so devout as other passages
of the same writer. The advice, however, is often tendered in the name
of religion to the life-weary and desolate; and there are
circumstances to which it well applies. But a distracting sense of
impotence weighed down the life of Job. Duty? He could do nothing. It
was impossible to find relief in work; hence the fierceness of his
words. Nor can we fail to hear in them a strain of impatience almost
of anger: "To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever
the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of
virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of
injustice. What then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but
some passion, some bubble of the blood?... Thus has the bewildered
wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after
question into the sibyl cave of Destiny, and receive no answer but an
echo. It is all a grim desert, this once fair world of his."
Job is already asserting to himself the reality of his own virtue, for
he resents the suspicion of it. Indeed, with all the mystery of his
affliction yet to solve, he can but think that Providence is also
casting doubt on him. A keen sense of the favour of God had been his.
Now he becomes aware that while he is still the same man who moved
about in gladness and power, his life has a different look to others;
men and nature conspire against him. His once brave faith--the Lord
gave, the Lord hath taken away--is almost overborne. He does not
renounce, but he has a struggle to save it. The subtle Divine grace
at his heart alone keeps him from bidding farewell to God.
* * * * *
The outburst of Job's speech falls into three lyrical strophes, the
first ending at the tenth verse, the second at the nineteenth, the
third closing with the chapter.
I. "Job opened his mouth and cursed his day." In a kind of wild
impossible revision of providence and reopening of questions long
settled, he assumes the right of heaping denunciations on the day of his
birth. He is so fallen, so distraught, and the end of his existence
appears to have come in such profound disaster, the face of God as well
as of man frowning on him, that he turns savagely on the only fact left
to strike at,--his birth into the world. But the whole strain is
imaginative. His revolt is unreason, not impiety either against God or
his parents. He does not lose the instinct of a good man, one who keeps
in mind the love of father and mother and the intention of the Almighty
whom he still reveres. Life is an act of God: he would not have it
marred again by infelicity like his own. So the day as an ideal factor
in history or cause of existence is given up to chaos.
"_That day, there! Darkness be it.
Seek it not the High God from above;
And no light stream on it.
Darkness and the nether gloom reclaim it.
Encamp over it the clouds;
Scare it blacknesses of the day._"
The idea is, Let the day of my birth be got rid of, so that no other
come into being on such a day; let God pass from it--then He will not
give life on that day. Mingled in this is the old world notion of days
having meanings and powers of their own. This day had proved malign,
terribly bad. It was already a chaotic day, not fit for a man's birth.
Let every natural power of storm and eclipse draw it back to the void.
The night too, as part of the day, comes under imprecation.
"_That night, there! Darkness seize it,
Joy have it none among the days of the year,
Nor come into the numbering of months.
See! That night, be it barren;
No song-voice come to it:
Ban it, the cursers of day
Skilful to stir up leviathan.
Dark be the stars of its twilight,
May it long for the light--find none,
Nor see the eyelids of dawn._"
The vividness here is from superstition, fancies of past generations,
old dreams of a child race. Foreign they would be to the mind of Job in
his strength; but in great disaster the thoughts are apt to fall back on
these levels of ignorance and dim efforts to explain, omens and powers
intangible. It is quite easy to follow Job in this relapse, half wilful,
half for easing of his bosom. Throughout Arabia, Chaldæa, and India went
a belief in evil powers that might be invoked to make a particular day
one of misfortune. The leviathan is the dragon which was thought to
cause eclipses by twining its black coils about the sun and moon. These
vague undertones of belief ran back probably to myths of the sky and the
storm, and Job ordinarily must have scorned them. Now, for the time, he
chooses to make them serve his need of stormy utterance. If any who hear
him really believe in magicians and their spells, they are welcome to
gather through that belief a sense of his condition; or if they choose
to feel pious horror, they may be shocked. He flings out maledictions,
knowing in his heart that they are vain words.
Is it not something strange that the happy past is here entirely
forgotten? Why has Job nothing to say of the days that shone brightly
upon him? Have they no weight in the balance against pain and grief?
"The tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there."
His mind is certainly clouded; for it is not vain to say that piety
preserves the thought of what God once gave, and Job had himself
spoken of it when his disease was young. At this point he is an
example of what man is when he allows the water-floods to overflow him
and the sad present to extinguish a brighter past. The sense of a
wasted life is upon him, because he does not yet understand what the
saving of life is. To be kind to others and to be happy in one's own
kindness is not for man so great a benefit, so high a use of life, as
to suffer with others and for them. What were the life of our Lord on
earth and His death but a revelation to man of the secret he had never
grasped and still but half approves? The Book of Job, a long, yearning
cry out of the night, shows how the world needed Christ to shed His
Divine light upon all our experiences and unite them in a religion of
sacrifice and triumph. The book moves toward that reconciliation which
only the Christ can achieve. As yet, looking at the sufferer here, we
see that the light of the future has not dawned upon him. Only when he
is brought to bay by the falsehoods of man, in the absolute need of
his soul, will he boldly anticipate the redemption and fling himself
for refuge on a justifying God.
II. In the second strophe cursing is exchanged for wailing, fruitless
reproach of a long past day for a touching chant in praise of the
grave. If his birth had to be, why could he not have passed at once
into the shades? The lament, though not so passionate, is full of
tragic emotion. The phrases of it have been woven into a modern hymn
and used to express what Christians may feel; but they are pagan in
tone, and meant by the writer to embody the unhopeful thought of the
race. Here is no outlook beyond the inanition of death, the oblivion
and silence of the tomb. It is not the extreme of unfaith, but rather
of weakness and misery.
"_Wherefore hastened the knees to meet me,
And why the breasts that I should suck?
For then, having sunk down, would I repose,
Fallen asleep there would be rest for me.
