CHAPTER XX.

1.-Then answered Zophar the Naamathite and said: Nevertheless my thoughts urge me to answer,

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And the impulse that stirreth in me.

I have heard a chiding to my shame,

But out of my understanding my spirit yieldeth me a reply.
Knowest thou not this, that, from of old,

Since man was placed upon the earth,

The triumph of the wicked is brief,

And the joy of the impious but for a moment?
Though he lift himself up to the heavens,
And his head sweep the clouds,

Yet shall he perish for ever like his own ordure:
They that saw him shall say, "Where is he?"
Like a dream shall he flit away and not be found,
He shall be chased away like a vision of the night;
The eye that saw him shall see him no more,
Neither shall his place any more behold him :
His children shall court the poor,
And his own hands shall restore their substance.
Though his bones are full of his youth,
It shall lie down with him in the dust.
Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth,
So that he retain it under his tongue,
So that he spareth it, yet will not leave it,
But holdeth it still in his mouth,
Nevertheless his food is changed in his stomach,
It is gall of asps within him;

He swallowed down riches, and shall disgorge them,
God will drive them out of his belly:

He sucked the poison of asps,
The viper's tongue shall slay him.

He shall not see the brooks,

The rivers, the torrents, of honey and cream;

That for which he toiled he shall restore and not consume,
Though large be his gain, he shall not have joy in it.
Because he ground down and abandoned the

poor,

Seized a house which he did not build-
Because his cravings knew no bounds,
With none of his delights shall he escape;

Nothing was safe from his greed,
Therefore his good fortune shall not endure:

In the fulness of his abundance shall he be straitened;

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Trouble of every kind shall come upon him.

Let there be food to fill his belly,—
God shall cast on him the glow of his wrath,
And shall rain it upon him while he is feasting.
If he flee from a weapon of iron,

A bow of brass shall transfix him;
If one draw it out, and it come forth from his body,
And the gleaming point from his gall,

[New] terrors shall be upon him.
All darkness is hoarded in his treasures;
A fire, not blown, shall devour him,
And feed on what is left in his tent :
The heavens shall reveal his iniquity,
And the earth rise up against him ;
The increase of his house shall depart,
Flowing away in the day of his anger.
This is the portion of the wicked from God,

And this the heritage ordained him of the Lord.

Verses 2 and 3.-Zophar's opening words are not very clear. He is evidently, and confessedly, agitated and perturbed; and for this reason. In the First Colloquy (Chap. xi. 6), he had warned Job that he was so great a sinner, that even his great misery was not an adequate punishment of his guilt. He had urged him to confess and renounce his sin, promising him that so soon as he could lift up a face without spot to God his misery would give way to all prosperous and happy conditions. And how has "Sir Oracle" been met? Instead of gratefully accepting his warning and invitation, and acting on them; instead of saying

My voice shall sound as you do prompt mine ear,
And I will stoop and humble my intents

To your well-practised wise directions,

Job has actually rejected his counsel, refuted the hypothesis upon which it was based, asserted and reasserted that he needed no repentance, and even appealed with apparent sincerity and confidence from Zophar's verdict to the judgment and sentence of God! How could any man, or any such man as Zophar, with the whole weight of orthodox opinion at his back, stand that? It was impossible that he should sit silent while the most ancient and approved conclusions were being so

wickedly called in question. It was still more impossible that he should hold his peace when opinions which he had espoused were mercilessly refuted, and counsels which he had deigned to offer were flung back into his face. He must speak, though he hardly knows what to say. Nay, to his own amazement, he finds that he has nothing of any real moment to say; and therefore he very naturally proceeds to abuse his adversary. Before, he had besought Job to repent; but now he finds in

him

such black and grainéd spots

As will not leave their tinct,

let him repent as he may. With an insolence almost incredible to Zophar, Job had even threatened him, the very pink and pattern of orthodoxy, with the sword and judgment of God (Chapter xix. 29). It was intolerable. Job must be silenced; but how? That was not so easy to determine. And so, in an excited yet pompous way, hiding the poverty of his invention under a cloak of big words, and yet revealing his consciousness of wounded vanity and outraged piety in the very words behind which he would fain conceal it, he begins.

