Some Additional Reading

In the foregoing pages and footnotes the author has cited some of the best and most easily accessible literature on the Book of Job. No one who is designing a course of lectures on this "greatest poem of ancient or modern times" could do better than turn to the works so justly recommended: — J. A. Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867); A. B. Davidson's The Book of Job, in the "Cambridge Bible for Schools"(1884), or his article "Job" in the Ency. Brit, eleventh edition; W. T. Davison's The Wisdom Literature (1894), or his article "Job" in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. These all supply expository material of the highest practical value, and may well be consulted by the teacher or preacher in the framing of his discourse.

To these may be added three other works of the same outstanding character, (1) A. M. Fairbairn's The City of God, pp. 143-189 (1886) — a fine appreciation of the "nameless man," who so lived and wrestled that "the thoughts that possessed him, the faith that consoled him, and the hopes that transmuted and glorified his sorrows, are set here as to everlasting music." (2) T. K. Cheyne's admirable article on "Job" in the Ency. Biblica — a study which, with all its emendations and grammatical details (warning Paseks, and the rest) is yet pre-eminently lucid and suggestive, and never fails to do justice to that "inextinguishable heart-religion" which is surely one of the leading features of this great psychological drama. (3) As a perfect mine of expository material, however, we must make special mention of the latest study in this age-long problem — James Strahan's supremely able and spiritually alive volume, The Book of Job (1913. For the purposes of a wise and practical exposition, based upon a sound and illuminating exegesis, we hail this contribution to Old Testament literature as one of the best books of its kind. Open it where one may, one instinctively feels that he is under the guidance of a master. Is it the description of the writer of the poem as contained in the finely conceived Introduction? "He resembles the prophets of his race in his high and imperious standard of right, his flaming hatred of wrong. His expanding opinions only intensify his moral sense. His strenuous thinking is no less remarkable than his consummate literary art" Or is it the sigh of conscious rectitude, longing to come near to God, that the maligned one may be delivered from his judge (xxiii. 3, 7)? We are at once pointed to the much better rendering of the LXX: — "so should I forever recover my right." "Job asks for a trial, not in order that he may be delivered from his Judge, but that he may hear his Judge vindicate his innocence and give him back his good name as an everlasting possession." Once more, is it the thought of death extinguishing the faint gleam of an after-life, as depicted in xiv. 14, and forcing the patriarch to exclaim —

"Thou prevailed for ever against him, and he passeth;

Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away"?

He passeth! The attention of the reader is directed at once to the significance of this figure, and he is asked to see in it the inspiring teaching of Revelation, no less than the sombre language of nature. "But if Revelation consents to retain the word 'passeth,' she does so only on the condition that she shall be allowed to give it an entirely new content; for her teaching is that 'we have passed out of death into life' (1 John iii. 14), so that at the last 'there is no death, what seems so is transition.' The 'Passing of Arthur' is not a descent, dreaded by the ancients, into an underworld of darkness, but a going to meet the dawn." Or, finally, if we turn to the great crucial passage in chapter xix., and read —

"Oh that my words were now written!

Oh that they were inscribed in a book!

Could anything be more suggestive than the comment — "how splendidly his idea has been realised! His singular fancy of a testimony in the rocks could not be gratified, but he has his apologia — his monumentum ære perennius — in a book which is the masterpiece of Hebrew poetic genius."

All this is biblical exegesis at his best; and no one should attempt the exposition of the Book of Job without consulting the wealth of homiletical hint and sound Bible teaching contained in this painstaking and admirable volume.

J. A.