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THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

A STUDY IN THE BOOK OF JOB

JOHN EDGAR McFADYEN, D.D.

PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY,
UNITED KRK.K CHURCH COLLFGE, GLASGOW.

AUTHOR OF "THK PSALMS IN MODERN SPEECH," "OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM

AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH," "INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT,"

"COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLES TO THE CORINTHIANS," ETC.

LONDON

JAMES CLARKE & co., 13 & 14, FLEET STREET, E.C,

PREFACE

NOTHING that any one has ever said or will ever say
about the book of Job can remotely approach the
titanic impression made by the book itself. It is
therefore all the more to be regretted that it is so little
known. " Ye have heard of the patience of Job."
Many people have heard no more about Job than
that, and do not even know enough of the book to
know that it is his endurancejrather than his patience
that stamps him as the hero that he is, and that is
commended in the well-known words of St. James
(v.n). It is therefore at least as important to
present the book as to discuss it. For this reason I
have woven the translation continuously through
the discussion, so that neither reader nor discussion
can ever wander very far from the book itself.

The glory of the book could not be altogether
extinguished even by a feeble prose translation, and
in many places it is quite clearly reflected from the
noble prose of the Authorized Version. But I
have ventured to present it, or most of it, in a fresh
translation, which attempts to do what little justice
is possible to the rhythmical and sonorous cadences
of the original. I hope soon to publish a continuous
translation of the book. The text bristles with
difficulties and obscurities of every kind — many of
them probably for ever insoluble. It is not the

Preface

function of this volume to discuss critical and
textual questions ; in the translation I have adopted
such emendations as seemed to me most reasonable.

Probably the poetical part of the book would
lend itself to dramatic representation as readily, say,
as Everyman ; but without discussing the question
whether it is technically a drama or not, no one can
deny that it is alive with dramatic quality. Partly
to bring this out, and partly to articulate the pro
gress of its thought, I have given to its clearly marked
divisions the name of Acts, instead of the more
familiar " Cycles of Speeches."

The book of Job is astonishingly modern. It may
be true, as Cheyne has said, x that " more than any
other book in the Hebrew canon it needs bringing
near to the modern reader " ; nevertheless, Job's
questions are ours — the meaning of life, the purpose
of pain, the nature of religion, the seat of authority,
etc. This volume, however, does not discuss the
general problem of pain : it simply seeks to interpret
this marvellously penetrating discussion of it from
a far-off day, when the world, though younger,
was already perplexed and sorrowful.

There is nothing here about the War. Yet it is
perhaps not too much to hope that this noble ancient
discussion will shed some light on the sorrows which
have perplexed the faith of some and broken the
hearts of many.

JOHN E. MCFADYEN.

•" Job and Solomon, p. 107.

CONTENTS

FACE

THE PROLOGUE: A GOOD MAN CRUSHED

RUINED FORTUNES (ch. i.) n

RUINED HEALTH (ch. ii.) 26

ACT I

JOB'S LAMENT AND LONGING FOR DEATH (ch. iii.) 35

ELIPHAZ'S COMFORTABLE EXHORTATION AND

REVELATION (chs. iv. and v.) 41

JOB'S DENUNCIATION OF HOLLOW FRIENDSHIP. His

CHALLENGE OF GOD AND HIS LONGING TO BE

GONE (chs. vi. and vii.) 50

BILDAD'S APPEAL TO THE TEACHING OF TRADITION

(ch. viii.) 61

JOB'S CHALLENGE OF IMMORAL OMNIPOTENCE (chs.

ix. and x.) 67

ZOPHAR'S APPEAL TO THE UNSEARCHABLE WISDOM

OF GOD (ch. xi.) 76

JOB'S INDEPENDENT CRITICISM OF THIS WORLD

AND HIS GLIMPSE BEYOND IT (chs. xii.-xiv.) 81

ACT II

ELIPHAZ'S APPEAL TO THE UNADULTERATED

DOCTRINE OF THE PAST (ch. xv.) 99

JOB'S CRY TO THE WITNESS IN HEAVEN (chs. xvi.

and xvii.) 106

BILDAD'S PICTURE OF THE SURE AND TERRIBLE

DOOM OF THE WICKED (ch. xviii.) 116

Contents

JOB'S SUBLIME FAITH m His FUTURE VINDICATION

(ch. xix.) 123

ZOPHAR'S WARNING AND INNUENDO THAT HEAVEN
AND EARTH HAVE ALREADY WITNESSED
AGAINST JOB (ch. xx.) 138

JOB'S FIERCE INDICTMENT OF THE EXISTING ORDER

(ch. xxi.) 145

ACT III

ELIPHAZ'S CRUEL AND BASELESS CHARGES (ch. xxii.) 157

JOB'S SECOND SUSTAINED INDICTMENT OF THE

EXISTING ORDER (chs. xxiii. and xxiv.) 164

BILDAD'S DECLARATION OF GOD'S WISDOM AND

POWER (chs. xxv. and xxvi.) 174

THE LAST CLASH — BETWEEN JOB AND ZOPHAR

(ch. xxvii.) 179

JOB'S GREAT DEFENCE AND HIS LAST APPEAL (chs.

xxix.-xxxi.) 186

ACT IV

THE ANSWER OF THE ALMIGHTY (chs. xxxviii., xxxix.

xl. 2, 8-14) 209

JOB'S HUMBLE AND PENITENT REPLY (ch. xl. 3-5,

xlii. 2-6) 230

THE EPILOGUE
THE RESTORATION OF JOB (ch. xlii. 7-17) 241

ELIHU'S INTERPRETATION OF SUFFERING (chs. xxxii.-

xxx vii.) 253

THE MYSTERY OF THE DIVINE WISDOM (ch. xxviii.) 273

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER 279

BIBLIOGRAPHY 293

INDEX 297

THE PROLOGUE: A GOOD MAN
CRUSHED (JoB i. AND ii.)

THE PROLOGUE
RUINED FORTUNES (Job i.)

THE story opens with a simple quiet dignity, which
raises no suspicion of the storm that is so soon to
break. " In the land of Uz there was a man called
Job — a man blameless and upright, who feared God
and shunned evil." It is the story of an innocent
sufferer ; but, already in his opening words, the
large and generous outlook of the writer is evident :
for, Jew though he be himselLJii^ieroi^, foreigner,
As if to deliver usJaTfhe~ very Cutset from all little
views of life and its problems, he brings up upon his
stage a blameless and God-fearing man from the
land of Uz. Where Uz was we know not — enough
that it was not Judaea ; but if, as seems most pro
bable, it was in Edom, the marvel is all the greater
that this good and saintly man belonged not only to
a foreign, but to a hostile and hated people. For it
was Edomites who had said of Jerusalem in the
day of her anguish, " Lay her bare, lay her bare,
right down to her very foundation" (Ps. cxxxvii. 7) ;
and it was of Edom that a Hebrew prophet, possibly
contemporary, or nearly so, with the writer of Job,
speaking in the name of Jehovah, declared, " Jacob
I loved, but Esau (i.e., Edom) I hated " (Mai. i. 21).
In this man therefore we see something of the breadth \
of the mind of Jesus, who made the kind hero of his
famous parable a Samaritan and not a Jew. By

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setting his story beyond the limits of Israel, he further
reminds us that just as there are good men beyond
her borders — in Uz or anywhere — so the problem
with which he is about to wrestle is a universal
problem, not Israel's any more than ours. The story
makes its grand appeal " wherever on the wide earth
tears are shed and hearts are broken.' '

The goodness of Job is drawn in simple but firm
outlines. He is not perfect — no man is ; and more
than once in the course of the argument, Job
| frankly acknowledges his sins ; but he is a man of
1 blameless life, rooted in the fear of God. The unani
mous voice of the Old Testament, heard in the
Decalogue, in the prophets, everywhere, is that no
morality is secure, or in the true sense even possible,
which is not rooted in religion : the good man of the
prophets is he who rests an active life of justice and
mercy upon a humble walk with God (cf. Mic. vi. 8).
And such was Job. His was not merely the negative
morality of " avoiding evil.'* The positive beauty
and eager generosity of his character we shall see
displayed when he comes to make his great defence
in chapters xxix.-xxxi. against the cruel insinuations
and charges of his friends ; and we need not here
anticipate, especially as the opening incidents of the
story reveal the fine quality of his inner and outer
life. But it is of the utmost importance for our
appreciation of the later developments of the drama
to bear steadily in mind this tribute deliberately
paid in the opening verses to his unimpeachable
integrity and piety. Job will later say violent and
bitter things, which may astonish us as profoundly

The Prologue

as they exasperated his friends ; but we dare not
forget that he is and remains a man blameless and
upright, fearing God and shunning evil.

Now it is the all but universal teaching of the Old
Testament that men and nations of this moral

religious quality are honoured with material rewards.
The earth was the Lord's, and the fulness thereof,
and the Judge of all the earth was implicitly trusted
to do right : which, in one of its aspects, meant to
give men according to their deserts — goods to the
good and evils to the evil. This is the view of
Deuteronomy (cf. ch. xxviii.) and of Proverbs, it is
the view of Job's friends who had been trained in the
orthodoxy of Deuteronomy, it is — at least to begin
with — the view of Job himself. Accordingly, it is
natural that to so good a man " there were born
seven sons and three daughters " — for a large I
family was a peculiarly convincing mark of the divine I
favour (Ps. cxxvii. 3-5) — and that " he owned seven
thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred
yoke of oxen, five hundred she-asses, and a vast
train of servants, so that he was the richest man in all
the East." These facts of his prosperity are not
additional to his piety : they are the consequence and
the reward of it — stable, so long as his piety remained
stable. For the good man not only may, but must,
fare well. So said orthodoxy.

We are next introduced to a happy family scene.
" Now his sons used to hold feasts day about, and
they would send and invite their three sisters to eat
and drink with them." But this perpetual round
of gaiety was not without its perils, andjob — whom

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•

we may think of as a man past middle life, as he has
grown up sons with houses of their own — is fearful
lest his happy children may be tempted to forget
or ignore or defy the claims of religion. So " when
the cycle of feasts was over, Job used to send for
them, and prepare them for worship, rising early and
offering burnt-offerings for them all." May we
detect in this any reflection of the criticism which
seldom fails to be meted to the rising generation by
their soberer elders ? However that may be, it is
plain that Job is a man of the most scrupulous piety.
Like a good father who bears upon his conscience
the burden of his children's welfare, he individualizes
them : not content with a single offering for all, he
makes an offering for each. He is priest of his family
not in name only, but in deed and in truth. He
knows how easy it is for the young and light-hearted
to go astray, especially when in jovial mood, and to
trespass the bounds of religious decorum ; and he
will take no risks where his children are concerned,
" for/' he said,

"Perchance my children have sinned
And cursed God in their heart. "

He does not know for certain, but perhaps they have ;
and that is enough. Behind the outward rite we
see Job's deep and earnest anxiety for the honour of
his God and the spiritual welfare of his children, even
after they are grown up and have homes of their own.
Geniality and religion reigned in this ancient home.
Of scrupulous piety and integrity, happy in his home
and possessions — such was Job.

The Prologue

From these happy family festivals of merry sons
and daughters with their anxious and reverent
father, we are swiftly transported to another scene,
— this time in the world above, where " on a certain
day the heavenly Beings came to present themselves
before Jehovah, and among them came Satan "
(more strictly, the Satan, or Adversary) ; for he too
is one of the supernatural Beings who form the council
of Jehovah, and perform the several tasks allotted
to them. " Then Jehovah asked Satan where he
had come from, and Satan answered Jehovah thus,
' From ranging the earth and from walking up and
down it.' ' Satan, frs some ofle Jhas said, is the^
vagabond of the heavenly host : he makes it his
business to go up and down the world, spying upon
men, peering with sinister eyes into their motives,
and throwing doubt upon their integrity. " Then
Jehovah said unto Satan,

' Hast thou noted my servant Job,

That on earth there is none like him —
A man blameless and upright,
Who fears God and shuns evil ? '

Here is praise indeed. The generous testimony given
in the introduction to the nobility of Job is here
confirmed upon the lips of Jehovah Himself in words
which deliberately repeat the former statement, as
if to suggest that heaven and earth, God and man,
are alike agreed about the integrity and piety of Job.
Nay, Jehovah goes even further than this : in calling
him by the rare and honourable title My servant,
He lifts him to a place of unique distinction and sets
him beside those few but mighty servants who

The Problem of Pain

greatly interpret or accomplish His will. He is
proud of His servant, He is sure of his inflexible
loyalty, and He is not afraid to expose him to the
scrutiny of the celestial Cynic. In view of the terrific
blows which are so soon to smite Job's earthly
happiness into dust and ashes, it is of the utmost
importance to note that the initiative comes from
Jehovah : it is He and not Satan who throws down
the challenge. Perhaps the writer is here suggest
ing that human experience, and not least misfortune,
may have its origin in some thought of God — it
may even be in a thought which does the highest
honour to the man who suffers. He suffers as
My servant, who can be trusted with a cross.
To Jehovah's proud question, Satan made answer :

" But is it for nothing that Job fears God ?
Hast Thou not Thyself fenced him and his house,

And all he possesses on every side ?
But put forth Thy hand and touch all he possesses,

And assuredly then to Thy face he will curse Thee."

The problem of the book, on one of its sides, is
succinctly stated in the very first words of Satan,
7s it for nothing that Job fears God ? or, in modern
language, Is there such a thing as disinterested
religion ; or, at any rate, a religion whose only
interest is God Himself ? In his wanderings across
the world, Satan has apparently seen hypocrites
enough to make him more than sceptical of the
possibility of a religion which cost, but which did
not pay. When it ceased to pay, it vanished — that
was his simple theory, founded on a vast array of
facts to which he could not believe that Job would

The Prologue

prove any exception. The earthly cynic, like the
heavenly, who is but his counterpart, is often
flagrantly wrong in his estimate of character. Job
was good — Satan freely admitted — but it was worth
his while. Anyone might well be good on those
terms : for his substance abounded in the land, and
" hast Thou not Thyself fenced him and his house,
and all he possesses on every side ? " so that neither
thief nor beast could break through or steal. His
religion has never been put to the test. " Put forth
Thy hand and touch all he possesses " : Satan could
not conceive of a man who had a life beyond his
possessions, a life which no blow could shatter. He
imagined that, when the gift was withdrawn,
the sufferer would recoil from the Giver with a curse ;
because he did not know that there were men — doubt
less there are not many, and cynical eyes cannot see
any — to whom the Giver is infinitely more precious
* than the gift. Thus, in casting doubt upon the )
.sincerity of Job, Satan was also implicitly denying j
the lovableness of God : a man might love God for j
what He gave, but not conceivably for what He was. \
1 Thus God was on His trial, no less than Job. Each
believes in the other ; but both will be revealed for
the shams that they are, when put to the test of fire.
" Strip the man," says Satan in effect, " of all that
he has — all of it — and then we shall see what he is."
It is a terrible test, but Jehovah is not afraid : if
His servant trusts Him, no less does He trust His
servant. So " Jehovah said to Satan :

' See ! all he possesses is in thy power ;

But lay not thy hand on the man himself.' '

The Problem of Pain

His health and his life were to be spared. " Then
forth went Satan from the presence of Jehovah,"
to tear with cruel fingers the coverings from the
innocent Job and to reveal the man in his essential
quality ; and we may suppose the heavenly council
looking down, with eyes of strained and eager interest,
while the terrible test goes on. The departure of
Satan upon his dark errand recalls the departure of
another upon an errand darker still. " Judas,
having received the sop, went immediately out :
and it was night " — night in the world and in his
heart.

This fateful council in the sky makes a fine foil
to the happy family scene below, and completely
explains its swift and sorrowful transformation.
For no sooner had Satan departed than the blows
— directed by his evil genius — which were to shatter
the earthly fortunes of Job, began to fall fast and
furious. " Now on a certain day, as his sons and
daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house
of their eldest brother, suddenly a messenger
appeared before Job with the tidings :

' The oxen were hard at the plough,

And the asses were feeding beside them,
When Sabeans fell upon them and seized them :
The servants they slew with the sword —
Only I alone am escaped to tell thee.'

While he was still speaking, another came and said :

1 The fire of God has fallen from heaven,
And burnt to a cinder the sheep and the servants —
Only I alone am escaped to tell thee.'

The Prologue

While he was stiJJ speaking, another came and said :

' Chaldeans, formed into three bands,

Made a raid on the camels and seized them.
The servants they slew with the sword —
Only I alone am escaped to tell thee.'

While he was still speaking, another came and said :

' Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking

In the house of their eldest brother :
On a sudden a mighty wind

From the other side of the desert
Came and smote the four sides of the house,

That it fell on the young folk and killed them —
Only I alone am escaped to tell thee.' "

There is a certain breathlessness about the narrative
which describes the cruel impetuosity of Satan's
assault upon the fortunes of Job, and the unrelenting
thoroughness with which their overthrow was accom
plished. ' While he was yet speaking, another came
and said . . ." Scarcely had one blow fallen,
when another and more terrible is delivered. Satan
is determined to strip Job without warning, without
mercy, and without delay, of all that makes it worth
his while to be good ; and, to ensure his ruin, the
forces alike of heaven and earth are summoned —
not only the robber tribes of the desert, but the very
lightning, the fire of God from heaven, and the mighty
rushing wind that comes up from the desert. These
calamities may be natural injtheir kind^ but they are
supernatural in their intensity and in the rapidity
of their succession : for was there ever lightning that
consumed seven thousand sheep at one stroke ?
It seemed as if the powers of the universe were
leagued against Job, to tear from him not only all

The Problem of Pain

that he had, but all that he loved : for those happy
sons and daughters, whom last we saw feasting in
their elder brother's house, are now lying dead among
its ruins. And the irony of it all is that this should
have happened at the beginning of one of the cycles
of the feasts, that is, just after Job had solemnly
and scrupulously sought to purge his household from
every shadow of guilt. But now, despite his faith
fulness, all that was his is gone — oxen, asses, sheep,
camels, servants, sons, daughters, all but his wife
and the four servants who came with their tales of
horror — vanished in one brief day. Verily, as
another Hebrew poet wrote :

" It is but as a vapour that every man stands,
It is but in mere semblance man walks to and fro."

(Ps xxx ix. 5f)

Satan has had a free hand, and he has made the
most unscrupulous use of the terrifying resources at
his disposal. His test has lacked nothing ot
rigour ; it is his own test, applied in his own way.
How does Job stand it ? At once the breathless
narrative becomes calm, serene and dignified as
if to suggest by its very form the steadiness of this
great soul against which the furious storm had hurled
itself in vain. " Then Job rose and rent his robe ;
and, after shaving his head, he fell prostrate on the
ground." Job is not a Stoic : he is not unmoved,
as who could be that in one short hour had lost all
his beloved children ? He is wounded to the very
heart of him, and he shows all the signs of Oriental
mourning. But we are especially concerned with
what he will say, for has not Satan insinuated that

The Prologue

his first word would be a curse ? Celestial eyes
are watching, and celestial ears are listening, and
this is what he says

" Naked came I from my mother's womb,

And naked thither must I return :
Jehovah hath given, Jehovah hath taken ;
The name of Jehovah for ever be blessed/'

It is infinitely noble. Job came to the earth with
nothing, and he is content to leave it with nothing.
The things that had crowded his life with interest
and pleasure, and the children who had filled his
home with glee, were strictly not his own ; they were
gifts — gifts from the Lord, and the Lord who gave
has the right to take. See how this man's whole
life, all that he once enjoyed and all that he now is
suffering, is overshadowed from end to end with a
sense of the presence of God. Calamity might rob
him of his possessions and his children, but it could
not rob him of his God. The storm that rushed up
from the wilderness might shatter the house of
festivity, but it could not shatter Job. He stood
firm, for he had built his life upon the everlasting
Rock. With fine literary skill the writer reserves
the crucial word for the last. " The name of Jehovah
be — ," and breathlessly we wait for the word which
Satan had maintained and hoped would be " cursed; "
but the mighty Satan, with those terrible resources
of fire and storm at his disposal, had met his match
in Job. " The name of Jehovah be blessed." So
Satan is foiled, affronted before gods and men. Job
had stood the test and Job's God too ; for He was
worthy for whom Job should suffer this. " In

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all this Job committed no sin, nor did he charge God
with unseemly dealing."

How suggestive is all this ! We learn, for one
thing — and the writer's contemporaries had need
of the lesson — that a good man, the best man in all
the earth, one " blameless and upright, fearing God
and shunning evil," could be hurled to the depths of
sorrow and loss for no sin of his own — and in this
the story is a fine preparation for Christianity ;
and we see, for another thing, how a good man
behaves in such an hour. He bows humbly to the
ground before the great Power, the great Person,
who is above and behind and through all his experi
ence ; but his attitude is not merely resignation,
it is praise. He can bless the unseen Hand that
smote him, for he knows that it is God's. Nay, we
say, but is it not Satan's ? Job, of course, could not
know this ; but does not the story remind us that
it was in the last analysis God who, fearlessly con
fiding in the loyalty of His servant, and for high
reasons of His own, delivered Job over for a season
to the Arch-sceptic and Tormentor ?

• •- . A MMWMMW..

Now all this is the more wonderful, when we con
sider that Job had been trained in the school which
connected piety indissolubly with prosperity, and
no one could have been more surprised than he at
the grievous things which had befallen. The blow
was all the more terrible that it struck at the faith
by which Job lived. He is utterly alone : not only
without a child to comfort him, but without an
explanation or theory to reconcile him to his misery.
Nay, he is left among the ruins of his happiness with

The Prologue

a series of facts which, on his old theory of life, would
seem — as they seemed to his friends — to point
infallibly to some heinous hidden sin. But he can
bear the loneliness, for he is alone with God : that
portion not Satan himself could take from him.

The writer of this wonderful story was too great
a man to suppose that he had any absolutely complete
and satisfactory solution to offer of the mysterious
ways of God : his whole book is a mighty protest
against the inadequacy of contemporary theories
of life and suffering. But there are brilliant flashes
of insight which momentarily light up the mystery,
and one or two of the most brilliant are in this open
ing chapter of the story. Whydojpod men sufferj
One answer to that is this : That through their suffer-
ing a divine purpose — we do not yet say what pur
pose, but some purpose — is being worked out. To
the thinking heart life would be intolerable and
history a chaos, were their seeming confusions not
redeemed and illuminated by a sense of purpose.
This is the faith that reconciles us to the mystery,
and this is the faith which shines through the story
of the council in heaven. The blows that shatter
to atoms the happiness of Job are not dealt by chance
or accident or any random hand : they fall by per
mission. They come, because " Jehovah had said
to Satan, ' Hast thou considered my servant Job ? '
That is, the sorrows below find their explanation in
the world above.

Extraordinarily suggestive is the juxtaposition of
these two scenes — the council of the gods in the world
above, and the calamities that hurl themselves on

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Job in the world below. Both scenes must come
into the picture, if the world below is to be approxi
mately understood, or even tolerated. Something
was said or purposed there, and something happens
here. A scene in nature or in life without a sky is
meaningless. If such a thing could be, it would
drive men to despair ; but if such a thing cannot be,
then there is hope and a gospel. " Heaven over
arches you and me " : to believe that makes all the
difference. The ancient writer uses the beliefs of his
own time or perhaps an older time to enforce, or at
any rate, to suggest, his meaning ; but behind this
ancient and long superseded conception of a council
of gods in the heavens is the eternal truth that above
us is One who cares for us, One whose plan requires
and comprehends our little lives, One who has His
purposes for us, One without whose knowledge and
permission nothing that happens to us can happen.
Job was ignorant of the details, as we are ; but his
noble words show that he believed, as we may, in the
Presence and the Purpose. Job did not know of
Satan ; it would have been easier for him to say
what he said had he known. But the presence of
God in his life, and some more or less consciously
apprehended sense of His purpose, kept him steady.
Can we define this purpose more closely ?
Whether we can or not, it is, as we see, comforting
and steadying to believe it. But certain aspects of
the purpose are subtly suggested by the story itself.
It is, for example, a kindly purpose ; it is the purpose
of a God who trusts us, who wishes us well, and
expects us, so to speak, to play up to it In the

The Prologue

mind of God there is not a thought of punishing
Job. " Neither did this man sin, nor his parents ;
but that the works of God should be made manifest
in him." Suffering is a privilege He confers upon
Job, in order to defeat for ever the cynical view,
urged by Satan, that man has no interest higher than
his own profit, and that the only religion he can be
persuaded to embrace is one that ministers to his
comfort or prosperity. Suffering, from this point
of view, is a test of the quality of a man's religion j
if there is a point at which it will cease to stand the
strain, then it is indeed the hollow thing which Satan
maintained it to be. Religion, to be worth anything,
^ust Jae^orth everything : it is only worth while, if
it enables a man to endure to the end. But if it
does this, not only is the man glorified, but God no
less, seeing that it is through faith in Him and His
purpose that the man endures. Beyond the ruins
of his earthly happiness and hope he sees a kindly
Face, and he takes heart for the lonely days to come,
which cannot fail to be cheered by the great Com
panion. As Paul Volz has finely said, ' There
breathes in the story a glorious optimism — faith in
the victory of the good God and the good man. In
this human life there is enacted the conflict between
the good and the evil, and the good abides."

