he struggles upwards through his desertion by God and man to the love that lies deep in the heart of God, which in spite of hostile manifestation cannot abandon the righteous. Whither shall Job turn when God seems to him as an enemy, and when he nevertheless will not renounce God? He can only turn from the hostile God to the God who is differently disposed towards him, and that is equivalent to saying from the imaginary to the real God, to whom faith clings throughout every outward manifestation of wrath and wrathful feeling.[1]
Since both, however, is one God, who only seems to be other than He is, that bold grasp of faith is the exchange of the phantom-god of the conflict of temptation for the true God. Faith, which in its essence is a perception capable of taking root, seizes the real existence behind the appearance, the heart behind the countenance, that which remains the same behind the change, and defies a thousand contradictions with the saintly Nevertheless: God nevertheless does not belie himself.
Job challenges the earth not to hide his blood; unceasingly without restraint shall the cry of his blood rise up. What he says in Job 16:18 is to be taken not so much as the expression of a desire as of a demand, and better still as a command; for even in case he should succumb to his sufferings, and consequently in the eyes of men die the death of a sinner, his clear consciousness of innocence does not allow him to renounce his claim to a public declaration that he has died guiltless. But to whom shall the blood of the slain cry out? To whom else but God; and yet it is God who has slain him? We see distinctly here how Job's idea of God is lighted up by the prospect of a decisive trial of his cause. The God who abandons Job to death as guilty, and the God who
- ↑ Compare the prayer of Juda ha-Levi, אברח ממך אליך ((
Arabic characters)), in Kämpf's Nichtandalusische Poesien andalusischer Dichter (1858), ii. 206.
