(4) Elihu's style is prolix and laboured; his phrases often very obscure, even where the words separately are familiar. As Davidson remarks, there are not only unknown words (these we meet with elsewherein the book), but an unknown use of known words. There is also a deeper colouring of Aramaic (see Appendix), which F. C. Cook, following Stickel, explains by the supposed Aramæan origin of the speaker; in this case, it would be a refinement of art which adds a fresh laurel to the crown of the poet. But the statement in xxxii. 2 is that Elihu was 'the son of Barakel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram.' That Ram = Aram is unproved; while Buz, as Jer. xxv. 23 shows, is the name of a genuine Arabian people. It would be better to explain the increased Aramaism by the lapse of a long interval in the writer's life. This explanation is, to me, equivalent to assigning these speeches to a different writer (as I have remarked elsewhere, comparing Goethe's Faust). Those who will may adopt it; but my own respect for the poet of Job will not allow me to believe that his taste had so much declined as to insert this inferior poem into his masterpiece.
(5) Elihu's allusions to passages in the rest of the book (comp. xxxiii. 15 with iv. 13; xxxiv. 3 with xii. 11; xxxv. 5 with xxii. 12; xxxv. 8 with xxii. 2; xxxvii. 8 with xxxviii. 40) and his minute reproductions of sayings of Job (see xxxiii. 8, 9; xxxiv. 5, 6; xxxv. 2, 3) point to an author who had the book before him, so far as then known, as a whole.
(6) Elihu's somewhat scrupulous piety, or shall I call it his advance in reverential, contrite devoutness? compared with the three friends, suggests that the poet of Elihu was the child of a later and more sombre generation which found the original book in some respects disappointing.
Putting all this together, if the main part of the Book of Job belongs to the Exile, the Elihu-portion may well belong to the post-Exile period.
To this view, it is no objection that, on the one hand, Elihu not merely (to express oneself shortly) criticises the position of the three friends, but, by ignoring it, criticises the
