Page:03.BCOT.KD.HistoricalBooks.B.vol.3.LaterProphets.djvu/1390

that a just distribution of prosperity and misfortune is not to be found in the world, Job 9:22-24; Job 12:6. But now for the first time he designedly brings it forward in reply to the friends, after he has found every form of assertion of his innocence unavailing, and their behaviour towards him with their dogma is become still more and more inconsiderate and rash. Job sins in this speech; but in order to form a correct judgment of this sinning, two things must be attended to. Job does not revel in the contradiction in which this lasting fact of experience stands to the justice of divine retribution, he had rather be ignorant of it; for he has no need of it in order, in spite of his affliction, to be able to hold fast the consciousness of his innocence. No indeed! if he thinks of this mystery he is perplexed, and shuddering comes over him, Job 21:6. And when he depicts the prosperity of sinners, he expresses his horror of the sins of such prosperous men in the words: The counsel of the ungodly be far from me! (Job 21:16), in order that it may not be erroneously imagined that he lusts after such prosperity.
If we compare Zophar's and Job's speeches one with another, we are obliged to say, that relatively the greater right is on the side of Job. True, the Scriptures confirm what Zophar says of the destruction of the evil-doer in innumerable passages; and this calamitous end of one who has long been prosperous and defiant, is the solution by which the Old Testament Scriptures (Ps. 37, 73; Jer 12:1-3; Hab. 1:13-2:1) remove the stumbling-block of the mysterious phenomenon of the prosperity of the evil-doer. But if we bear in mind that this solution is insufficient, so long as that calamitous end is regarded only outwardly, and with reference to the present world, - that the solution only becomes satisfactory when, as in the book of Ecclesiastes, in reply to a similar doubt to that which Job expresses (Ecc 7:15; Ecc 8:14), the end is regarded as the end of all, and as the