With kings and councillors of the earth
Who built them solitary piles;
Or with princes who had gold,
Who filled their houses with silver;
Or as a hidden abortion I had not been,
As infants who never saw light.
There the wicked cease from raging,
And there the outworn rest.
Together the prisoners are at ease,
Not hearing the call of the task-master.
Small and great are there the same,
The slave set free from his lord._"
It is beautiful poetry, and the images have a singular charm for the
dejected mind. The chief point, however, for us to notice is the absence
of any thought of judgment. In the dim under-world, hid as beneath heavy
clouds, power and energy are not. Existence has fallen to so low an ebb
that it scarcely matters whether men were good or bad in this life, nor
is it needful to separate them. For the tyrant can do no more harm to
the captive, nor the robber to his victim. The astute councillor is no
better than the slave. It is a kind of existence below the level of
moral judgment, below the level either of fear or joy. From the
peacefulness of this region none are excluded; as there will be no
strength to do good there will be none to do evil. "The small and great
are there the same." The stillness and calm of the dead body deceive the
mind, willing in its wretchedness to be deceived.
When the writer put this chant into the mouth of Job, he had in memory
the pyramids of Egypt and tombs, like those of Petra, carved in the
lonely hills. The contrast is thus made picturesque between the state
of Job lying in loathsome disease and the lot of those who are
gathered to the mighty dead. For whether the rich are buried in their
stately sepulchres, or the body of a slave is hastily covered with
desert sand, all enter into one painless repose. The whole purpose of
the passage is to mark the extremity of hopelessness, the mind
revelling in images of its own decay. We are not meant to rest in that
love of death from which Job vainly seeks comfort. On the contrary, we
are to see him by-and-by roused to interest in life and its issues.
This is no halting-place in the poem, as it often is in human thought.
A great problem of Divine righteousness hangs unsolved. With the death
of the prisoner and the down-trodden slave whose worn-out body is left
a prey to the vulture--with the death of the tyrant whose evil pride
has built a stately tomb for his remains--all is not ended. Peace has
not come. Rather has the unravelling of the tangle to begin. The
All-righteous has to make His inquisition and deal out the justice of
eternity. Modern poetry, however, often repeats in its own way the
old-world dream, mistaking the silence and composure of the dead face
for a spiritual deliverance:--
"The aching craze to live ends, and life glides
Lifeless--to nameless quiet, nameless joy.
Blessed Nirvana, sinless, stirless rest,
That change which never changes."
To Christianity this idea is utterly foreign, yet it mingles with some
religious teaching, and is often to be found in the weaker sorts of
religious fiction and verse.
III. The last portion of Job's address begins with a note of inquiry.
He strikes into eager questioning of heaven and earth regarding his
state. What is he kept alive for? He pursues death with his longing as
one goes into the mountains to seek treasure. And again, his way is
hid; he has no future. God hath hedged him in on this side by losses,
on that by grief; behind a past mocks him, before is a shape which he
follows and yet dreads.
"_Wherefore gives He light to wretched men
Life to the bitter in soul?
Who long for death but no!
Search for it more than for treasures._"
It is indeed a horrible condition, this of the baffled mind to which
nothing remains but its own gnawing thought that finds neither reason
of being nor end of turmoil, that can neither cease to question nor
find answer to inquiries that rack the spirit. There is energy enough,
life enough to feel life a terror, and no more; not enough for any
mastery even of stoical resolve. The power of self-consciousness seems
to be the last injury, a Nessus-shirt, the gift of a strange hate.
"The real agony is the silence, the ignorance of the why and the
wherefore, the Sphinx-like imperturbability which meets his prayers."
This struggle for a light that will not come has been expressed by
Matthew Arnold in his "Empedocles on Etna," a poem which may in some
respects be named a modern version of Job:--
"This heart will glow no more; thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought--
But a naked eternally restless mind....
To the elements it came from
Everything will return--
Our bodies to earth,
Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air.
They were well born,
They will be well entombed--
But mind, but thought--
Where will they find their parent element?
What will receive them, who will call them home?
But we shall still be in them and they in us....
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life,
Baffled for ever."
Thought yields no result; the outer universe is dumb and impenetrable.
Still Job would revive if a battle for righteousness offered itself to
him. He has never had to fight for God or for his own faith. When the
trumpet call is heard he will respond; but he is not yet aware of
hearing it.
The closing verses have presented considerable difficulty to
interpreters, who on the one hand shrink from the supposition that Job
is going back on his past life of prosperity and finding there the
origin of his fear, and on the other hand see the danger of leaving so
significant a passage without definite meaning. The Revised Version
puts all the verbs of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth verses into
the present tense, and Dr. A. B. Davidson thinks translation into the
past tense would give a meaning "contrary to the idea of the poem."
Now, a considerable interval had already elapsed from the time of
Job's calamities, even from the beginning of his illness, quite long
enough to allow the growth of anxiety and fear as to the judgment of
the world. Job was not ignorant of the caprice and hardness of men. He
knew how calamity was interpreted; he knew that many who once bowed to
his greatness already heaped scorn upon his fall. May not his fear
have been that his friends from beyond the desert would furnish the
last and in some respects most cutting of his sorrows?
"_I have feared a fear; it has come upon me,
And that which I dread has come to me.
I have not been at ease, nor quiet, nor have I had rest;
Yet trouble has come._"
In his brooding soul, those seven days and nights, fear has deepened
into certainty. He is a man despised. Even for those three his
circumstances have proved too much. Did he imagine for a moment that
their coming might relieve the pressure of his lot and open a way to
the recovery of his place among men? The trouble is deeper than ever;
they have stirred a tempest in his breast.
Note that in his whole agony Job makes no motion towards suicide.
