CHAPTER V.

THE SPEECHES OF JEHOVAH. (CHAPS. XXXVIII.-XLII. 6.)

‘The words of Job are ended’ (xxxi. 40_b_), remarks the ancient editor, and amongst the last of these words is an aspiration after a meeting with God. That Job expected such a favour in this life is in the highest degree improbable, whatever view be taken of xix. 25-27. It is true, he sometimes did almost regard a theophany as possible, though he feared it might be granted under conditions which would make it the reverse of a boon (ix. 3, 15, 33-35; xiii. 21, 22). He wished for a fair investigation of his character, and he craved that God would not appear in too awful a form. It seems at first sight as if Jehovah, casting hard questions at Job out of the tempest, and ignoring both the friends’ indictment and Job’s defence (xxxi. 35-37), were realising Job’s worst fears and acting as his enemy. The friends had already sought to humble Job by pointing him to the power and wisdom and goodness of God, and Job had proved conclusively that he was no stranger to these high thoughts. Is the poet consistent with himself, first, in introducing Jehovah at all, and, secondly, in making Him overpower Job by a series of sharp, ironical questions? Several answers may be given if we wish to defend the unity of the poem. Job himself (it may be said) has not continued at the same high level of faith as in xix. 25-27 (assuming Prof. Davidson’s view of the passage); he needs the appearance of Jehovah more than he did then. As to the course attributed in xxxviii. 1 to Jehovah, this too (the poet may have felt in adding these speeches) was really the best for Job. Jehovah might no doubt have declared Job to be in the right as against his friends. He might next have soothed the sufferer’s mind by revealing the reason why his trials were permitted (_we_ know this from the Prologue). But this would not have been for Job’s spiritual welfare: there was one lesson he needed to learn or to relearn, one grace of character he needed to gain or to regain—namely, devout and trustful humility towards God. In the heat of debate and under the pressure of pain Job’s old religious habit of mind had certainly been weakened—not destroyed, but weakened—and a strong remedy was necessary if he was not to carry his distracted feelings to the grave. And so, as a first joyful surprise, came the theophany: to ‘see’ God before death _must_ have been a joyful surprise; and if the questioning cast him down, yet it was only to raise him up in the strength of self-distrust. The object of these orations of Jehovah is not to communicate intellectual light, but to give a stronger tone to Job’s whole nature. He had long known God to be strong and wise and good, but more as a lesson learned than as personal experience (xlii. 5). And the means first adopted to convey this life-giving ‘sight’ is not without a touch of that humour which we noticed in the Prologue. Job, who was so full of questions, now has the tables turned upon him. He is put through a catechism which admits of but one very humbling answer, each question being attached to a wonderfully vivid description of some animal or phenomenon. For descriptive power the first speech of Jehovah, at any rate, is without a parallel. The author, as Prof. Davidson remarks, ‘knew the great law that sublimity is necessarily also simplicity.’ It is true he does but give us isolated features of the natural world: no single scene is represented in its totality. But this is in accordance with the Hebrew genius, to which nature appears, not in her own simple beauty, but bathed in an atmosphere of emotion. The emotion which here animates the poet is mainly a religious one; it is the love of God, and of God’s works for the sake of their Maker. He wishes to cure the murmuring spirits of his own day by giving them wider views of external nature and its mysteries, so wondrously varied and so full of Divine wisdom and goodness. He has this great advantage in doing so, that they, like himself (and Job), are theists; they are not of those who say in their heart, ‘There is no God,’ but of the ‘Zion’ who complains, ‘Jehovah has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me’ (Isaiah xlix. 14). And the remedy which he applies is the same as that of the Babylonian-Jewish prophet, a wider study of the ways of God. Job had said, ‘I would tell Him the number of my steps;’ Jehovah replies by showing him, in a series of questions, not irritating but persuasive, the footprints of His own larger self-manifestation.

The Divine Speaker is introduced by the poet thus:

And Jehovah answered Job out of a tempest, and said.

