has no similarity in sound with the words Damascus and Trachonitis, that might make a combination with them plausible, we may surely have before us a reliable historical notice here, or at least a tradition which was then general (and therefore also for us important), while we may doubt this in connection with other parts of the genealogies, where Josephus seems only to catch at that which is similar in sound as furnishing an explanation.
But that which might injure the authority of Josephus is the contradiction in which it seems to stand to a far older statement concerning Ausitis, viz., the recognised postscript of the lxx to the book of Job, which makes Job to be the Edomitish king Jobab. The identification, it may be said, can however only have been possible because Ausitis was in or near Edom. But the necessity of this inference must be disputed. It is indeed unmistakeable that that postscript is nothing more than a combination of the Jews beyond Palestine (probably Egytpio-Hellenistic), formed, perhaps, long before the lxx, - such a vagary as many similar ones in the Talmud and Midrash. From the similarity in sound of Ἰωβάβ with Ἰώβ, and the similarity in name of Ζαρά, the father of Jobab, with a son of Re'ûël and grandson of Esau (Gen 36:13), Job's descent from Esau has been inferred. That Esau's first-born was called Elîphaz and his son Temân, seemed to confirm this combination, since (in accordance with the custom[1] of naming the grandson as a rule after his grandfather) Elîphaz the Temanite might be regarded as grandson of that Elîphaz, therefore like Job as great-grandson of Esau and πέμπτος ἀπὸ Ἀβραάμ. The apparent and certainly designed advantages of this combination were: that Job, who had no pedigree, and therefore was to be thought of as a non-Israelite, was brought into the nearest possible blood-relationship to the people of God, and that, by laying the scene in the time of the patriarchs, all questions which the want of a Mosaic colouring to the book of Job might excite would be met. Now, even if the abode of Job were transferred from the land of ‘Us to Edom, it would be only the consequence of his combination with Jobab, and, just as worthless as this latter itself, might lead no one astray. But it does not seem to have gone so far; it is even worthy of observation, that מבצרה (from Bosra, the Edomite city),[2] being attached to the misunderstood υἱὸς Ζαρά ἐκ Βοσόῤῥας, Gen 36:33, is reproduced in the lxx by μητρὸς Βοσόῤῥας, as also that Job's wife is not called an
- ↑ From this custom, which is called the grandfather's “living again,” the habit, singular to us, of a father calling his son jâ abı̂, “my father!” or jâ bêjı̂, “my little father,” as an endearing form of address, is explained.
- ↑ It need hardly be mentioned that one is not to think of the Hauranitish Bosrâ (Arab. bṣrâ), since this name of a city only came into use some centuries after Christ.
