THE SHORT COURSE SERIES

Edited by Rev. John Adams, B.D.

The Divine Drama of Job

By Rev. Charles F. Aked, D.D.

Chapter 1 THE INSURRECTION OF DOUBT

"Towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world" — so runs the famous criticism of the Book of Job pronounced by one of the most noted men of letters of the nineteenth century.1 Did Carlyle influence Froude in this opinion as in some others? At least Froude may have been driven to study Job afresh when Carlyle's Heroes fell into his hands, some thirteen years before he wrote his luminous exposition. Carlyle would have it that Job, "apart from all theories about it," is "one of the grandest things ever written with pen." "A noble book," he insists; "all men's book... grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity, in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement." And he multiplies words of admiration, indeed, of awe: "Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind; — so soft and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars. There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit"2

1. The Plot.

Job is a man, in the far-off patriarchal days, rich in herds and flocks; rich, too, in sons and daughters; rich in the esteem of all his world, honoured, powerful, and great. After calamity falls upon him he looks back with blended pride and sadness to the time of his prosperity:

"When I went forth to the gate unto the city.

When I prepared my teat in the street,

The young men saw me and hid themselves,

And the aged rose up and stood:

The princes refrained from talking,

And laid their hand on their mouth;

The voice of the nobles was hushed,

And their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth.

For when the ear heard me, then it blessed me;

And when the eye saw me, it gave witness unto me:

Because I delivered the poor that cried,

The fatherless also, that had none to help him.

The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me;

And I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy." 3

Unmerciful disaster brings him very low. A robber band sweeps down upon his oxen and his asses and carries them away, and his men-servants they put to the sword. Other bandits carry off his camels and kill the young men in charge of them. A fire destroys his sheep. And then a w great wind from the wilderness smote the four corners of the house" in which his children held high festival, so that seven tall sons and three fair daughters die together. Job is attacked by a loathsome disease. Bereaved, afflicted, lonely, "steeped in poverty to the very lips," like many of the distressed amongst the children of men before his day and since, he "wished that he had never been born."

Friends come to condole with him. They are three in number, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, men of strangely diverse temperament and habit of mind. They come to him in entire friendliness. They approach him with respect, even with reverence, for they have not to be told that sorrow like this sorrow is a sacred thing. Seven days and seven nights they sit upon the ground near to him, their garments rent, with ashes on their heads. And "none spake a word unto him; for they saw that his grief was very great." When, however, Job begins to give sorrow words, his friends are shocked, and, very mildly at first, with consideration and deference and tenderness, they venture to remonstrate with him and entreat him to restrain the utterances of grief which seem to them profane. And when Job, unrelieved by their sympathy and unconsoled by their preaching, persists in his outcry against the evil fate which has overwhelmed him, they lose patience and roundly reproach him. They do more. They tell him, in effect, that in some way he has brought these misfortunes on himself. Though they cannot lay their hands upon the secret sin which has called down upon him the judgment of an offended God, yet they are very sure that such secret sin there is. His protestations of innocence are in their eyes added proof of guilt. God has ordained that light shall shine upon the ways of the righteous man while the lamp of the sinner shall be put out. Had not Job so deeply sinned he would not now so deeply suffer. And since his sufferings are visible unto all men it cannot but be that heaven has visited upon him the recompense of his guilt. His denials add hypocrisy to iniquity and crown disobedience with insolent defiance of the Most High!

These charges, false and foolish as they are, and false as Job knows them to be, increase his misery. To the gloom in which he sits they add the horror of a great darkness which can be felt. And still the accusations are piled up against him. They grow more pointed, more definite, as the controversy proceeds. They deepen in intensity. They increase in violence. And Job writhes beneath them. They are false, and though every living human being pronounce them true he knows them false. Though earth go reeling back to chaos he will yet deny and denounce and damn the slanders which affront his soul.

Before the end Jehovah intervenes. Although Job did not know it, Jehovah, in the days of the great man's prosperity, had affirmed the righteousness of His servant's life. He had said that there was none like him on the earth. He had described Job as an upright and a perfect man, one who feared God and turned from evil. Now He sternly rebukes the friends who so misrepresent Him to the suffering man. His wrath is kindled against them because they have not spoken of Him w the thing that is right." And Jehovah "turned the captivity of Job" and gave him twice as much as he had before. Oxen and sheep and camels were multiplied to him; sons and daughters were born to him: in the land were found no women so fair as the daughters of Job: and his days were long in the land.

2. Author and Origin.

Is this story fact or fiction, history or parable? Did such a man as Job ever live, and did he experience these vicissitudes of fortune? Did his entire family of ten children die in one day, and then was that exact number of children born to him again in after years? Were seven thousand sheep destroyed and fourteen thousand restored to him? Three thousand camels destroyed and six thousand restored? And so with the asses and the oxen: did it really happen that precisely double the number lost were given to him again? And did Jehovah really deliver those long speeches, and if so, how did He deliver them? And who reported them? And how?

These questions answer themselves, and they go far to indicate the nature of the Book of Job. We are not here concerned with fact, not even with fact decked out in oriental hyperbole. Job is a work of imagination, a poem, a dramatic poem; and it is not any more fact than Paradise Lost, Macbeth, or Faust. It is poetry; it is philosophy; most of all, it is religion.

