It was perhaps as the fifth century was slipping into the past that the poet whose genius made him the peer of the most gifted of our race wrote his mighty work. But while it may take some of its colour from the dark experience of its time, it really contributes little to our understanding of it to connect it closely with any set of historical conditions. It is not with the nation that the poet is concerned, but with the individual, not with Israel but with man, not with God's discipline of His people, but with His government of the world. Of the author we know nothing save what we can glean from the work. He had passed through the most agonizing doubts, had faced without flinching the suffering of mankind, and had fought his way to peace.
Job stands before his destiny as blind as we do before our own in common life, where no poet introduces us into the counsels of God. Indeed, he is still blinder than we, for we Christians know that the sorrows of this time are only the transition to a future glory; we consider ourselves members of a great body in which no member suffers, whatever befalls him, by himself. Job, on the contrary, knows not the future world. He stands entirely isolated before his God. He can seek the causes of his distress only in God or in himself. What a fearful choice! May the cause lie in himself? No; he does not think of this; he feels himself so pure inwardly that, from the beginning, the question of an offence committed by him does not occur to him. The cause then must lie in God. But what a horrible thought is this! He feels himself forced to this conclusion, but he recoils in horror from it. “Would that I had never been born, would that I were dead,” he cries out in torture. In the mouth of a Christian this wish would be blasphemous, but in the mouth of Job it appears to us natural; it is a cry of despair wrung from him not so much by his misfortune as by the blindness of his soul, his ignorance concerning the causes of his fate and the torment of that fearful thought-
“Why is light given to the sorrowful,
And life to the troubled in soul; …
To the man whose way is hid,
And about whom Eloah has made a hedge?”
This Wherefore is the kernel of the first lament of Job, which is not a declaration of innocence or a complaint, or a murmuring against God, but a bitter and anxious cry, Wherefore? Were his fate not hidden from him he would bear it boldly, and put Satan to shame. This Wherefore now becomes the fundamental tone of all his speeches, his especial problem, for the solution of which, after he has overcome his first horror and the noble courage of a good conscience has broken forth victoriously, he inquires into all the possibilities in the character of his God; it is the reason why he asks for a Divine manifestation, a clear utterance, a personal revelation of God. The poet has wonderfully mingled truth and error in this discourse. It is true that the cause of his suffering does not lie in Job, but in God; but God on account of His very righteousness, had to abandon His pious servant to the persecution of Satan. This does not appear to Job because he considers his relation to God as purely as an individual, without reference to the whole sphere of his dominion. It is a noble, but one-sided, individualism which is here involved in enigmas and struggles in distresses.1 [Note: B. Duhm, in The New World, iii. 334.]
1. Let us first of all see clearly the general principles of belief on which the Book of Job is founded.
(1) There was, first, the belief that God is the great cause at work everywhere; that everything must be traced to Him; that all the phenomena of the world, all the events of life, are but a manifestation of Him. In the words of Professor Davidson, “The philosophy of the wise did not go beyond the origin of sin, or referred it to the freedom of man; but, sin existing, and God being in immediate personal contact with the world, every event was a direct expression of His moral will and energy.” This was the first position in the minds of the men of Job's day. To them prosperity and adversity came, not through what we might vaguely call the force of circumstances, but from the hand of God. The afflicted were afflicted by God; it was His hand that lay heavy upon them.
(2) Next, there was the belief that God is just, and that His dealings with men are the outcome of His justice. One phase of this belief, as then held, was that suffering is sent by God because of sin; that it is the direct consequence of sin and is proportional to it, so that special suffering must be accounted for by special sinfulness.
(3) Third, there is the further position with which it is beyond reasonable doubt that the friends of Job set out, that the feelings of God towards a man must be made manifest during this life, so that ere death the favour of God must shine out over the righteous man, however tossed about by the waves of misfortune he may have been for a time. To them the state of existence beyond the grave brought no thought of retribution, as a state in which to the righteous the calamities of a lifetime would seem as nothing in the everlasting favour of God, while the short-lived pleasures and seeming good fortune of the wicked would be swallowed up in the misery of an existence apart from Him whose lovingkindness is better than life.