Arnold's Empedocles cries against life, flings out his questions to a
dumb universe, and then plunges into the crater of Etna. Here, as at
other points, the inspiration of the author of our book strikes clear
between stoicism and pessimism, defiance of the world to do its worst
and confession that the struggle is too terrible. The deep sense of
all that is tragic in life, and, with this, the firm persuasion that
nothing is appointed to man but what he is able to bear, together make
the clear Bible note. It may seem that Job's ejaculations differ
little from the cry out of the "City of Dreadful Night,"
"Weary of erring in this desert, Life,
Weary of hoping hopes for ever vain,
Weary of struggling in all sterile strife,
Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain,
I close my eyes and calm my panting breath
And pray to thee, O ever quiet Death,
To come and soothe away my bitter pain."
But the writer of the book knows what is in hand. He has to show how
far faith may be pressed down and bent by the sore burdens of life
without breaking. He has to give us the sense of a soul in the
uttermost depth, that we may understand the sublime argument which
follows, know its importance, and find our own tragedy exhibited, our
own need met, the personal and the universal marching together to an
issue. Suicide is no issue for a life, any more than universal
cataclysm for the evolution of a world. Despair is no refuge. The
inspired writer here sees so far, so clearly, that to mention suicide
would be absurd. The struggle of life cannot be renounced. So much he
knows by a spiritual instinct which anticipates the wisdom of later
times. Were this book a simple record of fact, we have Job in a
position far more trying than that of Saul after his defeat on Gilboa;
but it is an ideal prophetic writing, a Divine poem, and the faith it
is designed to commend saves the man from interfering by any deed of
his with the will of God.
We are prepared for the vehement controversy that follows and the
sustained appeal of the sufferer to that Power which has laid upon him
such a weight of agony. When he breaks into passionate cries and seems
to be falling away from all trust, we do not despair of him nor of the
cause he represents. The intensity with which he longs for death is
actually a sign and measure of the strong life that throbs within him,
which yet will be led out into light and freedom and come to peace as
it were in the very clash of revolt.
VII.
_THE THINGS ELIPHAZ HAD SEEN._
ELIPHAZ SPEAKS. CHAPS. iv., v.
The ideas of sin and suffering against which the poem of Job was
written come now dramatically into view. The belief of the three
friends had always been that God, as righteous Governor of human life,
gives felicity in proportion to obedience and appoints trouble in
exact measure of disobedience. Job himself, indeed, must have held the
same creed. We may imagine that while he was prosperous his friends
had often spoken with him on this very point. They had congratulated
him often on the wealth and happiness he enjoyed as an evidence of the
great favour of the Almighty. In conversation they had remarked on
case after case which seemed to prove, beyond the shadow of doubt,
that if men reject God affliction and disaster invariably follow.
Their idea of the scheme of things was very simple, and, on the whole,
it had never come into serious questioning. Of course human justice,
even when rudely administered, and the practice of private revenge
helped to fulfil their theory of Divine government. If any serious
crime was committed, those friendly to the injured person took up his
cause and pursued the wrong-doer to inflict retribution upon him. His
dwelling was perhaps burned and his flocks dispersed, he himself
driven into a kind of exile. The administration of law was rude, yet
the unwritten code of the desert made the evil-doer suffer and allowed
the man of good character to enjoy life if he could. These facts went
to sustain the belief that God was always regulating a man's happiness
by his deserts. And beyond this, apart altogether from what was done
by men, not a few accidents and calamities appeared to show Divine
judgment against wrong. Then, as now, it might be said that avenging
forces lurk in the lightning, the storm, the pestilence, forces which
are directed against transgressors and cannot be evaded. Men would
say, Yes, though one hide his crimes, though he escape for long the
condemnation and punishment of his fellows, yet the hand of God will
find him: and the prediction seemed always to be verified. Perhaps the
stroke did not fall at once. Months might pass; years might pass; but
the time came when they could affirm, Now righteousness has overtaken
the offender; his crime is rewarded; his pride is brought low. And if,
as happened occasionally, the flocks of a man who was in good
reputation died of murrain, and his crops were blighted by the
terrible hot wind of the desert, they could always say, Ah! we did not
know all about him. No doubt if we could look into his private life we
should see why this has befallen. So the barbarians of the island of
Melita, when Paul had been shipwrecked there, seeing a viper fasten on
his hand, said, "No doubt this is a murderer whom, though he hath
escaped from the sea, yet justice suffereth not to live."
Thoughts like these were in the minds of the three friends of Job, very
confounding indeed, for they had never expected to shake their heads
over him. They accordingly deserve credit for true sympathy, inasmuch as
they refrained from saying anything that might hurt him. His grief was
great, and it might be due to remorse. His unparalleled afflictions put
him, as it were, in sanctuary from taunts or even questionings. He has
done wrong, he has not been what we thought him, they said to
themselves, but he is drinking to the bitter dregs a cup of retribution.
But when Job opened his mouth and spoke, their sympathy was dashed with
pious horror. They had never in all their lives heard such words. He
seemed to prove himself far worse than they could have imagined. He
ought to have been meek and submissive. Some flaw there must have been:
what was it? He should have confessed his sin instead of cursing life
and reflecting on God. Their own silent suspicion, indeed, is the chief
cause of his despair; but this they do not understand. Amazed they hear
him; outraged, they take up the challenge he offers. One after another
the three men reason with Job, from almost the same point of view,
suggesting first and then insisting that he should acknowledge fault and
humble himself under the hand of a just and holy God.
Now, here is the motive of the long controversy which is the main
subject of the poem. And, in tracing it, we are to see Job, although
racked by pain and distraught by grief--sadly at disadvantage because he
seems to be a living example of the truth of their ideas--rousing
himself to the defence of his integrity and contending for that as the
only grip he has of God. Advance after advance is made by the three, who
gradually become more dogmatic as the controversy proceeds. Defence
after defence is made by Job, who is driven to think himself challenged
not only by his friends, but sometimes also by God Himself through them.