RUINED HEALTH (Job ii.)

Satan has been defeated ; but, though perplexed,
he is not in despair. He simply assumes that the
test to which he had subjected the piety of Job was
not terrible enough ; and so, with cool effrontery
and high hopes, he plans to return to the assault the
very next time " the heavenly Beings came to present
themselves before Jehovah. Then Jehovah asked
Satan where he had come from, and Satan answered
Jehovah thus, ' From ranging the earth and from
walking up and down it.' Then Jehovah said to
Satan :

' Hast thou noted my servant Job,

That on earth there is none like him —
A man blameless and upright,
Who fears God and shuns evil ? ' "

The scenery, the speaker, the statements, the
questions, the answers, are precisely the same as in
the first supernatural council. It is the fashion of
ancient narratives to indulge in repetition, but it is
impossible to miss in Jehovah's second challenge to
Satan the undertone of triumphant irony. He speaks
as if nothing had happened, though they both know
very well that much has happened: Satan's cynicism
has been utterly discredited, and Jehovah's daring con
fidence in His loyal servant has been triumphantly
justified. We can fancy Satan wincing under the

The Prologue

innuendo, the more so as Jehovah, now pointedly
reminding him of Job's immovable allegiance, goes
on : " And still " — despite the bitter and unmerited
sufferings which he owes to thy groundless suspicions
and cruelty —

" And still he clings to his honour,:

In vain hast thou set me on to destroy him."

To this Satan made answer :

" Skin for skin-
All a man's goods will he give for his life."

Cynic before and cynic still ! He cannot now deny
— for to his discomfiture he has seen it proved —
that a man may lose and suffer much and yet retain
his religion, but he is still deeply convinced that there
is a point at which a strained faith will snap ; and
it is one of the innumerable touches illustrative of
the writer's insight that the strain which he regards
as conceivably capable of snapping an otherwise
inflexible faith is the strain of shattered health
The first blow, terrible as it had been, had at least
left Job with his life — and nothing is more precious
than life. " All that a man has " — his sheep and
oxen and camels, yes, and his children too — " he
will willingly give for his life " : a truly superficial
estimate of human nature, disproved by a thousand
noble lives, but thoroughly worthy of your pro
fessional cynic. Still, what is life without health ?
Shatter that, and the faith will reel. So Satan
requests Jehovah to

" Put forth Thy hand, touch his bone and his flesh,
And assuredly then to Thy face he will curse Tliee."

The Problem of Pain

To slay him outright would, of course, have invali
dated the whole test. " Whereupon Jehovah said
to Satan :

' See ! he is in thy power,

But take heed that thou spare his life.'

Then forth Satan went from the presence of
Jehovah " ; and, as before, at his departure the cruel
tragedy recommences, only this time in fiercer
form ; for " he smote Job from the sole of his foot
to the crown of his head with boils." Again, as
before, the calamity is natural — it is the awful
scourge of lerjrosy : but again, as before, it is super
natural in its swiftness and intensity. Not gradually
as upon other men, but instantly it falls upon Job ;
and it seizes not upon one part of his body only, but
upon all " from the sole of his foot to the crown of
his head ; " and the eruptions are so grievous that,
as he sat solitary and apart upon the ash-heap, out
side the village, " he took a potsherd to scratch
with," in order to ease him of his pain.

At this point his wife appears, whom the narrative
has hitherto ignored ; and she said to him,

" Art thou clinging still to thine honour ?
Curse God and die."

As Edward Caird x has said, there are those who
" think, like Job's wife, that the difficulties which
try our faith are a sufficient reason for renouncing
it altogether." Her first words are a witness to the
indomitable integrity of Job's faith ; but if this is
what it comes to, better dead : a curse from his lips —

1 Lay Sermons, p. 298.
28

The Prologue

this was what Satan had planned for and hoped for,
and the wife unconsciously seconds the Tempter —
a curse from his lips would evoke an avenging stroke
from the God he had cursed, and so bring his intoler
able misery to an end.

The instinctive assimilation of the woman's
mind to the purpose of the Tempter suggestively
recalls the story of Eve and the serpent, and is in
line with some aspects of the Old Testament view of
woman. It was Eve who ruined Adam, it was
Sarah who laughecl incredulously at the promise
which Abraham was ready to believe, it was Lot's
wife who turned back for a last look at the wicked
Sodom. These facts have tempted the commen
tators into much humorous but rather unworthy
cynicism. Cheyne, l for example, remarks that " his
wife, by a touch of quiet humour, is spared " in the
catastrophes which overthrew his family ; and in the
same strain Dillon2 — the Adversary " spares his
spouse, lest misery should harbour any possibilities
unrealised." Far more worthy, and essentially far
more penetrating, is Louise Houghton's comment*
that " the only woe which is to her intolerable is
that in which she herself has no share." It takes
a woman to understand a woman. But Job's wife
serves the purpose of showing how ordinary people
would act under a strain so awful, and her wild
impulsive outburst throws into the bolder relief the

1 Job and Solomon, p. 14.
» The Sceptics of the Old Testament, p. 73,
» Hebrew Life and Thought, p. 267.
29

The Problem of Pain

marvellous patience of Job, who gently chides her
in these immortal words :

" Must them too speak

As foolish women speak ?
We accept from God what is good,
Shall we not accept what is evil ? "

We — he and she : in their happiness they had been
together, and in misery they should not be divided.
Now, as before, he recognises the great Figure
moving behind all life's experience — permitting,
bestowing it all ; and the sorrow, he gently main
tains, should be as unmurmuringly welcomed as the
joy. In the presence of an utterance so noble and
a philosophy of life so sublime, it is a peculiarly
touching under-statement that " in all this Job
sinned not with his lips."

Now that the tale of his sufferings is fully told, we
are more convinced than ever that a good man may
suffer terribly : nay, the best of men may suffer
the worst of all — here again the story of Job is a
preparation for the story of Jesus. Orthodoxy of
course, denied this : but the sheer nobility of Job,
of his conduct and of his speech, as he lay there in his
lonely misery, not only uncomplaining but reconciled,
the victim of a loathsome and incurable disease,
daily dying his living death, tempted to blasphemy
by the wife he loved, yet retaining his mastery of
himself and his devotion to his inscrutable God —
this noble man was the living evidence of the
inadequacy, not to say the falsehood, of orthodoxy.
Already we begin to feel upon our faces the breath of
the coming challenge.

The Prologue

But before the storm breaks, the blackness in
which Job sits is pierced by a gleam of friendship.
Three men, apparently great Edomite sheikhs like

himself — Eliphaz older than he, Bildad probably

about the same age, and Zophar younger, repre
senting among them the chief aspects of life's
experience and the combined wisdom of the contem
porary world — came from their various districts
to condole with their stricken friend. It was a
grave and sorrowful business, they met to discuss
it, and they " made a tryst together to condole with
him and comfort him. But when they caught a
glimpse of him at a distance, they did not recognise
him " — so horribly disfigured was he. Like that
other more famous Servant, " his visage was marred
out of all human likeness."1 " Then every man of them
wept aloud and tore his robe and scattered dust
heavenward " — in token of the intensity of his grief
— " upon his head." Though they did not see the
agony of his soul, they saw his misery, and they " sat
down beside him upon the ground seven days and
nights " — the time one mourns for the dead — " and
no one said a word to him," for they did not know
what to say to a sorrow like this, and " they saw
that his pain was very great."

We shall have occasion enough to resent most
bitterly ,as Job did, many of the things they will
say when their tongue is loosened ; but we begin
with a tribute of respect to the men who travelled
far to offer their silent sympathy to their unhappy

1 Isa. lii. 14.
31

The Problem of Pain

friend. " They do not write notes to him and go
about their business as if nothing had happened.
They are for ever, " as Mark Rutherford has said,
" an example of what man once was and ought to be
to man."

ACT I

(JoB iii-xiv.)

ACT I

JOB'S LAMENT AND LONGING FOR DEATH (Job iii.)

BEFORE the curtain rises and the great dramatic
debate begins, it is well to remind ourselves that this
discussion, like so many another, is carried on in
ignorance of essential facts. The Prologue has put
Into our Bands flie Key to the problem which is so
hotly and in part fruitlessly debated by Job and his
friends. We are in the secret, but they are not.
They start from the misery which is before their eyes :
they know nothing of the council in heaven to which
we have been twice introduced, nothing of the pride
God is taking in His servant, nothing of the high and
friendly purpose which explains his misery. And
therein lies much of the pathos of this discussion, as
of many another, that it is conducted in the dark.

But after making every allowance, we are not
prepared for the awful words with which Job's first
soliloquy is introduced : " Then Job opened his
mouth and cursed." It falls like a bolt from the
blue. Is this the Job on whose lips were but lately
the words of resignation and praise ? Has Satan
triumphed after all ? Hardly. Job cursed, not
indeed his God — Satan shall never have that satis
faction — but his day, that is, his birthday.
Surprising and shocking as is such a curse from such
a man, Job is but following in the footsteps of the
great Jeremiah, that other suffering servant, whom

The Problem of Pain

later Israel delighted to honour. He too, had cursed
his birthday in language as vehement, though less
picturesque and elaborate (Jer. xx. 14-18).

Now this all but incredible revolution in Job's
mood becomes psychologically intelligible, when we
consider his intolerable bodily anguish, which the
long unbroken silence of his friends had done nothing
either to assuage or to explain, and when we further
remember that, according to the view of life in which
he had been nurtured and which had now had time
to reassert itself, he had a right to expect from God
some interposition on his behalf, some practical
vindication of his innocence, which the contemporary
world must otherwise inevitably construe as guilt.
His soul no less than his body was quivering with
pain. It is therefore no great wonder that the sorrow
which he had formerly accepted when it was new, he
now resents, and breaks into an imprecation of the
day on which he was born. Let us hear his moving
words :

" Perish the day wherein I was born,

And the night which announced that a man-child was there.
Utter darkness let that night be,

Looking for light, but finding none.
May God in the heights above ask not after it,

And may no beam shine forth upon it.
May darkness and gloom claim it for their own,

And may the thick cloud rest upon it.
Black vapours of the day affright it !

And let the thick darkness snatch it away.
May it not be joined to the days of the year,

Or enter into the tale of the months.
As for that night, let it be barren :

May there never ring through it a cry of joy.
Accursed of sorcerers be that day —

Of those that are skilful to stir up Leviathan,

Job's Lament

Dark be the stars of its morning twilight,
And never the eye-lids of Dawn may it see ;

Since it shut not the doors of my mother's womb,
And hid not trouble from mine eyes." (iii. 3-10.)

Job treats his birthday as a living thing, which
had cruelly ushered him into a life of sorrow ; and
he prays that every year, as it takes its place afresh
among the days, it may be blotted out or hurled
back to the primeval darkness out of which it came,
so that never again should child be born upon it, to
share a fate like his.

The patient Job of the Prologue who had accepted
his torture without murmur or question now rises
to a mood of challenge. " Why ? Wherefore ? "
(iii., n, 12, 20). If this is life, then better never to
have been born ; or, if birth was inevitable, then
better that death had swiftly followed — that would
have been happiness indeed.

"Why died I not at my birth,

Breathe my last as I came from the womb,
Like a hidden untimely birth,

Like infants that never see light ?
Why on the knees was I welcomed

And why were there breasts to suck ? "

(iii. 11-16).

The wail involuntarily reminds us of the chorus in
(Edipus Coloneus : " Not to be born is, past all
prizing, best ; but, when a man hath seen the light,
this is next best by far, that with all speed he should
go thither, whence he hath come " (1225 ff). Cruel
were the parents who gave him birth and welcomed
him ; but once born, if only he had had the unspeak
able joy of dying at once,

The Problem of Pain

Then had I lain down in quiet,

Then had I slept and had rest —
With kings of the earth and with counsellors,

Who built stately tombs for themselves,
Or with princes rich in gold

Who had filled their houses with silver.
There the wicked cease their tumult,

There the weary are at rest —
Prisoners at ease together,

Deaf to the taskmaster's voice.
There the small and the great are alike,

And the servant is free from his master." (iii. 13-19).

The agitated mood in which he began his impre
cation, subsides as he contemplates with gentle
satisfaction what it must be to dwell in peace among
the dead ; but, welcome as death would be, he never
for a moment dreams of attaining it by laying violent
hands on himself. There is a little, but significant
touch in the last line quoted, which reveals Job's
sympathy for the servant, a sympathy which often
again finds striking expression, and which shows how
kind was the heart that had been so deeply wounded.
Indeed, profoundly as Job is absorbed in his own
sorrow, he is ever disposed to " look upon the things
of others also," and especially upon their misery.
Out of the depths of his own misery he beholds a
great brotherhood of sorrow, a host of wretched and
embittered men who long for the death which refuses
to come ; and again he asks " Why ? " If human
life is foredoomed to such sorrow, why should it
ever have been at all ? What meaning is there in a
world which has nothing better than this to offer
to those who are forced to enter it without their
knowledge or their will ?

Job's Lament

'Why is light given to the wretched

And life to the bitter in soul ?
Such as long for death, but it comes not,

And dig for it, more than for treasure,
Who would joy o'er a mound of stones,

And rejoice, could they find a grave.
For my bread there comes to me sighing,

My groans are poured out like water.
For the evil I fear overtakes me,

The thing that I dread comes upon me.
Scarce have I ease or quiet

Or rest, when tumult cometh." (iii. 20-26).

In this opening lament two things are remarkable :
first, that Job says not a word about sin. The
average Hebrew — Job's friends, for example, and
many a psalmist — instinctively connected suffering
with sin, believing that suffering pointed as infallibly
to sin as sin to suffering. Nothing could more
vividly suggest Job's conscious innocence than 'this
tacit refusal to associate in any way his present
misery with former sin. And the other point is the
rising alienation which this monologue betrays.
Job does not curse God : he does not challenge
Him — at least directly : he hardly even names Him.
But in the question " Why is light given to the
wretched and life to the bitter in soul ? " we hear the
first rumblings of that thunder of challenge which
Job is to hurl at the Almighty. If we read, as we
may, " Why giveth He light to the wretched ? "
the challenge is just a little more audible and daring
than in the traditional text. He — the unnamed
cause of all the world's misery. But the meaning is
the same in the end. And if Job is bitter and on the
verge of defiance, we dare not forget that he had not

The Problem of Pain

the sublime consolations of the apostle,1 who wrote :
' Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ?
Shall tribulation or anguish or persecution or famine
or nakedness or peril or sword ? Nay, in all these
things we are more than conquerors through Him
that loved us."

Rom. viii. 35, 37.

ELIPHAZ'S COMFORTABLE EXHORTATION AND
REVELATION (Job iv. and v.)

The friends, who represent in different ways the
orthodoxy of the time, had come to condole with
Job; but on their theory of life — that he who does
well must fare well, and " who ever perished, being
innocent ? " —they could not even at the first have
regarded him as altogether innocent. And the
suspicions which the sight of him must have awakened
in them could not fail to be confirmed by his recent
words, which were but a veiled challenge of God
for creating so miserable a world. Nevertheless
Eliphaz, the most venerable and dignified of the
three, opens the debate with great courtesy :

" May we lift up a word unto thee who art fainting ?
For who has the heart to restrain his speech ?"

At the very outset he pays a tribute, which Job
richly deserves, to the fine quality of his character
in days gone by, significantly singling out his power
to strengthen the despondent, and gentlv contrast
ing it with his own despondency now.

" Behold ! thou hast instructed many,

And strengthened the drooping hands.
Thy words used to set up the stumbling,

And strengthen the tottering knees.
But now that it comes upon thee, thou art faint ;
Now that it reaches thyself, thou art terrified."

(iv. 3-5)-

The Problem of Pain

Here emerges for the first time a feature which
prepares us for the growing exasperation of the debate
and the rapidly widening estrangement between
Job and his friends : namely, that the words which
they sincerely mean to be a comfort act upon him as
a provocation. If Job had so nobly strengthened
the weak and the weary — so must he have thought
within himself — " why has God rewarded me so ? "
Eliphaz continues :

"Is not thy religion thy confidence

And thy blameless life thy hope ?
Bethink thee : has an innocent man ever perished ?
Or when have the just been cut off ? " (iv. 6f).

In support of this simple proposition, Eliphaz appeals
to his own experience :

"It is those who plough wrong and sow trouble

That reap it : — for this I have seen.
By the breath of God they perish,

At the blast of His anger they vanish." (iv. 8f).

In spite of this appeal, however, the truth rather is
that Eliphaz is imposing his theory upon experience,
interpreting experience by theory rather than con
structing his theory out of the facts of experience.
An innocent man cannot perish, he argues : there
fore, if he perishes, he cannot have been innocent.
It is all very simple, too simple to be true : as some
one has said, " Eliphaz solves the problem by voting
it out of existence ; " and he clinches his argument by
a rhetorical simile in which he pictures the sure
destruction of the roaring lions — one of those rather
heartless irrelevances into which the speakers are
apt to fall, because they are thinking more of their

Eliphaz's Revelation

theory than of the anguish of the innocent man before
them.

But Eliphaz has, or he thinks he has, an appeal still
more convincing even than the evidence of experi
ence — he grounds his case on a special revelation ;
and this he presents in a passage which must ever
rank as one of the weirdest in literature :

" Now to me a word came stealing,

And mine ear caught a whisper thereof,
In thoughts from the visions of night,

When deep sleep falleth on men.
Fear came upon me and trembling,

That made my bones all quake.
Then a breath passed over my face,

The hair of my flesh bristled up.
There — it — stood .

I could not tell what it looked like —
This form before mine eyes.

In the silence I heard a voice say." (iv. 12-16).

But how cold all this, how terrible, how different
from the warm personal friendship which Job in
later passages, as we shall see, claims to have
enjoyed with God. Job's God is a Friend, Eliphaz's
a Terror who makes his bones quake and his hair
stand on end ; whose presence is felt, not in the even
tenor of life, but in abnormal experiences and in the
dead of night. But let that pass : what does the
weird voice say ? It says :

" Can mortal be just before God,

Or a man clean before his Creator ?
See ! He putteth no trust in His servants,

His angels He chargeth with folly.
How much more those whose houses are clay,
Whose very foundation is dust,

The Problem of Pain

Who die before the moth,

Crushed between morning and evening,
Bruised without any regarding it,

Perished for evermore." (iv. 17-20.)

The message is worthy of the vision, both alike
are appalling : indeed, the message, besides being
appalling, is trivial. It hardly needed all this
supernatural horror to justify so commonplace a
truth as that no mortal can be just before God or
pure in the sight of his Maker. Job himself, who
never claims to be perfect, would have been the first
to admit the general truth of this statement, but
what he cannot and will not admit is that this ade
quately explains the special incidence of the cata
strophes which have ruined his life. Eliphaz's
"revelation," besides being appalling and trivial,
is cruelly irrelevant. If the very angels, with their
finer natures and opportunities, must stand convicted
of folly before so stern a God, how much more cer
tainly must men succumb who live in frail tenements
of clay ! Can a reasonable God expect from poor
mortal men a standard of virtue which He does not
find even in His holy angels ? Here again the words
which were meant to explain and comfort can only
exasperate. From the God whom Eliphaz so blandly
presents Job can only recoil as from an incarnate
Injustice. Besides, Eliphaz's argument proves
too much. If Job's " sin " consists in nothing worse
than in sharing the inevitable frailty of human kind,
why should he be singled out to suffer this exceptional
and unutterable woe ? If man is born to frailty,
is that not all the more reason why a God worthy of

Eliphaz's Revelation

human trust and worship should exercise His com
passion ? Eliphaz is at the other end of the world
from the Psalmist who wrote :

" As a father pities his children,

So the Lord pities them that fear Him ;
For well He knoweth our frame,

He remembers that we are dust." (Ps. ciii. 13!).

Eliphaz is vexed at the irritation which so good
and wise a man as Job has displayed in his opening
speech. He reminds him that no good can come of
that : it is really the mark of the fool, and can but
draw upon him the deadly stroke of God — the very
thing that Job's wife, in her extremity, had desired
for him (ii. 9).

"For vexation killeth the fool,

Indignation slayeth the simpleton." (v. 2).

Eliphaz' s renewed appeal to experience and his
frequent use of the personal pronoun / (which is
more emphatic in the Hebrew text than in the
English : '^/Jiave seen ") show that he is a person
of conscious dignity, who takes himself and his
instruction very seriously : and this in turn explains
and excuses the later irony of Job.

"I have seen a fool taking root,

But his branch became suddenly rotten.
His children were far from help,

Crushed beyond hope of deliverance.
The hungry eat up their harvest,

And the thirsty draw from their wells.
For not from the dust riseth ruin,

Nor out of the ground springeth trouble ;
But man is born unto trouble,

While the sons of flame ' soar above it." (v. 3-7).
1 Possibly the angels. The meaning of the verse is very obscure,
and the ordinary translation (" as the sparks fly upward ") is only
just not impossible.

The Problem of Pain

All this again is commonplace and irrelevant, as
addressed to an innocent man : but in addition, we
feel here for the first time — and it will not be the
last — how cruel are the wounds that can be dealt,
almost half unconsciously, by those who care more
for doctrines than for men. For, whether Eliphaz
means it or not, his calm allusion to the children
" far from help and crushed beyond hope of deliver
ance" brings before our minds, as it must have
brought before Job's, the vision of his happy sons
and daughters lying dead beneath the ruins of their
house. Another point of exasperation ! Is it any
wonder that Job flings his taunt at them, " Miserable
comforters are ye all "?

Eliphaz now graciously condescends to show how
he would act in Job's position. "As for me"
—again the note of conscious importance— " I
would seek unto God " — the very thing that Job
had twice done in the noblest imaginable way, when
writhing under the terrific blows struck in the
Prologue.

" Were it I, I would seek unto God ;

My cause I would bring unto God,
Who doeth great things and unsearchable,

Marvellous things without number.
Who bringeth rain over the earth,

And over the fields sendeth water —
Setting the lowly on high,

And lifting the mourners to safety,
Frustrating the plans of the crafty

And robbing their hands of success,
So taking the wise in their guile,

That their tortuous plans fail through rashness :
They feel in the day as in darkness,

At noontide they grope as at night.

Eliphaz's Revelation

So the needy He saves from the sword,
And the poor from the hands of the mighty.

Thus hope is born in the weak,

And iniquity stoppeth her mouth." (v. 8-16).

This is good poetry, and good preaching ; but it
is not good consolation. It is the teacher here who
speaks, not the comforter. It is all true enough,
but it is in the air ; it is laden with no balm for the
sick and sorrowful heart. But into these fine
rhetorical commonplaces there shoots a gleam of
real light.

" Happy, then, the mortal whom God correcteth ;

So spurn not thou the Almighty's chastening.
For He bindeth the wounds He hath made,

And His hands heal the hurt He hath dealt." (v. iyf).

In other words, suffering may be sent, not to
punish, but to discipline the sufferer, and to promote
his spiritual welfare. It is the same truth as is
expressed by another of Israel's wise men :

" Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,

He afflicteth the son He delights in." (Prov. iii. 12).

Here is a valuable addition to the brilliant sugges
tions as to the meaning of suffering thrown out in
the Prologue ; and we shall treasure it carefully,
as there are not many gleams of light in the speeches
of the orthodox friends. The only objection to it
is that it does not apply to the case in hand : for —
as we must never forget — the man to whom it is
addressed has been described not only by the
narrator but by God Himself as " blameless and
upright, fearing God and shunning evil." Perhaps
we may say that there is another and an even more

The Problem of Pain

fatal objection to it — that it springs from a heart
dominated more by doctrine than by sympathy :
lor, the moment it is stated, the speaker moves
airily off into an enumeration of calamities from
which Job may, if he accepts the divine discipline,
expect to be preserved, but with not one of which
he is at the moment in the least concerned, except
it may be " the scourge of the " thoughtless " tongue"
by which he is being lashed and from which there is
little chance of his being preserved. Famine, war,
and the rest — what have they to do with the broken
man upon the ash-heap ?