Nevertheless, despite all you have said, and said with such intolerable confidence and presumption, my thoughts-the word for "thoughts" is a peculiar one, used only here and in Chapter iv. Verse 13, and means " doubtful, perplexed, agitated thoughts"-urge me to answer. The whole line implies that there was a tempest in his soul, that he was driven to and fro by contending impulses which he could not control, and hardly knew for what point to steer. And this impression of blind, hasty, undirected force is strengthened by the words that follow, in which he confesses that a violent "impulse" is at work within him.

In the next Verse he adds new strokes to this unconscious delineation of the trouble and agitation of his spirit. I have heard a chiding to my shame; i.e., "I know very well what the aim of the check and counter-check of your last words was. You intended that threatening of judgment for me. You meant to put me to shame. But you did not, and cannot, put me to shame, nor even put me to silence. In my "under

standing" there is an immense store of arguments, if only I could get at them; and "out of" this store "my spirit" will select that which I deem most pertinent and conclusive. If I am for a moment embarrassed, and know not what to say, it is simply my wealth of replies which embarrasses me.

These are brave words, but rich men do not boast of their wealth. And I am afraid that Zophar must either have been much poorer than he thought, or that he put forward this pretension of wealth to hide a conscious penury. For, after all, he has nothing to say-nothing of the quality of an argument, or of a reply to the arguments of Job. To him, as to many of the self-appointed champions of subsequent creeds, the most familiar weapon of controversy was invective; and his one merit is that he makes his invective as keen and biting as he can. There is really nothing but racy and telling invective in the Verses which follow; and one might have hoped that men of so much religious culture and genuine piety as Eliphaz and Bildad would have been a little ashamed of their colleague's irrational and self-defeating virulence. But just as we now often see good men, who would not themselves deign to use sinister and cruel weapons against the heretic or the sceptic, not altogether displeased when combatants of a coarser grain wield those weapons with effect; just as we occasionally see them, in times of great excitement, even stooping to use the weapons they would have disdained to touch in their calmer and better hours; so, as we shall find in the next Colloquy, even Eliphaz, the wisest of the three Friends, sinks to the level of Zophar, and stoops to invectives as baseless and cruel, though not so grossly worded as his.

There is not much in Zophar's invective to detain us. It divides itself into three sections. In the first (Verses 4-11) he describes the punishments which wait on sin; in the second (Verses 12-22) he affirms these punishments to be the natural and necessary consequences of the sins to which they are attached; and in the third (Verses 23-28) he asserts that these punishments, though they are the natural consequences of sin, are nevertheless inflicted by God, and execute his verdict on the transgressions by which they are provoked.

In Verse 4 he affirms the constancy, the eternity, of the

retributive principle which he is about to assert, viz., that (Verse 5) the success and prosperity of the wicked man are short-lived. The higher and the more imposing the elevation to which he climbs (Verse 6), the more disastrous and disgraceful is his fall from it (Verse 7). The coarse figure which Zophar here employs-"like his own ordure "-was probably suggested by the mezbele on which Job lay; and implies that Job himself, whose head had once seemed to sweep the clouds, had already fallen from his high estate, and become as loathsome as that on which he lay. So sudden and so unexpected is the downfall of the sinner, so complete and obliterating the Divine judgment on him, that men will look round for him in amazement, asking, “Where is he?" all his imposing bulk and grandeur having vanished like the pageantry of a dream (Verse 8). Verse 9 is stolen bodily from Job, and was doubtless meant as a broad hint that it was Job whom Zophar, under the thin disguise of a general description, had in view. Job had said (Chap. vii. 8, 10)," The eye that seeth me shall see me no more;" and again, virtually, " Neither shall my place know me any more:" and Zophar now says of his wicked man, 66 The eye that saw him shall see him no more, Neither shall his place any more behold him,"-this echo being also an innuendo. In Verse 10, as if feeling that he was too openly breaking through his disguise, too plainly christening his wicked man Job, Zophar adds a more abstract and general touch to his delineation: "His children shall court the poor," i.e., they will have to court the favour of those whom he has impoverished, restoring to them what his rapacious hands have seized. And as Job's children were all dead, we might think that here at least Zophar was not girding at him: but the words which follow betray him. He cannot keep his secret for two sentences together, nor even for two clauses of the same sentence. For his wicked man, he adds, shall restore the substance of which he had plundered his neighbours with his own hands. And incredible as it may appear that he who knew the just and noble manner of Job's life so well should intend to charge him with having made raids on the neighbouring clans, and should have held, therefore, that the inroads of the Sabeans and Chasdim who had "lifted" his oxen and camels were only