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar agree in the opinion that Job has done
evil and is suffering for it. The language they use and the arguments
they bring forward are much alike. Yet a difference will be found in
their way of speaking, and a vaguely suggested difference of
character. Eliphaz gives us an impression of age and authority. When
Job has ended his complaint, Eliphaz regards him with a disturbed and
offended look. "How pitiful!" he seems to say; but also, "How
dreadful, how unaccountable!" He desires to win Job to a right view of
things by kindly counsel; but he talks pompously, and preaches too
much from the high moral bench. Bildad, again, is a dry and composed
person. He is less the man of experience than of tradition. He does
not speak of discoveries made in the course of his own observation;
but he has stored the sayings of the wise and reflected upon them.
When a thing is cleverly said he is satisfied, and he cannot
understand why his impressive statements should fail to convince and
convert. He is a gentleman, like Eliphaz, and uses courtesy. At first
he refrains from wounding Job's feelings. Yet behind his politeness is
the sense of superior wisdom--the wisdom of ages, and his own. He is
certainly a harder man than Eliphaz. Lastly, Zophar is a blunt man
with a decidedly rough, dictatorial style. He is impatient of the
waste of words on a matter so plain, and prides himself on coming to
the point. It is he who ventures to say definitely: "Know therefore
that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth,"--a
cruel speech from any point of view. He is not so eloquent as Eliphaz,
he has no air of a prophet. Compared with Bildad he is less
argumentative. With all his sympathy--and he, too, is a friend--he
shows an exasperation which he justifies by his zeal for the honour of
God. The differences are delicate, but real, and evident even to our
late criticism. In the author's day the characters would probably seem
more distinctly contrasted than they appear to us. Still, it must be
owned, each holds virtually the same position. One prevailing school
of thought is represented and in each figure attacked.
It is not difficult to imagine three speakers differing far more from
each other. For example, instead of Bildad we might have had a Persian
full of the Zoroastrian ideas of two great powers, the Good Spirit,
Ahuramazda, and the Evil Spirit, Ahriman. Such a one might have
maintained that Job had given himself to the Evil Spirit, or that his
revolt against providence would bring him under that destructive power
and work his ruin. And then, instead of Zophar, one might have been
set forward who maintained that good and evil make no difference, that
all things come alike to all, that there is no God who cares for
righteousness among men; assailing Job's faith in a more dangerous
way. But the writer has no such view of making a striking drama. His
circle of vision is deliberately chosen. It is only what might appear
to be true he allows his characters to advance. One hears the
breathings of the same dogmatism in the three voices. 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 dramatising is vague, not at all of our sharp, modern kind like
that of Ibsen, throwing each figure into vivid contrast with every
other. All the author's concern is to give full play to the theory
which holds the ground and to show its incompatibility with the facts
of human life, so that it may perish of its own hollowness.
Nevertheless the first address to Job is eloquent and poetically
beautiful. No rude arguer is Eliphaz but one of the golden-mouthed,
mistaken in creed but not in heart, a man whom Job might well cherish
as a friend.
I. The first part of his speech extends to the eleventh verse. With
the respect due to sorrow, putting aside the dismay caused by Job's
wild language, he asks, "If one essay to commune with thee, wilt thou
be grieved?" It seems unpardonable to add to the sufferer's misery by
saying what he has in his mind; and yet--he cannot refrain. "Who can
withhold himself from speaking?" The state of Job is such that there
must be thorough and very serious communication. Eliphaz reminds him
of what he had been--an instructor of the ignorant, one who
strengthened the weak, upheld the falling, confirmed the feeble. Was
he not once so confident of himself, so resolute and helpful that
fainting men found him a bulwark against despair? Should he have
changed so completely? Should one like him take to fruitless wailings
and complaints? "Now it cometh upon thee, and thou faintest; it
toucheth thee, and thou art confounded." Eliphaz does not mean to
taunt. It is in sorrow that he speaks, pointing out the contrast
between what was and is. Where is the strong faith of former days?
There is need for it, and Job ought to have it as his stay. "Is not
thy piety thy confidence? Thy hope, is it not the integrity of thy
ways?" Why does he not look back and take courage? Pious fear of God,
if he allows himself to be guided by it, will not fail to lead him
again into the light.
It is a friendly and sincere effort to make the champion of God serve
himself of his own faith. The undercurrent of doubt is not allowed to
appear. Eliphaz makes it a wonder that Job had dropped his claim on
the Most High; and he proceeds in a tone of expostulation, amazed that
a man who knew the way of the Almighty should fall into the miserable
weakness of the worst evil-doer. Poetically, yet firmly, the idea is
introduced:--
"_Bethink thee now, who ever, being innocent, perished,
And where have the upright been destroyed?
As I have seen, they who plough iniquity
And sow disaster reap the same.
By the wrath of God they perish,
By the storm of His wrath they are undone.
Roaring of the lion, voice of the growling lion,
Teeth of the young lions are broken;
The old lion perisheth for lack of prey,
The whelps of the lioness are scattered._"
First among the things Eliphaz has seen is the fate of those violent
evil-doers who plough iniquity and sow disaster. But Job has not been
like them and therefore has no need to fear the harvest of perdition.
He is among those who are not finally cut off. In the tenth and
eleventh verses the dispersion of a den of lions is the symbol of the
fate of those who are hot in wickedness. As in some cave of the
mountains an old lion and lioness with their whelps dwell securely,
issuing forth at their will to seize the prey and make night dreadful
with their growling, so those evil-doers flourish for a time in
hateful and malignant strength. But as on a sudden the hunters,
finding the lions' retreat, kill and scatter them, young and old, so
the coalition of wicked men is broken up. The rapacity of wild desert
tribes appears to be reflected in the figure here used. Eliphaz may be
referring to some incident which had actually occurred.