" He will save thee in six distresses,

In seven no evil shall touch thee.
In famine he frees thee from death,

And in war from the power of the sword.
From the scourge of the tongue thou art safe,

Thou shalt fear not the onslaught of ruin.
At ruin and dearth shalt thou laugh,

And the beasts of the field thou shalt fear not.
For the stones of the earth are thine allies,

The beasts of the field are thy friends.
Thou shalt know that thy tent is secure,

Thou shalt visit thy fold and miss nothing."

(v. 19-24).

It is part of that thoughtlessness which, in certain
circumstances, may amount to a cruelty and a crime:
and it surely does become cruelty when he goes on to
add:

" Thy seed thou shalt know to be many,

Thine offspring as grass of the earth." (v. 25).

But Job's children are dead — a fact which Eliphaz,
carried away by his eloquent homily, seems to have
forgotten altogether. The whole speech is, in the

Eliphaz' s Revelation

intention of the writer, a fine satire on the impotence
of a mechanical orthodoxy, and on the potential
cruelty of its exponents, who will not look at facts.
For all his cutting, or at least careless, innuendo,
Eliphaz is trying, at the end as at the beginning,
to be gracious, and he ends upon a note of promise
— a promise destined to be truer than he knew.

'* Thou shalt come to the grave in thy strength,
As a sheaf coraeth in in its season." (v. 26).

Or, to be more correct, he really ends upon the note
of self-conscious importance which had run through
the whole of his speech :

" See ! this we have searched — so it is.

We have heard it — lay thou it to heart." (v. 27).

He and his friends are clearly superior persons,
possessed of truths resting on experience, investi
gation, and revelation, which it is of the highest
importance for Job to lay to heart. To Job, in the
tortures of an incurable disease, the rosy pictures of
restoration painted by Eliphaz must have seemed
a bitter mockery ; and this, coupled with Eliphaz's
cool assumption of superiority, while he is really
ignorant of the innocence of which Job is so sublimely
sure, piepares us for the stern speech in which Job
answers him.

JOB'S DENUNCIATION OF HOLLOW FRIENDSHIP.
His CHALLENGE OF GOD AND His LONGING TO BB
GONE (Job vi. and vii.)

Job, who always takes his stand on fact, at once
concedes the irritation with which Eliphaz had
charged him (v. 2), but maintains that it is more
than explained by the misery with which he is
weighted.

"O could my vexation be carefully weighed,

And my misery set in the balance against it !
For it is more heavy than sand of the sea,

And therefore it is that my words are wild."^- 2*)'

And the Almighty, at whom he had darkly hinted
before (iii. 23), he now names directly as the Archer
whose deadly shafts of lose and pestilence have been
hurled at him, keeping him in ceaseless turmoil
of body and soul.

"For the arrows of God Almighty are in me,

My spirit drinketh their fiery poison." (vi. 4)."

It is this that constitutes Job's problem : not the
physical tortures, terrible though they be, but that
they have been let loose upon him by God's own
hand. The once gracious Friend has armed Himself
with terrors and become his relentless foe. He is
in the mood of the Psalmist who said :

" This it is that grieves me,

That the hand of the Most High hath changed."

(Ps. Ixxvii. 10).

Job's Challenge

His sense of alienation is increasing, and it is
aggravated still more by the odious and insipid
counsel of the friend who has just spoken : for

" Doth the wild ass bray as he nibbles the grass,

And over their fodder do oxen low ?
Can a man eat that which is tasteless and saltless ?

Is there any taste in the slime of the yolk ? " (vi. 5f).

Eliphaz had pointed him to the possibility of
secure and happy days yet in store ; but this, he
feels, is not for him. As before, it is not life, but
death, that he longs for ; he asks not for mercy, or
even for justice, but only for death. That would
be his comfort and his joy, and it cannot come too
speedily.

"O that I might have my request,

That God would grant me the thing that I long for !
O that God would consent to crush me,

To let His hand loose and cut me off !
So should I still have this for my comfort —
Leaping for joy amid torture unsparing —
That I had not concealed the words of the Holy One."

(vi. 8-10).

He has no strength left to achieve or endure any
more, least of all to endure the sting of those terrible
darts hurled by an almighty Hand.

"What is my strength, that I should endure ?

Or what is mine end, that I should be patient ?
Is my strength the strength of stones ?

Or was I created with flesh of brass ?
Behold ! I have no help in myself,

And the power to achieve is driven from me." (vi. 11-13).

Then he turns from the inscrutable God to the
friends who have failed him in his hour of deepest

The Problem of Pain

need, and expresses his disappointment at their
" treachery " in one of those pictures which will
live for ever. He compares them to the streams
which are full and swollen, when no refreshing
draught is needed, but which, when the thirsty
caravans reach the spot, have vanished.

"To one who is fainting a friend should be kind,

Even though he forsaketh the fear of the Almighty.
But my brethren have dealt like a treacherous torrent.

Like channels that overflow their banks,
Which are turbid because of the ice

And the snow that hides within them ;
But, when they are scorched, they vanish :

In the heat they are quenched from their place.
The caravans bend their course thither,

Go up through the waste, and perish.
The caravans of Tema looked out for them,

The companies of Sheba kept hoping :
But their confidence brought them to shame ;

When they came to the place, they blushed.
Such now have ye proved unto me :

When ye look on the terror, ye shudder." (vi. 14-21).

iFew things are more touching than this thirst of
Job for human friendship. Intellectually indepen
dent as he is, he needs men, all the more that God has
wounded and forsaken him. He had hoped that
they would pour upon his fevered spirit the cooling
waters of their sympathy ; instead, they regale him
with the barren sands of dogma. How utterly
alone he is, forsaken, as it seems, alike by God and
man.

From bitterness he passes to irony. He could
have understood their recoil from him, he tells them,
had he asked them for a gift of money — to ransom
him, for example, from captivity : that would

Job's Challenge

indeed have been too heavy a tax to impose upon
their generosity.

"Did I ask you to give me a present,

Or make me a gift of your substance,
To rescue me from the foe,

From the hands of the tyrant to free me ? " (vi. 221).

But no such gift had he demanded : all he asks is
some little light upon his problem, some true and
simple word which will still the storm in his heart.

"Teach me, and I will be silent,

Show me wherein I have erred.
How sweet are words that are true 1

But when you reprove, what is reproved ? " (vi. 241).

The friends are unkind, in part because they are
shallow : nothing impresses them but what they see
and hear, the misery of the man and his desperate
words of challenge : they cannot look behind either
the facts or the words to the innocent life and the
torn, bleeding heart. He accuses them of taking
his wild words too seriously : and we must not
ourselves forget this in our criticism of them, either
now or later. The words of a man driven by misery
to despair are not to be coolly dissected by those who
stand outside his misery, nor are they to be taken
as a revelation of his inmost heart : they are to be
borne away by the winds beyond the range of such
solemn cavil.

"Is it words that ye mean to reprove ?

But for winds are the words of despair.
Would ye throw yourselves on the innocent,

Or make an assault on your friend ? " (vi. 261).

At this point the friends turn away in horror from
his protestations, and again we see this strong man's

The Problem of Pain

craving for human sympathy. He cannot bear to
think that they doubt him or will leave him, and
it is infinitely touching to watch the almost naive
earnestness with which he urges upon those conven
tional men that, when he claims to be innocent, he
is speaking the truth.

"Now look upon me, I pray you :

I would surely not lie in your face.
O come back — let there be no injustice .

Come back, for the right is still mine." (vi. 281).

The magnificent breadth of Job's character is
seen not least in this that, intense as is his own pain
and misery, he does not allow himself to be completely
absorbed by it. As in his first lament he had been
drawn beyond himself to the great brotherhood of
sorrow (iii. 2off), so here again from his own wretched
ness he glides almost instinctively into the contem
plation of the larger sorrow of the world. His own
life, all human life — what is it but an unending,
unrelenting warfare, from which there is no dis
charge but death ? What is it but the service of
a hard Master, which is only rendered tolerable by
the certainty that, however hard or long the day,
the blessed shadows of evening must inevitably fall
at last ?

\" Hath man on the earth not a warfare,
With days like the days of a hireling ?
Like a slave that pants for the shadow,

A hireling that longs for his wages,
So empty months are my portion,

And wearisome nights mine appointment, "(vii. 1-7).

Note here again the sympathy for the servant
(cf. iii. 19). But again Job is swung back to the

Job's Challenge

thought of his own unutterable misery, with its
loathsome physical accompaniments.

" I lie down, saying, ' When cometh day ? '

When I rise, methinks ' When cometh even ? '
Worms and clods clothe my flesh,

My skin grows hard and then runs." (vii. 4f).

After his former cries for the speedy advent of
death, it comes as a surprise that he now complains
of the shortness of life :

" My days are more swift than a shuttle,

They come to an end without hope.
O remember my life is but breath,

Mine eye shall see good nevermore." (vii. 6f).

Perhaps his pain has for the moment eased a little :
however that may be, we have here one of those swift
changes of mood which invest with perennial interest
the psychological situations of the great drama.
The genius of the man for friendship is movingly
suggested by the next words, which hint rather than
plainly say that the bitterest drop in death's cup
is that he and his friends shall see each other no
more ; and saddest of all is that his intimacy with
the great Friend will be over for ever. This thought
is expressed in language of pathetic beauty.

<' The eye that now sees me shall see me no more ;

Thine eyes shall look for me, but I shall be gone."

(vii. 8).

God, after His inscrutable treatment of His faith
ful servant has brought him beneath the ground,
will begin to think of him and look for him again.
Here we see the beginning of that struggle between
two thoughts of God — almost between two Gods
— in the soul of Job : the God who has treated him

The Problem of Pain

with such inexplicable cruelty, and shot His poisoned
arrows at him, and the God who beneath all the
torture wishes him well and will miss him and yearn
for him when he is gone. But then it will be too
late, for the man who leaves this life leaves it for
ever.

" Like the cloud that is spent and that passeth away,

He that goes down to Sheol shall come up no more.
He shall never come back to his house again,

And the place that was his shall know him no more."

(vii. 9f).

To understand the fierceness of the problem that
tormented Job — or, if you like, the great soul who
makes Job his mouthpiece — it is well to remember
that it has to be fought out on this side the grave.
For, broadly speaking, there is no Beyond, none at
least that brings any comfort or hope to those who
have been wronged here. Death is the end : in the
world beyond, small and great, oppressed and
oppressor, are all alike (iii. 19). Of punishment,
reward, or restitution, there is meantime not a
thought. So, if the gracious Face has to be seen at
all, it must be here and now. That is for Job the
tragedy that, if he does not see it here, he cannot hope
to see it anywhere. But beneath the pathetic lines
in which he dwells on the inexorableness of death
we can detect, if not the faint whisper of a hope, at
any rate the passionate yearning that it might be
otherwise. The wistfulness with which he looks at
the thought before he pushes it away, shows how
much he was fascinated by it ; and he returns to it
again and again.

Job's Challenge

Since, however, he is to die, and death is the end,
he will at least speak his mind to God before he
goes ; and the bitter anguish of his spirit drives him
to an audacity even surpassing that of his first
sorrowful monologue :

" So my mouth I will not restrain,
I will utter mine anguish of spirit,
Pour out mine embittered soul.
Am I a sea or a sea-monster,

That upon me Thou settest a watch ?" (vii. nf).

The allusion is to the great mythological dragon
which the God of Light had to fight and slay before
He could proceed to His beneficent work of creation.
Job is only too conscious of being nothing but a poor
"driven leaf" (xiii. 25); and does God — he asks
with savage irony — take him for another monster
like that which He slew and ripped open before, a
monster who, if he were not crushed, would threaten
the peace and security of the universe ? If not,
why does He watch him so ? It maddens him to
think that he is being everlastingly spied upon by
those pitiless eyes that never slumber or sleep. His
case is immeasurably worse than that of the servant
who can rest at eventide. For, besides the perpetual
torment which gnaws him to the bone by day, his
nights are tormented with appalling dreams and
visions. Better a thousand times that the horrible
disease which is eating at his throat should suffocate
him outright and end this living death.

" When I look to my couch to comfort me,

To my bed for relief of my sorrow,
Then Thou scarest me with dreams,
And with visions dost so affright me

The Problem of Pain

That gladly would I be strangled :

Death itself I spurn in my pain.
I would not live for ever :

Let me go, for my days are but breath."

(vii. 13-16).

Then follows one of the most sublimely daring
passages of the book. In his happier days Job had
many a time thought with quiet gladness of the
gracious psalm which tells how the infinite God of the
starry spaces comes daily with His condescending
love into the little life of man :

" When I look at Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers,
The moon and the stars, which Thou hast set there,
What is mortal man, that Thou thinkest of him,

And the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? " (Ps. viii. 31) .

Those words flash back upon him now, and he breaks
out into a bitter parody of them, which falls little
short of blasphemy :

" What is man, that so great Thou dost count him

And settest Thine heart upon him —
Visiting him every morning

And testing him moment by moment ? " (vii. lyf).

Instead of the God whom the psalmist saw coming in
love, Job sees a God coming to torment him every
morning with His tortures and every night with His
terrors. Why should God count men so great as to
be worthy of all this cruel attention ?

"Why dost thou make me Thy target ?

Why burden Thyself with me ? " (vii. 20).

How infinitely kinder just to leave him alone : that
is all Job asks — that that great Presence, those

Job's Challenge

terrible eyes, should be withdrawn. The sense of
estrangement is deepening rapidly.

)"O when wilt Thou turn Thine eyes from me,
And leave me, though but for a moment ? " (vii. 19).

Job ascribes his misery to God ; the friends find
the ' root of the matter " in himself and in his sin .
J ob is too clear-sighted and honest to claim perfection ;
he acknowledges his sin, but none comparable to the
misery which is crushing him. However, granting
his sin — and here comes another very daring turn
of thought — how does that affect God ?

"If I sin, how does that harm Thee,

O Thou who art watcher of men ? " (vii. 20.)

— watching men indeed too pitilessly well. Is
God nothing but a great incarnate Vindictiveness,
that for sins inevitable to human frailty He
should smite man to the dust with His omnipotent
Hand ? Surely, the true greatness and glory of
God would be shown rather in forgiveness :

" Why not forgive my sin,

And pass mine iniquity by ? " (vii. 21).

Here is a flash of insight into the essential nature of
God ; and the thought of forgiveness, though it
seems so remote as to be unattainable, wakes again
in the poor tormented mind the old kindly thought
of God as his Friend — and with that he character
istically ends :

" For now shall I lie in the dust :

Thou wilt search, but I shall not be." (vii. 21).

The Problem of Pain

For all his wild words, he knows at the bottom of his
heart that God loves him — loves him so dearly that,
after he is gone, and when it is too late, He will
search for him. He will not only miss him, but He
will earnestly seek to recover His vanished friend.
The man who could so think of God and His pursuing
love must surely be found of Him in the end. As
Duhm has said, this is " an anthropomorphism,
such as could only spring from a living religion."

BILDAD'S APPEAL TO THE TEACHING OF TRADITION
(Job viii.)

The argument is now taken up by Bildad, a man
probably about Job's own age. The irritation with
which he had listened to Job's audacities wells up
into his opening words :

" How long wilt thou utter these things —

These thy blustering windy words ? " (viii. 2).

Job's impetuous speeches had amounted to a prac
tical impeachment of divine justice, and the reverent
but commonplace Bildad can hardly believe his ears.
Does Job really mean to say that God Almighty can
be guilty of injustice ?

" Is God a perverter of justice ?

The Almighty, subverter of right?" (viii. 3).

Nay, verily, the government of the world is in just
hands. There is a moral order, which ordains that
the sinner must suffer, and which pronounces no
less surely that the sufferer has sinned. Nor is the
proof of this far to seek. Has not Job already
seen it exemplified in the fate of his own children ?
— an experience which affects Bildad so little that he
can incidentally throw it into a subordinate cause :

" If thy children, for sinning against Him,

He has left to bear their transgression." (viii. 4.)

The Problem of Pain

It is Eliphaz's easy dogma over again, " Who ever
perished, being innocent ? " The children are
demonstrably sinners, because they are lying dead
among the ruins of their house. Involuntarily there
rises into our mind the word of Jesus about the
Tower of Siloam (Luke xiii. 41), and the solemn
protest He hurled against this shallow, heartless,
Pharisaic interpretation of human misfortune.
Bildad does not scruple to begin his argument by
stabbing the father's heart. Here again (cf. v. 4),
the writer is letting us feel how cruel disputants can
be who care more for doctrines than for men.

The children are dead, their time for repentance
is past, but it is not yet too late for Job.

"Yet seek thou thyself unto God,

And supplicate the Almighty.
And if thou art pure and upright,

Thy righteous abode He will prosper ;
And, though thy beginning be slender,

Thine end He shall greatly increase." (viii. 5-7).

Bildad's use of the word " seek " shows how deeply
he has been provoked by the beautiful thought with
which Job had closed his speech. His word is a
stinging reminder of Job's. He would remind Job,
who has had the incredible audacity to speak of
God's seeking for him, that it is rather his business
to seek for God : he is too shallow to feel that
Job's wild words are nothing but a passionate grop
ing after God. So he counsels him to return to the
God who, as Job believes, has fled from him rather
than he from God, and promises him on these terms

Bildad's Appeal to Tradition

a happiness far surpassing that which once was his —
here speaking, like Eliphaz (v. 26) truer than he
knew. With fine dramatic instinct, the writer
often makes the friends say things prophetic of the
end. In spite of the cruel allusion to the children,
Bildad's opening words were intended to be concilia
tory, as those of Eliphaz were courteous.

The friends are all representatives of orthodoxy,
but each champions it in his own way. While all
are saying essentially the same thing, their characters
and temperaments are quite distinguishable and
their appeals are different. Eliphaz had rested his
case on revelation, Bildad rests his on tradition.
The moral principles on which the world is governed
he has learned from the fathers. He humbly
recognises that the problem which is agitating
all their minds is too stupendous for him to solve,
even to attempt, but he comforts himself with
the reflection that it has been solved long ago.
The faith has been delivered once for all to the
saints, and it is never to be challenged or
even criticized any more. Bildad will not, like
Job, employ his own mind upon the facts ; he is
content to accept the results reached by the men of
the olden time, who, strangely enough, are supposed
to be wiser, though the world was younger and its
experience necessarily more meagre. He forgets that
there can be no results for the man who refuses,
whether from modesty or indolence, to pass his mind
through processes. He will not use his eyes, but
only his ears — a much easier exercise — to listen to
what other men have said who used their eyes.

The Problem of Pain

" For inquire thou of past generations,

Regard the research of the fathers : —
For we are but dullards of yesterday,

Whose days on the earth are a shadow —
Shall they not give thee instruction,

And bring forth words out of their heart ? "

(viii. 8-10).

In these words your true traditionalist is pilloried
for all time — his intellectual indolence, his smug
humility which dispenses him from the obligation to
do honest and independent work of his own, and not
least the cool effrontery with which he sweeps all
his contemporaries into the same category of medio
crity to which he himself so manifestly belongs :
"for we " — not he only, but all his fellows also —
" we are but of yesterday, and know nothing."
To the searching question, " Sayest thou this of
thyself or did others tell it thee ? " he would have
replied without shame or hesitation, " Who am I
to presume to say this on the strength of my own
intelligence ? Others told me of it." At the bottom
of this indolence and timidity lies an unworthy
conception of God. Bildad believes in a God who
was, but not in a God who is : in a God who once
inspired and illumined the minds of men, but who
does so no more. His is a mind without resiliency,
and the God he worships and defends is a God of the
dead only and not of the living also. His temper
a little recalls that of the lines of Clough :

" The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and fears,
And all the earnings of their pain —
Ah, yet consider it again !

Bildad' s Appeal to Tradition

We ! what do we see ? each a space
Of some few yards before his face ;
Does that the whole wide plan explain ?
Ah, yet consider it again ! "

No sane thinker despises the toil of the past ; on
the contrary, he pays it a deep and humble tribute
of respect : but he pays the truest respect to the
thinkers of the past when he works in their indepen
dent and courageous spirit. Then, and then only,
can he claim to be of their lineage. It is significant
that the champions ^of^^the orthodoxy which Job
so fiercely combats are men who will not think for
themselves — men like Eliphaz, who appeal to
revelation, or like Bildad, to tradition. Not much
light upon the dark and awful problem is to be looked
for from men like these.

But what is it, after all, that Bildad has so humbly
and easily learned at the feet of the fathers ? It is
a truth expressed in rather elaborate and difficult
imagery — the text of the passage is obscure — but a
truth as essentially commonplace as that which
flowed from Eliphaz's awe-inspiring " revelation."
It is simply that the hope of the hypocrite dies like
the rush which is not fed by water.

" Can the rush shoot high without swamp ?

Or the reed grow up without water ?
While yet in its freshness, unplucked,

Of all herbs it withers most quickly.
So end all who put God out of mind,

And the hope of the hypocrite dies.
His confidence is but a thread,

And his trust as the web of a spider.
He leans on his house, but it stands not ;

He grasps, but it cannot endure.

The Problem of Pain

Like a plant is he, fresh in the sunshine,

With suckers that shoot o'er the garden.
Its roots are entwined round the wall,

It lays hold of its stone habitation.
But when it is ruined, the spot

Denies having ever beheld it.
Thus its course ends in desolation,

And out of the dust springs another." (viii. 11-19):

" Parturiunt monies, nascetur ridiculus mus." It
is of sombre significance for the attitude of the friends
to Job that the truth which Bildad thinks it worth
his while to thrust upon him as embodying the
garnered wisdom of the past, is that the doom of the
hypocrite is sure and terrible. Clearly Job stands
already condemned at the bar of their judgment :
his misery, to say nothing of his blasphemy, has
condemned kim. And yet they would be kind. If
he seeks God, there is hope. So Bildad ends, like
Eliphaz, upon a note of comfort and with a vision of
Job's restitution.

" See ! God spurns not an innocent man,

But He will not uphold evil-doers.
He will yet fill thy mouth with laughter,

Thy lips with a shout of joy.
Thy foes shall be clothed with shame,
And the tent of the wicked shall vanish."

(viii. 20-22).

He does not know the grim point of his own prophecy,
that he himself, in the end, will be among the foes
to be clothed with shame (xlii. 8). But in spite of
his happy picture and his gracious words, his real
mind about Job comes out in the warning with wnich
he closes : " The tent of the wicked shall vanish."

JOB'S CHALLENGE OF IMMORAL OMNIPOTENCE
(Job ix. and x.)

Job replies in a speech of splendid power. Bildad
had maintained it to be unthinkable that God could
be other than just. " No doubt," says Job bitterly :
" He is always in the right for the very sufficient
reason that, being omnipotent, He can put anybody
who dares to challenge Him in the wrong, by the
simple process of crushing him." When he asks,
" How can man be just with God ? " he means some
thing very different from Eliphaz when he had asked
" Can mortal be just before God ? " (iv. 17). Eliphaz
meant that man cannot stand, because he is a
sinner ; Job means, because he is too weak to stand
before a Being of such overwhelming power that He
can topple the mountains over with a touch of His
little finger. Before such a One, how can frail
terrified man hope to plead his cause — to win his
case and secure his right ? All he can do in such a
Presence is to lie stupefied before His avalanche of
questions (cf. xxxviii.-xl.).

" Yes, truly ; I know it is so :

But with God how can man urge his right ?
Should Pie choose to contend against him,

He could answer not one in a thousand.
Wise-hearted and strong as He is,

Who hath ever successfully braved Him ?
Mountains He moves without effort,

He turns them about in His anger.

The Problem of Pain

He shaketh the earth from her place,

And maketh her pillars shudder.
He speaks to the sun and it shines not,

He setteth a seal on the stars.
He stretcheth the heavens all alone,

He treadeth the heights of the sea.
He maketh the Bear and Orion,

The Pleiades and the southern chambers.
He doeth great things and unsearchable,

Marvellous things without number." ( ix. i-io).

Job repeats in the last couplet former words of
Eliphaz (v. 9), but the difference in their outlook
upon the universe is infinite. Eliphaz sees it as an
arena of wonderful beneficence (cf. v. 10) ; Job,
of wonderful and devastating omnipotence. The
(Tod1 rrie"sees ""there" is ine'T^emble God oT"the earth
quakes, volcanoes, eclipses, and storms. And more
vexing even than the irresistibleness of this dark
Power is its invisibility and elusiveness. Every
where are subtle marks of the terrible Presence, but
nowhere can you face it and call it to account ;
and if you could, it would make no difference, for
it is irresponsible as well as irresistible — a savage,
capricious, annihilating Force, sublimely indifferent
to moral interests.

