this interest which alone explains why the thought of his fellow-sufferers not only brings no comfort[1] to Job, but fails even to calm his excitement.
Am I the sea (he says) or the sea monster,
that thou settest a watch over me? (vii. 12.)
It is an allusion to a myth, based on the continual 'war in heaven' between light and darkness, which we have in these lines. Job asks if he is the leviathan (iii. 8) of that upper ocean above which dwells the invisible God (ix. 8, Ps. civ. 3). He describes Jehovah as being jealous (comp. Gen. iii. 4, 5, 22) and thinking it of importance to subdue Job's wild nature, lest he should thwart the Divine purposes. But here, again, Job rises above himself; the sorrows of all innocent sufferers are as present to him as his own; nay, more, he bears them as a part of his own; he represents mankind with God. In a bitter parody of Ps. viii. 5 he exclaims—
What is frail man that Thou treatest him as a great one
and settest Thy mind upon him;
that Thou scrutinisest him every morning,
and art every moment testing him? (vii. 17, 18.)
It is only now and then that Job expresses this feeling of sympathetic union with the human race. Generally his secret thought (or that of his poet) translates itself into a self-consciousness which seems morbidly extravagant on any other view of the poem. The descriptions of his physical pains, however, are true to the facts of the disease called elephantiasis, from which he may be supposed to have suffered. His cry for death is justified by his condition—'death rather than (these) my pains'[2] (vii. 15). He has no respite from his
- ↑ Contrast the touchingly natural expressions of an Arabian poet, translated by
Rückert (Hamâsa, ii. 315):—
'Gieng es nicht wie mir vil andern,
Würd' ich's nicht ertragen;
Doch wo ich nur will, gibt Antwort
Klage meinen Klagen.'The same sentiment is expressed more than once again; comp. Buddha's apologue of the mustard seed.
- ↑ So Merx and Bickell. Text, 'my bones.'