A storm was the usual accompaniment of a Divine appearance: there was no intention of crushing Job with terror. In Blake’s thirteenth drawing Job (and his wife!) are represented kneeling and listening, with countenances expressive of thankfulness; in his fourteenth, Job and his four friends kneel rapt and ecstatic, while the ‘sons of God,’ sweet, vital, heavenly forms, are shouting for joy. In fact, the speeches of Jehovah contain, not accusations (except in xxxviii. 2), but remonstrances, and, though the form of these is chilling to Job’s self-love, yet the glorious visions which they evoke are healing to every sorrow of the mind. The text of the speeches is unfortunately not in perfect order. For instance, there are four verses which have, no one can tell how, been deposited in the description of behemoth (xli. 9-12, A. V.) but which most probably at one time or another opened the first speech of Jehovah. Perhaps the author himself removed them, feeling them to be too depressing for Job to hear; or perhaps it was purely by accident that they were transferred, and Merx and Bickell have done well to replace them in their corrected editions of _Job_ between xxxi. 37 and xxxviii. 1. As corrected by the former they run thus:—

Behold, his hope is belied: will he fight against mine appearing? He is not so bold as to stir me up; who indeed could stand before me? Who ever attacks me in safety? all beneath the whole heaven is mine. I will not take his babbling in silence, his mighty speech and its comely arrangement.

We must regard this as a soliloquy, after which, directly addressing Job, Jehovah upbraids the ‘mighty speaker’ with having shut himself out by his ‘blind clamour’ from a view of the Divine plan of his life.

Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? (xxxviii. 2.)

To gain that ‘knowledge’ which will ‘make darkness light before him,’ Job must enrich his conception of God. Those striking pictures already referred to have no lower aim than to display the great All-wise God, and the irony of the catechising is only designed to bring home the more forcibly to Job human littleness and ignorance. Modern readers, however, cannot help turning aside to admire the genius of the poet and his sympathetic interest in nature. His scientific ideas may be crude; but he observes as a poet, and not as a naturalist. Earth, sea, and sky successively enchain him, and we can hardly doubt that the natural philosophy of the Chaldæans was superficially at least known to him.[53] In his childlike curiosity and willingness to tell us everything he reminds us of the poet of the _Commedia_.

Has the rain a father?[54] or who has begotten the dew-drops? from whose womb came forth the ice, and the hoar frost of heaven—who engendered it, (that) the waters close together like a stone, and the face of the deep hides itself? Dost thou bind the knots of the Pleiades,[55] or loose the fetters of Orion?[56] Dost thou bring forth the moon’s watches at their season, and the Bear and her offspring—dost thou guide them? Knowest thou the laws of heaven? dost thou determine its influence upon the earth? (xxxviii. 28-33.)

‘The laws of heaven!’ Can we refuse to observe the first beginnings of a conception of the cosmos, remembering other passages of the Wisdom Literature in which the great world plan is distinctly referred to? Without denying a pre-Exile, native Hebrew tendency (comp. Job xxxviii. 33 with Jer. xxxi. 35, 36) may we not suppose that the physical theology of Babylonia had a large part in determining the form of this conception? Notice the reference to the influence of the sky upon the earth, and especially the Hebraised Babylonian phrase Mazzaroth (i.e. _mazarati_,[57] plural of _mazarta_, a watch), the watches or stations of the moon which marked the progress of the month. But it is not so much the intellectual curiosity manifest in these verses which we would dwell upon now as the poetic vigour of the gallery of zoology, and, we must add, the faith which pervades it, reminding us of a Bedouin prayer quoted by Major Palmer, ‘O Thou who providest for the blind hyæna, provide for me!’ Ten (or nine) specimens of animal life are given—the lion and (perhaps) the raven,[58] the wild goat and the hind, the wild ass, the wild ox,[59] the ostrich, the war horse, the hawk and the eagle. It is to this portion that the student must turn who would fain know the highest attainments of the Hebrew genius in pure poetry, such as Milton would have recognised as poetry. The delighted wonder with which the writer enters into the habits of the animals, and the light and graceful movement of the verse, make the ten descriptions referred to an ever-attractive theme, I will not say for the translator, but for the interpreter. They are ideal, as the Greek sculptures are ideal, and need the pen of that poet-student, faint hints of whose coming have been given us in Herder and Rückert. The finest of them, of course, is that of one of the animals most nearly related in Arabia to man (in Arabia, but not in Judæa), the horse.

Dost thou give might to the horse? Dost thou clothe his neck with waving mane? Dost thou make him bound as a locust? The peal of his snort is terrible! He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength; he goes forth to meet the weapons; he laughs at fear, and is not dismayed, and recoils not from the sword: the quiver clangs upon him, the flashing lance and the javelin: bounding furiously he swallows the ground, and cannot stand still at the blast of the trumpet; at every blast he says, ‘Aha!’ and smells the battle from afar, the captain’s thunder and the cry of battle (xxxix. 19-25).