" Lo ! He passes me by all unseen ;

Sweeps past — but I cannot perceive Him.
He seizeth, and who can prevent Him ?

Who dare ask Him, ' What doest Thou ? ' " (ix. nf.).

If by some happy chance Job could secure the meet
ing for which he longed, it would not advance his
cause one iota ; for this omnipotent Judge cares so
little for justice that He would not even deign to
listen : and even if He would, Job would be too
terrified to speak.

Immoral Omnipotence

"Were I right, I could give Him no answer,

But must needs entreat my judge.
If I called, He would give me no answer;

I cannot believe He would listen.
For He crushes me in a tempest

With many a wanton wound.
He suffers me not to take breath,

But with bitterness He fills me.
Is it question of right ? There He is.

Or of justice ? Then who will implead Him ?
Am I right ? Still mine own mouth condemns me.

Innocent ? He proveth me perverse." ( ix. 15-20).

How far the unhappy man is being driven by his
pain and despair from his former thought of that
persistent love which would seek him with diligence,
even after he had gone (vii. 21). Now he thinks of
God as a Tyrant who is determined to regard him,
innocent though he be, as a reprobate, and to treat
him as such ; but Job is equally determined to assert
his innocence even in the: face of Omnipotence.
Lashed by pain and grief, he passes from defiance
to recklessness and hurls at the Almighty a charge
more appalling than any he has yet permitted him
self to indulge in :

"Innocent I am — but I reck not,

I spurn my life ; 'tis all one,
And therefore it is that I say,

' He destroyeth both guiltless and guilty.'
When the scourge bringeth sudden death,

The despair of the blameless He mocketh.
He hath given up the earth to the wicked,

He veileth the face of its judges.

If it be not He, who then ? " ( ix. 21-24).

There is nothing in the universe but pitiless
| Power — no mercy, no justice, no moral order,
I nothing but the most cynical confusion of moral

The Problem oi Pain

interests, and an order — if order it be — which is not
only indifferent, but positively and unabashedly
immoral. For the moment, it almost seems as if
Satan's hope is to be fulfilled after all. " He des-
troyeth " — it is a direct challenge of God, though
he does not name Him — " He destroyeth innocent
and guilty alike." He uses His almighty power
to defy and destroy the interests which good men
hold dear, and for which some are ready, like Job,
to suffer and die. The writer of this book, as of
Ecclesiastes (cf. iii. 16, iv. i, v. 8) probably lived in
sorrowful days when justice was flouted ; and behind
all the rampant injustice of earth Job sees a monster
who not only tolerates, but ordains it ; for " if it be
not He, who then ? " This is one of the most drama
tically effective and moving passages in the book.
For while we are in the secret, Job is not : we know
that the immediate cause of his misery is Satan and
that behind him is a God who reposes in Job a con
fidence so superb that He can defy Satan to do his
worst. Job's fearful challenge is only possible,
because he does not know all the facts.

After this passionate outburst, his strength is
spent, and in gentler mood he turns from the great
world-sorrow to his own, and laments the swiftness
of his passing days. They are replete with tortures,
the most awful of which is that God is resolved to
ignore his innocence.

" If I vow to forget my plaint

And to wear a bright face for a joyless,
I shudder at all my pains :

I know Thou wilt not hold me guiltless." (ix. 27!).

Immoral Omnipotence

All the same, life is sweet and his days are numbered.
Here again the swift fluctuations of his mood are
traced with immense psychological power : one
moment passionately praying for death, and the
next bewailing the swiftness of its approach.

" My days are more swift than a runner,

They flee unillumined by joy.
They glide like the ships of reed,

Like an eagle that darts on its prey." (ix. 251).

Bitterest of all is God's incurable hostility and His
determination to crush him as a reprobate :

"I then am infallibly guilty,

So why should I labour in vain ?
For, though I wash me with snow,

And cleanse my hands with lye,
Thou would'st plunge me then in the mire,

So that even my friends would abhor me." (ix. 29-31).

Then across the black despair of his soul darts
a flash of his old irrepressible faith in God, the real
God.

"Thou art not a man like myself,

That we come into judgment together.
O for an umpire between us,

To lay his hand on us both !
Let Him take His rod from off me,

And affright me no more with His terror,
And then I would speak unafraid,

For not such at heart am I. " (ix. 32-35).

There should be, there must be in the universe some
One who in kindly human fashion would stand
between him and his Tormentor, lay his hand upon
them both and arbitrate between them. It is a
sublime and daring intuition, " an unconscious
prophecy " — as Professor Strahan has well said

The Problem of Pain

— " of incarnation and atonement." His Tormentor
is now Judge ; but, if He were only plaintiff and
some j uster and diviner One were Judge, Job
would plead his cause, even against so dreadful an
antagonist, with confidence in the issue, for he has
the courage of the pure in heart. As it is, however,
the contest is so pitifully uneven : still, Job will face
it, if his Tormentor but remove from him the painful
stroke of leprosy, and affright him no more with
those terrors which he has so magnificently des
cribed in the earlier part of his speech.

Again the bitter mood comes over him, and he
" lets loose his complaint against God." Mere
omnipotence can never command respect, unless
it be allied with justice : so Job demands to know
the ground of God's quarrel with him. " Show me
why Thou contendest with me." It is the challenge
of the thinker who " would not make his judgment
blind." He demands that the universe, of which
he is a part, shall answer to the deepest yearnings of
his own mind and heart. Surely God is not blind
to mistake little faults for damnable sins, and
impatiently to crush to the dust a man whom He
knows to be innocent.

"Hast Thou then eyes of flesh ?

Or seest Thou as man seeth,
That Thou shouldest seek out my guilt,

And make this search for my sin,
Though Thou knowest I am not guilty

And no treachery cleaves to my hand. " (x. 4, 6. 7.)

Here another brilliant thought leaps into that mind
whose fertility no pain can destroy. It is the thought

Immoral Omnipotence

of the responsibility of the Creator. Must not the
God who fashioned men so wonderfully care at least
as much for His creature as the potter for the vessel
which he has made ? The thought of the Persian
poet comes into our minds :

Another said — " Why, ne'er a peevish Boy
Would break the bowl from which he drank in joy ;

Shall He that made the vessel in pure Love
And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy?"

Every man was once a thought in the mind of God :
is it conceivable that He made him only to torture
and destroy him ? Or is the care which He expended
on His handiwork not a guarantee of His interest
in it and love for it ? Nay verily ! Job gives
to his beautiful thought a turn of incredible bitter
ness and audacity. This cunning Potter did indeed
make His creature so marvellous, only to treat him
with marvellous cruelty. Wonderful alike in his
origin and destiny ! How bitter, and how different
in its application from the gentle thought that
breathes through Psalm cxxxix. (cf. vv. 13-18).

"What dost Thou gain from oppressing

And spurning the work of Thy hands ?
Thy hands did fashion and mould me,

And now wilt Thou turn and destroy me ?
Remember Thou madest me like clay,

And back to the dust wilt Thou bring me ?
Didst Thou not pour me out like milk,

And curdle me after like cheese,
Clothe me with skin and flesh,

And knit me with bones and with sinews ?
Life Thou didst grant me and favour,

Thy providence guarded my spirit ;
While this was Thy secret heart,

And this was Thy purpose, I know. " (x. 3, 8-13).

The Problem of Pain

It is easy to see that behind this amazing invective
lies a passionate yearning for the friendship of God.
It is because God and His love are everything to Job
that he cannot bear to think of Him as his enemy.
How intensely personal all this is, and how unlike
the cold, remote " revelations " and visions of
Eliphaz !

Again Job repeats and elaborates the charge that,
whether innocent or guilty, God is equally deter
mined to crush him, working fresh miracles of cruelty
upon him and marshalling against him His hosts —
the pains, the tortures, the terrors — out of the infinite
resources at His disposal.

" Do I sin ? Then Thou dost observe me,

And refuse to acquit me of guilt.
Am I wicked ? Then woe is me.

Just ? I dare not lift up my head —

Full of shame and drunken with sorrow.
If I rise, like a lion Thou huntest me,

Working fresh marvels upon me.
Thine anger with me Thou increasest,

Thou musterest fresh hosts against me. " (x. 14-17).

Then he reverts to the old sad question which he had
asked in his opening monologue : if it was to misery
like this that God had ordained him, why should He
ever have created him at all ? He asks now nothing
more than that he be a little eased of his pain during
the few short days that lie between him and the dark
land from which he shall never return :

" O why from the womb didst Thou bring me ?

O why died I not all unseen ?
O to be as though I had not been,
Borne from the womb to the grave.

Immoral Omnipotence

Are the days of my life not few ?

O leave me to smile a little,
Ere I go, to return no more,

To the land of darkness and gloom,
To the land of murky darkness,

Of gloom and utter confusion,

Where the very light is as darkness. " (x. 18-22).

His friends had closed their speeches with a vista
of hope and comfort, but Job knows better. He is
dying : and the elaboration with which he lingers
upon the inexorable end, beyond which there is
nothing, shows how passionately he yearns for a
something beyond, and prepares the way for the
emergence of a belief in it.

ZOPHAR'S APPEAL TO THE UNSEARCHABLE WISDOM
OF GOD (Job xi.)

A new champion of orthodoxy enters the lists—
the young and insolent Zophar. He has been
provoked by the length of Job's last speech, so he
boldly begins :

"Should a voluble man go unanswered,

A man who but babbles be justified ? " (xi. 2).

But he has been provoked no less by its temper —
its frightful challenges of God which seemed to sound
the deepest depths of presumption and irreverence,
and its nearly as appalling assertions of Job's own
innocence.

" Must men hold their peace at thy bragging ?

Thy mocking is no one to curb ?
Thou maintainest thy way to be pure,

And thyself to be clean in His sight. " (xi. 3!:).

In point of fact Job had repeatedly and unflinchingly
maintained his innocence (cf, ix. 21) : this alone, in
the face of his calamity, would have been enough to
condemn him in eyes like Zophar' s, that were bleared
by convention. Job had complained of the
silence of God : when He does speak, says Zophar —
and he prays that soon He may — it will be in con
demnation of this self-righteous, blasphemous
braggart ; he will then know that the God he has

Unsearchable Wisdom

so bitterly impugned has been vastly kinder to him
than he deserves.

" But oh that God would speak,

And open His lips against thee,
And show thee the secrets of wisdom —

How marvellous are her achievements :
For then thou should 'st know that thy guilt
God remembers not wholly against thee."

(xi. 5f).

This wish of Zophar that God would speak is one of
the most effective things in the book : when God
does speak, in the sequel, it is he and not Job who
is humiliated. " After Jehovah had spoken these
words to Job, He said to Eliphaz, ' My anger is hot
against thee and thy two friends, for ye have not
spoken the truth about Me, as My servant Job has
done.' " (xlii. 7).

How little Zophar really knows of the God whose
mysterious ways he is defending with such shallow
impetuosity : just as little as he does of the true
quality of the man he is insulting. Indeed, with
naive inconsistency he goes on to admit his ignorance :

" Canst thou find out the deep things of God ?

Or come nigh the Almighty's perfection ?
It is higher than heaven — what canst thou ?

Deeper than Sheol — what knowest thou ?
Longer than earth is its measure,

And broader it is than the sea." (xi. 7-9).

Formally a rebuke of Job, who had had the presump
tion to challenge the infinite God, these words are
essentially a comprehensive admission of the
impotence of man to understand the divine nature.
This sounds very humble : as a matter of fact,
Zophar' s attitude to the problem, despite his pre-
77

The Problem of Pain

tence of humility, is immeasurably more arrogant
than Job's. Zophar believes, or believes that he
believes, in a God whose ways are unsearchable :
nevertheless he himself can expound those ways
quite glibly. The acknowledged mystery of the
divine nature, the very thought of which — as Zophar
urges — ought to silence Job's impious challenges,
is apparently, for all that, pretty clearly understood
by Zophar himself, who blandly proceeds to expound
it. Often in religious debates a cloak of humility
has covered a claim to something like omniscience.
Zophar, however, has nothing to offer but the old and
exasperating explanation which associates suffering
with previous sin, and which is more cutting to Job
than the calamity itself.

"For well He knoweth vain men,

He looks upon sin and He marks it." (xi. n).

It is significant that this friend makes no appeal
to authority of any kind in support of his conven
tional statements. Eliphaz had rested his case on
" revelation," Bildad on " tradition " : if these
fail to carry conviction — a direct message from
heaven, and the matured wisdom of the fathers
— what is left ? The average man, with his common
sense, is left : and on this Zophar is content to rest
his case.

" Even a senseless man may be taught,

As a wild ass's colt may be caught." (xi. 12).

Men, like colts, learn sense by suffering. It is a
somewhat coarser version of the truth put forward
by Eliphaz, that suffering is disciplinary (v.

Unsearchable Wisdom

Considering the unexplained misery of the older man
before him, this saying and simile of Zophar's
are stamped with a callousness, different indeed in
kind, but similar in spirit to that of the other two
friends (cf. v. 4, viii. 4). It is characteristic of the
youthful and fiery Zophar that he thinks to dispose
of a great and heart-breaking problem by a witty
proverb. We begin to feel how bankrupt is the
wisdom of the friends, and how little it can do for a
bold and resolute thinker like Job.

In spite, however, of his flippancy and insolence,
Zophar means well, and he, like his friends, closes
with a gracious promise, expressed in language of
much beauty : for the writer, though he has little
sympathy with the friends, never seeks to win an
easy victory over them by holding them up to
ridicule. He lavishes upon the form of their
argument the same wealth of genius as he expends
upon his hero :

"Now if thou would Jst prepare thy heart,

And stretch out thy hands unto Him,
And put away sin from thy hand,

And let wrong dwell no more in thy tent,
Then thy face thou would 'st lift without blemish,

And thou would'st be steadfast and fearless.
Yea, thou would'st forget thy sorrow —

As floods that are passed would'st thou think of it.
Brighter than noon would thy life rise,

Thy darkness would be as the morning.
Secure would'st thou be in thy hope :

Thou could 'st lie without trembling or care,
Lay thee down without one to affright thee,

And many would sue for thy favour." (xi. 13-19).

It is to be noted that the condition of Job's restora
tion is a penitent return to God. This is precisely

The Problem of Pain

what the other two friends had urged (v. 8, viii. 5).
How it must have stabbed the heart of the man who
all his life had feared God and shunned evil, and who
even now was yearning for God to return to him.

Throughout the first cycle of speeches the friends,
though they have said many irritating things, have
had Job's welfare at heart, and have honestly sought
to guide and comfort him. They have their sus
picions of his integrity, and they have expressed
them, but they have not accused him of heinous
sin. Their real mind about him, however, comes out
ominously in the last words of Zophar :

"But the eyes of the wicked shall fail,
The place of their refuge is perished.
Their hope is — to breathe their last."

Doubtless this utterance skilfully identifies the
wicked with Job's enemies, and has the effect of an
unconscious prophecy of the fate of the friends ;
but beneath the words we cannot help feeling that a
warning is intended for Job himself, especially as
more than once he had uttered his desire for death.

JOB'S INDEPENDENT CRITICISM OF THIS WORLD AND
His GLIMPSE BEYOND IT (Job xii.-xiv.)

The friends have all now spoken, and Job thinks
very little of what they have had to say. He meets
it with a sarcastic proverb to match the proverb with
which Zophar had disposed of the great problem
(xi. 12).

"Verily ye are the people

And wisdom shall die with you." (xii. *).

Woe betide the world when Zophar and his friends
leave it, for only fools will then be left in it. But
in sober truth their expositions are the veriest
trivialities, familiar to everybody, familiar — he
scornfully adds — to the very animals themselves.

" But, like you, I have understanding :

Who knoweth not things like these ?
Inquire of the beasts — they will teach thee ;

The birds of the air — they will show thee;
The creatures that crawl — they will teach thee ;

The fish of the sea — they will tell thee.
For which of them all doth not know

That the hand of Jehovah hath wrought this —
In whose hand are all living souls,

And the breath of all human kind ? " (xii. 3, 7-10).

Well might Job claim to have understanding as well
as the friends ; all that they had said about the
greatness and the mystery of deity, he too had
maintained with equal, nay with superior power.
Above all, he had read the facts with independence ;

The Problem of Pain

and, caring not how far his conclusions deviated
from the findings of " revelation " or tradition, he
had discovered that

"It is tents of robbers that prosper,

And those that vex God that are safe —
Those who say, ' Is not God in my hand ? ' "

(xii. 6).

Honesty was the ruinous policy : the road to success
was made by trampling upon the rights of men and
the laws of God.

His opinions may be right or they may be wrong ;
but at any rate they are unconventional, and they
are his own.

" Doth not the ear test words

As the palate tastes food for itself ? "(xii. n).

This is one of the great emancipating words of the
book. The true thinker must take the facts between
his teeth, and taste the world for himself. He has
no more right, and no more need, to accept on these
points the verdict of another man than to accept his
decision on the taste of food. Every palate has the
power, the right, the duty, to decide for itself :
and no man can taste by proxy. As with food, so
with facts. Job will enslave his minoTTo noTnan.
His ear will test for itself the words which enshrine
the wisdom of the ancients and challenge them, if
need be. He claims for himself the right which the
fathers exercised, of using his own mind and reaching

Ihis own conclusions. Here again (cf. x. 2), the voice
of the Protestant speaks, asserting alike the right and
the duty of private judgment. Zophar had thought
to silence Job by pointing him to the inscrutable

Job's Independent Criticism

wisdom of God (xi. 7-9). Job refuses to be silenced;
he owes it to his own mind to demand an answer.
His is the true scientific temper, which collects and
investigates all facts, welcome and unwelcome, in the
belief that they are ultimately coherent and
intelligible. It is, as a biographer of Maeterlinck
has said, " the spirit that does not seek, like the
traditional religions, to create a reputation for itself
of inflexibility and infallibility, certifying the un
certain and striving to adjust the facts or supposed
facts to theories, but which plainly states difficulties
and loyally constrains theories to bend humbly
before the phenomena that prove them untenable
or doubtful."1 The power to read the facts does not
depend upon age —

" Doth wisdom depend upon years,

Understanding on length of days ? "(xii. 12) —

but upon intellectual honesty and insight.

And what does Job see when he looks at the world ?

Many a psalmist had seen it to be full of the goodness

. of God : " O taste and see that the Lord is good "

(Ps. xxxiv. 8). Job tastes and sees — not this, but

only that

" With Him is wisdom and might,

Understanding and counsel are His. "(xii. 13).

Infinite might directed by infinite skill, but not a
trace of morality, of goodness, of justice or love.
The solemnity with which he delivers his report is
indicated by the twice repeated Behold !

1 From the French of Gerard Harry, by Alfred Allinson, A
Biographical Study of Maurice Maeterlinck, p. 41.

The Problem of Pain

" See ! He breaketh down, and who buildeth ?

Imprisons, and none can set free.
See ! He holds back the floods, and they dry ;

Then He hurls them on earth and confounds it."

(xii. I4f).

Through his own sombre experience he looks out
upon the world, and he sees upon the arena of history
what he had seen before in nature (cf. chap, ix.) —
a great, capricious, devastating Omnipotence,
which overturns peoples and mountains with equal
ease.

" The wise men of earth He makes foolish,

The judges He turns into madmen.
The fetters kings rivet He loosens,

And binds their own loins with a chain.
He leadeth priests barefoot away,

Ancient families He overturneth.
He removeth the speech of the trusty.

The elders He robs of discretion.
He poureth contempt upon princes,

He looseth the belt of the strong.
He revealeth the deep things of darkness,

The gloom-wrapped He bringeth to light.
Earth's chiefs He bereaves of their judgment ;

They wander in trackless wastes,
Where they grope in the unlit darkness,

And stagger like drunken men." (xii. 17-25).

These glowing lines are doubtless a reflection of the
sorrowful soul of Job, but no less of the misery of
some period when ancient national landmarks were
being removed, when the contemporary political
order was being overthrown, and a confusion reigned
similar to that which we are witnessing to-day.
One of the most amazing and intellectually heroic
things in the writer of the book is that, unlike some
of his contemporaries, he refuses to seek refuge from
the sorrows of the present in some future Kingdom of

Job's Independent Criticism

God, or to comfort his soul with apocalyptic visions.
He looks the facts full in the face, and seeks his
explanation among them, not beyond them in some
area not amenable to the control of evidence.

Now the appalling facts which he has emphasised
are indisputable : he has seen them with his own
eyes and examined them with that independence
which he has just been claiming as at once his right
and his duty.

" Lo ! all this mine eye hath seen,

Mine ear hath heard it and marked it." (xiii. i.).

He turns with scorn from the conventionalities of
the friends who would seek to " besmear " the facts,
to whitewash with their falsehoods the perplexing
order of the world, and to heal with their inanities
the deep wound of his heart. He reminds them that
their only chance to pass for wise men will be to say
nothing at all ; and he resolves to turn from them
to God Almighty who alone can help, and argue his
case before Him.

^ " What ye know, that I know too :
I am not one whit behind you.
But I would addresss the Almighty —

Tis with God I am longing to reason :
For ye are smearers of lies,

Good-for-nothing physicians, each man of you."

(xiii. 2, 5).

I Here again flashes out that irrepressible confidence
Jin God and His reasonableness, which no accumu
lation of facts could slay. The bitter mood is
passing, at least for the time, and the deeper thing
in the soul of Job is coming to the surface. But
before he appeals to the God in whom we feel he

The Problem of Pain

is trusting in spite of everything, he turns to the
friends and discharges upon them a searching and
solemn rebuke for their flimsy apologetics and their
immoral defence of God ; for every defence must be
not only inadequate but immoral, which ignores or
explains away inconvenient but undeniable facts.

"Now listen to this mine indictment,

Attend to the plea of my lips.
Is it God that ye utter your lies for ?

Do ye speak your deceit for Him ?
And to Him would ye show your favour ?

And God's is the cause ye would plead ?
Were it well il He searched you out ?

Can ye mock Him as men are mocked ?
For He will punish you sore,

If ye secretly show Him your favour.
Shall His majesty not make you shudder ?

Shall the dread of Him not fall upon you ?
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes,

Your bulwarks are bulwarks of clay." (xiii. 6-i2(.

These, as one has said, are truly " golden words."
God needs no favouritism ; and Job assures his
friends — so confident is he in His eternal justice —
that God will not only decline to accept their
defences of Himself and His ways, but that He will
not even tolerate them : nay, He will summon all
those terrors, which Job has already so vividly
described, to strike down those self-constituted
champions of His, who in reality are not defending
Him at all, but rather their own narrow and bigoted
conceptions of Him. He needs no defence but the
truth, but it must be the whole truth. The friends
have forgotten that God lives and moves. They
have their settled views of the universe, resting on

Job's Independent Criticism

revelation, tradition, dogma, into which no new or
disconcerting facts may be allowed to intrude ;
or, if they do enter, they must be instantly accommo
dated to the scheme, instead of being allowed to
modify it, if the scheme, as it stands, cannot find
room for them. Their theology is a finished product,
and, because finished, it is dead. But Job's is a
living mind, alert and responsive to every new
phenomenon : he believes in a living and a moving
God, whose work is never done, and whose revelation
is never over. The " maxims " with which the
friends placidly settle the stupendous world-problem
were once indeed glowing convictions in the minds of
those who coined them, but the glow of the early
vision has died in its passage across the generations
and become cold ashes. The " bulwarks," defences,
apologetics, as we call them, go down before the first
serious attack of an honest mind alive to the facts
of to-day. The writer's scorn for ancient defences
which no longer meet modern needs could not be
better indicated than by his threat of the divine
terrors which await those who take shelter behind
them. He is preparing us for the doom of the friends
in the Epilogue (xlii. 7). Every word of Job
at this point thrills with the conviction that God
is just — not merely wise and mighty, as he had
formerly maintained — and will see justice done.
His old confidence in God is not merely reviving, it is
aglow ; and its re-emergence, after the bold and bitter
challenges of the previous chapter, is peculiarly
refreshing and significant of the fundamental
security of Job's faith. His feet are on the rock.

The Problem of Pain

He feels that it is no longer with the friends that
he has to do, but with God ; and, though his life is
being gradually crushed out of him by the unen
durable pains and horrors of a disease sent, as he
believes, by God, he is desperately resolved to take
all the risks of meeting Him face to face, in order to
present his case and defend his character. His
happiness and prosperity have vanished, His physical
existence is being swiftly destroyed : but all that is
as nothing if he can only vindicate his moral per
sonality. And in the very thought that he dare thus
venture to approach Him, he experiences a sudden
access of comfort. This high resolve is itself a
guarantee of his innocence, for no hypocrite would
willingly approach so terrible a Presence. Behind
the terror Job knows at the bottom of his soul that
there is a Justice to which he may with confidence
appeal, and he is prepared to die rather than have
his innocence suspected.

