CHAPTER II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bildad’s speech, with its barbed allusions to Job’s sad history, had a twofold effect. First of all it raised the anguish of Job to its highest point, and, secondly, it threw the sufferer back on that great intuition, already reached by him, of a Divine Witness to his integrity in the heavens. It is a misfortune which can scarcely be appraised too highly that the text of the famous declaration in xix. 25-27 is so uncertain. ‘The embarrassment of the English translators,’ remarks Prof. Green, of Princeton,[31] ‘is shown by the unusual number of italic words, and these of no small importance to the meaning, which are heaped together in these verses.’ It is scarcely greater, however, than that of the ancient versions, and we can hardly doubt that the text used by the Septuagint translator was already at least as corrupt as that which has descended to us from the Massoretic critics.[32] This would the more easily be the case since, as Prof. Green says again, ‘Job is speaking under strong excitement and in the language of lofty poetry; he uses no superfluous words; he simply indicates his meaning in the most concise manner.’ Without now entering on a philological discussion, we have, I think, to choose between these alternatives, one of which involves emending the text, the other does not. Does Job simply repeat what he has said in xvi. 18, 19 (viz. that God will avenge his blood and make reparation, as it were, for his death by testifying to his innocence), without referring to any consequent pleasure of his own, or does he combine with this the delightful thought expressed in xiv. 13-15 of a conscious renewal of communion with God after death?[33] The context, it seems to me, is best satisfied by the former alternative. Job’s mind is at present occupied with the cruelty, not of God (as when he said, ‘O that thou wouldst appoint me a term and then remember me,’ xiv. 13), but of his friends. His starting-point is, ‘How long will ye (my friends) pain my soul?’ &c. (xix. 2.) We may admit that the best solution of Job’s problem would be ‘the beatific vision’ in some early and not clearly defined form of that deep idea; but if Job can say that he not merely dreams but _knows_ this (‘I _know_ that ... I shall see God,’