It may be feared that Job was not so profoundly impressed. by the oracle, or vision, as Eliphaz expected him to be. For here (at Verse 2) something in his manner seems to arrest the attention of Eliphaz,-to change and irritate the current of his thoughts. It may be that Job indulged himself in some passionate despairing gesture at this point. It may be that he meant nothing more by his gesture than to express his entire agreement with the affirmation that none of the angels would be at all likely to take his part against God; or to intimate that he was by no means craving an impossible victory over God, but to understand Him and be reconciled to Him. Whatever he meant, Eliphaz seems to have misconceived him, and to have taken the interruption in dudgeon; for, with a sudden break in the sequence of his thoughts, he exclaims: "Nay, do not give way to passion and indignation, as the wicked do, for I have seen them, and marked both their course and their end." And then (in Verses 3-5) he proceeds to depict a fool, a moral fool, i.e. the sort of fool who says in his heart, "There is no God"-a fool whom he once saw; and to describe how, the moment he apprehended what the man was, he was able to predict his fate. Verses 4 and 5 probably give the ipsissima verba of this prediction or curse. What Eliphaz foresaw was that the fool, though for the moment in great prosperity and spreading himself like a green bay-tree, would come to sudden and utter ruin; his children, unsuccoured by friend or kinsman, would "crush each other in the gate," i.e., ruin one another by feuds and suits brought before the judges who sat in the gate of the city; his homestead would be deserted, his property unprotected, so that the famished starvelings who prowled about it, emboldened by so many signs of neglect and ruin, would venture to break through the hedge of thorns that defended the stacks, and carry off whatever they cared to take. All the wealth of the fool and his family would suddenly disappear, as though some huge trap, which had long gaped for it, had swallowed it in an instant.1 1 Verse 5, " And the snare shall gape for their substance." Umbreit and Ewald prefer the rendering of the Ancient Version," The thirsty shall snatch at their substance." And "the thirsty " makes so good an apposition with "the starveling" of the previous line, that one would like to retain it. It At Verse 6 Eliphaz resumes, and in a milder tone, the general course of his argument, working up into it, however, the little episode of Verses 2-5. He had been arguing that man is by nature frail and sinful, and that therefore Job should humble himself before God, instead of proudly asserting his integrity. And, now, he once more affirms that there is that "born" in man which exposes him to the "trouble" which is the invariable result of sin, the appointed discipline of a weak and sinful nature. But he does not forget and drop the fool whom, and whose end, he once saw. All that sudden ruin which befell him was to have been expected, implies Eliphaz; for trouble is the consequence of sin, and if men will sin they must take the consequence. So that both his lines of thought coalesce in this Verse, which throws one of the common and Divine facts of life into a proverbial form. Misfortune, he says, is not a weed springing at haphazard from the soil of life; it is part of the divine order of the world. It is just as truly in the natural order of things (Verse 7) as that sparks-literally, "the sons of fire”—should spring upward. Again we may note the apologetic tone of this pious Temanite. He believes that Job's sufferings spring from his sins, conscious or unconscious; but he admits the universal tendency of human nature to such sins, its universal liability, therefore, to such sufferings. So far from wishing, at least for the present, to make Job out a sinner above other men, he endeavours so to set forth the sinfulness of all other men as to make it easy for Job to confess his sins and seek the Divine forgiveness. This is the course which he himself would take were his soul in the stead of Job's, as he tells us in Verses 8-16. Job's only direct reference to God had been a complaint (Chap. iii. 23) that God had fenced him in so that he could find no outlet for his thoughts or his activities. "That," responds Eliphaz, "is not the right attitude for the sufferer to assume toward God; it is not the course which I myself would take." is impossible, however, to do so without substituting mere conjecture for criticism, without altering the pointing of the Hebrew, without what Professor Davidson calls "violent vocalic changes" in the teeth of all authority. God is not only just, but kind; and therefore, instead of impugning his justice, the afflicted should appeal to his compassion. The character of God is to be inferred from all forms of his activity, and, notably, from his doings in the inanimate world of nature and in the world of animate and reasonable men. In the natural world He doeth things great and inscrutable, wonders past finding out: sending rain, for example-rain being the chief of blessings, and the type of all other blessings, to an Oriental mind. In this material sphere his way is manifold, complex, mysterious; but it all tends to a single end, viz., " to set up on high them that be low and to lift up them that are cast down" (Verses 9-11). In the human world the energy of God has to contend with the passions, the