If we exclude disciplinary suffering as being simply a natural extension of penal or retributive, then we may say that the Old Testament offers five different attitudes to the problem of the suffering of the innocent (with the related fact of experience, the prosperity of the wicked). These five attitudes in logical, though not chronological, order, are (1) Wait! (2) There may be life beyond death for the righteous; (3) Life is a dark mystery; (4) Life is the bright mystery of a Divine purpose higher than our grasp; (5) The suffering of the innocent may avail for the guilty. The variety of these suggestions shows how widely the problem was felt, as their fruitfulness shows its intensity. We might almost write a history of Old Testament religion around the simple account of its development.…
It is clear that the second, fourth, and fifth of these attitudes or solutions mark a real advance for religion. Besides the fundamental conception of suffering as penal and disciplinary, which continues to hold its proper, if partial, place in any moral view of the world, there is (a) the reminder that the portion of life we see is incomplete, and affords no sufficient data for a final judgment; (b) the idea of suffering as the necessary test and manifestation of disinterested religion; and (c) the conviction of its atoning value for others.1 [Note: H. Wheeler Robinson, The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament, 171, 177.]
2. The question then is, how to make these fundamental positions consist rationally with the facts of the case-the undoubted fact of Job's calamities, and the seeming fact of his uprightness; or, to decide which of the positions can be abandoned or modified so as to arrive at something like a satisfactory explanation of the facts.
(1) Now we notice first of all, that Job's righteousness is in no way repudiated; indeed it is heartily recognized. This picture of the righteous Gentile is incorporated in the Canon; at the end of the book this righteous man is restored to his prosperity and continues to live a life of the same type of righteousness: “the Lord accepted Job”; more than this, his words receive the Divine stamp of approval: not only has he spoken better than his friends, but he has spoken the thing that is right about God; he has looked facts in the face and seen rightly that without further explanation they are not consistent with the justice of God; and he has rightly appealed to the facts of his own life; he has a right to set long years of goodness in the balance against the few months of misery; he has rightly clung to his own sense of justice and mercy and purity; he has rightly appealed to the witness of his own consciousness, even though external circumstances seem for the moment to be confirming that opinion. The book then asserts the validity of a man's appeal to the witness of his own conscience, to the inherent and inalienable value of his own personality.
(2) But, secondly, we notice that this righteousness is assigned its true position and proportion. Job was quite right to appeal to the witness of his own personality against the assertions of his friends; he was right to appeal to his whole lifetime as against the events of a few months; but he had forgotten that God has the same rights. God is (as has been said) “a Being of infinite self-respect”; He ought to be trusted to be doing nothing unworthy of His true nature; He may not stop at every moment to explain His processes; He too may appeal against current notions and temporary appearances to His essential life. In order to be judged, His work must be seen in its entirety from beginning to end; for He too can appeal to great acts of power and majesty and beauty. Thus Jehovah's appeal to His creative acts forms a pendant to Job's appeal to his past life, but drawn on a larger canvas and with a greater emphasis on their intrinsic power. He has laid the foundations of the earth; He has shut up the sea within doors; He has caused the dayspring to know its place; He knows the gates of death, the dwelling of light and darkness, of wind and rain and dew and frost; He controls the planets, the clouds and the lightning; He has given their instincts and their beauty to the wild goat, the ass, the ox, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk, and the eagle, the hippopotamus, and the crocodile. Can Job equal all this? “Hast thou an arm like God, and canst thou thunder with a voice like him?” Nay, might he not remember that this great Creator had created man as well? Might he not trust that one who so cared for the animals would care for him too and ultimately vindicate his righteousness?
(3) Once more, we have here an appeal from appearances to essential personality: the lower personality of Job is brought face to face with the higher, the more commanding, personality of Jehovah; and the result is what it must always be when man really faces the thought of what God is. “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself (or, “I loathe my words”) and repent in dust and ashes.” Human personality at its best is limited and dependent: it will go wrong even in the assertion of its own good acts, unless it recollects its dependence, and bows itself before its Creator. “Wilt thou condemn me that thou mayest be justified?” Jehovah had asked of Job, and Job came to recognize that he must in the end justify God if he hopes to be justified himself.