The terrible element in animal instincts seems indeed to fascinate the mind of our poet; he closes his gallery with a sketch of the cruel instincts of the glorious eagle. We are reminded, perhaps, of the lines of a poet painter inspired by Job—

Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?[60]

And now we might almost think that the object of the theophany has been attained. Never more will Job presume to litigate with Shaddai, or measure the doings of God by his puny intellect. He has learned the lesson expressed in Dante’s line—

State contenti, umana gente, al quia,[61]

but also that higher lesson, so boldly expressed by the same poet, that in all God’s works, without exception, three attributes are seen united—

Fecemi la divina potestate, La somma sapienza, e ’l primo amore.[62]

He is silenced, indeed, but only as with the poet of Paradise—

All’ alta fantasia qui mancò possa.[63]

The silence with which both these ‘vessels of election’ meet the Divine revelation is the silence of satisfaction, even though this be mingled with awe. Job has learned to forget himself in the wondrous creation of which he forms a part, just as Dante when he saw

La forma universal di questo nodo.[64]

Job cannot, indeed, as yet express his feelings; awe preponderates over satisfaction in the words assigned to him in xl. 4, 5. In fact, he has fallen below his better knowledge, and must be humbled for this. He has known that he is but a part of humanity—a representative of the larger whole, and might, but for his frailty, have comforted himself in that thought. God’s power and wisdom and goodness are so wondrously blended in the great human organism that he might have rested amidst his personal woes in the certainty of at least an indirect connection with the gentler manifestations of the ‘Watcher of mankind’ (vii. 20). This thought has proved ineffectual, and so the Divine Instructor tries another order of considerations. And, true enough, nature effects what ‘the still, sad music of humanity’ has failed to teach. Job, however, needs more than teaching; he needs humiliation for his misjudgment of God’s dealings with him personally. Hence in His second short but weighty speech ‘out of the tempest’ Jehovah begins with the question (xl. 8)—

Wilt thou make void my justice? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?

This gives the point of view from which Jehovah ironically invites Job, if he thinks (see chap. xxiv.) that he can govern the world—the human as well as the extra-human world—better than the Creator, to make the bold attempt. He bids him array himself with the Divine majesty and carry out that retribution in which Jehovah, according to him, has so completely failed (xl. 11-13). If Job will prove his competence for the office which he claims, then Jehovah Himself will recognise his independence and extol his inherent strength. Did the poet mean to finish the second speech of Jehovah here? It is probable; the subject of the interrogatory hardly admitted of being developed further in poetry. A later writer (or, as Merx thinks, the poet of _Job_ himself) seems to have found the speech too short, and therefore appended the two fancy sketches of animals which follow. But in the original draft of the poem xl. 14 must have been followed immediately by Job’s retractation, closing with those striking words (see above, p. 49) which so well supplement the less articulate confession of xl. 4, 5—

I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye sees thee:[65] therefore I retract and repent in dust and ashes (xlii. 5, 6).

How complete a reversal of the ‘princely’ anticipations of Job in xxxi. 37! To us, indeed, it may seem somewhat ungracious to Job to give this as the last scene of his pathetic drama. But the poet leaves it open to us to animate Job’s repentance with love as well as awe and compunction. With fine feeling Blake in his seventeenth illustration almost fills the margin with passages from the Johannine writings.

The long description of the two Egyptian monsters (xl. 15, xli. 26) is, as we have hinted above, out of place in the second speech of Jehovah. It has indeed been suggested that the writer may have intended it as a development of xl. 14—

Then will I in return confess unto thee that thy right hand can help thee—

which implies that Job has no power to help himself in the government of the world. According to this view, the opening words of the behemoth section will mean, ‘Consider, pray, that thou hast fellow-creatures which are far stronger than thou; and how canst thou undertake the management of the universe?’ It must, however, be admitted that the emphasis thus laid on the omnipotence of God, apart from His righteousness, introduces an obscurity into the argument which almost compels us to assume that the sketches of behemoth and leviathan are later insertions. At any rate, even if we regard them as the work of the principal writer of Job, we must at least ascribe them to one of those after-thoughts by which poets not unfrequently spoil their best productions. The style of the description, too, is less chastened than that of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. (so that Bickell can hardly be right in placing xl. 15, &c., immediately after xxxix. 30), and if it relates to the hippopotamus and the crocodile is less true to nature than the other ‘animal pieces.’

The truth is that neither behemoth nor leviathan corresponds strictly to any known animal. The tail of a hippopotamus would surely not have been compared to a cedar by a truthful though poetic observer like the author of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. Moreover that animal was habitually hunted by the Egyptians with lance and harpoon, and was therefore no fit symbol of indomitable pride. The crocodile too was attacked and killed by the Egyptians, though in xli. 26-29 leviathan is said to laugh at his assailants. Seneca in his description of Egypt describes the crocodile as ‘fugax animal audaci, audacissimum timido’ (_Quæst. Nat._, iv. 2). Comp. Ezek. xxix. 4, xxxii. 3; Herod. ii. 70.

