CHAPTER XII.

ON THE DISPUTED PASSAGES IN THE DIALOGUE-PORTION, ESPECIALLY THE SPEECHES OF ELIHU.

A detailed exegetical study would alone enable the reader to do justice to the controversies here referred to. But I may at least ask that, even upon the ground of the slender analysis which I have given, he should recognise the difficulties at the root of these controversies. In comparison with his possession of a ‘seeing eye,’ it is of little moment to me whether he adopts my explanations or not. Poets, like painters, have different periods. It is therefore conceivable that the author of _Job_ changed in course of time, and criticised his own work, these afterthoughts of his being embodied in the ‘disputed passages.’ It is indeed also conceivable that the phenomena which puzzle us are to be explained by the plurality of authorship. In the remarks which follow I wish to supplement the sketch of the possible or probable growth of the Book offered in section 3 of Chap. VII., chiefly with regard to the speeches of Elihu.

Keil has spoken of ‘the persistently repeated assaults upon the genuineness’ of these discourses. I must however protest against the use of the word ‘genuineness’ in this connection. Even if not by the author of the poem of _Job_, the speeches of Elihu are as ‘genuine’ a monument of Israel’s religious ‘wisdom’ as the work of the earlier writer. No critic worthy of the name thinks of ‘assaulting’ them, though divines no less orthodox than Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede have uncritically enough set the example. The speeches of Elihu only seem poor by comparison with the original work; they are not without true and beautiful passages, which, with all their faults of expression, would in any other book have commanded universal admiration. The grounds on which chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii. are denied to the original writer may be summed up thus.

(1) Elihu puts forward a theory of the sufferings of the righteous which does not essentially differ from that of the three friends (see especially xxxiii. 25-28; xxxiv. 9, 11, 12, 36, 37; xxxv. 9-16; xxxvi. 5-7, 21-25; xxxvii. 23, 24). No doubt he improves the theory, by laying more stress upon the chastening character of the righteous man’s afflictions (xxxiii. 14-30; xxxvi. 8-12, 15, 16, and comp. Eliphaz in v. 18, 19), and to many disciples of the New Covenant his form of the theory may recommend itself as true. But, even apart from the appendix or epilogue (see xlii. 7-9), it is clear from the whole plan of the poem, particularly if the discourses of Jehovah be taken in, that this was not, in the writer’s mind, an adequate solution of the problem, especially in the case of the God-fearing and innocent Job.

(2) These speeches interrupt the connection between the ‘words of Job’ and those of Jehovah, and seem to render the latter superfluous. Whether the ‘words of Job’ (to borrow the phrase of some editor of the book) should end at xxxvii. 37 or at ver. 40, it is difficult not to believe that xxxviii. 1, 2, ‘And Jehovah answered Job out of the storm, and said, Who then is darkening counsel by words without knowledge?’ was meant to follow immediately upon them. The force of this seems to some to be weakened by taking Elihu’s description of the storm (xxxvii. 2-5) as preparatory to the appearance of Jehovah in chap. xxxviii. But, evidently, to make this an argument, the storm ought to be at the end of the speech.

(3) There is no mention of Elihu in the Prologue, nor is any divine judgment passed upon him in the Epilogue. It is not enough to reply with Stickel that Jehovah himself is not mentioned in the Prologue as the umpire in the great controversy; why should he be?—and that the absence of any condemnation of Elihu on the part of Jehovah, and the harmony (?) between Elihu’s and Jehovah’s discourses, sufficiently indicate the good opinion of the Divine Judge.

(4) Elihu’s style is prolix and laboured; his phrases often very obscure, even where the words separately are familiar. As Davidson remarks, there are not only unknown words (these we meet with elsewhere in the book), but an unknown use of known words. There is also a deeper colouring of Aramaic (see Appendix), which F. C. Cook, following Stickel, explains by the supposed Aramæan origin of the speaker; in this case, it would be a refinement of art which adds a fresh laurel to the crown of the poet. But the statement in xxxii. 2 is that Elihu was ‘the son of Barakel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram.’ That Ram = Aram is unproved; while Buz, as Jer. xxv. 23 shows, is the name of a genuine Arabian people. It would be better to explain the increased Aramaism by the lapse of a long interval in the writer’s life. This explanation is, to me, equivalent to assigning these speeches to a different writer (as I have remarked elsewhere, comparing Goethe’s _Faust_). Those who will may adopt it; but my own respect for the poet of _Job_ will not allow me to believe that his taste had so much declined as to insert this inferior poem into his masterpiece.

(5) Elihu’s allusions to passages in the rest of the book (comp. xxxiii. 15 with iv. 13; xxxiv. 3 with xii. 11; xxxv. 5 with xxii. 12; xxxv. 8 with xxii. 2; xxxvii. 8 with xxxviii. 40) and his minute reproductions of sayings of Job (see xxxiii. 8, 9; xxxiv. 5, 6; xxxv. 2, 3) point to an author who had the book before him, so far as then known, as a whole.

(6) Elihu’s somewhat scrupulous piety, or shall I call it his advance in reverential, contrite devoutness? compared with the three friends, suggests that the poet of Elihu was the child of a later and more sombre generation which found the original book in some respects disappointing.

Putting all this together, if the main part of the Book of Job belongs to the Exile, the Elihu-portion may well belong to the post-Exile period.