" Be still, let me be ; / will speak —

Then upon me come what may.
I will take my flesh in my teeth,

I will put my life in my hands.
See ! He slays me, I cannot endure ;

But my ways will I defend to His face.
And this also shall be my salvation,

That a hypocrite dare not approach Him.
Hear now my speech with attention,

As I declare in your ears.
Attend as I set forth my case,

I know that the right is with me ;
And if any disputeth against me,

Then I would be silent and die." (xiii. 13-19).

He is preparing to meet his God, when the old
sense of his helplessness comes over him again

Job's Independent Criticism

(cf. ix. 34). How can he, as he is, face God, as He is,
with any hope of doing himself justice ? — he, the
poor, emaciated, tortured man face the terrible God
of the earthquake, the eclipse, and the storm ?
The Judge and the defendant will meet on too pathet
ically unequal terms. So Job first asks that the
awful leprosy be lifted from his body, and the terror
of the divine majesty from his soul, and, thus
emancipated from his disabilities, he professes him
self willing to face the Almighty without flinching —
ready to answer any charge that He may bring, or to
make his own statement first, and calmly await the
answer of the Almighty.

"But two things alone do not unto me,

Then I will not hide from Thy face.
Lift the weight of Thy hand from off me,

And let not Thy terrors appal me :
Then call Thou, and I will answer ;

Or let me speak, and answer Thou me.
How great is my guilt and transgression ?

Acquaint me with my sin." (xiii. 20-23).

There is superb audacity in all this ; such an audacity
as is only possible to conscious integrity of the Old
Testament type. In the sequel, as we shall see,
something very different happens. There is no
debate : when God finally speaks, Job is dumb
(xl. 41). Still, his apostrophe here is nothing less
than magnificent. With his good conscience he is
ready to appear before God and speak to Him
unafraid, as a man to his friend, leaving Him free
to open or close the debate as He pleases. For
all his sense of the sovereignty of the Presence he is

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willing to confront, Job uses language which daringly
suggests something like equality ; but behind the
audacity lies an overwhelming faith in the person
ality, the reasonableness, the friendship of God,
which is worth a thousand of Eliphaz's revelations
or Bildad's traditions.

He calls, and with beating heart he listens for an
answer ; but no answer comes. Then " his un
friended and solitary spirit shrinks back into its
tenement of pain/'1 and he cries :

"O why dost Thou hide Thy face,

And count me as Thine enemy ?
Wilt Thou harass a leaf that is tossed ?

Wilt Thou chase the withered stubble,
That Thou passest a judgment so bitter,

Entailing upon me the sins of my youth ?
Thou dost fasten a block on my feet,

And set watch over all my ways.
Round my roots Thou cuttest a line,

Setting bounds that they may not pass." (xiii. 24-27).

Job does not deny that he shares the sinfulness, as
the frailty, of humanity : but he cannot believe
that for common and inevitable sins God would
impose upon him a penalty so dreadful, and he knows
not how else to account for His pitiless vigilance and
persistent hostility. So far is Job from being worthy
of those fierce assaults, like the primeval monster
whom it took the great God to slay (cf. vii. 12), he
is only too conscious of being nothing but a driven
leaf or withered stubble. Why should the Almighty
harass the frail one so ?

1 G. G. Bradley, Lectures on the Book of Job, p. 116.
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Job's Independent Criticism

From the sorrow of his own life Job now passes,
as was natural to so generous a heart, to the con
templation of the pathos of all human life. Formerly
he had dwelt upon its toil (vii. iff), now he is thinking
of its transiency : and he wonders that God should
bring to so stern an account a being whom He has made
so frail, and exposed, by the very constitution of his
nature, alike to the ravages of care and sin. In a
spirit very different from Eliphaz (iv. i8ff), he argues
that the frailty of man's moral nature is a reason
why God should deal with him in clemency. Besides,
his time is so short ; and all he asks is that, like an
over-wrought servant, at the end of the day, he
may be permitted to spend the brief evening of his
life in peace, before the everlasting night descends
upon him.

"Man that is born of a woman

Is of few days and filled with trouble.
He comes forth like a flower and he withers,

He flees like a shadow and stays not.
On such dost Thou open Thine eyes ?

And him would 'st Thou bring to Thy judgment ?
Who can bring from the unclean the clean ?

Not one is free from sin.
Seeing, then, that his days are decreed,

And the tale of his months is with Thee,
Look away, and let him have peace,

To enjoy, like a hireling, his day." (xiv. 1-6).

Yes, the night is everlasting ; so that, if there is
no hope here, there can be none there. But there is
hope here — at least for a tree ; and here the great
sufferer startles us with one of his most touching and
beautiful thoughts :

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" For hope there may be for a tree ;

Though cut down, it may sprout once more,

And the shoots therefrom need not fail.
Though its root in the earth wax old,

And its stem be dead in the ground,
It may bud at the scent of water,

And put forth boughs like a plant." (xiv. 7-9).

Travellers tell us that it is still the custom, in the
neighbourhood of Damascus, to cut down old and
decaying trees near the roots, and that, when plenti
fully watered, they put forth shoots again. In
happier days Job had watched this phenomenon
with those clear and penetrating eyes of his :
perhaps he sees it now, in an inspired moment, as a
parable of the new life to which man shall awake,
when Death has laid his axe to the roots of his present
life — for how much better is a man than a tree ! —
and for one bright moment his bruised mortal body
stands before his enraptured eyes, clothed with
immortality, on the other side of death. But the
next moment the vision has vanished.

" But the strong man dies and lies prostrate :
Man breathes his last, and where is he ?

Like the floods of a vanished sea,
Like a river dry and withered —

Till the heavens be no more, he awakes not,

Nor ever is roused from his sleep." (xiv. 10-12).

We see, as we have seen before (vii. 91), how Job
is fascinated by the thought of the Beyond. It is
too good to be false, and nature points that way ;
but the facts of human experience, those facts from
which Job never flinches, are all against it ; and
sadly, but deliberately, he puts the thought away.

Job's Independent Criticism

Yet he cannot put it away. May it not be true after
all ? He looks at it again spell-bound.

" O wouldst Thou but hide me in Sheol,

Out of sight, till Thine anger be past,
And then call me to mind in Thine own set time,

If a dead man may live once again :
I could wait all the days of my warfare,

Until my release should come.
Thou shouldst call, and I would answer ;

Thou wouldst yearn for the work of Thy hands."

(xiv. 13-15).

Here is one of his most splendidly daring thoughts —
all the more wonderful that he had so recently
longed for death. He is going down swiftly to
Sheol ; but perhaps the inexplicable anger of the
God who is sending him there, will one day be spent ;
and He, the omnipotent One, He to whom nothing is
impossible, will yearn for His faithful friend and in
love summon him back again. It is the old kindly
thought of God which he had for a moment cherished
once before (vii. 21), but now he dwells upon it
more wistfully. We see here the will to believe, the
slow struggle of the soul towards a faith in immor
tality, and we shall see more of it. It is as touching
as it is daring — this thought of the God who has
hidden him in the dark under-world for a season,
but who loves him still and will bring him up again
in His own good time. If this gracious imagination
be true, then Job will no longer ask even for a quiet
even-tide : he will be content to endure his
unendurable anguish, sustained by the thought of
that ineffable meeting with his now reconciled God,

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who has been yearning for Job as passionately as
Job for Him.

This is no doubt a bit of autobiography. It gives
us a glimpse into the soul of the writer, as it struggled
and swayed under its conflicting emotions towards
a faith which meant peace. We see, too, the fertility
of his mind, and its hospitality towards new ideas.
Not only do such thoughts never occur to the con
ventional friends, but they do not even offer them a
welcome : they do not give them a moment's
consideration. This helps us to feel the loneliness
of Job, who, in the hour of his supreme need, is left
uncomforted by the religion of his day with its para
phernalia of revelations, traditions and maxims,
but who takes his splendid leap across to Sheol,
and finds God waiting for him there.

" But now " — after his daring flight he is forced
back into his gloom by the stern realities of the
present—

" But now Thou countest my steps,

And passest not over my sin.
My transgression is sealed in a bag,

Thou hast fastened secure mine iniquity."

(xiv. i6f).

God has been pitilessly watching his every sin,
counting them carefully, hoarding them relentlessly
to bring them forward now, in their totality, in
justification of the penalty He is exacting. The
friends had spoken of the future with hope, but what
hope can there be for him or for any one in a world
whose law is decay and death ? Man crumbles to
dust as surely as the mountains.

Job's Independent Criticism

"But the very hills crumble to pieces,

The rocks are moved out of their place.
Water wears stones to dust,

The floods wash the soil away :
So the hope of man Thou destroyest ;

He lieth, to rise up no more.
Thou dost worst him for ever ; he passeth,

Dismissed — with his face how changed !
Honour comes to his sons, but he knows not:

Or shame, but he doth not perceive it.
But the flesh upon him feels pain,

And the soul within him is sorrowful." (xiv. 18-22).

The whole chapter is of inexpressible beauty. Man
passes from the misery of this present world to that
dull listless life, which is no life, in Sheol, where his
dearest matter not to him nor he to them ; and with
this sorrowful picture the first great cycle of speeches
closes.

The friends, leaning upon their rigid and con
ventional doctrines, have sincerely striven to bring
Job to a better mind ; and, though they have said
many things that wounded him to the quick, they
have on the whole tried to be kindly and comforting,
and they have always ended with a vision of happier
days to come. But Job has stood before them as a
wall of adamant : he has rejected with scorn their
theories which he cannot reconcile with so many
tragic facts. But while their minds have been
stationary, his has been swiftly moving from
point to point : now scorning life, now lamenting
the speed of its passing ; now bewailing the finality
of death, now venturing — if only for a moment —
upon a faith in some sublime experience beyond it.
Behind all his challenges we can detect the gentle

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undertone^of _a faith in God as his omnipotent
Friend. Will this glimmering faith be smothered
by his misery, or will it rise into increasing clearness
and power ? That is the question that rises to our
minds, as we enter upon the second act of this great
spiritual drama.

ACT II
(JoB xv.-xxi.)

ACT II

ELIPHAZ'S APPEAL TO THE UNADULTERATED
DOCTRINE OF THE PAST (Job xv.)

THE friends have listened with something like
consternation to the audacities and irreverences of
Job, delivered, as we may well believe, with a
passion that flashed from his very eyes.

"How fierce the emotions that sweep thee 1

And how thou flashest thine eyes,
As thou turnest thy breath against God
Into words from thy rebel lips." (xv. 121).

Job stands before them guilty — condemned alike by
his misery and by his own wild and impious speeches.
Any lingering doubt they may have cherished as to
his guilt is entirely removed by the arrogance of his
demeanour towards God and themselves, His repre
sentatives.

"Thy guilt instructeth thy mouth,

And thou choosest the tongue of the crafty.
Thine own mouth condemns thee — not I,

And thine own lips are witness against thee."

(xv. 5f).

The very first words of Eliphaz, who resumes the
debate, betray a little temper. Job, he hints, is not
quite the wise man he takes himself to be : his last
long speech, flashing with thoughts too fair and subtle
for mechanical minds, had only bored Eliphaz and
stamped the speaker as a wind-bag. He begins by
asking,

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"Would a wise man pour forth windy answers,

Or fill with the east wind his breast ?
Would he reason with profitless words,

And with speech that is all unavailing ? " (xv. 2f).

Worse, Job is not only unwise, but ungodly ;
by his outspoken impieties he is not only violating
the reverent silence which is seemly in the presence
of God, but he is assailing the very foundations of
religion itself.

" See ! thou art destroying religion,

Disturbing devout contemplation." (xv. 4).

Eliphaz is no doubt thinking partly of Job's (to him)
extraordinary suggestion that God could lightly
pass over sin (cf. vii. 21), but chiefly of his furious
denials of the existence of a moral order, and of his
assertion that the Power behind the world is cruelly
indifferent to moral interests — " He destroyeth
innocent and guilty alike " (ix. 22). But later words
in this speech of Eliphaz lead us to believe that he
is also thinking of Job's defiant repudiation of the
theory of human suffering he himself had so carefully
set forth in his first consolatory speech — as adequately
explained by the inherent sinfulness of man (iv. lyff),
and as having a disciplinary purpose (v. lyf). It
would be altogether in the spirit of the friends to
confuse religion with orthodoxy, to identify it with
their particular interpretation of it, and to condemn
the man who rejected their views as if he had rejected
religion itself — in other words, to consider the
heretic as a practical atheist. It would be amusing
if it were not so tragic ; for there is more genuine
religion, more passionate yearning for God, in one of

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Job's invectives than in all their orthodoxy put
together.

But it is not surprising that the aged Eliphaz,
conscious of being supported in his opinions by the
mature wisdom of his time — for

" With us are the gray and the aged,

More mighty in years than thy father " (v. 10) —

should descend to the language of sarcasm, and ask
Job whence he derives this marvellous wisdom of
which he seems to claim a monopoly. Perhaps he
was a member of the heavenly council, initiated into
the divine secrets, in the distant days when the world
was born ?

" Wast thou the first man to be born ?

Wast thou fashioned before the hills ?
Wast thou one of the heavenly council ?

Was wisdom revealed unto thee ? " (xv. yf).

Eliphaz is thinking, with a sense of superiority, of
the real revelation, trivial though it seemed to Job,
which God had once vouchsafed to him in the dead
of night (iv. 12 ft). Job had scornfully rejected
the friends' commonplaces, dressed up as revelations,
with the words " Who knoweth not such things as
these ? " (xii. 3), and he had summoned them to
listen to his own daring and independent criticism
of life (xii. n, I4ff). Eliphaz is piqued and angry.

"What knowest thou that we know not ?

What insight is thine and not ours ? " (xv. 9).

He does not see the pointlessness of his question :
he forgets that Job knows all that the friends can
tell him — for he has himself been trained in the same

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school — and very much more. To their knowledge
of the theory he adds his own experience of its inade
quacy, he knows the touch of suffering upon his life,
and that has sharpened his eyes to the vast sorrow
of the world.

But the vanity of Eliphaz has been particularly
wounded by Job's rejection of what he is pleased to
call "the consolations of God," the "gentle"
speech of comfort with which he had opened the
debate and in which he had directed Job to his
"revelation," and sought to teach him the disci
plinary value as well as the origin of his sufferings.

"Dost thou spurn the divine consolations,

The word that dealt with thee so gently ? " (xv. 1 1).

How bitterly Job would smile at this allusion to the
" consolations." They were indeed the miserable
consolations of an Eliphaz, but assuredly not " of
God." For Job the tragedy is that God will not
intervene at all, far less to console him : He will not
break His inexplicable silence. But Eliphaz is not
to be moved by Job's ridicule from his beloved
" revelation." He repeats his comfortable doctrine
of human depravity, and almost in the old words :

" What is man that he should be clean,

Or just — one of woman born ?
See ! He putteth no trust in His saints,

And the heavens are not clean in His sight ;
How much less one abhorrent and tainted —

A man that drinks evil like water." (xv. 14-16).

This rather impotent reiteration, this inflexible
adherence to an old formula, is psychologically very
effective, suggesting as it does that Eliphaz, like his

1 02

Unadulterated Doctrine

friends, is a man of ossified mind. His affection
for the single idea he possesses closes his mind to
other ideas, even when they are forced upon him by
a tragedy. How unlike the flexibility of Job, who
eagerly scans the whole range of fact, in nature, in
life, in history. We feel here the writer's tacit
condemnation of a wooden orthodoxy which refuses
to expand or modify in the presence and under the
pressure of new facts.

" Now listen," says Eliphaz. The debate grows
exciting. Job (cf. xiii. 17) and his friends fling about
their appeals for a hearing, each keenly conscious
that he has something of real importance to say,
which the other side is ignoring.

"Now listen to what I will show thee,

The thing I have seen I will tell —

Even tales that were told by the wise

And not hidden from them by their fathers,
Who had the land all to themselves,

When no stranger had yet come among them/'

(xv. 17-19).

Eliphaz, after reminding Job of his wonderful reve
lation, here adopts a position not unlike that of
Bildad in emphasizing tradition (ch. viii.). He
begins by promising to tell Job of something he has
seen, but it turns out to be, after all, only something
he has heard. For one of his conventional religious
type, that will do just as well. The doctrine with
which he is about to regale Job has come down
from the " wise " men of the olden time ; and the
wise men of to-day, like Eliphaz, accept it unques-
tioningly, as Job would, too, if he were the wise man
he thinks he is. It is the " pure " doctrine cherished

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The Problem of Pain

in the old days before there had been any infiltration
of foreign influence. Again, an indirect testimony
to the closed mind of orthodoxy ! No intellectual
stimulus, nothing but mental and moral corruption,
can be expected from circles or nations beyond its
own. " He followeth not with us." What a small
and hermetically sealed world the friends are living in,
irresponsive to the innumerable fructifying influences
beyond it, and blind to many of the most impressive
facts. But let that go. What is, after all, the doc
trine ushered in with this pompous and very flimsy
and questionable guarantee of its truth ? It is this :

"All his days is the wicked in pain,

All the years for the tyrant appointed.
In his ears is the sound of terrors,

In peace comes the spoiler upon him.
He cannot escape from the darkness,

And he is reserved for the sword,
Appointed as food for the vulture —

He knows that his doom is at hand.
The day of darkness appals him,

Constraint and distress overpower him.
For he stretched out his hand against God,

Played the warrior against the Almighty,
Running against Him stiff-necked

With the thick of the boss of his bucklers,

Like a king prepared for the onset.
He covered his face with his fat,

He set thick folds of flesh on his loins ;
And he dwelt in desolate cities,

In houses that none should inhabit.
What he has won, others shall capture,

His substance shall not endure.
The fierce heat shall wither his branches,

His fruit shall the wind whirl away.
Let him not trust his plant when it shoots,

For the branch thereof shall be vanity.
It shall wither before its time,

Before its fronds become green.

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Unadulterated Doctrine

His grapes he shall shed like the vine,
And cast off like the olive his blossom.

For a barren tribe are the godless ;

Tents of bribery the fire shall consume." (xv. 20-24).

It is just the old doctrine of the certain doom of
the wicked, expressed, of course, with the ingenious
variety of its brilliant writer's mind. But there are
two or three points of importance. One is the
thoughtlessness and irrelevance of part of the speech.
In the picture of the bloated, sensuous, corpulent
sinner who rushes like a warrior against the Almighty
— how unlike the bruised worn man whose misery
started the whole problem ! — we cannot help feeling
that the speaker is wandering from the immediate
facts and indulging his gift for rhetoric, as he had
done before in his cruelly thoughtless allusion to
the children (v. 4). It is further of importance that
he dwells now upon the inward penalty of sin. The
sinner is lashed by conscience as well as by misfortune
— the sound of the coming destruction is in his ears.
But most significant of all is it that the well-meaning
Eliphaz should now entirely drop the idle of com
forter and hold before Job the divine terrors. He does
not yet accuse him of heinous sins — that monstrous
injustice is yet to come (xxii. 5ff) ; but he points
with ominous elaboration to the fate of the obstinate
and unrepentant sinner, and leaves Job this time
without a word of hope. This has the natural effect
of alienating Job still more from the friends and
driving him back upon God.

105

JOB'S CRY TO THE WITNESS IN HEAVEN (Job xvi.
and xvii.)

Eliphaz has made it very plain by implication
that the time for consolation is past, and that his
duty now is to operate upon his misguided friend
with the gospel of fear. Job's sensitive soul instinct
ively feels the chill in the temperature. Far from
refreshing his weary spirit, the friends have wearied
him yet more with their voluble commonplaces, and
with his customary candour he has not hesitated
to tell them so.

"Many things such as these have I heard:

Ye are wearisome comforters — all of you." (xvi. 2).

He feels that with disputants like these no progress
is possible ; and, so far as the profit of the debate is
concerned, it might be immediately brought to an
end. With slight variations due to temperament,
age, and mental predisposition, the friends persist
in saying the same things over and over again ;
and we have seen how Eliphaz harps for the second
time upon his famous revelation, which was to
reconcile Job to his lot. The friends repeat them
selves and repeat each other ; there is an intellectual
rigidity about them, which rendered further dis
cussion useless. Their minds only mark time, they
could not march ; and well might Job ask :

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The Witness in Heaven

"Shall windy words have an end ?

What is it that provokes thee to answer ? "

(xvi. 3).

Behind their intellectual rigidity there lay, as
there always does in such cases, a certain lack of
imagination. They had no eyes but for familiar
facts, no minds but for established doctrines, no
power to enter sympathetically into the unfamiliar,
whether a new range of facts or another human
experience. Their comfort is therefore of the
rhetorical order, lacking heart and imagination —
— lip-comfort, as Job calls it — accompanied by an
ominous shake of the head. But Job has imagina
tion as well as intellect. " Were your soul in my
soul's stead " — Job could readily imagine that :
but they could not imagine the reverse, and so they
have nothing steadying or uplifting to say.

" I, too, could speak like you,

Were your soul in my soul's stead.
I could weave words together about you,

And shake my head at you.
I could strengthen you with my mouth,
And encourage you with lip-comfort." (xvi. 4!).

Yes, he could, but he never would : he has too pro
found a sense of human sorrow for that ; and, on
Eliphaz's own confession (iv. 31) what he had really
done in such a case is what he afterwards claims to
have done (xxix. 12-17) — he had " strengthened the
drooping hands : his words had set up the stumbling,
and strengthened the tottering knees."

Since, however, the friends with their cold
comfort have only harrowed his soul and deepened

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his sense of loneliness, his only refuge is in God.
But what a God ! For

"Now He hath wearied and dazed me,

My misery seizes upon me,
It rises for witness against me,

My grief testifies to my face.
In His wrath He hath flung me down torn,

He hath gnashed upon me with His teeth.
My foes whet their eyes upon me,

With open mouth they gape.
They insult me with blows on the cheek,

Coming on in their masses against me.
To knaves God has given me up,

Into wicked hands He has hurled me.
I was happy, when He took and shattered me,

Grasped my neck, and then dashed me to pieces.
He set me up for His target,

On all sides His archers beset me.
He cleaves through my veins unrelenting,

He pours out my gall on the ground.
One breach after another He makes on me,

Rushing at me like a warrior.
Sackcloth I sewed on my skin,

And my horn I have laid in the dust.
My face is red with weeping,

And over mine eyelids is darkness —
Though wrong there is none in my hands,

And though my prayer be pure " (xvi. 7-17).

One or two of the touches graphically suggest
the horror of the disease— the face inflamed, the
spasmodic weeping ; but the deepest horror is that
behind this inscrutable thing is God. The verses
are alive with the strong sense of God's personal
hostility. He is there in the gloomy background,
though He is only once named. It is He that hath
done this : and what He has done is described in
a succession of similes, as if no single picture was
adequate to describe the fury of the inexhaustible

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The Witness in Heaven

wrath which was being hurled upon him. First,
in language palpitating with an energy in which the
fierceness of the assault becomes almost audible,
God is likened to a wild beast which seizes him by
the neck with its claws, crushes and tears him to
pieces, and then flings him down bleeding on the
ground. Then He is compared to an archer (cf. vi. 4.)
who hurls his pitiless shafts at his poor human target,
piercing him through and through ; and finally to
a warrior, storming the wall of an enemy city.
Two circumstances conspire to render these assaults
all the more pathetic : one is that, before they came,
Job had been so strangely happy ; and the other,
that he had led a blameless life. And now this is the
end ! He, an innocent man, is being hurried into
the grave with every circumstance of cruelty by
the God whom he had served so well. He goes down
with his reputation besmirched and unvindicated.

But no ! It cannot be. At this point Job's
spirit takes one of its magnificently daring flights.

" O earth ! cover not my blood ;

No rest let there be to my crying.
Behold, in heaven is my Witness,

And I have a Sponsor on high.
My friends pour their scorn upon me,

But my tear-stained eyes look unto God,
That He plead for a man with God,

And for son of man with his Friend." (xvi. 18-21).

He is being murdered, he is dying : but his blood,
like the murdered Abel's (Gen. iv. 10), can cry
from the ground to the God of justice in heaven, for
the universe is on the side of justice. There is one
there who will hear. In the dazzling light which

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The Problem of Pain

momentarily illumines the gloom of Job's spirit,
he sees Him up yonder. Behold ! he is sure of
Him, not merely of His presence, but of His good
will, of His support, of His advocacy, of His power
and His yearning to testify on his behalf and to
establish his innocence before an unbelieving
world. He prays no more for a little ease or comfort
before he dies ; for before his soul there hovers the
glorious vision of his heavenly Friend, his Witness
and Sponsor on high.