II. In the second division of his address he endeavours to bring home to
Job a needed moral lesson by detailing a vision he once had and the
oracle which came with it. The account of the apparition is couched in
stately and impressive language. That chilling sense of fear which
sometimes mingles with our dreams in the dead of night, the sensation of
a presence that cannot be realised, something awful breathing over the
face and making the flesh creep, an imagined voice falling solemnly on
the ear,--all are vividly described. In the recollection of Eliphaz the
circumstances of the vision are very clear, and the finest poetic skill
is used in giving the whole solemn dream full justice and effect.
"_Now a word was secretly brought me,
Mine ear caught the whisper thereof;
In thoughts from visions of the night,
When deep sleep falls upon men,
A terror came on me, and trembling
Which thrilled my bones to the marrow.
Then a breath passed before my face,
The hairs of my body rose erect.
It stood still--its appearance I trace not.
An image is before mine eyes.
There was silence, and I heard a voice--
Shall man beside Eloah be righteous?
Or beside his Maker shall man be clean?_"
We are made to feel here how extraordinary the vision appeared to
Eliphaz, and, at the same time, how far short he comes of the seer's
gift. For what is this apparition? Nothing but a vague creation of the
dreaming mind. And what is the message? No new revelation, no
discovery of an inspired soul. After all, only a fact quite familiar
to pious thought. The dream oracle has been generally supposed to
continue to the end of the chapter. But the question as to the
righteousness of man and his cleanness beside God seems to be the
whole of it, and the rest is Eliphaz's comment or meditation upon it,
his "thoughts from visions of the night."
As to the oracle itself: while the words may certainly bear
translating so as to imply a direct comparison between the
righteousness of man and the righteousness of God, this is not
required by the purpose of the writer, as Dr. A. B. Davidson has
shown. In the form of a question it is impressively announced that
with or beside the High God no weak man is righteous, no strong man
pure; and this is sufficient, for the aim of Eliphaz is to show that
troubles may justly come on Job, as on others, because all are by
nature imperfect. No doubt the oracle might transcend the scope of the
argument. Still the question has not been raised by Job's criticism of
providence, whether he reckons himself more just than God; and apart
from that any comparison seems unnecessary, meeting no mood of human
revolt of which Eliphaz has ever heard. The oracle, then, is
practically of the nature of a truism, and, as such, agrees with the
dream vision and the impalpable ghost, a dim presentation by the mind
to itself of what a visitor from the higher world might be.
Shall any created being, inheritor of human defects, stand beside
Eloah, clean in His sight? Impossible. For, however sincere and
earnest any one may be toward God and in the service of men, he cannot
pass the fallibility and imperfection of the creature. The thought
thus solemnly announced, Eliphaz proceeds to amplify in a prophetic
strain, which, however, does not rise above the level of good poetry.
"Behold, He putteth no trust in His servants." Nothing that the best
of them have to do is committed entirely to them; the supervision of
Eloah is always maintained that their defects may not mar His purpose.
"His angels He chargeth with error." Even the heavenly spirits, if we
are to trust Eliphaz, go astray; they are under a law of discipline
and holy correction. In the Supreme Light they are judged and often
found wanting. To credit this to a Divine oracle would be somewhat
disconcerting to ordinary theological ideas. But the argument is clear
enough,--If even the angelic servants of God require the constant
supervision of His wisdom and their faults need His correction, much
more do men whose bodies are "houses of clay, whose foundation is in
the dust, who are crushed before the moth"--that is, the moth which
breeds corrupting worms. "From morning to evening they are
destroyed"--in a single day their vigour and beauty pass into decay.
"Without observance they perish for ever," says Eliphaz. Clearly this
is not a word of Divine prophecy. It would place man beneath the level
of moral judgment, as a mere earth-creature whose life and death are
of no account even to God. Men go their way when a comrade falls, and
soon forget. True enough. But "One higher than the highest regardeth."
The stupidity or insensibility of most men to spiritual things is in
contrast to the attention and judgment of God.
The description of man's life on earth, its brevity and dissolution,
on account of which he can never exalt himself as just and clean
beside God, ends with words that may be translated thus:--
"_Is not their cord torn asunder in them?
They shall die, and not in wisdom._"
Here the tearing up of the tent cord or the breaking of the bow-string
is an image of the snapping of that chain of vital functions, the
"silver cord," on which the bodily life depends.
The argument of Eliphaz, so far, has been, first, that Job, as a
pious man, should have kept his confidence in God, because he was not
like those who plough iniquity and sow disaster and have no hope in
Divine mercy; next, that before the Most High all are more or less
unrighteous and impure, so that if Job suffers for defect, he is no
exception, his afflictions are not to be wondered at. And this carries
the further thought that he ought to be conscious of fault and humble
himself under the Divine hand. Just at this point Eliphaz comes at
last within sight of the right way to find Job's heart and conscience.
The corrective discipline which all need was safe ground to take with
one who could not have denied in the last resort that he, too, had
"Sins of will,
Defects of doubt and taints of blood."
This strain of argument, however, closes, Eliphaz having much in his
mind which has not found expression and is of serious import.
