might have rested amidst his personal woes in the certainty of at least an indirect connection with the gentler manifestations of the 'Watcher of mankind' (vii. 20). This thought has proved ineffectual, and so the Divine Instructor tries another order of considerations. And, true enough, nature effects what 'the still, sad music of humanity' has failed to teach. Job, however, needs more than teaching; he needs humiliation for his misjudgment of God's dealings with him personally. Hence in His second short but weighty speech 'out of the tempest' Jehovah begins with the question (xl. 8)—
Wilt thou make void my justice?
wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?
This gives the point of view from which Jehovah ironically invites Job, if he thinks (see chap. xxiv.) that he can govern the world—the human as well as the extra-human world—better than the Creator, to make the bold attempt. He bids him array himself with the Divine majesty and carry out that retribution in which Jehovah, according to him, has so completely failed (xl. 11-13). If Job will prove his competence for the office which he claims, then Jehovah Himself will recognise his independence and extol his inherent strength. Did the poet mean to finish the second speech of Jehovah here? It is probable; the subject of the interrogatory hardly admitted of being developed further in poetry. A later writer (or, as Merx thinks, the poet of Job himself) seems to have found the speech too short, and therefore appended the two fancy sketches of animals which follow. But in the original draft of the poem xl. 14 must have been followed immediately by Job's retractation, closing with those striking words (see above, p. 49) which so well supplement the less articulate confession of xl. 4, 5—
I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,
but now mine eye sees thee:[1]
therefore I retract and repent
in dust and ashes (xlii. 5, 6).
So an anonymous writer well expresses it (Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, p. 196).]
- ↑ [All his thinkings seemed like hearsay. This, then, was the real God.