cunning devices, the follies and fool-hardy oppositions of men; but here also his various lines of action converge on one point, viz., to bring help to the feeble and to stop the mouth of iniquity (Verses 12-16). The right attitude of the sufferer toward God (Verses 1727) is, therefore, one of grateful acquiescence. Since the whole course of his providence is designed to save the poor and the afflicted, since, moreover, the design of affliction itself is to quicken in them a sense of sins of which they were before unconscious, and to lead them to a more complete fellowship with Him, "happy is the man whom God correcteth." God has no pleasure in afflicting the children of He only wounds that He may heal, only exposes them to dangers which they cannot confront alone that, feeling their need of Him, they may run into Him and be safe. The man who is at one with Him-and suffering tends to bring us to Him and unite us with Him-will find all things working together for his good, all the forces of Nature enlisted on his side, even to the stones of the field which obstruct the plough, and the wild beasts which harry the flocks and herds. If Job will but take this attitude toward God, all men. 1 The sentiment of Verse 23 sounds like an extravagant hyperbole to many readers. How natural it nevertheless is, and consonant even to the reason of man, may be seen by a careful study of any of our greater poets. It is to be found, for example, in one of our most recent poems,-Mr. Swin his outward and painful conditions will be reversed; instead of lying homeless, childless, stripped, dying, on the mezbele, he shall abide securely in his tent, with flocks and herds undiminished by the stroke of Heaven or the rapacity of man, his offspring numerous and flourishing as the grass of the land, and shall only go to his grave in a ripe old age, “frosty, but kindly." There is only one allusion in these Verses which calls for explanation. In Verse 26, "the shock of corn carried in," is, literally, "the shock of corn carried up;" the Hebrew verb points to the raising of the sheaves on to the lofty threshingfloor, which marks the close of harvest. On this verse Canon Cook quotes for comparison the noble lines from "Paradise Lost": So mayest thou live, till, like ripe fruits, thou drop Gathered, not harshly plucked; for death mature. These, then, are the general truths and convictions which Eliphaz would have Job apply to his own case. And when we have carefully considered them we shall find in them, I think, no coldness, no sarcasm, no heartless attempt to censure and condemn Job, but a genuine endeavour to "admonish" him, as he himself had admonished many, to strengthen his languid hands and to reknit his sinking knees. 2. JOB TO ELIPHAZ. CHAPTERS VI. AND VII. There is, as I have already said, far more of logic in Job's replies to the arguments and reproaches of the Friends than burne's "Erechtheus." In the fine lines put into the lips of the goddess Athene, we read: Time and change, Masters and lords of all men, shall be made To thee that knowest no master and no lord Servants; the days that lighten heaven and nights To attend upon thy glory. is commonly discerned in them. We must not, however, expect from an ancient Oriental the dialectical forms and subtleties of the modern schools of the West. Still less must we expect that Job should confine himself to a logical refutation of the arguments of his Friends, since he was carrying on a far deeper controversy than that in which he engaged with them. Behind and above them he saw Him who is invisible, so that he was for ever breaking away from his discussion with them in order to appeal to his invisible Antagonist, and to force from Him, if it were possible, some response to his appeal. Least of all must we expect from him logical and well-reasoned replies to the assaults of the Friends at the outset of this great argument; for, at the outset, his mind is preoccupied and perturbed by the strange bitter fact that even they had turned against him,—that even those who knew him best were suspecting and condemning him. At such a moment, and under the stress of this amazing discovery, he had little heart for weighing the forms which their suspicions and censures assumed, or for considering how he might best rebut them. That the very friends to whom he confidently looked for sympathy should suspect him of some hidden but heinous sin, and cherish this suspicion right in the teeth of all they knew of him-this was enough, and more than enough, to occupy his thoughts; on what grounds they based their assumption he did not care too curiously to inquire. Hence, in his reply to Eliphaz, though at first (Chapter vi. 2-13) he does in some sort take up their censures and reply to them; though, throughout, he bears them so far in mind as that he permits them, directly or indirectly, to prescribe the general course and bent of his thoughts, he breaks off, first (Verses 14-30), to make a passionate assault on the Friends, in which he affirms that their lack of sympathy with him implies a hardness of nature, a guilt beyond any which they have assumed in him; and then (Chapter vii. 1-21) to indulge in a new outburst of misery and despair, in which, forgetting all about the Friends, he challenges the equity of God, his real though unseen Antagonist, and demands death as the sole remedy of sufferings such as his. "And yet, the pity of it, the pity of it!" Had his human |