What a passion for character, what a soul of
honour, breathes through words like these ! He has
not yet risen to the wonderful conviction which he
later attains that he will himself see his Vindicator
and his vindication (xix. 25-27) ; but he goes down
to his grave happy in the sublime faith that, though
he will not be there to see it, his character will be
triumphantly cleared ; and that is infinitely more
to such a man than health or happiness or life itself.
Here we see him grasping more firmly thoughts
which had visited him before but which he had not
been able to hold — thoughts of the indefeasible
justice and friendship of God — and he now has the
courage to carry them into the world beyond. He
has now far transcended the sorrowful mood in
which he had said, " Thou shalt seek me, but I shall
not be" (vii. 21). He has a deeper assurance of the
future than when he threw out the tentative hope
that God might hide him for a season in Sheol, till
His wrath be overpast (xiv. 13). He is now con
vinced that the justice to which he had so confi-
4ently appealed (xiii. 7, 16) persists beyond death

The Witness in Heaven

His earthly friends may pour their scorn upon him,
but his heavenly Friend is for him, and that is enough.

At this point Job touches again, only more firmly,
the singular thought he had expressed before, of an
arbiter between himself and God (ix. 33-35). Then
he had lamented that there was no such one, no one
to stand between, laying one hand on God's shoulder
and the other on his, and decide between them both.
But now in this moment of illumination he sees that
in the contest between himself and God, God Himself
must be the arbiter. It is a subtle thought which
reveals two conceptions of God contending in the
soul of Job. He appeals away from the unintelli
gible God who torments him to the Judge of all the
earth, who will do right by the faithful, even after
they are dead. There is no refuge from God but
God, but He will be Refuge indeed.

It is characteristic of the swiftly moving mind of
Job that he can pass immediately from the shining
heights to the blackest depths. He is too sternly
compassed about by the sorrowful facts of the present
to tarry long in the high places to which he has been
swept in a moment of rapture. Like the prophets
who preface many a glorious vision of the future
with " It shall come to pass in the latter days,"
he sees only too plainly the misery and the bitterness
of the days that now are.

" For when but a few years come,

I shall go whence I shall not return.

His anger hath ruined my days,

And for me is left nought but the grave.

Delusion is surely my portion,

On bitterness tarries mine eye." (xvi. 22, xvii. if),

III

The Problem of Pain

Vindication will come — he is now sure of that — but
not here, at least not as long as he lives. And then
he gives utterance to that curious sense, which we
have observed before, of dichotomy in God, that
strange conflict between the inscrutable God who
torments him, and the God who will in the end deliver
or at least vindicate him. It is as if God were
divided against Himself.

" Lav a pledge for me — Thou with Thyself :

For who else would strike hands with me ? "

(xvii. 3).

The thought is much the same as that which he had
uttered but a moment before, that God would plead
for him with God — the God of grace, in whom he
trusts in spite of everything, with the God of wrath,
whose poisoned arrows quiver in his palpitating
flesh. The thought here is the same, but it takes
a slightly different turn. He prays for a pledge of
victory in that day of trial to which he looks forward
with expectation, but which he does not believe
he is destined with his bodily eyes to see. But who
can give such a pledge ? Who can provide a surety
that will satisfy the God whom for the moment he
is compelled to regard as his enemy ? Who but God
Himself ? for none but God can satisfy God. His
words here reveal the unutterable loneliness of his
soul, forsaken as he is alike by man and God — by the
well-meaning friends who lacerate him with their
platitudes, and by the God who abuses His omni
potence to crush him ; but they reveal no less his
indefeasible confidence in a love behind and beyond

The Witness in Heaven

the present distress, in a God who by His ultimate
intervention will justify alike Himself and Job.
With nothing else to sustain him, he sustains himself
completely upon the confidence that the Judge
Himself — no other and no less — will be his surety.

But again from this lofty height he sinks back
into the depths of the unredeemed misery which
besets him behind and before. The sorrows which
surge around him like a sea, the blackness of spirit
in which he dwells, the tortures which rack his poor
emaciated body, reveal him as a marked man —
marked by the anger of God, and marked for the
scorn of conventional men, who believe with only too
painful facility that, as God is just, so men are not
thus tormented for nothing. The hypocrite has
been unmasked at last. His story has travelled
from tribe to tribe and now he is the wonder
and derision of the world.

"Thou hast made me the by-word of nations,

They look upon me as a monster.
Mine eye is grown dim for vexation,
My members are all as a shadow.
My days pass away without hope,

The desires of my heart are extinguished.
The night I turn into day,

And the light is before me as darkness."1

(xvii. 6f, i if).

Infinite loneliness, hopelessness and sorrow
breathe through the words that follow :

1 The noble words of verses 8-10, especially verse 9, which A. B.
Davidson describes as " perhaps the most surprising and lofty in the
Book," hardly seem consonant with the mood of Job at this point,
and should probably be transferred, with many scholars, to the
speech of Bildad, between xviii. 3 and 4.

The Problem of Pain

" If I hope, then the grave is my home,

And my couch I have spread in the darkness.
I call to the pit, ' My mother,'

And unto the worm, ' My sister.'" (xvii. 13!).

Hope is hard to slay, and gleams of it fitfully illu
mine his anguish. But how can hope be cherished
by such a man as Job, whom a cruel and incurable
disease is relentlessly dragging down to the grave,
and whom God and man alike seem resolved to tor
ment to the end — the one by His power, and the
other by his platitudes ? If he timidly ventures to
hope, at once he is mocked by the spectre of the
grave which already is yawning for him. Never
more can there be for him real fellowship in the bright
world above where once, with wife and children and
friends, he was so happy, but only in the blackness
of the grave, where his fellows will be the ugly creep
ing things that harbour there. What is the good, then,
of cherishing hope or speaking of happiness ? and
why add this delusion to the others that embitter
his soul ?

"Where, then, were that hope of mine ?

And my happiness who can espy ? " (xvii. 15).

But he does not rest there. He closes with one
of those astonishing words which, however dark be
the mood in which they were spoken, begin to disclose
new and nobler vistas :

" Will it go with me down to the grave ?

Shall we sink to the dust together ?" (xvii. 16).

The words which lead up to this leave little doubt
that the mood in which it was spoken was one of
almost, if not altogether, utter hopelessness. And

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The Witness in Heaven

yet, as so often happens with the great words of the
Old Testament, it points to something beyond itself.
Job asks a question to which he gives no answer.
The answer he would give in that moment is as good
as certain ; and yet, as the question remains unan
swered, the other alternative is left open. Besides,
in other moods, Job had answered his question in
another and more daring way. He had looked at the
possibility and cherished the hope (xiv. 13-15) that
God would hide him in the dust until His wrath
was overpast ; that, overcome with yearning for the
work of His hands, He would call His servant back
from the nether gloom : and he had felt in antici
pation the thrill of unutterable joy with which he
would respond to that trumpet call. And deep down
in his soul, almost extinguished by the crushing
weight of his sorrows, this hope is glimmering still.
It is, or at least it may be, as it certainly once was :
whether the spark will ever again be fanned into a
flame only the sequel can show.

BILBAO'S PICTURE OF THE SURE AND TERRIBLE
DOOM OF THE WICKED (Job xviii.)

One of the most striking things in the speeches of
the friends — and here the writer is drawing from the
life — is their incapacity to be impressed by the
arguments of Job or by the movements of his mind.
His sublimest appeals they simply ignore. As the
drama unfolds, they show more temper and less
sympathy — less for the man and none for his argu
ment ; they move more and more deliberately away
from the fire of his challenges to the shelter of their
tedious and comfortless orthodoxy. His fairest
thoughts breed in them nothing but impatience,
and for answer they have nothing to offer but
truisms and ill-concealed invective The writer
is subtly suggesting how little of imaginative
response, how little of human sympathy, may be
looked for from men whose minds have been tied
by a system, and who are more concerned to defend
conventional opinions than to face new truth and to
alleviate human suffering.

Bildad's second speech well illustrates this
intellectual and moral callousness. His first
words reveal the impatience and the irritation with
which he had listened to Job's moving appeal to his
Witness in the heavens and his sorrowful lament
touching the hope which is likely to be buried with

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The Doom of the Wicked

him in the dust. The one is too sublime, and the
other too tender, for the pedestrian soul of Bildad.
Like all who care more for orthodoxy than for men,
his chief concern is to present his own case. So he
brusquely begins :

" When wilt thou end thy words ?

Now consider, and we will speak." (v. 2.)

He is mortally offended at the slight that Job had
more than once put upon his intelligence and that
of his friends — all the more that they are so conscious
of possessing the truth, the ancient truth believed
by the fathers (viii. 8) and piously handed on to
their succeeding race, the truth which had actually
been disclosed to Eliphaz in a special revelation
(iv. I2ff.) — while the misery of Job is proof enough of
how far he has swerved from it. Honest men like
Bildad will not be deflected from it by Job's captious
criticisms : they will be more than ever convinced
of the justice of their own opinions.

" Why are we counted as beasts,

And deemed by thee to be dullards ?
Honest men thrill with horror at this ;

A pure man is roused by such godlessness.
But the righteous holds on his way

And the man of clean hands waxes stronger."

(xviii. 3, xvii. 8f).

Job has been candid enough to count them as
beasts : why, it is not they, but he, who is behaving
like a beast, like a veritable wild beast — " thou
that tearest thyself in thine anger." He pointedly
recalls the word which Job, in his last speech, had had
the hardihood to apply to God's treatment of him :
he cannot rise to the height of Job's great argument,

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The Problem of Pain

but he can fasten, in his petty way, on single words.
Job had complained that God in His anger had
" torn " him with his teeth (xvi. 9). " Nay, verily,"
retorts Bildad, " it is thou that tearest thyself ; "
and what he means he at once makes plain, charac
teristically enough, in the language of exaggeration

" For thy sake shall earth be made desert,

Or rock be moved out of its place ? " (xviii. 4).

Job seems to imagine that the whole order of the
universe is to be turned upside down, simply to
accommodate his necessities. We are reminded of
the more modern taunt, " Shall gravitation cease
when you pass by ? " But Job had never really
made any such desperate claim : it is a nobler
thought that inspires his challenges. Doubtless he
feels the world-sorrow most keenly where it impinges
upon himself, for every heart must know its own
bitterness more directly and completely than it can
know that of any other heart. But, as we have seen,
more than once (chaps, vii. and xiv.), it is really a
world-sorrow that Job is voicing in his own laments ;
and the burden of his complaint is that the power
which is so manifest in the world is not manifestly,
or rather not at all, on the side of justice. " He
destroyeth innocent and guilty alike " (ix. 22).

Then Bildad begins to paint his comfortless picture
of the sure doom of the wicked — a doom of darkness
unillumined. Job had dreamt of a future in which,
though he himself would be dead, his heavenly
Witness would make his righteousness shine clear
as the noon-day : but let him not deceive himself.

118

The Doom of the Wicked

God is not mocked. The real truth Job had himself
proclaimed in the saner words with which he had
closed his last speech, and in which he had recog
nized that the grave would be his everlasting home,
and he and his hope alike would go down to the
eternal darkness together.

"Nay, the light of the wicked is quenched,

And the flame of his fire shall not shine.
The light in his tent shall be dark,

And the lamp o'er his head shall go out."

(xviii. 5f).

This, urges Bildad in a curious passage, is the
inevitable doom of those who ignore or defy the moral
constitution of the world. In truth it can neither
be ignored nor defied. The man who tries to run
athwart it will find himself caught in inextricable
toils.

" His great swinging strides become shortened,

His own counsel maketh him stumble.
His foot is thrust into a net,

So that over the net-work he sprawleth.
A snare shall take hold of his heel,

And a trap shall close tightly upon him.
A noose lies concealed on the ground,

And a trap on his path doth await him."

(xviii. 7-10).

This view of the moral universe is true, and there
is something powerful and eerie in the deliberate
accumulation of grim synonyms — something perhaps,
too, significant of the harsh quality of the mind of
Bildad in this view of the world as a gigantic trap.
It is all true ; but, like so much of the truth urged by
the friends, it happens not to be relevant to the case

119

The Problem of Pain

in hand. Hell-hounds may pursue " the wicked "
(v. 5) from one disaster to another ; but Job,
whatever his disasters, we know and God knows to be
a man " blameless and upright." Yet

" On all sides are terrors appalling,
Pursuing him close at his heels.
For him shall misfortune be hungry,

Disaster is ready to throw him." (xviii. nf).

The inexorable Bildad, however, is not content
with generalizations : in a cruel passage, redeemed
by two immortal phrases, he proceeds to sketch the
doom of the wicked in details so vividly and
pointedly suggestive of the sufferings of Job that his
rebuke could not be plainer, had he said outright,
" Thou art the man."

"The pestilence gnaws at his skin,

And the first-born of death at his members.
Then, dragged from his tent in despair,

He is marched to the King of Terrors.
His house shall be haunted by ghosts;

On his homestead shall brimstone be scattered.
His roots shall be dried up beneath,

And above shall his branches be withered.
From earth shall his memory perish ;

No name shall be his on the streets.
From the light he is thrust into darkness,

And chased right out of the world." (xviii. 13-18).

Job was the living, or shall we say the dying,
proof that Bildad's doctrine was true. " The first
born of death," the terrible leprosy, was that very
moment gnawing at his skin — not more cruelly than
the words of his " comforter " were lacerating his
soul. Plucked from the tent where he had had such

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The Doom of the Wicked

happy fellowship with his God and his children, and
driven, under the ban of his disease, to a place on the
ash-heap outside the village, he was even then, slowly
but surely, making his way to the King of Terrors.
In the brimstone to be scattered on the homestead
of the godless Job could not fail to read an allusion
to the " fire of God " that had fallen upon his flocks
from heaven (i. 16) ; while in the tree with its dry
roots and withered branches he could not fail to see,
as he was intended to see, his own wasted, blasted
life ; and the passing of his name from the streets, of
his memory from the earth, of his kith and kin from
human habitation, is a bitter reminder of the fate
that had swept away his sons and daughters. It is
all unspeakably cruel. In the first cycle of speeches
the friends had been drifted by their own rhetoric
into thoughtless and half unconscious allusions to
these things ; but this is a piece of studied and cal
culated callousness, which is sharpened to an even
keener edge by the speaker's closing words :

"The west is appalled at his doom,

And the east is stricken with horror.
Yea, such are the homes of the wicked,

Of those who care nothing for God." (xviii. 201).

The doom, well merited though it be, will be so
terrible that the world, from end to end, will shudder
at it. Yes, such will be the doom ; and all the par
ticulars enumerated are reflected to the last iota
in the experience of the unhappy man before whose
mournful eyes the picture is held up. Job sees
himself deliberately thrown by his friend among
" those who care nothing for God."

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The Problem of Pain

We must do Bildad the justice of admitting that
he spoke his real mind undisguisedly. He can cherish
no hope for his friend, and he extends to him none :
he wraps him in the gloom which he predicted for
him. How will this fresh injustice react upon the
soul of Job ?

122

JOB'S SUBLIME FAITH IN His FUTURE VINDICATION
(Job xix.)

The transparent insinuations of Bildad's speech
create in Job a tumult of emotions upon which he
is eventually lifted to higher heights than any he
elsewhere attains throughout the whole course of
the drama. But he reaches them out of the depths.
It is— in part at least— the despair to which his
human friends have driven him that throw him
at last into the arms of the great Friend. But the
fierceness of the soul-struggle on which Job is about
to enter already trembles through his opening words :

" How long will ye vex my soul,

And crush me to pieces with words ?
These ten times ye have put me to shame,

And set upon me unabashedly.
Well, be it that I have erred —

Mine error abides with myself." (xix. 2-4).

He does not mean by this to admit that he has
erred— certainly not in any degree which would
explain his present misery ; but if the concession
be made for the sake of argument, at any rate that
is his affair, not theirs. The real explanation, how
ever, lay not in sin, but in God. Here, as every
where, Job and the friends are diametrically opposed,
he finding the " root of the matter " (v. 28) in God,
and what he can only think of as His mysterious
and cruel caprice, they finding it in Job himself

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The Problem of Pain

and his sin. Bildad, in his first speech, had recoiled
in horror from the thought that God could " pervert
justice " (viii. 3) ; but this, Job maintains — using
the same word — is precisely what He has done :

" Know then, it is God that hath wronged me,

And compassed me round with His net." (xix. 6).

Bildad had had much to say about the net in which
the sinner must inevitably be caught (xviii. 8) ;
but Job, who is writhing in its toils, maintains that
it is God who has thrown it round him, an innocent
man.

" Behold ! I cry ' Wrong ' — but no answer ;
I call — but justice is none." (xix. 7).

Then he goes on, with an expressive variety of meta
phor, to describe the inexplicable alienation and
hostility of God :

"My way He hath fenced round impassably,

Darkness He sets on my path.
He hath stripped my glory from off me,

And taken the crown from my head " (xix. 8f) —

not only his prosperity, but still more perhaps, as
xxix. 14 suggests, and infinitely more precious to
Job, his reputation for righteousness.

" He hath torn me clean down — I am gone :
He hath plucked up my hope like a tree.
He hath kindled His anger against me,

And counted me one of His enemies.
On come His troops together,

They throw up a rampart against me."

(xix. 10-12)

He feels himself assaulted — as if he were some
mighty fortress, instead of being a broken, emaciated,

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Job's Sublime Faith

anguished man — by those terrible hosts of God,
disease, bereavement, pain, sorrow, despair.

So much for the alienation of God which, to a man
of Job's passion for the divine fellowship and favour,
was the bitterest loss of all. But very terrible also
to one with his generosity of nature and his instinct
for friendship was the alienation of men ; and this,
too, he had to bear — the estrangement, the mockery,
even the loathing, of some whom he had loved and
of others whom he had served. His misfortunes,
his miseries, and., above all, his disease, had stamped
him as a man " smitten of God and afflicted," whom
it was a sacred duty to shun ; and the frightful
physical accompaniments of the disease filled even
his dearest with aversion and horror. The peculiar
sting of his servant's treatment of him can only be
fully understood when we bear in mind Job's own
amazingly gracious treatment of his servants, as set
forth in his concluding speech (xxxi. 13-15).

" My brethren are gone far from me,

My friends have estranged themselves from me ;
My neighbours have ceased to acknowledge me,

Guests of my house have forgotten me.
Maids of mine count me a stranger,

An alien am I in their sight.
To my servant I call, but he answers not,

Till with my mouth I entreat him.
My breath is strange to my wife,

And my stench to mine own very children.
Yea, even young boys despise me,

And mock when I try to rise.
All mine intimate friends abhor me ;

The man whom I love turns against me.
My skin clings to my bones,

I escape with my flesh in my teeth." (xix. 13-20).

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The Problem of Pain

These mournful words could only have been
uttered by a man with a genius for kindliness and
friendship. He had none of that self-sufficiency
which enables an arrogant man to dispense with his
fellows, and the loss of his friends left him with
a feeling of desolation second only to that which he
suffered through the seeming withdrawal of God.
This helps us to understand the vehement appeal to
his three friends which follows :

" Have pity, have pity, my friends,

For the hand of God hath touched me."

(xix 21).

It is unexpected and almost bewildering that Job
should turn in his despair for pity to the very men
upon whose arguments he had showered such sar
casm, irony, and scorn, and whose friendship he had
compared to the waters which vanish when the
thirsty traveller needs them most. But it shows us
two things — his infinite need of friendship, and his
awful sense of the hostility of God. As more than
once he has been driven from the friends to seek
refuge in God, so here he seeks refuge with the
friends from the terrible unseen " Hand that has
touched " him.

Unutterably tragic is the wail which follows, for
no kindly response gleams from those sullen eyes
or frigid faces :

" Why do ye persecute me like — God,
And devour my flesh insatiably ? "

It is as if he said, " Well ye know that God is using
the resources of omnipotence to torture me : will ye
be as cruel as God ? " In this at least the friends are

126

Job's Sublime Faith

all too godlike. For Job it is a moment of indes
cribable tension and unutterable loneliness : in the
heavens above and the earth beneath there is nothing
but rampant injustice and cruelty. To whom can he
go ? To whom can he make his appeal ? God has
forsaken him, his friends have forsaken him, he has
nothing to support him in all the universe but his
own bare word. Well, let that be written down —
this testimony of a good and stainless conscience —
as an everlasting witness. If God will not witness
for him, he will confidently trust his honour to this
imperishable record inscribed upon the everlasting
rock.

" O that my words were now written,

That they were inscribed in a book,
That, with iron pen and with lead,

On a rock they were graven for ever."

(xix. 231).

He appeals away from the friends who misunder
stand, suspect, denounce him, to posterity — that
later world which, with this record before its eyes,
will do him the justice he cannot find among his
contemporaries.

It is a daring and glorious appeal ; but, after all,
it is not enough to satisfy the wronged and lacerated
heart : and after a pause Job, recognizing its
inadequacy, goes back upon it. It is something
more intimate and personal for which his heart is
yearning. Then, by one of those marvellous
revulsions of feeling which reflect so vividly the
tempest of his soul, he rises at one bound out of the
depths of the blackest despair to the sublimest
confidence in the God whom he cannot and will not

127

The Problem of Pain

let go, and he expresses this confidence in language
of unshakable conviction. Unhappily, at this point
both the text and the meaning are unusually obscure.
This is not the place to enter upon a minute dis
cussion of textual difficulties : yet we cannot rightly
understand the speaker's attitude of mind until we
have at least some approximate idea of what he
actually said. How difficult it is to reach certainty
on this point will be readily seen by a comparison of
the three best known English versions. The
Authorized Version reads :

v. 25. " For I know that my redeemer liveth,

And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth :

v. 26. And though after my skin worms destroy this body,
Yet in my flesh shall I see God :

v. 27. Whom I shall see for myself,

And mine eyes shall behold, and not another ;
Though my reins be consumed within me."

(xix. 25-27).

The Revised Version :

"But 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 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."

And the American Revised Version :

" But as for me I know that my Redeemer liveth,

And at last he will stand up upon the earth :
And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed,

Then without my flesh shall I see God ;
Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side,

And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger,

My heart is consumed within me."

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Job's Sublime Faith

The obscurity of the original is seen in the intrusion
of very important and conceivably misleading words,
italicized in the Authorized Version — for example,
" at the latter day" <( though after my skin worms
destroy this body " — for which there is no warrant
whatever in the original. Apart from this, there is
at least one great phrase about whose meaning there
is among translators not only no unanimity,
but positively conflicting and diametrically contra
dictory interpretations. One rendering represents
Job as anticipating a vision of God in his flesh,
another from his flesh, another without his flesh.
The Hebrew preposition means simply from, which
two of the versions have taken to mean from within
and the other apart from. Both meanings are
justified by Hebrew usage, and only the immediate
and the larger context has the right to decide.

But even when the translation is decided, the
meaning is still uncertain : for each of these render
ings is capable of two interpretations, one descrip
tive of Job's condition before death, the other after,
(i) " In his flesh " has been taken, for example,
not very naturally perhaps, to mean " reduced to a
mass of flesh " — the skin having disappeared under
the ravages of the disease ; but the living man, though
thus disfigured, is still blessed with a vision of God.
(ii) It has also been taken to mean " clothed in a
resurrection body." It is easy to see how far-
reaching the consequences of this rendering would be ;
and though there are no thoughts too daring for the
brilliant mind behind this book, the conscientious
interpreter will be reluctant to accept this view

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The Problem of Pain

without the amplest proofs of its probability. But
again, the other rendering " without my flesh "
may mean either (i) "in a disembodied state "
after death — which would yield an idea the very
opposite of that which we were last considering ;
or (ii) " in a fleshless state," that is, reduced to a
skeleton — a view which would approximate to the
first we considered.

All these possibilities are daring and dramatic,
and thoroughly worthy of the context. The picture
of the sufferer, now but a shadow of his former self,
looking out from his bruised and emaciated frame
upon the face of God, is hardly less wonderful than
the picture of him on the other side of death gazing,
whether in some strange new resurrection body or as
a disembodied spirit, upon that Face which had so
long been hidden here. Our decision will partly
depend upon whether we regard Job as thinking
with despair or with kindliness and hope of the world
beyond death ; and, as we have seen, his attitude
on this point fluctuates. It is prevailingly one of
gloom : Sheol is the world of impenetrable dark
ness, from which no traveller returns (vii. 10, xiv.
10) : but in rapt moments he had seen the darkness
illumined by a flash. He had thought of the love of
God as searching for him after he was gone (vii. 21),
as hiding him in Sheol till the divine wrath was over
past, only to remember him and bring him up again
(xiv. I3ff.) ; and if there is anywhere a sublime
moment in the drama, it is surely at the point which
we have reached. This consideration inclines us
very decidedly towards the view that Job is thinking

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Job's Sublime Faith

of the world beyond. Swiftly descending, as he is,
to the grave in humiliation and agony, he comforts
himself with the great and beautiful thought that
he will see God on the other side.