To me, indeed, as well as to M. Chabas, the behemoth and the leviathan seem to claim a kinship with the dragons and other imaginary monsters of the Swiss topographies of the sixteenth century. A still more striking because a nearer parallel is adduced by M. Chabas from the Egyptian monuments, where, side by side with the most accurate pictures from nature, we often find delineations of animals which cannot have existed out of wonderland.[66]

It is remarkable that the elephant should not have been selected as a type of strange and wondrous animal life; apparently it was not yet known to the Hebrew writers, though of course it might be urged that the poet was accidentally prevented from writing more. Merx has pointed out that the description of behemoth is evidently incomplete. He also thinks that the poet has not yet brought the form of these passages to final perfection: a struggle with the difficulties of expression is observable. He therefore relegates xl. 15-xli. 26 to an appendix with the suggestive title (comp. Goethe’s _Faust_) Paralipomena to Job. He thinks that a reader or admirer of the original poem sought to preserve these unfinished sketches by placing them where they now stand. This is probably the most conservative theory (i.e. the nearest to the traditional view) critically admissible.

Footnote 53:

See Sayce on ‘Babylonian Astronomy’ (_Translations of Soc. of Bibl. Archæology_, 1874); Lenormant, _La magic chez les Chaldéens_, and his _Syllabaires cunéiformes_ (1876), p. 48.

Footnote 54:

This is not mere ‘patriarchal simplicity’ (Renan, p. lvi.), but a contradiction of the mythic view that a nature god like Baal is the ‘father’ or producer of the rain and the crops (see Cheyne, _Isaiah_, ed. 3, i. 28, 294, ii. 295). Elihu no doubt goes further in his explanations; see xxxvi. 27, 28.

Footnote 55:

Heb. _kima_; comp. Ass. _kimtu_, ‘a family.’ The word occurs again in ix. 9, Am. v. 8 (but are not this verse and the closely related one in iv. 13 additions by a later editor of Amos in the Exile period?)

Footnote 56:

Heb. _k’sīl_, the name of the foolhardy giant who strove with Jehovah. The Chaldeo-Assyrian astrology gave the name _kisiluv_ to the ninth month, connecting it with the zodiacal sign Sagittarius. But there are valid reasons for attaching the Hebrew popular myth to Orion.

Footnote 57:

‘He did not watch the stars of heaven, nor the _mazarati_.’ So Fox Talbot quotes from a cuneiform tablet (_Transactions of Soc. of Bibl. Archæology_, 1872, p. 341). The above explanation, however, which is that of Delitzsch on _Job_, differs from that of Fox Talbot.

Footnote 58:

Mr. Bateson Wright’s pointing, _lá’ereb_ for _la’ōrēbh_, is plausible. The raven is an insignificant companion to the lion, and the birds of prey are mentioned at the end of Job’s picture gallery. Render ‘who provides in the evening his food,’ &c.; but in this case should not _lābhī_ in ver. 39 be rendered ‘lion’ rather than ‘lioness’ (note ‘_his_ young ones’)? The root idea is probably voracity. That _lābhī_ in iv. 11 is the feminine is no objection. Comp. Ps. lvii. 5, and perhaps Hos. xiii. 8. Possibly, however, the ‘raven’ was inserted here to make up the number ten, by a reminiscence of Ps. cxlvii. 9.

Footnote 59:

The ‘unicorn’ of A. V. comes from the Sept. and Vulg.; but in Deut. xxxiii. 17 the _re’ēm_ is said to have ‘horns.’ Schlottmann and Delitzsch identify it with the oryx or antelope, but the oryx was tamable (Wilkinson, _Egyptians_, i. 227), whereas our poet asks, ‘Will the _re’ēm_ be willing to serve thee?’ See Cheyne on Isa. xxxiv. 7.

Footnote 60:

Blake, _Songs of Experience_.

Footnote 61:

_Purg._, iii. 37.

Footnote 62:

_Inf._, iii. 5, 6.

Footnote 63:

_Parad._, xxxiii. 142.

Footnote 64:

_Parad._, xxxiii. 91.

Footnote 65:

[All his thinkings seemed like hearsay. This, then, was the real God.] So an anonymous writer well expresses it (_Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance_, p. 196).

Footnote 66:

_Etudes sur l’antiquité historique_, prem. éd., pp. 391-393.