Here it is of special interest to note how St. Paul modifies the adaptation which he seems to make of Job's words to himself. St. Paul was as self-conscious, as self-assertive, as Job: he was “touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless”: he was a faithful steward of the mysteries of God; he appealed with no less confidence from his detractors to the witness of his own conscience; but he had been brought face to face with a righteousness that was above the law; he knew that all his strength was drawn from a power greater than himself; he too had been a blasphemer and injurious; but he had already had the vision which ultimately humbled Job, and so while with Job he asserts, “I know nothing by myself,” he adds quickly, “yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.”
A noble mind has worked itself free out of a narrow creed into one far wider, and as we watch the process, we discern what deep religious instincts may underlie professions of atheism; and we learn what need there is on our part of patience, of sympathy, of loyal facing of all the facts of life, if we are to be of any help to one who is passing through a time of such perplexity; and how in the last resort such an one may have to be left alone with God as his teacher. A righteous soul has passed from a religion in which self is the centre to one in which God is the centre. A high spirit has been brought to a real penitence, a heartfelt confession of its own unworthiness, by the sight of an ideal higher than its own. The natural righteousness of humanity has been respected, humbled and lifted higher as it has learnt to realize its inferiority to the majesty of God.1 [Note: Walter Lock.]
3. Can we go further without attributing to the author of the book thoughts to which he had not attained? There are two questions: First, Did he find the final solution of the problem in love? and, second, Was he strengthened in his trust by the hope of a life beyond?
(1) What is the question set in the Prologue? Does Job serve God for nought? In other words, Does any man serve God out of mere love to Him, without thought of reward? God undertakes to prove that there is a man capable of a real and disinterested goodness, while Satan undertakes to prove that the best man's goodness is but a veiled selfishness. And this scene at the beginning is to some extent the key to the inner meaning of the book. It is meant to prove that God is capable of winning, and man capable of cherishing, an unselfish and a disinterested goodness.
Of this Job himself was wholly unconscious. He could not know that he was a spectacle to men and angels; he could not know of the great issue which was to be fought out in his own soul. Had he known that God was proving him through His own capacity of inspiring the highest devotion, his trial would have ceased to be a trial; he would cheerfully have borne anything (any misery by which God could be proved to be what he knew Him to be) by which it could be shown that He could inspire a disinterested love, and that man is capable of a real and unselfish goodness. But we can read the innermost teaching and the lesson of this remarkable work. No doubt it teaches us other things. It throws a light on the mystery of human life; it shows that its miseries are corrective, and not punitive, that the wrongs of time are to be redressed; but it has this deeper intention and purpose always behind, viz., to vindicate God and man at once, to show that, amid whatever doubts and perplexities and difficulties, Satan's taunt can be answered. “Job does serve God for nought.” God is capable of inspiring a disinterested affection; man is able to rise to the heights of one-“though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.”
And the Epilogue agrees with the Prologue. It is love called forth by love exhibited, and answering to it with eagerness. “So the Lord blessed (not “rewarded”) the latter end of Job more than the beginning.” The restoration of Job does not then rest upon any servile notion of works of merit, but upon the value which love sets upon love. Love appreciates love above all things-loves essentially only it. If God is Love, and if, being such, He has willed to be loved, how should He not in His turn, having found what He seeks, manifest Himself emphatically as the loving God? Were He to act otherwise, His creature would be better than Himself.
Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of love-of that only pure love in which no self is left remaining. We have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the privilege of suffering for what is good. Que mon nom soit flétri pourvu que la France soit libre, said Danton; and those wild patriots who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Justice is done; the balance is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt to serve without looking to be paid for it.
Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever high-minded men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol, the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call, because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and punishment was superseded by the law of love.1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, i. 324.]
O God, I love Thee mightily,
Not only for Thy saving me,
Nor yet because who love not Thee
Must burn throughout eternity.
Thou, Thou, my Jesu, once didst me
Embrace upon the bitter Tree.