III. The speaker sees that Job is impatient of the sufferings which
make life appear useless to him. But suppose he appealed to the
saints--holy ones, or angels--to take his part, would that be of any
use? In his cry from the depth he had shown resentment and hasty
passion. These do not insure, they do not deserve help. The "holy
ones" would not respond to a man so unreasonable and indignant. On the
contrary, "resentment slayeth the foolish man, passion killeth the
silly." What Job had said in his outcry only tended to bring on him
the fatal stroke of God. Having caught at this idea, Eliphaz proceeds
in a manner rather surprising. He has been shocked by Job's bitter
words. The horror he felt returns upon him, and he falls into a very
singular and inconsiderate strain of remark. He does not, indeed,
identify his old friend with the foolish man whose destruction he
proceeds to paint. But an instance has occurred to him--a bit of his
large experience--of one who behaved in a godless, irrational way and
suffered for it; and for Job's warning, because he needs to take home
the lesson of the catastrophe, Eliphaz details the story. Forgetting
the circumstances of his friend, utterly forgetting that the man lying
before him has lost all his children and that robbers have swallowed
his substance, absorbed in his own reminiscence to the exclusion of
every other thought, Eliphaz goes deliberately through a whole roll of
disasters so like Job's that every word is a poisoned arrow:--
"_Plead then: will any one answer thee;
And to which of the holy ones wilt thou turn?
Nay, resentment killeth the fool,
And hasty indignation slayeth the silly.
I myself have seen a godless fool take root;
Yet straightway I cursed his habitation:--
His children are far from succour,
They are crushed in the gate without deliverer:
While the hungry eats up his harvest
And snatches it even out of the thorns,
And the snare gapes for their substance._"
The desolation he saw come suddenly, even when the impious man had
just taken root as founder of a family, Eliphaz declares to be a curse
from the Most High; and he describes it with much force. Upon the
children of the household disaster falls at the gate or place of
judgment; there is no one to plead for them, because the father is
marked for the vengeance of God. Predatory tribes from the desert
devour first the crops in the remoter fields, and then those protected
by the thorn hedge near the homestead. The man had been an oppressor;
now those he had oppressed are under no restraint, and all he has is
swallowed up without redress.
So much for the third attempt to convict Job and bring him to
confession. It is a bolt shot apparently at a venture, yet it strikes
where it must wound to the quick. Here, however, made aware, perhaps by
a look of anguish or a sudden gesture, that he has gone too far, Eliphaz
draws back. To the general dogma that affliction is the lot of every
human being he returns, that the sting may be taken out of his words:--
"_For disaster cometh not forth from the dust,
And out of the ground trouble springeth not;
But man is born unto trouble
As the sparks fly upward._"
By this vague piece of moralising, which sheds no light on anything,
Eliphaz betrays himself. He shows that he is not anxious to get at the
root of the matter. The whole subject of pain and calamity is external
to him, not a part of his own experience. He would speak very
differently if he were himself deprived of all his possessions and
laid low in trouble. As it is he can turn glibly from one thought to
another, as if it mattered not which fits the case. In fact, as he
advances and retreats we discover that he is feeling his way, aiming
first at one thing, then at another, in the hope that this or that
random arrow may hit the mark. No man is just beside God. Job is like
the rest, crushed before the moth. Job has spoken passionately, in
wild resentment. Is he then among the foolish whose habitation is
cursed? But again, lest that should not be true, the speaker falls
back on the common lot of men, born to trouble--why, God alone can
tell. Afterwards he makes another suggestion. Is not God He who
frustrates the devices of the crafty and confounds the cunning, so
that they grope in the blaze of noon as if it were night? If the other
explanations did not apply to Job's condition, perhaps this would. At
all events something might be said by way of answer that would give an
inkling of the truth. At last the comparatively kind and vague
explanation is offered, that Job suffers from the chastening of the
Lord, who, though He afflicts, is also ready to heal. Glancing at all
possibilities which occur to him, Eliphaz leaves the afflicted man to
accept that which happens to come home.
IV. Eloquence, literary skill, sincerity, mark the close of this
address. It is the argument of a man who is anxious to bring his
friend to a right frame of mind so that his latter days may be peace.
"As for me," he says, hinting what Job should do, "I would turn to
God, and set my expectation upon the Highest." Then he proceeds to
give his thoughts on Divine providence. Unsearchable, wonderful are
the doings of God. He is the Rain-giver for the thirsty fields and
desert pastures. Among men, too, He makes manifest His power, exalting
those who are lowly, and restoring the joy of the mourners. Crafty
men, who plot to make their own way, oppose His sovereign power in
vain. They are stricken as if with blindness. Out of their hand the
helpless are delivered, and hope is restored to the feeble. Has Job
been crafty? Has he been in secret a plotter against the peace of men?
Is it for this reason God has cast him down? Let him repent, and he
shall yet be saved. For
"_Happy is the man whom Eloah correcteth,
Therefore spurn not thou the chastening of Shaddai.
For He maketh sore and bindeth up;
He smiteth, but His hands make whole.
In six straits He will deliver thee;
In seven also shall not evil touch thee.
In famine He will rescue thee from death,
And in war from the power of the sword.
When the tongue smiteth thou shalt be hid;
Nor shalt thou fear when desolation cometh.
At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh;
And of the beasts of the earth shalt not be afraid.
For with the stones of the field shall be thy covenant;
With thee shall the beasts of the field be at peace.
So shalt thou find that thy tent is secure,
And surveying thy homestead thou shalt miss nothing.
Thou shalt find that thy seed are many,
And thy offspring like the grass of the earth;
Thou shalt come to thy grave with white hair,
As a ripe shock of corn is carried home in its season.
Behold! This we have searched out: thus it is.
Hear it, and, thou, consider it for thyself!_"
Fine, indeed, as dramatic poetry; but is it not, as reasoning,
incoherent? The author does not mean it to be convincing. He who is
chastened and receives the chastening may not be saved in those six
troubles, yea seven. There is more of dream than fact. Eliphaz is
apparently right in everything, as Dillmann says; but right only on
the surface. _He has seen_--that they who plough iniquity and sow
disaster reap the same. _He has seen_--a vision of the night, and
received a message; a sign of God's favour that almost made him a
prophet. _He has seen_--a fool or impious man taking root, but was not
deceived; he knew what would be the end, and took upon him to curse
judicially the doomed homestead. _He has seen_--the crafty confounded.
