Contents.— As it now lies before us it consists of five parts. 1. The prologue, in prose, ch. i,-ii., describes in rapid and dramatic steps the history of this man, his piety and prosperity and greatness corresponding to his godliness; then how his life is drawn in under the operation of the trying, sifting providence of God, through the suspicion suggested by the Satan, the minister of this aspect of God’s providence, that his godliness is but selfish and only the natural return for the unexampled prosperity bestowed upon him, and the insinuation that if stripped of his prosperity he will renounce God to His face. These suspicions bring down two severe calamities on Job, one depriving him of · all external blessings, children and possessions alike, and the other throwing the man himself under a loathsome and painful malady. In spite of these afflictions Job retains his integrity and ascribes no wrong to God. Then the advent of Job’s three friends is described, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, who, having heard of Job’s calamities, come to condole with him. 2. The body of the book, in poetry, ch. iii.-xxxi., contains a series of speeches in which the problem of Job’s afflictions and the relation of external evil to the righteousness of God and the conduct of men is brilliantly discussed. This part is divided into three cycles, each containing four speeches, one by Job and one by each of the friends (ch. iii·-xiv.; ch. xv.-xxi.; ch. xxii.-xxxi.), although in the last cycle the third speaker Zophar fails to answer, and Job, having driven his opponents from the field, carries his reply through a series of discourses in which he dwells in pathetic words upon his early prosperity, contrasting with it his present misery and humiliation, and ends with a solemn repudiation of all the offeηces that had been insinuated or might be suggested against him, and a challenge to God to appear and put His hand to the charge which He had against him and for which He afflicted him.’ 3, A youthful bystander named Elihu, the representative of a younger generation, who had been a silent observer of the debate, intervenes and expresses his dissatisfaction with the manner in which both J ob and his friends had conducted the cause, and offers what is in some respects a new solution of the question (ch. xxxii.-xxxvii.). 4. In answer to Job’s repeated demands that God would appear and solve the riddle of his life, the Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind. The Divine speaker does not condescend to refer to Job’s individual problem, but in a series of ironical interrogations asks him, as he thinks himself capable of fathoming all things, to expound the mysteries of the origin and subsistence of the world, the phenomena of the atmosphere, the instincts of the creatures that inhabit the desert, and, as he judges God’s conduct of the world amiss, invites him to seize the reins himself and gird him with the Divine thunder and quell the rebellious forces of evil in the universe (ch. xxxviii.-xlii. 6). Job is humbled and abashed, and lays his hand upon his mouth, and repents his hasty words in dust and ashes. No solution of his problem is vouchsafed; but God Himself effects that which neither the man’s own thoughts of God nor the representations of the friends could accomplish: he heard of Him with the hearing of the ear without effect, but now his eye saw Him. This is the profoundest religious deep in the book. 5. The epilogue, also in prose, ch. xlii. 7-17, describes Job’s restoration to a prosperity double that of his former estate, his family felicity, and long life.

Design.— With the exception of the episode of Elihu, the connexion of which with the original form of the poem may be doubtful, all these five parts are essential elements of the work as it came from the hand of the first author, although some parts of the second and fourth divisions may have been expanded by later writers. The idea of the composition is not to be derived from any single element of the book, as from the prologue, but from the teaching and movement of the whole piece. Job is unquestionably the hero of the work, and in the ideas which he expresses and the history which he passes through combined we may assume that we find the author himself speaking and teaching. The discussion of the question of suffering between Job and his friends occupies two-thirds of the book, or, if the space occupied by Elihu be not considered, nearly three-fourths, and in the direction which the author causes this discussion to take we may see revealed the main didactic purpose of the book. When the three friends, the representatives of former theories of providence, are reduced to silence and driven off the ground by Job, we may be certain that it was the author’s purpose to discredit the ideas which they represent. Job himself offers no positive contribution to the doctrine of evil; his position is negative, and merely antagonistic to that of the friends. But this negative position victoriously maintained by him has the effect of clearing the ground, and the author himself supplies in the prologue the positive truth, when he communicates the real explanation of his hero’s calamities, and teaches that they were a trial of his righteousness. It was therefore the author’s purpose in his work to widen men’s views of the providence of God and set before them a new view of suffering. This may be considered the first great object of the book. This purpose, however, was in all probability no mere theoretical one, but subordinate to some .wider practical design. No Hebrew writer is merely a poet or a thinker. He is always a teacher. He has men before him in their relations to God. And it is not usually men in their individual relations, but as members of the family of Israel, the people of God. It is consequently scarcely to be doubted that the book has a national scope. The author considered his new truth regarding the meaning of affliction as of national interest, and to be the truth needful for the heart of his people in their circumstances. But the teaching of the book is only half its contents. It contains also a history—deep and inexplicable affliction, a great moral struggle, and a victory. The author meant his new truth to inspire new conduct, new faith, and new hopes. In Job’s sufferings, undeserved and inexplicable to him, yet capable of an explanation most consistent with the goodness and faithfulness of God, and casting honour upon his faithful servants; in his despair bordering on unbelief, at last overcome; and in the happy issue of his afflictions—in all this Israel may see itself, and from the sight take courage, and forecast its own history. Job, however, is not to be considered Israel, the righteous servant of the Lord, under a feigned name; he is no mere parable (though such a view is found as early as the Talmud); he and his history have both elements of reality in them. It is these elements of reality common to him with Israel in affliction, common even to him with humanity as a whole, confined within the straitened limits set by its own ignorance, wounded to death by the mysterious sorrows of life, tortured by the uncertainty whether its cry finds an entrance into God’s ear, alarmed and paralysed by the irreconcilable discrepancies which it seems to discover between its necessary thoughts of Him and its experience of Him in His providence, and faint with longing that it might come into His place, and behold Him, not girt with His majesty, but in human form, as one looketh upon his fellow, —it is these elements of truth that make the history of Job instructive to Israel in the times of affliction when it was set before them, and to men in all ages. It would probably be a mistake, however, to imagine that the author consciously stepped outside the limits of his nation, and assumed a human position antagonistic to it. The chords he touches vibrate through all humanity; but this is because Israel is the kernel of humanity, and because from Israel’s heart the deepest music of mankind is heard, whether of pathos or of joy.