To this view, it is no objection that, on the one hand, Elihu not merely (to express oneself shortly) criticises the position of the three friends, but, by ignoring it, criticises the view of Job’s afflictions taken in the Prologue, and, on the other, has much in common with the rest of the book in orthographic, grammatical, and lexical respects. The idea that God permits affliction simply to try the disinterestedness of a good man, is one which might easily shock the feelings of one only too conscious that he was not good; and the linguistic points which ‘Elihu’ and the rest of the book have in common are such as we should expect to find in works proceeding from the same class of writers. If Jeremiah wrote all the pieces which contain Jeremian phraseology, or Isaiah all the prophecies which remind one at all of the great prophet, or the same ‘wise man’ wrote Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, then we may perhaps believe that the author of _Job_ also wrote the speeches of Elihu and perhaps one or two of the didactic psalms.

Professor Briggs, the author of that excellent work _Biblical Study_, takes up a different position, which, though not new, acquires some authority from his respected name. He does not see any literary or theological merit in Elihu’s speeches, and yet regards them as ‘an important part of the original work.’ The author designed to portray Elihu as a young and inexperienced man, and uses these ambitious failures ‘as a literary foil ... to prepare the way for the divine interposition, to quiet and soothe by their tediousness the agitated spirits of Job and his friends.’[111] To me, this view of the intention of the speeches lowers the character of the original writer. So reverent and devout a speaker as Elihu is ill rewarded by being treated as a literary and theological foil. Artistically, the value of this part may be _comparatively_ slight, but theologically it enriches the Old Testament with a monument of a truly Christian consciousness of sin. Had the original writer equalled him in this, we should perhaps have missed a splendid anticipation of the life of Christ, who ‘did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.’ But the Elihu-section expresses in Old Testament language the great truth announced by St. Paul in 1 Cor. xi. 32.[112]

On the other ‘disputed passages’ I have little to add.

(_a_) To me, the picture of the behémoth and the leviathan (xl. 15-xli.) seems but little less probably a later insertion than the speeches of Elihu; this view of the case has the authority of Ewald. That cautious critic, Dr. Davidson, remarks that this passage has a very different kind of movement from that of the tight and graceful sketches in chaps. xxxviii., xxxix., and that the poetic inventory which it contains reminds us more of an Arab poet’s description of his camel or his horse (_Job_, p. liv.)

(_b_) I cannot speak so positively as to the speeches of Jehovah. From a purely æsthetic point of view, I am often as unwilling as any one to believe that they were ‘inserted.’ At other times I ask myself, Can the inconsistencies of this portion as compared with the Colloquies be explained as mere oversights? The appearance of the Almighty upon the scene is in itself strange. Job had no doubt expressed a wish for this, but did not suppose that it could be realised,[113] at any rate in his own lifetime. It is still stranger that the Almighty should appear, not in the gentle manner which Job had desired (ix. 34, 35), not with the object of a judicial investigation of the case, but in the whirlwind, and with a foregone conclusion on Job’s deserts. For in fact that splendid series of ironical questions which occupies chaps. xxxviii., xxxix., and which Job had by anticipation deprecated (ix. 3), is nothing less than a long drawn-out condemnation of Job. The indictment and the defendant’s reply, to which Job has referred with such proud self-confidence (xxxi. 35, 36), are wholly ignored; and the result is that which Job has unconsciously predicted in the words,—

To whom, though innocent, I would not reply, but would make supplication unto my Judge (ix. 15).

(_c_) Great difficulties have been found in xxvii. 8 (or 11)-23, xxviii. First of all, Is there an inner connection between these passages? Dr. Green seeks to establish one. ‘While continuing,’ he says, ‘to insist upon his own integrity, notwithstanding the afflictions sent upon him, he freely admits, and this in language as emphatic as their own, the reality of God’s providential government, and that punishment does overtake the ungodly. Nevertheless there is a mystery enveloping the divine administration, which is quite impenetrable to the human understanding’ (_The Book of Job_, p. 233). This is very unnatural.[114] How can Job suddenly adopt the language of the friends without conceding that he has himself hitherto been completely in error? And what right have we to force such a subtle connection between chaps. xxvii. and xxviii? Looking at the latter by itself, one cannot help suspecting that it once formed part of a didactic treatise similar to the Introduction to the Book of Proverbs (see end of Chap. III). For a careful exegetical study of chaps. xxvii., xxviii., see Giesebrecht (see ‘Aids to the Student,’ after Chap. XV.), with whom Dr. Green seems to accord, but who fails to convince me. See also Budde in his _Beiträge_, and Grätz, ‘Die Integrität der Kap. 27 und 28 im Hiob,’ _Monatsschrift_, 1872, p. 241 &c.

Footnote 111:

_Presbyterian Review_, 1885, p. 353.

Footnote 112:

Delitzsch, art. ‘Hiob,’ Herzog-Plitt’s _Realencyklopädie_, vi. 132.

Footnote 113:

Since this wish cannot be realised, Job pleads his cause against an invisible God with the same earnestness as if he stood before His face.

Footnote 114:

It is a pleasure to quote the forcible summing-up of Mr. Froude. ‘A difficulty,’ he remarks, ‘now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the 27th is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the 11th to the 23rd verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has maintained before—is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of Job’s last and highest position, supposes that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem’ (_Short Studies_, vol. i.) He then proceeds to mention with cautious approbation the theory of Kennicott (see note on Text at end of Chap. XV.)