To reach the time and scenery, we dare not say in which the unknown author lived, but at all events to which he seems to summon us, we must pass back beyond the cradle of Roman greatness and of Greek genius; back through the whole series of God's dealings with the sons of Israel; we must plant our feet outside the furthest limits of the Holy Land; among men and races who worship indeed the one God and Ruler of the universe, but who know nothing of the distinction between Jew and Gentile; nothing of the heroic age of Joshua or of Gideon; nothing of the glories of David or of the greatness of Solomon; nothing of the walls of Zion, or the Temple of Jerusalem. We breathe, at every breath we draw, the free air of the early world, dashed indeed with occasional sounds and scents of a later age, but in the main the fresh air of a patriarchal life, of the land of the fathers and chieftains of the “Sons of the East.” The men with whom we are brought into contact are the sons of a race with a civilization and culture and conquests of its own, but still familiar with the eagle and rock-goat, the lion, the primeval ox and the wild ass; treading the illimitable plains of Asia, with the dew of the morning still upon its forehead, and the curtain yet unraised upon the long centuries that form what we call history.
Uz has not, indeed, been geographically identified, but the rolling table-lands of Southern Syria and Northern Arabia seem to correspond well with all the circumstances and local colouring of the story. The poet selects his stage with inimitable art. The problems with which he has to deal are the largest and most profound that can engage the human mind. These, and these only, must be grappled with; there must be no evasions, no side issues, no irrelevant complications. It is to be an era-making battle, and the decks must be completely cleared for action. Not amid the dust and din of busy life, not amid the teeming throngs, is the poet's eye and the thinker's mind clearest to see and to know the vision of God and the mystery of man; not amid the rude contacts and the deafening dissonance of contest and struggle can the poet's ear distinguish and drink in the eternal harmonies; not from the low level of his narrow glen, hemmed in by an environment of national prejudice and the dogmas of his time, can the seer discern and measure the possibilities, proportions, and actualities of men and things. He must to yonder mountain-top amid the silent stars, to yon vast wilderness in spirit hie, and there in pensive loneliness, girded by infinity, propound for solution the dark riddles of existence, and seek for answers out of the deep where dwelleth the Divine.
There is a suggestion which I wish to make, with such diffidence and tentativeness as is necessary for one who is not a Hebrew scholar, that the greater part of the Book of Job, that is to say, the whole of the dramatic argument between Job and his three friends and Elihu, is a conscious attempt by a Jewish author to represent the highest Gentile thought with which he was acquainted on the problem of suffering; and that the utterance of Jehovah represents the addition which he feels that Jewish revelation can make to what we should call the truths of natural religion. There is much that supports such a view: the scene of the drama is at once placed in a Gentile country: “there was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job”; he is “the greatest of all the children of the East”; the Gentile origin of each of the friends is stated: one is a Temanite, another a Shuhite, the third a Naamathite, while the fourth speaker is a Buzite. They quote no revelation of God; Bildad appeals to the wisdom of former generations, and Eliphaz claims that this is a native wisdom untouched by the influence of strangers, “which wise men have told from their fathers, and have not hid it; unto whom alone the land was given, and no stranger passed among them”; the standard of Job's righteousness is the same as that which our Lord adopts when He passes judgment on the heathen world in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats: the allusions to the magicians who draw out Leviathan, to the great monsters of the Nile, to the papyrus and to the skiffs made from the papyrus, the possible references to the pyramids and the phœnix point in the same direction, and the two great lines of argument which are mainly insisted on-that suffering springs from sin, and that it has an educative value-only expand those truths which were enshrined in the terse epigrams of Æschylus and of Solon, παθεῖν τὸν ἔρξαντα and τὰ δέ μοι παθήματα … μαθήματα γεγόνεε (Æsch. Agam., 1564; Herod. i. 207).
Then to crown and to go beyond this Gentile feeling after God there comes the utterance of Jehovah Himself, the addition of Judaism. What is the substance of this? may we not say that it is the application to the problem of suffering of the great revelation of the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis? It is not merely an appeal to the omnipotence of God-that argument which the prophets and even St. Paul use at times with such sledge-hammer force to limit the freedom of man and to represent him as nothing more than clay in the potter's hand; it is partly that, and that is very Jewish; but it is more than that. It is not, again, simply an appeal to the beauty and strength of Nature; it is that, too; it is full of the thought that God saw all that He had made and that it was very good. But there is also the suggestion that these are the work of the same God who had created man himself; and there is also the suggestion that all this beauty of the world was made to be subservient to man: the writer knew (for he had already in Job_7:17 described Job as parodying) the eighth Psalm; and the thought of that Psalm, that man is greater than all creatures, is implicit here. “Look at My power” (this is the argument), “look at the beauty of all that has come from My hand; then you will feel your own powerlessness before the Creator, but you will also be willing to believe that He is producing out of your own human life with all its present sufferings a result which will have upon it in the end the stamp of Divine beauty: wait and trust: a Creator will prove a Redeemer.” It is very closely akin to the way in which the voice of Nature and its kinship with the still sad music of humanity, drew Wordsworth from despondency into faith; it is the thought which has been expressed with all his beautiful simplicity by my Dorset poet:
An' many times when I do vind
Things all goo wrong, an' vo'k unkind,
To zee the happy veeden herds,
An' hear the zingen of the birds,
Do soothe my sorrow mwore than words:
Vor I do zee that 'tis our sin
Do meäke woone's soul so dark 'ithin,
When God would gie woone zunsheen.1 [Note: W. Lock, in The Interpreter, ii. (1906) 353.]