Two threads requiring to be followed, therefore, run through the book,—the one the discussion of the problem of evil between Job and his friends, and the other the varying attitude of Job’s mind towards heaven, the first being subordinate to the second. Both Job and his friends advance to the discussion of his sufferings and of the problem of evil, ignorant of the true cause of his calamities,— Job strong in his sense of innocence, and the friends armed with their theory of the righteousness of God, who giveth to every man according to his works. With fine psychological instinct the poet lets Job altogether lose his self-control first when his three friends, the men his fellows, came to visit him. His bereavements and the acute anguish of his malady he bore with a steady courage, and the direct instigations to godlessness of the woman, his wife, he repelled with severity and resignation. But when men, his equals and the old associates of his happiness, came to see him, and when he read in their looks and in their seven days’ silence the depth of his own misery, his self-command deserted him, and he broke out into a cry of despair, cursing his day and crying for death (ch. iii.). Job had somewhat misinterpreted the demeanour of his friends. It was not all pity that it expressed. Along with their pity they had also brought their theology with them, and they trusted to heal Job’s malady with this. Till a few days ago Job would have agreed with them on the sovereign virtues of this remedy. But he had learned through a higher teaching, the events of God’s providence, that it was no more a specific in his case. His violent impatience, however, under his afflictions and his covert attacks upon the divine rectitude only served to confirm the view of his sufferings which their theory of evil had already suggested to his friends. And thus commences the high debate which continues through thirty chapters of the book.

The principle with which the three friends of Job came to the consideration of his history was the principle that calamity is the result of evil-doing, as on the other hand prosperity is the reward of righteousness. Suffering is not an accident or â spontaneous growth of the soil; man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards; there is in human life a tendency to do evil which draws down upon men the chastisement of heaven (ch. ∙v. 6). The form in which the principle is enunciated by Eliphaz, from whom the other speakers take their cue, is this: where there is suffering there has been sin in the sufferer, not necessarily deadly sin, though where the suffering is great the sin must have been heinous. Not suffering in itself, but the effect of it on the sufferer is what gives insight into his true character. Suffering is not always punitive; it is far offener disciplinary, designed to wean the good man from his sin. If he sees in his suffering the monition of God and turns from his evil, his future shall be rich in peace and happiness, and his latter estate more prosperous than his first. If he murmurs or resists, he can only perish under the multiplying chastisements which his impenitence will provoke. Now this principle of the friends is far from being a peculiar crotchet of theirs; its truth is undeniable, though they erred in supposing it a principle that would cover the wide providence of God. The principle is the fundamental idea of moral government, the expression of the natural conscience, a principle common more or less to all peoples, though perhaps more prominent in the Semitic mind, because all religious ideas are more prominent and simple there,—not suggested to Israel first by the law, but found and adopted by the law, though it may be sharpened by it. It is the fundamental principle of prophecy no less than of the law, and, if possible, of the wisdom or philosophy of the Hebrews more than of either. Speculation among the Hebrews had a simpler task before it than it had in the West or.in the further East. The Greek philosopher began his operations upon the sum of things; he threw the universe into his crucible at once. His object was to effect some analysis of it, such an analysis that he could call one element cause and another effect. Or, to vary the figure, his endeavour was to pursue the streams of tendency which he could observe upwards till he reached at last the central spring which sent them all forth. God, a single cause and explanation, was the object of his search. But to the Hebrew this was already found. The analysis resulting in the distinction of God and the world had been effected for him long ago, so long that the history and circumstances of the process had been forgotten, and only the unchallengeable result remained. His philosophy was not a quest of God whom he did not know, but a recognition on all hands of God whom he knew. The great primary idea to his mind was that of God, a Being wholly just, doing all. And the world was little more than the phenomena that revealed the mind and the presence and the operations of God. Consequently the nature of God as known to him and the course of events formed a perfect equation. The idea of what God was in Himself was in complete harmony with His manifestation of Himself in providence, in the events of human life, and the history of men and nations. The philosophy of the wise did not go behind the origin of sin, or referred it to the freedom of man; but, sin existing, and God being in immediate personal contact with the world, every event was a direct expression of His moral will and energy; calamity fell on wickedness, and success attended right-doing. This view of the moral harmony between the nature of God and the events of providence in the fortunes of men and nations is the view of the Hebrew wisdom in its oldest form, during what might be called the period of principles, to which belong Prov. x. sg. ; and this is the position maintained by Job’s three friends. And the significance of the book of Job in the history of revelation arises from this that it marks the point when such a view was definitively overcome, closing the long period when this principle was merely subjected to questionings, and makes a new positive addition to the doctrine of evil.

