passages, which, with all their faults of expression, would in any other book have commanded universal admiration. The grounds on which chaps. xxxii.-xxxvii. are denied to the original writer may be summed up thus.
(1) Elihu puts forward a theory of the sufferings of the righteous which does not essentially differ from that of the three friends (see especially xxxiii. 25-28; xxxiv. 9, 11, 12, 36, 37; xxxv. 9-16; xxxvi. 5-7, 21-25; xxxvii. 23, 24). No doubt he improves the theory, by laying more stress upon the chastening character of the righteous man's afflictions (xxxiii. 14-30; xxxvi. 8-12, 15, 16, and comp. Eliphaz in v. 18, 19), and to many disciples of the New Covenant his form of the theory may recommend itself as true. But, even apart from the appendix or epilogue (see xlii. 7-9), it is clear from the whole plan of the poem, particularly if the discourses of Jehovah be taken in, that this was not, in the writer's mind, an adequate solution of the problem, especially in the case of the God-fearing and innocent Job.
(2) These speeches interrupt the connection between the 'words of Job' and those of Jehovah, and seem to render the latter superfluous. Whether the 'words of Job' (to borrow the phrase of some editor of the book) should end at xxxvii. 37 or at ver. 40, it is difficult not to believe that xxxviii. 1, 2, 'And Jehovah answered Job out of the storm, and said, Who then is darkening counsel by words without knowledge?' was meant to follow immediately upon them. The force of this seems to some to be weakened by taking Elihu's description of the storm (xxxvii. 2-5) as preparatory to the appearance of Jehovah in chap. xxxviii. But, evidently, to make this an argument, the storm ought to be at the end of the speech.
(3) There is no mention of Elihu in the Prologue, nor is any divine judgment passed upon him in the Epilogue. It is not enough to reply with Stickel that Jehovah himself is not mentioned in the Prologue as the umpire in the great controversy; why should he be?—and that the absence of any condemnation of Elihu on the part of Jehovah, and the harmony (?) between Elihu's and Jehovah's discourses, sufficiently indicate the good opinion of the Divine Judge.