_He has seen_--the man whom God corrected, who received his
chastisement with submission, rescued and restored to honour. "Lo,
this we have searched out," he says; "it is even thus." But the piety
and orthodoxy of the good Eliphaz do not save him from blunders at
every turn. And to the clearing of Job's position he offers no
suggestion of value. What does he say to throw light on the condition
of a believing, earnest servant of the Almighty who is _always_ poor,
_always_ afflicted, who meets disappointment after disappointment, and
is pursued by sorrow and disaster even to the grave? The religion of
Eliphaz is made for well-to-do people like himself, and such only. If
it were true that, because all are sinful before God, affliction and
pain are punishments of sin, and a man is happy in receiving this
Divine correction, why is Eliphaz himself not lying like Job upon a
heap of ashes, racked with the torment of disease? Good orthodox
prosperous man, he thinks himself a prophet, but he is none. Were he
tried like Job he would be as unreasonable and passionate, as wild in
his declamation against life, as eager for death.
Useless in religion is all mere talk that only skims the surface,
however often the terms of it may be repeated, however widely they
find acceptance. The creed that breaks down at any point is no creed
for a rational being. Infidelity in our day is very much the
consequence of crude notions about God that contradict each other,
notions of the atonement, of the meaning of suffering, of the future
life, that are incoherent, childish, of no practical weight. People
think they have a firm grasp of the truth; but when circumstances
occur which are at variance with their preconceived ideas, they turn
away from religion, or their religion makes the facts of life appear
worse for them. It is the result of insufficient thought. Research
must go deeper, must return with new zeal to the study of Scripture
and the life of Christ. God's revelation in providence and
Christianity is one. It has a profound coherency, the stamp and
evidence of its truth. The rigidity of natural law has its meaning for
us in our study of the spiritual life.
VIII.
_MEN FALSE: GOD OVERBEARING._
JOB SPEAKS. CHAPS. vi., vii.
Worst to endure of all things is the grief that preys on a man's own
heart because no channel outside self is provided for the hot stream
of thought. Now that Eliphaz has spoken, Job has something to arouse
him, at least to resentment. The strength of his mind revives as he
finds himself called to a battle of words. And how energetic he is!
The long address of Eliphaz we saw to be incoherent, without the
backbone of any clear conviction, turning hither and thither in the
hope of making some way or other a happy hit. But as soon as Job
begins to speak there is coherency, strong thought running through the
variety of expression, the anxiety for instruction, the sense of
bewilderment and trouble. We feel at once that we are in contact with
a mind no half-truths can satisfy, that will go with whatever
difficulty to the very bottom of the matter.
Supreme mark of a healthy nature, this. People are apt to praise a mind
at peace, moving composedly from thought to thought, content "to enjoy
the things which others understand," not distressed by moral questions.
But minds enjoying such peace are only to be praised if the philosophy
of life has been searched out and tried, and the great trust in God
which resolves all doubt has been found. While life and providence,
one's own history and the history of the world present what appear to be
contradictions, problems that baffle and disturb the soul, how can a
healthy mind be at rest? Our intellectual powers are not given simply
that we may enjoy; they are given that we may understand. A mind hungers
for knowledge, as a body for food, and cannot be satisfied unless the
reason and the truth of things are seen. You may object that some are
not capable of understanding, that indeed Divine providence, the great
purposes of God, lie so far and so high beyond the ordinary human range
as to be incomprehensible to most of us. Of what use, then, is
revelation? Is it given merely to bewilder us, to lead us on in a quest
which at the last must leave many of the searchers unsatisfied, without
light or hope? If so, the Bible mocks us, the prophets were deceivers,
even Christ Himself is found no Light of the world, but a dreamer who
spoke of that which can never be realised. Not thus do I begin in doubt,
and end in doubt. There are things beyond me; but exact or final
knowledge of these is not necessary. Within my range and reach through
nature and religion, through the Bible and the Son of God, are the
principles I need to satisfy my soul's hunger. And in every healthy mind
there will be desire for truth which, often baffled, will continue till
understanding comes.
And here we join issue with the agnostic, who denies this vital demand
of the soul. Our thought dwelling on life and all its varied
experience--sorrow and fear, misery and hope, love threatened by death
yet unquenchable, the exultation of duty, the baffling of ambition,
unforeseen peril and unexpected deliverance--our thought, I say,
dealing with these elements of life, will not rest in the notion that
all is due to chance or to blind forces, that evolution can never be
intelligently followed. The modern atheist or agnostic falls into the
very error for which he used to reprove faith when he contemptuously
bids us get rid of the hope of understanding the world and the Power
directing it, when he invites us to remember our limitations and
occupy ourselves with things within our range. Religion used to be
taunted with crippling man's faculties and denying full play to his
mental activity. Scientific unbelief does so now. It restricts us to
the seen and temporal, and, if consistent, ought to refuse all ideals
and all desires for a "perfect" state. The modern sage, intent on the
study of material things and their changes, confining himself to what
can be seen, heard, touched, or by instruments analysed, may have
nothing but scorn or, say, pity for one who cries out of trouble--
"Have I sinned? Yet, what have I done unto Thee,
O Thou Watcher of men?
Why hast Thou set me as Thy stumbling-block,
So that I am a burden to myself?
And why wilt Thou not pardon my transgression,
And cause my sin to pass away?"
