Shechem,[1] though in reality the author probably described it from his observation of settled life in Arabia. But none of these allusions required any special gift of historical imagination. The tone of the few descriptive passages in the Colloquies, and of the reflections throughout, is that of an age long subsequent to the patriarchal. The very idea of wise men meeting together to discuss deep problems (as in the later Arabic maqāmāt, compared by Bertholdt and others) is an anachronism in a 'patriarchal' narrative, and (like the religious position of the speeches in general) irresistibly suggests the post-Solomonic period. The Job of the Colloquies is a travelled citizen of the world at an advanced period of history; indeed, he now and then seems expressly to admit this (xxiv. 12, xxix. 7). It is therefore needless to discuss the theory which assigns the book to the Mosaic or pre-Mosaic age,—a theory which is a relic of the cold, literal, unsympathetic method of the critics of the last two centuries. A few scholars of eminence, feeling this, placed the poem in the Solomonic period, a view which is in itself plausible, if we consider the pronounced secular turn of the great king, and his recorded taste for eastern parabolistic 'wisdom,' but which falls with the cognate theory of the authorship of Proverbs. A more advanced stage of society than that of the period referred to, and a greater maturity of the national intellect, are presupposed on every page of the poem. The tone of the book—I refer especially to the Colloquies—suggests a time when the nationalism of the older periods had, in general, ceased to satisfy reflecting minds. The doubters, whom Job and his friends represent, have been so staggered in their belief in Israel's loving God, that they decline to use His revealed name:—[2] once or twice only does it slip in (xii. 9; cf. xxviii. 28), as if to show that the poet himself has fought his. 'Numen quoddam esse non negant, sed' &c. Psalterium Hieronymi, pp. 155-6 ('Corollarium').]
- ↑ Mr. Tomkins compares Job's mode of life with that of Abram before his departure from Kharran (Studies on the Times of Abraham, 1878, p. 61).
- ↑ I cannot go quite so far as Lagarde, who argues from the use of 'Eloah' (instead of 'Elohim' and 'Jehovah') that the doubters have cast off belief in all the supposed various manifestations of divinity in the world, and merely retain a comfortless belief in [Greek: to theion
