trust, justifying the title borne by Job among the Syrians, as if in contradiction to the Talmud, of 'the lover of the Lord.'[1]
So far as the author of Job has any direct purpose beyond that of giving a helpful picture of his own troubles, it is no doubt principally a polemical one. He has suffered so deeply from the inveterate error (once indeed a relative truth) so tenaciously maintained by the wisest men that he would fain crush the source of so much heart-breaking misery. But that for which we love the book is its [Greek: philanthrôpia,] its brotherly love to all mankind. No doubt the author thinks first of Israel, then (as I suppose) suffering exile; but the care with which the poem is divested of Israelitish peculiarities, seems to show that he looks beyond his own people, just as in his view of God he has broken the bonds of a narrow 'particularism.' 'I can see no other explanation of those apparently hyperbolical complaints, that strange invasion of self-consciousness, and that no less strange 'enthusiasm of humanity'[2] . . . than the view expressed or implied by Chateaubriand, that Job is a type of righteous men in affliction—not merely in the land of Uz, nor among the Jews in Babylonia, nor yet, on Warburton's theory of the poem, in the Judæa of the time of Nehemiah, but wherever on the wide earth tears are shed and hearts are broken.' This is the truth in the too often exaggerated allegorical view[3] of the poem of Job. According to his wont, the author lets us read his meaning by occasional bold inconsistencies. No individual can use such phraseology as we find in xvii. 1, xviii. 2, 3, xix. 11, and perhaps I may add xvi. 10, xxvii. 11, 12. And yet the fact that Job often speaks as the 'type of suffering humanity' no more destroys
- ↑ Hottinger, referred to by Delitzsch, Iob, p. 7. In the Peshitto, Heb. xii. 3-11 has for a sub-title, 'In commemoration of Job the righteous.' The choice of the section shows in what sense Job's 'righteousness' is affirmed—not the Talmudic.
- ↑ See especially Job vi. 2, 3, vii. 1-3, xiv. 1-3.
- ↑ This view goes back to the last century (Warburton, Michaelis, &c.) It has been remodelled by Seinecke and Hoekstra, who regard Job, not as the people of Israel in general, but the idealised Israel or 'Servant of Jehovah.' See especially Hoekstra's essay, Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1871, p. 1 &c., and Kuenen's reply, Th. Ti., 1873, p. 492 &c.
