If so, the experiment can hardly have been made before the great subversion of Hebrew traditions at the Babylonian captivity. Residence in a foreign land produces a marked effect on one's language. Recollect too that our author was a literary man. Internal evidence converges to show that Job belonged to that great literary movement among the wise men, philosophers, or humanists, to which we shall have to refer Prov. i-ix., the Wisdom of Sirach, and the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Before leaving this subject, let us notice the parallels to descriptions in the speeches of Jehovah in the Arabian poets, who show the same attention to the striking phenomena of earth and sky as the author of these speeches. The Arabian tone and colouring of the descriptions of animals in Job has been already remarked upon by Alfred von Kremer in vol. ii. of his Culturgeschichte des Orients. Is it possible to conceive that those sketches of the wild goat, the wild ass, and the horse, were not written by one who was familiar with the sight? Or that the author had not observed the habits of the ostrich, when he penned his lines on the ostrich's neglect of her eggs? Or that his interest in astronomy was not deepened by the spectacle of a night-sky in Arabia? Or that personal experience of caravan life did not inspire the touching figure in vi. 1520? And observation of the mines in the Sinaitic peninsula[1] the fine description of xxviii. 1-10? It is possible that some of these passages may be due to other travelled 'wise men;' but this only increases the probability that the Hebrew movement was strengthened by contact with similar movements abroad. The 'wise men' had certainly travelled far and wide among Arabic-speaking populations, though nowhere perhaps were they so much at home as in Idumæa and its neighbourhood. As M. Derenbourg remarks, 'Les riantes oasis, au milieu des contrées désolées, environnant la mer Morte, étaient la demeure des
- ↑ On the mining passage see further p. 40. Stickel, however, though inclining to the above view, thinks that it is still not quite impossible that Palestinian mines are meant, comparing Edrisi's statements on the iron-mines of Phœnicia and the words of the Deuteronomist in Deut. viii. 9. Das Buch Hiob, pp. 265-6.