Job agreed with the friends that afflictions came directly from the hand of God, and also that God afflicted those whom He held guilty of sins. But his conscience denied the imputation of guilt, whether insinuated by his friends or implied in God’s chastisement of him. Hence he was driven to conclude that God was unjust, that He sought occasions against him, and perverted his right. The position of J ob appeared to his friends nothing else but impiety, as it came very near being; while theirs was to him mere falsehood and the special pleading of sycophants in behalf of God because He was the stronger. Within these two iron walls the debate moves, making little progress, but with much brilliancy, if not of argument, of illustration. A certain advance indeed is perceptible. In the first series of speeches, ch. iv.-xiv., the key-note of which is struck by Eliphaz, the oldest and most considerate of the three, the position is that affliction is caused by sin, and is chastisement designed for the sinner’s good; and the moral is that Job should recognize it and use it for the purpose for which it was sent. In the second, ch. xv.-xχi., the other side of the picture is held up, the terrible fate of the sinner, and those brilliant pictures of a restored future, thrown in by all the speakers in the first series, are absent. Job’s demeanour under the consolations offered him afforded little hope of his repentance. In the third series, ch. xxii. sg., the friends cast off all disguise, and openly charge Job with a course of evil life. That their armoury was now exhausted is shown by the brevity of the second speaker, and the failure of the third to answer in any form. In reply Job disdains for a time to touch what he well knew lay under all their exhortations; he laments with touching pathos the defection of his friends on whom he counted, who were like the winter torrents looked for in vain by the perishing caravan in the summer heat; he meets with bitter scorn their constant cry that God will not castoff the righteous man, by asking—How one can be righteous with God? what can humaħ weakness, however innocent, do against infinite might and subtlety? they are righteous whom an omnipotent and perverse will thinks fit to consider so; he falls into a hopeless wail over the universal misery of man, who has aweary campaign of life appointed him; then, rising up in the strength of his conscience, he upbraids the Almighty with His misuse of His power and His indiscriminate tyranny,—righteous and innocent He destroys alike—and challenges Him to lay aside His majesty and meet His creature as a man, and then he would not fear Him. Even in the second series Job can hardly bring himself to face the personal issue raised by the friends. His relations to God absorb him almost wholly,—his pitiable isolation, the indignities showered on his once honoured head, the loathsome spectacle of. his body; and, abandoned by all, he turns for pity from God to men and from men to God. Only in the third series of debates does he put out his hand and grasp firmly the theory of his friends, and their “defences of mud” fall to dust in his hands. Instead of that roseate moral order which they are never weary insisting upon, he finds only disorder and moral confusion. When he thinks of it, trembling takes hold of him. It is not the righteous but the wicked that live, grow old, yea wax mighty in strength, that send forth their children like a flock and ’ establish them in their sight. Before the logic of facts the theory of the friends goes down; and with this negative result, which the author skilfully reaches through the debate, has to be combined his own positive doctrine of the uses of adversity advanced in the prologue.

To a reader of the poem now it appears strange that both parties were so entangled in the meshes of their preconceptions regarding God as to be unable to break through to broader views. The friends, while maintaining their position that injustice on the part of God is inconceivable, might have given its due weight to the persistent testimony of Job’s conscience as that behind which it is impossible to go, and found refuge in the reflexion that there might be something inexplicable in the .ways of God, and that affliction might have some other meaning than to punish the sinner or even to wean him from his sin. And Job, while maintaining his innocence from overt sins, might have bowed beneath the rod of God and confessed that there was such sinfulness in every human life as to account for the severest chastisement from heaven, or at least have stopped short of charging God foolishly. Such a position would certainly be taken up by an afflicted saint now, and such an explanation of his sufferings would suggest itself to the sufferer, even though it might be in truth a false explanation. Perhaps here, where an artistic fault might seem to be committed, the art of the writer, or what is the same thing his truth to nature, and the extraordinary freedom with which he moves among his materials, as well as the power and individuality of his dramatic creations, are most remarkable. It was the rôle which the author reserved for himself to teach the truth on the question in dispute, and he accomplishes this by allowing his performers to push their false principles to their proper...