We need not inquire too particularly concerning the location of the land of Uz. It is a land of spirit. Neither do we need to establish the lineage of Job himself. Some suffering servant of Jehovah in some unknown age may have suggested to the unknown author the "plot" of his sublime drama, and some unwisely learned, affectionately cruel friends of the sufferer may have served the poet as models for his artistic creations, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. In this sense Job may be said to be "founded on fact." But such speculations are not free from a taint of pedantry, and in any case they do not carry us far. This is in truth "all men's book," and there is always in the land of Uz a man whose name is Job.

It is very wonderful to think that this book is anonymous. We, with our passion for publicity, and with our rigid views of the sacred rights of property in the children of our brain, can with difficulty think ourselves back to the mind of a day when a man of genius, one of the first-born of the sons of God, could give to the world a work greater than Hamlet, greater than the Inferno, greater than the Critias, and "scorn to blot it with a name." And our wonder deepens as we perceive that all the scholarship of all the A world has failed to find one shred of internal evidence which goes to establish the place of its origin or the century of its birth. From the time of Moses to the period of the Exile every century has been named by tradition or by criticism as the date of Job. A critic of international reputation4 does indeed declare that "beneath the patriarchal disguise" may be discerned "the features of the author's own time," and that a late period in the history of Israel; that he "betrays familiarity with the law"; that he is "a true Israelite" and "betrays himself to be so at every turn." The ordinary reader of Job is a little chagrined by the reflection that he cannot discover for himself the ground of such dogmatic assurance. And he takes comfort from the mild protest of another scholar, held in equal honour by two continents,5 "that other critics would demur to such decided phraseology," and that "it is certain that the book has to be searched very carefully before any traces of the law can be found in it, and these are not of a very pronounced kind." On the other hand, the references to life outside Israel, the amazing information which the writer possessed about the wonder-worlds in the lands beyond, and about their traditions, their myths, their cosmogony, startle and bewilder the reader at every turn and upset every theory as soon as it is advanced. "The life, the manners, the customs are of all varieties and places — Egypt, with its river and its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia; the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people.... We look to find the three friends vindicate themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old war of the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, the sweet influences of the seven stars, and the glittering fragments of the sea-snake Rahab trailing across the northern sky."6 And it is not strange that in the presence of these phenomena the reader exclaims that the "scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to baffle curiosity." The author of Job remains the Great Unknown of literature.

3. The Great Polemic.

The theme of the Book of Job is the world-old problem of pain and mystery of evil, against which the thinkers of the race have beaten their brains for twice two thousand years. One after another, Bible writers have looked the difficulty boldly in the face — and passed on! The author of the thirty-seventh Psalm — some sweet-natured, kind old man— concluded that it was best not to fret over such perplexing things, for worry tends only to wickedness.7 He was satisfied that the wicked might grow to great power and spread himself like a green tree in his native soil, but that soon one would look for him in vain. While as to the righteous, he declared —

"I hare been young, and now am old,

Yet hare I not seen the righteous forsaken,

Nor his seed begging bread."

But the author of Job could have told him that if he had not seen the righteous forsaken others had, and had likewise seen the seed of the righteous begging bread! The writer of the seventy-third Psalm, one of the most characteristic and significant in the whole Psalter, frankly confessed that the matter was to him unthinkable,8 until he, too, found refuge from the burden of it in the forced belief which orthodoxy prescribed that the end of the sinner would be violence and death.

Upon such elementary "solutions" of his problem the author of Job flings scorn. There is one answer to them, and only one; but that is final and irrefutable; they are not true! They are not true to the facts of life. And men would not go on saying these things if others had not said them before. They are taught to say them. And generation by generation the tongues of men repeat them, though their minds, if they would but use their minds, yield no consent to them. These "solutions" are cheap and easy. They have become recognised formulas, and men have "swallowed formulas." The word was not then known, but the spirit of it breathes in Job's passionate speeches; these sayings are mere "cant" — cant, be it understood, properly defined as "unrealised phraseology," words which are supposed to cover a situation though their precise import has not once been seriously considered by the persons who repeat them so glibly. It is simply not true that virtue will find its sure reward in a life exempt from sickness, pain, and sorrow. It is not true that a violation of the laws of right will be followed by immediate, overwhelming calamity. Habits which constitute "righteousness" do on the whole and in the long run make for prosperity, while unrighteousness blinds and paralyses and destroys so that on the whole and in the long run the wages of sin is death. But in Job the accumulated miseries which befall the hero are not the consequence of his transgression. And on any broad view of the many-coloured life of man upon this earth some other explanation of the presence and pressure of sorrow must be found. On this tremendous subject the author of Job sets himself to broaden the thought of the world.

Then what is his "solution?" What explanation does he offer? None, absolutely none. In the wonderful Book of Job this is perhaps the most wonderful thing. The opening chapter supplies a prologue to the drama. There we are introduced into the Court of Heaven. We see that the Satan is given permission by Jehovah to afflict Job in order to demonstrate to the unseen powers the faith of the man. But this must not for a moment be supposed to convey any suggestion as to the real meaning of pain. So to read it is to misconceive the object of the prologue, and to set one's feet from the beginning on a path which is bound to lead to misunderstanding of Job. Davidson's language is unfortunate: "Does then the

author offer no solution? He does not, and no solution is offered to us, unless the prologue supplies it. This passage, however, when naturally read, teaches that Job's sufferings were the trial of his righteousness." The prologue was not intended, to teach this or anything else. This is only the machinery of the drama, the author's way of getting his characters upon the stage and into action. The meaning of suffering and its place in the providence of God are yet to seek. The methods of our author are those of the much decried "negative criticism"; but, for once at least in the history of "rationalism," his conclusions are wholly spiritual, and the total net result is not the destruction but the restoration of faith.