CHAPTER XI.
ARGUMENT FROM PARALLEL PASSAGES.
The new phase into which the controversy as to the early
Christian work on the Teaching of the Apostles has passed
excuses me from justifying the importance (in spite of its difficulty)
of the study of parallel passages. A great point has
been gained in one's critical and exegetical training when one
has learned so to compare parallel passages as to distinguish
true from apparent resemblances, and to estimate the degree
of probability of imitation. In Essay viii. of vol. ii. of The Prophecies of Isaiah, I endeavoured to help the student to do
this for himself within the field of the Book of Isaiah. I shall
not attempt this with the same thoroughness for the Book of
Job. It is a sign of the consummate skill of the writer that he
is an artist even in his imitations. As Luther says, 'Die
Rede dieses Buches ist so reisig und prächtig als freilich keines
Buches in der ganzen Schrift.' The author retains the parallelistic
distich, but is no longer content with a bare synonymous
or antithetic bifurcation of his material, and dwells on
the decoration of an idea with a freedom which sometimes
obscures his meaning; hence too the germinal phrase or
word suggested by an earlier book may easily escape notice.
I shall confine my attention to the most defensible points of
contact, referring for the rest, without pledging myself to
agreement, to Dr. J. Barth's Beiträge zur Erklärung des Buches Job (Leipzig, s.a.), pp. 1-17.
The influence of Job on the works which all admit to be of post-Exile origin need not detain us here. There is but one undoubted reference to Job in Ecclesiastes (v. 14; comp. Job i. 21)—we should perhaps have expected more. But
