evident that not an absolute arbitrary power, but divine wisdom, whose inmost impulse is love, moulds human destiny.
6. Time of Composition
That this masterpiece of religious reflection and systematic creative art - this, to use Luther's expression, lofty and grand book, in which, as the mountains round an Alpine valley, all the terribly sublime that nature and human history present is ranged one above another - belongs to no other than the Salomonic period, we might almost assume, even if it were not confirmed on all sides. The opinion that Moses wrote the book of Job before the giving of the law, is found in the Talmuds (jer. Sota V. 8; b. Bathra, 15a). This view has been recently revived by Ebrard (1858). But how improbable, all but impossible, that the poetical literature of Israel should have taken its rise with such a non plus ultra of reflective poetry, and that this poem should have had Moses the lawgiver for its author? ”Moses certainly is not the composer of the book of Job,” says Herder rightly,[1] “or Solon might have written the Iliad and the Eumenides of Aeschylus.” This opinion, which is also found in Origen, Jerome, Polychronius, and Julian of Halicarnassus, would surely never have suggested itself to any one, had not the studious avoidance in the book of all reference to the law, prophecy, history, religious worship, and even of the religious terminology of Israel, consequent on its design, produced the appearance of a pre-Sinaitic origin. But, first, this absence of such reference is, as we have already seen, the result of the genius and aim which belong to the book; secondly, the writer distinctly enough betrays his acquaintance with the Thora: for as the Chokma for the most part necessarily presupposes the revelation of God deposited in the Thora,
- ↑ Geist der Ebr. Poesie, 1805, i. S. 130.