But the man whose soul is eager in the search for reality must
endeavour to wrest from Heaven itself the secret of his
dissatisfaction with the real, his conflict with the real, and why he
must so often suffer from the very forces that sustain his life. Yes,
the passion of the soul continues. It protests against darkness, and
therefore against materialism. Conscious mind presses toward an origin
of thought. Soul must find a Divine Eternal Soul. Where nature opens
ascending ways to the reason in its quest; where prophets and sages
have cut paths here and there through the forest of mystery; where the
brave and true testify of a light they have seen and invite us to
follow; where One stands high and radiant above the cross on which He
suffered and declares Himself the Resurrection and the Life,--there
men will advance, feeling themselves inspired to maintain the search
for that Eternal Truth without the hope of which all our life here is
a wearisome pageant, a troubled dream, a bitter slavery.
In his reply to Eliphaz, Job first takes hold of the charge of
impatience and hasty indignation made in the opening of the fifth
chapter. He is quite aware that his words were rash when he cursed his
day and cried impatiently for death. In accusing him of rebellious
passion, Eliphaz had shot the only arrow that went home; and now Job,
conscientious here, pulls out the arrow to show it and the wound.
"Oh," he cries, "that my hasty passion were duly weighed, and my
misery were laid in the balance against it! For then would it, my
misery, be found heavier than the sand of the seas: therefore have my
words been rash." He is almost deprecatory. Yes: he will admit the
impatience and vehemence with which he spoke. But then, had Eliphaz
duly considered his state, the weight of his trouble causing a
physical sense of indescribable oppression? Let his friends look at
him again, a man prostrated with sore disease and grief, dying slowly
in the leper's exile.
"_The arrows of the Almighty are within me,
The poison whereof my spirit drinketh up.
The terrors of God beleaguer me._"
We need not fall into the mistake of supposing that it is only the
pain of his disease which makes Job's misery so heavy. Rather is it
that his troubles have come from God; they are "the arrows of the
Almighty." Mere suffering and loss, even to the extremity of death, he
could have borne without a murmur. But he had thought God to be his
friend. Why on a sudden have those darts been launched against him by
the hand he trusted? What does the Almighty mean? The evil-doer who
suffers knows why he is afflicted. The martyr enduring for conscience'
sake has his support in the truth to which he bears witness, the holy
cause for which he dies. Job has no explanation, no support. He cannot
understand providence. The God with whom he supposed himself to be at
peace suddenly becomes an angry incomprehensible Power, blighting and
destroying His servant's life. Existence poisoned, the couch of ashes
encompassed with terrors, is it any wonder that passionate words break
from his lips? A cry is the last power left to him.
So it is with many. The seeming needlessness of their sufferings, the
impossibility of tracing these to any cause in their past history, in a
word, the mystery of the pain confounds the mind, and adds to anguish
and desolation an unspeakable horror of darkness. Sometimes the very
thing guarded against is that which happens; a man's best intelligence
appears confuted by destiny or chance. Why has he amongst the many been
chosen for this? Do all things come alike to all, righteous and wicked?
The problem becomes terribly acute in the case of earnest God-fearing
men and women who have not yet found the real theory of suffering.
Endurance for others does not always explain. All cannot be rested on
that. Nor unless we speak falsely for God will it avail to say, These
afflictions have fallen on us for our sins. For even if the conscience
does not give the lie to that assertion, as Job's conscience did, the
question demands a clear answer why the penitent should suffer, those
who believe, to whom God imputes no iniquity. If it is for our
transgressions we suffer, either our own faith and religion are vain, or
God does not forgive excepting in form, and the law of punishment
retains its force. We have here the serious difficulty that legal
fictions seem to hold their ground even in the dealings of the Most High
with those who trust Him. Many are in the direst trouble still for the
same reason as Job, and might use his very words. Taught to believe
that suffering is invariably connected with wrong-doing and is always in
proportion to it, they cannot find in their past life any great
transgressions for which they should be racked with constant pain or
kept in grinding penury and disappointment. Moreover, they had imagined
that through the mediation of Christ their sins were expiated and their
guilt blotted out. What strange error is there in the creed or in the
world? Have they never believed? Has God turned against them? So they
inquire in the darkness.
The truth, however, as shown in a previous chapter, is that suffering
has no proportion to the guilt of sin, but is related in the scheme of
Divine providence to life in this world, its movement, discipline, and
perfecting in the individual and the race. Afflictions, pains, and
griefs are appointed to the best as well as the worst, because all
need to be tried and urged on from imperfect faith and spirituality to
vigour, constancy, and courage of soul. The principle is not clearly
stated in the Book of Job, but underlies it, as truth must underlie
all genuine criticism and every faithful picture of human life. The
inspiration of the poem is so to present the facts of human experience
that the real answer alone can satisfy. And in the speech we are now
considering some imperfect and mistaken views are swept so completely
aside that their survival is almost unaccountable.
Beginning with the fifth verse we have a series of questions somewhat
difficult to interpret:--
"_Doth the wild ass bray when he hath grass?
Or loweth the ox over his fodder?
Can that be eaten which is unsavoury, without salt?
Or is there any taste in the white of an egg?
My soul refuseth to touch them;
They are to me as mouldy bread._"
By some these questions are supposed to describe sarcastically the
savourless words of Eliphaz, his "solemn and impertinent prosing."
This, however, would break the continuity of the thought. Another view
makes the reference to be to Job's afflictions, which he is supposed
to compare to insipid and loathsome food. But it seems quite unnatural
to take this as the meaning. Such pain and grief and loss as he had
undergone were certainly not like the white of an egg. But he has
already spoken wildly, unreasonably, and he now feels himself to be on
the point of breaking out afresh in similar impatient language. Now,
the wild ass does not complain when it has grass, nor the ox when it
has fodder; so, if his mind were supplied with necessary explanations
of the sore troubles he is enduring, he would not be impatient, he
would not complain. His soul hungers to know the re
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