How complete a reversal of the 'princely' anticipations of Job in xxxi. 37! To us, indeed, it may seem somewhat ungracious to Job to give this as the last scene of his pathetic drama. But the poet leaves it open to us to animate Job's repentance with love as well as awe and compunction. With fine feeling Blake in his seventeenth illustration almost fills the margin with passages from the Johannine writings.
The long description of the two Egyptian monsters (xl. 15, xli. 26) is, as we have hinted above, out of place in the second speech of Jehovah. It has indeed been suggested that the writer may have intended it as a development of xl. 14—
Then will I in return confess unto thee
that thy right hand can help thee—
which implies that Job has no power to help himself in the government of the world. According to this view, the opening words of the behemoth section will mean, 'Consider, pray, that thou hast fellow-creatures which are far stronger than thou; and how canst thou undertake the management of the universe?' It must, however, be admitted that the emphasis thus laid on the omnipotence of God, apart from His righteousness, introduces an obscurity into the argument which almost compels us to assume that the sketches of behemoth and leviathan are later insertions. At any rate, even if we regard them as the work of the principal writer of Job, we must at least ascribe them to one of those after-*thoughts by which poets not unfrequently spoil their best productions. The style of the description, too, is less chastened than that of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. (so that Bickell can hardly be right in placing xl. 15, &c., immediately after xxxix. 30), and if it relates to the hippopotamus and the crocodile is less true to nature than the other 'animal pieces.'
The truth is that neither behemoth nor leviathan corresponds strictly to any known animal. The tail of a hippopotamus would surely not have been compared to a cedar by a truthful though poetic observer like the author of chaps. xxxviii. xxxix. Moreover that animal was habitually hunted