There are other phrases, however, in our trans
lations, either ambiguous or misleading. Take the
most famous — " my Redeemer." At once the word
suggests to our minds redemption from sin, whereas
nothing could be further from the mind of Job
at this moment, when he is looking forward to a
future in which his innocence will be established.
The word here rendered Redeemer is used in Hebrew
to denote the next of kin, whose duty was to deliver
a kinsman from bondage or debt, or to avenge his
blood. What Job longs for is One who will clear
his reputation, and some such word as Vindicator
or Champion is needed to bring this out. Parallel
to this is the word rendered in the Authorized
Version by " at the latter day," in the Revised Ver
sion by "at the last," in the American Revised
Version by " at last." It is not so strong in colour
as these renderings suggest, it simply means " an
after-one," that is, one coming after to establish his
innocence when he is dead. There are other minor
points on which we need not here touch.

It has been instinctively felt by every generation of
readers that the faith of Job utters itself here in the
sublimest form : and it is more than probable that
the fascination of the passage has influenced the
present text, as it has unquestionably influenced the
later versions. The Latin version, for example,
of v. 2$b reads in novissimo die de terra surrecturus

The Problem of Pain

sum, " on the last day I shall arise from the earth" —
which is wrong and misleading in nearly every
particular, most of all in its totally unwarranted
substitution of I for he ; and our own Authorized
Version shows similar,though not so fatal, tendencies.
In the light of these facts, the present text demands
the most scrupulous examination ; and, though this
cannot be done fully here, or anywhere adequately,
without a discussion of the Hebrew original, one or
two points are obvious, and may carry more or less
conviction even to the reader who cares nothing for
the minutiae of criticism.

The most obvious fact is that v. 27 consists of three
lines, whereas practically throughout the whole
book — at any rate in indubitably authentic passages1
— there are only two lines in each verse.2 Probably
therefore, one of these lines is not original. It is
further obvious that the three lines 26b, 2jab, ring
the changes on the same thought in a way rather
alien to the masculine style of Job with its infinite
variety. It might indeed be argued that this linger
ing upon the thought is psychologically motived
by the dazzling power of the vision, as Job sees it
with the eye of faith ; but when the first two lines
(i.e., z6b, 2ja,) are written in Hebrew,* one beneath
the other, they are seen to be composed of almost
identical consonants. For example, the word for

1 The triplets in chapter xxiv. (13-24) and xxx. (2-8) are believed
to be a later intrusion.

1 The last clause of the last verse of the chapter we are discussing
is suspected for good reasons.

3 266 mbsr 'chzh 'lh.
2ja 'shr 'n 'chzh I.

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Job's Sublime Faith

flesh in v. 26b (bshr) differs by only a single consonant
from the word for whom (shr) in v. 2ja ; besides, the
relative (whom) is so clumsy and unusual at the
beginning of a line of Hebrew poetry as to be
altogether improbable in this place ; and this so
strongly tends to confirm the suspicion of the line,
arising in our minds out of its virtual repetition of the
preceding line, that we may with reasonable proba
bility assume that it is not original.

Further, in v. 26a, though it is not impossible to
extricate some kind of meaning from the phrase
after my skin, it cannot be said to be a natural phrase.
Now, as it happens, the outlines of the words for
" after " and " another " are the same in Hebrew
(chr) and for " skin (fr) and " witness " (d) they
are very similar.1 In this context, where everything
turns upon the divine vindication and testimony, it is
surely highly probable that the original reference
is to that " Other" who was to be in the after-time
Job's ' Witness." Now in the similar passage
(xvi. 19) the " Witness in heaven " has for its parallel
the " Sponsor on high." There is indeed no such
parallel in the text here as we have it ; but it is im
portant to observe that the corresponding word from
my flesh, which, as we saw, is so capable of various
interpretations, was not read by the Greek version
at all, which had, on the contrary, a word whose
consonants2 are closely akin to those of the word
translated sponsor in xvi. 19. It does not seem
prudent, however tempting it may be, to build much

1 The consonants d and r in Hebrew differ only by a " tittle."
* mshd.

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upon a word like flesh, which has not the support
of our oldest foreign witness to the text, viz., the
Greek version ; and it seems, on the other hand, very
probable that we have here an echo of the words
used before in a similar, though less exalted, moment
of rapture. Probably, therefore, the whole passage
originally ran thus :

" I know that there liveth a Champion,
Who will one day stand over my dust ;

Yea, Another shall rise as my Witness,
And, as Sponsor, shall I behold — God,

Whom1 mine eyes shall behold, and no stranger's.
My heart is faint in my bosom." (xix. 25-27).

It may seem at first sight a pity that attention
should have been drawn away from this great experi
ence of Job upon a critical discussion. But no dis
cussion can be irrelevant which helps us to enter the
soul of a writer or speaker ; and the words of Job,
thus recovered from later modifications and accre
tions, shine out more gloriously than ever. Every
word is alive with passion. "/ know." The I is
here in the Hebrew emphatic as well as the know :
the American version is right with its " As for me
I know." It is his own conviction that Job is about
to utter — his own and not another's, just as later it
is through his own eyes and not those of another that
he sees his dazzling vision of God. Bildad may be
content to appeal to tradition (viii. 8), but Job must
know for himself — know with his own mind, and see
with his own eyes " I know." He utters here the
deep and settled assurance of his soul. Tossed upon

1 Whom, not in the Hebrew, but inserted here for the sake of
the connection in English.

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Job's Sublime Faith

a sea of doubt, he anchors here at last. He does not
think his ultimate vindication merely possible, or
highly probable ; it is certain : he knows. The
spark of faith which had been all but smothered by
his sufferings and by the rhetorical " consolations "
and orthodoxies of his friends, leaps into flame.
He passes from a mere presentiment of his coming
justification (xiv. 14) through a prayer (xvi. 21)
to the assurance of it. He goes on from strength to
strength till in the end he sees beyond the darkness
to the shining face of God (cf. Ps. Ixxxiv. 7).

It is no abstract or formal vindication with which
he is concerned, no vindication even by the just
voice of posterity. That is good, but it is not enough :
his religion is too warm and personal to be satisfied
with that. He longs for his Vindicator even more
than for his vindication : he yearns for Another, for
One like unto himself, only infinitely greater, who will
speak to him on the other side of death the mighty
word which will establish his innocence for ever.

" I know that my Vindicator liveth." He may
seem to be inert and dead : Job, borne away by his
passion, may have maintained that there is not a
trace of discriminating justice in all the world
(ix. 22} ; but now he is sure that, in spite of appear
ances, God is alive. It is the living God of Job,
not the dead God of contemporary theology, that
quickens his mind to this living thought of Himself.
There is perhaps here, too, a contrast between the
living God and the dead Job. Job must die and that
speedily ; but what matters that, if he trust his
fortunes and his soul to a God who cannot die, but

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who lives and works in the interests of righteousness
for evermore ? The postponement of the word
God to the end of v. 26 conies with overwhelming
dramatic power. When Job speaks of the Champion
who will one day stand over his dust, it is still open
to the friends to believe that he has in view some
human champion, especially as minds so con
ventional as theirs would be little prepared for so
startlingly bold a claim as Job here makes. How
the last words would sound upon their ears as the
utterest blasphemy — " And as Sponsor shall I
behold— God ! "

The vision of God as Witness to Job's innocence
after he is dead and gone, and of himself alive again,
face to face with that God, and hearing from His
own lips the blessed words of justification, so over
powers him that he swoons away in rapture — " My
heart is faint in my bosom ; " and when he returns to
himself, it is to warn his friends of the awful doom in
store for them, if they persist in their attempt to
find the root of the matter in him, that is, to account
for his sufferings by his sins :

"But if ye are determined to hunt me,

And in me find the root of the matter,
Then dread ye the sword for yourselves ;

For wrath will destroy the ungodly." (xxi. 281).

There is an inexhaustible suggestiveness about
this scene. But we must be careful not to be drawn
by the spell of it into inferences which are not
justified by the facts. We have here one of those
flashes of inspired insight which reappear in later
and less original days as doctrines and dogmas ;

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Job's Sublime Faith

but there is nothing here that in any way implies
any developed doctrine of the resurrection. Job
is not contemplating for himself a state of ever
lasting blessedness in the world beyond. He is
interested in the other world primarily as the arena
of his vindication, and he concentrates his gaze upon
the sublime moment when he and his Vindicator shall
stand face to face. That is all : but that is much, it
is almost everything; for if — though but for a moment
— the dead can live again, then the bar between this
world and the other is not insurmountable, the veil
has been rent in twain ; and if life for a moment
beyond it is possible, it will not be long till men will
learn to believe in the life that shall never end.

The germ of the doctrine of immortality is here ;
and it is profoundly significant of the passionately
ethical and religious quality of the Hebrew genius
that this belief in a life beyond is not reached by any
consideration of the animistic nature of the soul.
It is struck like a spark out of the clash of a great
spiritual experience by a passion for the victory of
justice and for fellowship with God. It is felt that
even the last great enemy Death must not and cannot
offer a permanent obstacle to the realization of those
two yearnings of the human heart.

It is strange and sad that Job is not able to hold
the splendid heights to which he has soared. Under
the lash of his friends and the strain of the great
world-sorrow together, he falls back again into his
mood of challenge. But it is something to have touched
those heights, if only for a moment. The man who
falls from them can only fall into the arms of God.r

137

ZOPHAR'S WARNING AND INNUENDO THAT HEAVEN

AND EARTH HAVE ALREADY WITNESSED AGAINST

JOB (Job xx.)

It is the unhappy lot of Zophar, the coarsest
and the noisiest of the friends, to reply to this noble
speech of Job. He replies to it — as the friends for
the most part do when their turn comes — by
ignoring it, launching breezily off instead upon the
sea of truisms and platitudes. The exquisite pathos
of Job's last utterance, the vision which had thrown
him into a transport of rapture and made him faint
for very joy, had left not an iota of impression upon
the prosaic soul of Zophar : at most it had provoked
him — as much of it as he had understood. The
broad arguments, the swift and beautiful intuitions,
are nothing to him : he can only fasten upon single
words, upon warnings and threats that move more
upon the level of his comprehension, upon obvious
exhibitions of temper whose real source and depth he
was incompetent to understand. Job had ended his
speech with a threat of the divine judgment which
would assuredly overtake those who persisted in
finding the root of the matter in him instead of in
God. That Zophar had understood ; and the resent
ment which it had kindled within him inspires his
opening words :

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Zophar' s Warning

" Nay, not so do my thoughts make answer ;

And therefore my heart is uproused.
Must I hear thine insulting reproof,

While mere breath without sense is thine answer ? "

(xx. 2f).

Then he proceeds with the now painfully familiar
homily upon the doom of the wicked : that is all the
friends have now to say. Eliphaz and Bildad had
both descanted eloquently upon this theme, leaving
the man whom they had come to comfort without a
ray of hope. Now Zophar joins the chorus. He
begins rather pompously by inviting Job to contem
plate the great sweep of history which illustrates
so abundantly the thesis he is about to develop, that
the happiness of the wicked is short.

" Knowest thou not this from of old,

From the time there were men on the earth,
That the song of the wicked is short,

And the hypocrite's joy but a moment ?
Though his majesty mount to the heavens,

And his head reach unto the clouds,
He shall utterly perish like dung ;

Those that knew him shall ask, ' Where is he ? ' "

(xx. 4-7).

Zophar, whose speeches proclaim him as a hasty
man, not unnaturally believes in a hasty God, a God
who cannot wait, but must show His hand at every
turn and smite the wicked by a swift and sudden blow
in the middle of his career. If this is Zophar's inter
pretation of history, it only shows either how little
he is acquainted with the facts, or how shallow is
his appreciation of them. He is kin to the man
who sang :

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The Problem of Pain

''Be not kindled to wrath at the wicked,

Nor envious at those that work wrong ;
For, like grass, they shall speedily wither,
And fade like the green of young grass."

(Ps. xxx vii. if)

Or:

"Yet but a little, and the wicked vanish :

Look at his place — he is there no more." (verse 10).

But the profounder thinkers of Israel, the great
psalmists and prophets, whose eyes were opened by
a sorrowful experience of their own or their nation,
never spoke thus. What impressed them was not
God's swift interventions, but rather His mysterious
delays. " How long," asks one,

" How long. O God, is the foe to insult ?

Shall the enemy spurn Thy name for ever ?
Why, O Lord, dost Thou hold back Thy hand,

And restrain Thy right hand within Thy bosom ?
Arise, O God, and defend Thy cause :

Remember how fools all the day insult Thee.
Forget not Thou the uproar of Thine enemies,
The din of Thy foes that ascends evermore."

(Ps. Ixxiv. lof, 221).

And a prophet, astonished that God should watch
in silence the devastating progress of a pitiless enemy,
thus delivers his soul : " Thou that art of purer eyes
than to behold evil, and that canst not look upon
perverseness, wherefore lookest Thou upon them that
deal treacherously, and holdest Thy peace when the
wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous
than he ? Is he to draw his sword for ever and to
slay the nations pitilessly evermore ? " (Hab. i. 13,
17). And for answer he is told that the intervention,
though sure, may tarry, and that one must with
patience wait for it (ii. 3).

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Zophar's Warning

But the duty of patience forms no part of the gospel
of Zophar. He has a simple mechanical creed,
because he fancies himself to be living in a simple
mechanical world. As we saw in his first speech,
the creed which he professes recognizes worthily
enough the mystery that attaches to the divine
nature : it asserts that no investigation can ever
explore that nature to its recesses (xi. 7). But in
truth he only believed that he believed this : his
working creed is very different. After his protesta
tion of humility, he immediately makes it clear that
to him the universe is not so very mysterious after
all. He really believed that the divine action was
an essentially simple thing, entirely within the limits
of his comprehension. Hence the glib exposition
which he offers Job of the ways of providence — an
exposition all the more irrefutable as it is illustrated
by the very fate of the man to whom it is addressed.
It is Job himself who has been soaring and who is
soon to vanish — to vanish in his prime :

"Like a dream he shall fly beyond finding,

Dispelled like a vision of night ;
No more shall the eye see that saw him,

His place shall behold him no more.
His sons shall be crushed by privation ;

His wealth shall his children restore.
The vigour of youth filled his bones,

But with him it shall lie in the dust." (xx. 8-n).

In the passage which follows Zophar offers a very
realistic description of the wicked man's love of sin,
which he elaborately compares to a dainty morsel
that an epicure rolls under his tongue, but which is
destined at the last to turn to poison within him :

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"Though evil be sweet in his mouth,

As he keeps it hid under his tongue ;
Though he spare it and let it not go,

But still holdeth it back in his mouth ;
Yet his food in his stomach is turned,

It is poison of asps within him.
The wealth that he swallows he vomits;

God casteth it forth from his belly.
The poison of asps he has sucked,

And the tongue of the viper shall slay him."

(xx. 12-16).

It is all very true and vivid, but grotesquely
irrelevant as applied to Job who, as the Prologue
reminds us, not only hated sin, but regularly made
atonement even for the bare possibility of it in his
children. But, besides being irrelevant, it is coarse,
— faithful reflection of a mind as indelicate as it was
shallow. The finer instincts of one of the Greek
translators modified the last word of the line " God
casteth it forth from his belly " to house. But this
is to obliterate a characteristic trait and to do Zophar
too much justice. The picture ought not to be
robbed of touches like these, which help us to under
stand what sort of man it sometimes is who sets
himself in opposition to a man of the type of Job.
Not then for the last time did the opponents of theo
logical progress show themselves coarse and abusive.
It would be amusing, were it not so pathetic, to
find Job described by implication as an arch-
oppressor. He who has repeatedly shown the most
tender regard for the lot of the servant, and who has
expressed with such intimate sympathy the servant's
longing for the evening shadow (iii. 19, vii. 2), is
held up to execration as a monster who robbed the
poor of their just gains and who is consequently

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Zophar's Warning

doomed by God to pay a terrible penalty — not only
the negative penalty of disgorging what he has
swallowed, but the positive penalty of assault from
the terrors of the divine wrath.

" No rivers of oil shall he see,

No torrents of honey and butter.
His increasing gain brings him no gladness,

His trafficking yields him no joy.
For he crushed down the gains of the poor,

And he plundered the house that he built not.
His treasures have brought him no peace,

And his precious things cannot deliver.
And since none has escaped his devouring,

His own fortune shall not endure.
Brought to straits in the fulness of plenty.

The fell force of trouble assails him.
God shall let loose His hot wrath against him,

And terrors shall rain down upon him.
As he fiees from the weapon of iron,

The bronze bow pierces him through.
The missile comes out at his back,

And the glittering point from his gall.
Terrors keep coming upon him ;

Deep darkness is stored up for him.
A mysterious fire shall devour him

And ravage those left in his tent." (xx. 17-26).

As Job had once described his own experience of
the divine assault in the imagery and almost in the
very language of v. 25 (xvi. 13) it is abundantly
evident that Zophar, though he may seem to be
indulging in innocent generalizations, is really hurling
venomed shafts at Job himself. If any confirma
tion were needed of a truth which is luminous in
every line of Zophar 's speech, it would be furnished
beyond a peradventure by the conclusion, which
runs thus :

"The heavens shall reveal his guilt,

And the earth shall rise up against him,

The Problem of Pain

His house shall be swept by destruction,

Accursed in the day of His wrath.
Such the wicked man's portion from God,

God's heritage unto the rebel." (xx. 27-29).

Job had appealed to the earth to transmit his
cry to God, and to the heavens to witness for him
(xvi. i8f). They will, says Zophar : the earth will
rise up against him, and the heavens will be witness
to his guilt. Nay, have not earth and heaven
already conspired to proclaim that guilt ? It is
impossible in these concluding words not to think
of the Prologue, where the successive catastrophes
of Job seemed to prove that heaven and earth were
in league against him as a guilty sinner. The
Sabeans and Chaldeans on earth, on the one hand ;
and on the other, the wind that rushed up from the
wilderness, smiting the house that held his children,
and the fire of God that fell from heaven : are not
these things the incontrovertible proof that Zophar
is speaking the truth ? " Such is the wicked man's
portion from God " — and such, only too obviously,
was the portion of Job : the inference to Job's
depravity was inescapable.

It is not without interest that this conclusion
closely resembles the conclusion of Bildad's last
speech (xviii. 21) ; as if the writer were deliberately
suggesting the imitative quality of conventional
minds. They are echoes, not voices. Eliphaz and
Bildad frankly admit that they but reproduce the
fathers (xv. 18, viii. 8). Men of this type have little
that is fresh or helpful to say, and much of that little
they borrow from one another.

144

JOB'S FIERCE INDICTMENT OF THE EXISTING ORDER
(Job xxi.)

The friends have no wall spoken for the second time.
Their personal allusions to the fortunes of Job have
been gradually growing more pointed and exasper
ating. But more exasperating even than those
innuendoes is the false or at least inadequate theory
from which they spring, that the world is governed
on principles of a mathematically exact retribution ;
and this is the theory which Job sets himself to
attack with all the energy of his outraged intelli
gence : for the case, as stated by the friends, is a
travesty of the facts. His opening words are already
heavy with the burden of the coming assault : they
disclose a soul charged with the solemnity of the
challenge it has undertaken in the interests of
truth.

" Hear now my word with attention :

Your consolation be this.
Suffer me, for I would speak also :

Then, when I have spoken, mock on.
Is it man that I would complain of ?

And why should I not be impatient ?" ^xxi. 2-4).

With an ironical allusion to the " divine consola
tions " Eliphaz had administered to him in vain
(xv. n), he declares that the only consolation he asks
of them is that they listen in silence to the terrible
truth about the government of the world which

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he is about to unfold. The most terrible truth of all
is that behind that government is God Himself.
Were human conduct all that Job had to complain
of, he could comfort himself with God . but, when
it is God Himself who, whether from indifference
or caprice, has created the problem, why should he
not be " impatient " almost unto fury ?

At the same time the speech which follows is not
delivered primarily with the idea of indicting God
for His government of the world : its aim is rather to
demolish the retributive theory of the friends, which
alleged that every sufferer was a sinner, by pointing
to an order of facts which they had conveniently
ignored. But they are not to be ignored, urges Job ;
they are clear enough to honest eyes ; the very
thought of them, to say nothing of the sight of them,
makes him shudder. And even the friends, unless
their eyes are blinded and their hearts irredeemably
hardened by their orthodoxy, must listen with horror
to a recital so terrible.

" Now listen to me ; and, in horror,

Lay ye your hand on your mouth.
When I think of it, I am confounded,

And shuddering seizeth my flesh." (xxi. 5f).

These words prepare us for an unusually fierce
attack upon the conventionalities of the friends and
a merciless exposure of some of the facts that make
faith hard. He begins with the old Protestant
challenge that had characterized his very first speech.
— " Why ? " The reason within him demands to
find its counterpart in the world without, and it is
the failure to find this correspondence that staggers

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Job's First Indictment

faith. The expectation is mocked by the facts.
At any rate Job's expectation has been mocked by
facts which have thrust themselves upon him, and
which he now proceeds to set forth with a remorseless
detail which shows that he is not moving in the region
of generalizations. He had claimed to be a man of
observation and of independent judgment (xii. u)
— to have a palate with which he tasted for himself :
he did not trust without verification the verdict
of others. He therefore confronts the eloquent
commonplaces of his friends with the more than
disconcerting results of his own independent
observation :

"Why are wicked men suffered to live,

To grow old and wax mighty in power ?
Their seed is established before them,

And their offspring in sight of their eyes.
Their homes are strangers to terror,

No rod of God is on them.
Their bull doth unfailingly gender,

Their cow never loses her calf.
Like a flock they send forth their young children ;

Their boys and their girls dance.
They sing to the timbrel and lyre;

At the sound of the pipe they make merry.
They finish their days in prosperity,

And go down to Sheol in peace —
Though they said unto God, ' O leave us,

We desire not to know Thy ways.
Why should we serve the Almighty ?

And what is the good of prayer ? '
See ! their fortune is in their own hand :

Nought He cares for the schemes of the wicked."

(xxi. 7-16).

The bitterness of the description lies in this, that
every detail of it is contradicted by Job's own
experience. " Blameless and upright, fearing God

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The Problem of Pain

and shunning evil," the blessings enumerated ought to
have been his — happiness at home, prosperity
abroad, a long life, a peaceful death : instead, they
fell to atheists who cared nothing for prayer or
worship, and who openly flouted God and His will.
As for him, though he had served God continually
with the most scrupulous piety, he had been con
demned to every conceivable torture of mind and
body, the rod of God had smitten him with many
stripes, he was going down in agony to a premature
grave. But the contrast reaches its climax of pathos
in the allusion to the band of children who go forth
like a flock, and who merrily dance to the sound of
music, while Job's own children are lying dead
beneath the ruins of their house.

Such, then, is Job's reading of the world — in
flattest contradiction to the verdict of the friends.
He gives the lie direct to their very words as well as
to their thoughts. With an evident allusion to
Bildad's easy dictum that " the light of the wicked
is put out " (xviii. 5) — apparently a favourite
statement of orthodox Israel, as it occurs twice
again in the Book of Proverbs (xiii. 9, xxiv. 20) —
Job scornfully asks,

" How oft is the lamp of the wicked put out ?
How oft does disaster assail them,
Or the pains of His anger lay hold of them ? "

(xxi. 17).

He does not maintain that this never happens, but
he knows too well that it does not always or even
often happen, as on the theory of the friends it
should. A prevalent belief in Israel, which finds

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Job's First Indictment

pictorial expression in the first Psalm, is that the
wicked are like the chaff which the wind driveth
away ; and at this statement, too, is hurled the
scornful challenge,

" How often are they as the straw before wind,

Or like chaff that is stolen by the storm ? " (xxi. 18).

Here we can imagine the friends, overcome by the
vehemence of the speaker and the inexorable logic
of his facts, sullenly conceding his contention that
the wicked man may fare brilliantly. But their
faith in the moral order is in no way disconcerted
by this circumstance ; for, if the sinner escapes, they
can still affirm that his children suffer ; and this
satisfied ancient conceptions of solidarity, such as are
suggested in the appendix to the second command
ment, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the
children, and such as are illustrated by the story
of Achan, where the children suffer, if not instead of,
at any rate, as well as, the guilty father (Josh. vii. 24!).