For me the nails, the soldier's spear,
With injury and insult, bear-
In pain all pain exceeding,
In sweating and in bleeding,
Yea, very death, and that for me
A sinner all unheeding!
O Jesu, should I not love Thee
Who thus hast dealt so lovingly-
Not hoping some reward to see,
Nor lest I my damnation be;
But, as Thyself hast lovèd me,
So love I now and always Thee,
Because my King alone Thou art,
Because, O God, mine own Thou art!2 [Note: R. H. Benson, Poems (1914), 45.]
(2) The question of a future vindication is very difficult. The chief passage on which it is based (Job_19:23-27) is difficult to translate and is often made to carry a surer belief than it expresses. But there are considerations in favour of the contention that Job looked forward to a life beyond death. As given by Professor Davidson they are as follows:
(a) Job asserts that though he die with God's face hidden from him, and under the reproach of being a transgressor, this perverse and cruel fate shall not for ever prevail over him; God shall yet appear to vindicate his innocence and he shall see Him to his joy.
(b) It is certain that Job does not anticipate restoration to health and prosperity in this life. His disease was to him the seal of God's estrangement from him. It was God's witness to his guilt. It was this moral meaning which his death had that caused him so to wrestle against it. It seems impossible that Job could have conceived God declaring to men and to himself his innocence while He continued to afflict him fatally with his disease.
Having, then, the conviction that he cannot recover from his illness, Job's thoughts are carried beyond this life. Can his beliefs expand in this direction so as to leave room for the element of his suffering? It seems all too daring. Such a thing has scarce been thought of. Has not Sheol been in all ages but the dull shadowy life, or rather existence, where all are alike, in which God is not, and when all opportunity of being acknowledged by Him is irrevocably gone? And yet the possibility is forced upon him. He sees it, but recoils from it as a baseless illusion-as, in fact, an impossibility. But it cannot be lightly thrown aside, for it is the only way left in which there seems the least chance of a solution of the difficulties which are pressing upon him. He tries to quiet the flutter which the very thought has raised in his heart by giving expression to his and belief:
“Man dieth, and wasteth away:
Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?”
…
“Man lieth down and riseth not:
Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake,
Nor be roused out of their sleep.”
But it is in vain that he asks, “If a man die, shall he live again?” The old words have lost their certainty. He begins to feel that he may live again if God is just. The idea becomes stronger and stronger, coming back to him more vividly after each repulse, till at last, seeing how completely every other way of escape is shut up, he feels that it must be so, and bursts out into a confession of faith in God that pierces beyond the grave:
“I know that my redeemer liveth,
And that he shall stand up at the last upon the earth:
And after my skin hath been thus destroyed,
Yet from [without] my flesh shall I see God:
Whom I shall see for myself,
And mine eyes shall behold, and not another.
My reins are consumed within me [with longing].”
If, however, we must conclude that Job looked for this appearance of God on his behalf, and this vision of Him to his joy, not previous to his death, we must not attempt to fill up the outline which he has drawn. We must take care not to complete his sketch out of events that transpired long after his day, or out of beliefs, reposing on these events, that are now current among ourselves. The English Version has done so at the expense of the original. The great thought which filled Job's imagination was the thought that God would appear to manifest his innocence, and that he should see Him in peace and reconciliation. This thought was so intense that it almost realized itself. Job's assurance of seeing God was so vivid that it virtually became a vision of God, and he faints in the ecstasy of his faith. In such a condition of mind the preliminaries and the circumstances that would occur to a mind in a calmer state, or which immediately occur to us, do not obtrude themselves; and if we are rightly to conceive Job's state of mind we must entirely exclude them. We should be wrong to say that he contemplates a purely spiritual vision of God, and further wrong to say that he contemplates being invested with a new body when he shall see God. Neither thought is present to his mind, which is entirely absorbed in the idea of seeing God. The ideas of Old Testament saints regarding the condition of man after death were too obscure to permit of any such formal and precise conception as that which we call a spiritual sight of God. Besides, as the kind of half ecstasy under which Job here speaks has fallen on him when a living man, it is probable that, like all persons in such conditions, he carries over with him his present circumstances into his vision after death, and seems to himself to be such a man as he is now when he sees God.