But such beliefs and practices are revolting to Job :

" God stores up his guilt for his children,"
(" Nay," I reply) ; " let Him punish
The man himself, that he feel it.
Let his own eyes behold his disaster,

Let him drink the wrath of Almighty.'
For what doth he care for his house,

When his own tale of months is cut short ? "

(xxi. 19-21).

He is, as we have seen, the sworn champion of the
sacred rights of personality ; and, just as he main
tains that every man must face the facts and
" taste " the flavour of the world for himself, so he
maintains the right of every man to be protected

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The Problem of Pain

from punishment for sins of which he was not guilty.
He lifts up the same sort of protest against current
conceptions as is raised by Deuteronomy (xxiv. 16),
" The fathers shall not be put to death for the
children, neither shall the children be put to death
for the fathers " ; and still more pointedly by
Ezekiel (xviii. 4), " The soul that sinneth, it " —
it, and no other soul — " shall die." Men cannot be
saved, and should not be punished, by proxy, and
Job's righteous soul is just as much incensed by the
penalization of the innocent as by the escape of the
guilty. This new fact, to which they appeal in
support of the moral order, is only another proof that
there is no such thing as a moral order at all. This
thought Job now proceeds to elaborate in lines of
astonishing pathos :

"One dies with his strength unimpaired,

In the heyday of ease and prosperity;
Filled are his buckets with milk,

His bones at the marrow are moistened.
And one dies with soul embittered,

With never a taste of good.
In the dust they lie down together,

The worm covers them both." (xxi. 23-26).

Job is not here saying that the wicked live in ease
and die in peace, while noble souls like himself go
down to their grave embittered. What he says is
subtler and sadder even than that : it is that in the
distribution of human fortunes, merit plays simply
no part at all. Moral considerations are not even
paid the respect of being defied, they are simply
ignored. There is no moral order, there is not even
a definitely immoral order ; there is simply no order

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at all. We are living in a world in which anything
may happen to anybody ; and in the world beyond
— to which one might look with humble hope for the
rectification of anomalies, and to which not long
before Job himself had looked forward with a delirium
of joy — there is no difference : " In the dust they
lie down together, the worm covers them both."
It is the same pessimistic protest against the indiffer
ence of things as we find in the later Hebrew thinker
who lamented that " all things come alike to all ;
there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked ;
to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean ;
to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth
not " (Eccl. ix. 2).

From this contemplation of the pathos and
seemingly utter meaninglessness of all human
destiny, Job returns, as is his wont, to the immediate
facts. He had been deeply pained by the innuen
does of the friends. They had not yet directly
accused him of heinous sin — that crowning insolence
is soon to follow : but, after describing his misery
to the letter, they had blandly asserted that such
was the fate of the wicked. It did not need the
quick intelligence of Job to discover that their
generalizations were really meant for him.

" Behold ! I know your thoughts,

And your cruel devices against me,
In asking, ' Where lives now the tyrant ?

Where now does the godless dwell ? ' " (xxi. ayf).

He knows very well that he himself is the godless
tyrant, at whom, cruel as God (xix. 22) they have
been aiming their poisoned shafts. But it is only

The Problem of Pain

their inexperience of the great world, he now reminds
them, that leads them to statements so unqualified
and to doctrine so inept. Every traveller knows how
false their position is. The whole course of the
debate has revealed their native incapacity to enter
sympathetically into another mind, and they have
not had their individual and national limitations
corrected by such an experience as travel gives.
They have never been beyond the borders of Edom,
nor have they taken the trouble to consult those who
have. Even had they done this, it would have made
little difference, for minds enthralled by the doctrines
to which they have been trained are not hospitable
to uncongenial truth.

" They take the rustic murmur of their bourg
For the great wave that echoes round the world."

But men who have travelled up and down the
world, as the writer of this book appears to have
done, know very well that many a tyrant has been
happy in his life-time and publicly honoured in his
death :

"Have ye never asked those that travel ?

Have ye never noted their proofs
That the wicked is kept from disaster,

Is saved in the day of wrath ?
Who tells him his way to his face,

Or requites him for what he hath done ?
And yet he is borne to the grave,

And men keep watch over his tomb.
Sweet for him are the clods of the valley,

And after him all men draw." (xxi. 29-33).

The vividness of these lines strongly suggests that
they portray an actual scene — of some mighty
monarch, it may be, who had wronged countries,

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burned temples, desolated homes, and broken
innumerable hearts, borne amid acclamation to his
tomb in the valley, where he sleeps his sweet sleep
for ever.

These are the facts, and no true comfort can be
offered by th'ose who deny them. Nay, those who
deny them are traitors and fools ; and this trenchant
word, which so scathingly summarizes the friends'
contribution to the debate, brings the second act of
the great drama to an end :

" Why then offer your idle comfort ?

Your answers leave nothing but falsehood.**

(xxi. 34.)

One cannot resist the impression that, in his
sombre indictment of facts, Job has been guilty of
that very one-sidedness for which he had con
demned the friends. He sees, as they do, only some
of the truth, not the whole of it. Still, his attitude
is an immeasurably greater contribution to the
progress of thought than theirs. Or it would be more
correct to say that their attitude renders progress
impossible : the truth is already fixed and formulated,
and all that the pious have to do is gratefully and
reverently to cling to it. But a man with the atti
tude of Job is disposed to travel (v. 29) oeyond con
ventional pronouncements, to keep his mind open
for fresh facts, however disconcerting they
may be to accepted theories, and to find, if he can,
an explanation which will cover all the facts, and
not some of them only : for if it does not cover them
all, it does not adequately cover any of them.
But in no case must inconvenient facts be ignored

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The Problem of Pain

in the interests of a theory, however buttressed by
" tradition " or " revelation/' or coerced within an
artificial scheme.

The course of the debate in the first two cycles of
speeches shows that Job's hospitality of mind is
rewarded by ever deeper glimpses of truth. While
the friends stand still, he is moving on. Always
profuse and not seldom brilliant, they grow less
dignified, less just, more bitter ; but intellectually
they remain where they were. Job, however, moves
from insight to insight. In his earlier moods
(cf. ch. iii.) he had thought of death as the end, and
of vindication he had not even dreamt ; then he
passed to a faith in the certainty of his vindication at
the hands of his Witness in the heavens, the God of
ultimate justice, though he would no longer be alive
to enjoy the ineffable comfort of it (xvi. 19) ; and
finally, there had flashed upon him the great con
viction that not only would he be vindicated after
death, but that he himself would hear the word
pronounced and see his Vindicator face to face, the
God in whom the ancient folk believed as " merciful
and gracious," but who is now seen to extend His
mercy and His grace to His faithful servant in the
world beyond the grave. Job lives in a world of
thought and emotion into which the friends cannot
follow him.

154

ACT III
(JoB xxii.-xxxi.)

ELIPHAZ'S CRUEL AND BASELESS CHARGES (Job xxii.)

There are unexhausted resources in the living
mind of Job ; but the friends, who mistake formulas
for truth, have reached the end of their wisdom.
They have stated and illustrated their theory, they
have scattered their insinuations very liberally
abroad, they have done all that from their standpoint
could be done, except accuse Job to his face of specific
sins ; and this, in resuming the debate, Eliphaz
calmly proceeds to do. But first he reminds Job
of the wisdom and profitableness of piety. It is
good to be good — so he argues — good, that is, for
the man himself : not of course, for God : what can
it matter to Him whether a man is good or not ?

" Can a man bring profit to God ?

Nay, the wise man but profits himself.
Doth Almighty God care for thy righteousness ?
Hath He gain from thy blameless ways ?" (xxii. 21).

There is something peculiarly repellent about this
position of Eliphaz, whether we consider its com
mercial view of religion or its loveless conception of
God. It is as if the writer were never weary of
satirizing the conventional religious type incarnate
in the friends. It would be worth Job's while to be
godly, urges Eliphaz ; for godliness pays, it is profit
able for this life — of any other he has not a glimmer
ing. He does not know, what the Prologue makes

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The Problem of Pain

so clear, that Job's sufferings have come upon him
just because he is a man of pre-eminent godliness —
" none like him in all the earth." He does not know
that there are men like Job, whose goodness is not
stained by the thought of earthly reward, but who
would continue to be good, though they should die
for it. In short, he adopts precisely the attitude of
the sneering Satan of the Prologue, who imagines that
men do not serve God for what He is but for what
they get, not for the love of Him and of goodness,
but only for the substantial returns He sends them.
The religion of Eliphaz could not be more sternly
pilloried than in this implicit comparison.

And his conception of God is on the same mean
level. He worships a God who stands aloof from
men and their struggles, showering upon them from
afar His rewards and penalties, but not really
caring, as He does not need to care, whether they
are good or not. It is they, and not He, who will
suffer for their folly. What a loveless God ! wide
as the poles asunder from the great Friend for
whom Job so passionately yearned. The Bible
from end to end might be regarded as a protest
against this dishonouring fiction of Eliphaz. His
torian, psalmist, prophet, evangelist, apostle, rise
up in indignant repudiation of such a travesty.

" As a father pities his children,

So the Lord pities them that fear Him ;
For well He knoweth our frame,

He remembers that we are but dust." (Ps. ciii. 131).

" As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride,

Even so shall thy God rejoice over thee." (Isa. Ixii. 5).

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Baseless Charges

"There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth" (Luke xv. 10).

It is no surprise that the man who thinks so meanly
of God should be cruelly unjust to his own suffering
friend. With his wooden view of the world, Eliphaz
can only interpret Job's suffering as punishment,
and, as it is obvious that a just God could never
punish a man for his piety, the inference is inevitable
that Job must be guilty of colossal sin.

" For thy piety would He chastise thee,
Or enter with thee into judgment ?
Is not thy wickedness great ?

Are not thine iniquities endless ? " (xxii. 41).

But not content with generalities, the old man, with
incredible effrontery, launches forth upon a detailed
catalogue of sins, which his theory obliges him to
believe Job must have committed and therefore did
commit :

" Thou hast wrongly taken pledge of thy brother,
And stripped from the naked their clothing.

No water thou gavest the weary,

And bread thou hast held from the hungry.

Thou hast sent widows empty away;

Orphan arms thou hast broken in pieces." (xxii. 6f, 9).

The sins alleged are all of that detestable order
denounced so ceaselessly and unsparingly by the
prophets, sins against the rights of the weaker
members of society — the poor, the hungry, the naked,
the widow, the orphan — the refusal of help to the
helpless, the keeping in pledge overnight of the gar
ment the poor man requires for sleeping in
(Exod. xxii. 261), and so on. We know already
from the Prologue that there is not a word of truth

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in all this charge. Job was and remains " a man
blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning
evil ; " and later we shall find him repudiating the
monstrous charge in detail (xxix. i2fL, xxxi).
Even Eliphaz himself had testified in his opening
speech to Job's benevolence. This is therefore a
melancholy exhibition of the frightful injustice to
which the exigencies of controversy may drive even
a good man like Eliphaz. There are no facts in
Job's career to support his theory, but it is easier
to believe that Job is a hypocrite than that the theory
is false or inadequate ; and so facts must be invented
— facts of the most damning kind. Devotion to a
doctrine blazes forth into the cruellest injustice
to the man who cannot be fitted into the doctrine :
his reputation is tortured till it does fit. All this
seems to suggest incorrigible depravity of soul ;
but in reality, though inexcusable, it becomes
intelligible, when we see that it has its roots in a sort
of intellectual depravity, or in a timidity as fatal
as depravity, that is, in a deliberate subjection of the
mind to an inelastic theory which restricts its free
exercise and forbids its appreciation of fresh facts.
In this cruel and baseless calumny we see an antici
pation of the havoc wrought all down the ages by
acrimonious theological debate.

Job's sad fortunes, then, are explained by his
grievous sins :

"And therefore are snares round about thee,

And fear on a sudden confronts thee.
Thy light is vanished in darkness,

And floods of water are over thee." (xxii. lof).

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Baseless Charges

Eliphaz immediately follows up one piece of injus
tice by another. To the wrong of calumny he adds
the wrong of misinterpretation :

" Is not God in the heights of heaven ?

And the tops of the high stars He seeth.
Yet thou sayest, ' What doth God know ?

Can He judge aright through the thick darkness ?
The clouds hide Him, so that He sees not ;

He walketh the vault of the heavens.' " (xxii. 12-14).

Job, of course, had never said anything of the kind,
though there were no doubt many in Israel who did
make use of such arguments, like the wicked who
created the problem for the writer of Psalm Ixxiiij

" How doth God know ? " they say,

" And hath the Most High any knowledge ? "

(verse n).

The height of Job's offence was his reiterated
complaint that the fortunes of men showed no trace
of being determined by divine justice. Eliphaz
perverted this criticism into the statement that God
had no knowledge of what happened on earth :
with the implied inference that Job was free to
sin as he pleased.

Eliphaz now does Job the dubious honour of
associating him with the ante-diluvian rebels :

" Wilt thou keep to the ancient way,

Which men of sin have trodden,
Who untimely were snatched away,

While the ground beneath ran Like a stream ? "

(xxii. I5f).

Job and they are alike in that neither would believe
in the judgments of God ; and unless he change his

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rebellious mind, he will as surely be swept away as
they. But for him there is yet hope ; and here
follows a noble passage, gracious and almost tender,
in which it is hardly fanciful to see the reflection of a
penitent mood in Eliphaz himself. It almost seems
as if, ashamed of the baseless charges with which
he had begun, he was determined to atone by ending
on a note of comfort and hope — a note which is all
the more striking, when we consider the almost
unrelieved harshness of his last speech (ch. xv.).

" Now be friendly with Him and submissive,

For this is the way to happiness.
Accept from His mouth instruction,

And lay up His words in thy heart.
If thou humbly turn to Almighty,

And put away sin from thy tent,
And lay in the dust thy treasure,

Ophir gold among stones of the brook,
That the Almighty become thy treasure,

And His instruction thy silver,
Then the Almighty shall be thy delight,

Thou shall lift up thy face unto God.
He will hearken unto thy petition,

And so shalt thou pay thy vows.
The thing thou decreest shall stand,

And light shall shine on thy ways.
For He humbles the high and the proud,

But whose eyes are lowly He saveth.
The innocent man He delivers

And saves, for his cleanness of hands." (xxii. 21-30).

Eliphaz is obliged, of course, by this theory to
believe in the guilt of Job ; but if Job is willing to
listen to such disciplinary truths as he had sought
to put before him (v. 17, xv. n) and to make his
peace with God, he assures him that all will yet be
well. Here, as elsewhere, the poet skilfully

Baseless Charges

introduces an anticipation of the end, especially in
the promise to Job that his prayer would be heard
(v. 27). Eliphaz could not know that the prayer
which was to be offered and heard was a prayer for
himself and his two misguided friends (xlii. 8-10).

163

JOB'S SECOND SUSTAINED INDICTMENT OF THE
EXISTING ORDER (Job xxiii. and xxiv.)

The speech of Eliphaz must have cut deeply into
the sensitive soul of Job — hardly less the call to
penitence with which it ended than the unjust
accusations with which it had begun ; for the one
was as irrelevant as the other. Its assumptions
were little calculated to soothe the rebellious mood
in which Job had hurled his last indictment at the
constitution of the world. Earlier speeches were
uttered " in the bitterness of his soul " (vii. n, x. i) :
it is only too natural that he is bitter and rebellious
still :

"This day also my plaint must be bitter,

His hand on my groaning lies heavy." (xxiii. 2).

But he does not immediately reply to the reproaches :
he does that later in detail, but not now. There are
speeches to which the only dignified answer is
silence. More than ever now, after the cruelty of
his oldest and wisest friend, he feels his infinite need
of God, and of a meeting with Him :

" O that I knew where to find Him,

That I might come unto His throne." (xxiii. 3).

Such an utterance never rises to the lips of any of
his friends, for no such need and no such passion
lodges in their hearts. They do not need to find
Him, for they have found Him already : at any rate

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Job's Second Indictment

the fathers have found Him (viii. 8-10) and told
them what they have discovered of Him ; and for
men of this shallow and conventional type that is
good enough. They are content to hear about Him.
Job must see Him — nothing else and nothing less
will do. They can define His attributes and
describe His ways, but Job must meet Him face to
face. They have theology, he has religion. It is a
very touching cry, " O that I knew." Not so long
ago, in a moment of illumination, he had been able to
say,

"I know that my Champion liveth,

Whom mine eyes shall behold, and no stranger's ;
And, as Sponsor, shall I behold — God." (xix. 25-27).

In that moment he had been sublimely sure that
he would find in the other world Him whom he
sought ; but alas ! he cannot find Him in this. This
sorrowful cry of the Old Testament " O that I knew
where I might find Him " is never completely
answered until One came who could say to all who
laboured and were heavy laden, " Come unto Me,
and / will give you rest " (Matt. xi. 28). Job was
calling for a God whom " no man hath seen at any
time : but the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom
of the Father, He hath declared Him " (John i. 18).
He has to solve his riddle without the solace of Him
who knew what was in man, who was touched with
the feeling of our infirmities, and tempted as we,
yet without sin/ He longs for a sight of the unseen
God, in order that he may set before His just and
sympathetic mind that case of his, which is so
tragically misunderstood by his earthly friends :

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"O that I knew where to find Him,

That I might come unto His throne,
And set forth my cause before Him,
With arguments filling my mouth.
I would know with what words He would answer,
And understand what He would say to me."

(xxiii. 3-5).

He believes that the God who made man's mind
will listen to the questions which that mind is com
pelled, by the facts of the world in which it finds
itself, to raise, and for which in some sense surely
God is responsible. Here we see another gleam
of that sweet confidence in God, which again and
again had broken through Job's darkness. There
had been times when he believed that all his effort
to vindicate himself would be in vain, that God
was unscrupulous as He was omnipotent, that, be he
never so clean, God would plunge him in the mire,
and use His awful power to crush him (ix. 3of).
But those times are past for ever. Not in vain has
he stood upon the peaks of vision. In the white
heat of an earlier struggle he had been able to say,

"This also shall be my salvation,

That a hypocrite dare not approach Him" (xiii. 16) ;

and later, in his greatest hour, he had been very sure
of God and of His will to vindicate him, if not here,
then hereafter (xix. 25 if). That is where he stands
now, with his kindlier thought of God. Should the
meeting come for which he passionately longs,

" Would He use His great power in the contest ?

Nay, He would give heed unto me ;
There the upright might argue with Him,

And my right I should rescue for ever." (xxiii. 6f).

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Job's Second Indictment

Job worships a reasonable God who, he knows,
will listen to His poor afflicted servant, if only He
can anywhere be found. But where is He ?

" Behold, I go east, but He is not ;

And west, but I cannot perceive Him.
I seek in the north, but in vain :

I turn south, but I cannot behold Him." (xxiii. 8f).

There, then, is the tragedy, that the God who is
working everywhere, is visible nowhere. If only He
would let Himself be seen, Job would appear before
Him, not only without fear, but with unspeakable
joy, whether to plead his case or to answer the
Almighty's questions. Job is as sure of God's
justice as of his own, as sure of his own as of God's ;
and this meeting of the two just ones would be but
the meeting of friends — the omnipotent God and His
disfigured, wasted servant. Nothing could better
evidence the stainless integrity of Job than this
longing for a meeting with Him whom no disguise
can deceive :

" He knoweth the way that is mine ;

I would come forth as gold, should He try me.
My foot hath held fast to His steps,

And His way have I kept without swerving.
Not once have I strayed from His precepts;
His words have I hid in my bosom." (xxiii. 10-12).

It is a bold claim to make, but, scanning his past,
Job makes it deliberately.

It is difficult, however, to maintain the soul in its
noblest moods, when the facts which confront it at
every turn are either neutral or hostile. The God
to whom he has appealed so passionately refuses to
appear, and His place is taken by the old spectre
of a capricious Omnipotence.

The Problem of Pain

" But when He hath resolved, who can turn Him ?
And what He desireth, He doeth." (xxiii. 13).

As Job looks round upon the world, a great revulsion
of feeling comes over him and he shudders with horror.
He is afraid, not because God judges, but because He
does not judge :

" For this cause His presence confounds me,
The thought of Him fills me with terror ;
For God hath weakened my heart,

And the Almighty confounded rne clean.
I am utterly lost in the darkness,

And gloom enwrappeth my face.
Why doth God not fix seasons for judgment,
And His friends never see His great day ? "

(xxiii. i5-xxiv. i).

Now it was exactly a mood of this kind that
introduced Job's vehement challenge of the existing
order of things in his last speech. There, after
summoning his friends to listen in awe-struck
silence, he begins his indictment of the world with
the words,

"When I think of it I am confounded,

And shuddering seizeth my flesh." (xxi. 6).

What follows is an exhibition of one side of the
injustice that runs through the fortunes of men —
the prosperity of the wicked : those who laugh at
God and prayer and goodness enjoy a happy life
and a peaceful death. It is perfectly certain from
the concluding words of ch. xxiv.,

" And if not, who will prove me a liar,

And reduce mine indictment to nothing ? "

that Job had immediately before been hurling a
similarly audacious challenge at the moral govern-

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Job's Second Indictment

merit of the world. The chapter, as it stands, is
striking but not terrible. It consists of a series of
brief but vivid sketches of various sorts of evil
doers or outcasts from society : first, of wealthy
land-owners who, for some small debt, deprive poor
tenants of their means of sustenance, snatching from
the widow, for example, her solitary cow.

"The wicked remove the landmarks,

They plunder the flock with the shepherd.

They drive off the ass of the fatherless,
Take the ox of the widow in pledge.

The poor they turn out of the way,

And the needy must huddle together." (xxiv. 2-4).

This is followed by a peculiarly graphic description
of some wretched folk, driven ofi the land by some
stronger race, to find a miserable subsistence in the
desert, where they are obliged to live by plunder,
exposed to biting winds and drenching rains, with no
shelter but the clefts of the rocks.

•• See ! like the wild ass in the desert,

They roam forth in search of prey :

Their children eat bread of the jungle.
They reap the fields in the night-time,

They plunder the vines of the wealthy.
All night they lie bare, without clothing,

With nothing to keep out the cold.
They are wet with the showers of the hills,

And the rocks they embrace for a shelter.
The fatherless they tear from the breast,

And the babe of the poor take in pledge.
They go about bare, without clothing,

And, hungry, they pilfer the sheaves.
They press out the oil 'twixt the olive-rows,

The wine-vats they tread and then drain.
From cities and homes they are driven ;

Their little ones cry out for hunger,

But God takes no heed of the wrong." (xxiv. 5-12).

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Then comes a description of night-hawks —
murderers, adulterers, and house-breakers — who,
haters of the light, prowl stealthily about and do
their wicked deeds under the shelter of the darkness
which they love.

" There are those who rebel against light,

Who recognize not His ways,

But refuse to abide in His paths.
In the evening the murderer rises

To butcher the poor and the needy,

The thief stalks abroad in the night.
With face muffled up in a veil,

The adulterer watches for twilight,

Assured that no eye can behold him.
In the darkness they break into houses,

They shut themselves up in the day-time ;

For all of them hate the light.
Familiar with gloomy ways,

They seek for themselves the deep darkness,

And swiftly they glide on the waters." (xxiv. i.3-i8a).

It will be noticed that, unlike the rest of the book
which has two lines to the verse, this little fragment
has three. So also has the following fragment —
much of it almost hopelessly unintelligible — which
des-cribes in interesting terms but in a thoroughly
conventional spirit the heartless conduct of some
notorious sinner, who is hurled to a well-deserved
doom.

"His portion of land shall be cursed,

Consumed by the drought and the heat,
And flooded away by snow-water.
The streets of his place shall forget him,
Shall think of his greatness no more :
Like a dead tree shall he be uprooted.
For he did not good to the widow,
No pity he showed to her babe ;
And his power swept the hopeless away.

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Job's Second Indictment

Vengeance falls : he expects not to live.

He is hurled beyond hope of recovery;

The tormentor is on his way.
His greatness is brief — he is gone :

Like the mallow he bends, he shrivels —

Cut down like the top ears of corn." (xxiv. i8b-24).

This little piece is conceived entirely in the spirit
of the friends, and could certainly never have been
adduced by Job as one of the supreme illustrations
of the mismanagement of the world. Indeed, it is
very doubtful whether even the earlier sketches,
significant enough as they are of the disorders that
infect society, are sufficiently appalling to justify
either the horror that creeps over Job as he enters
upon the recital, or the abrupt and telling challenge
with which he concludes it —

" And, if not, who will prove me a liar,

And reduce mine indictment to nothing ?"

— a challenge peculiarly inapplicable in relation to
the last of the sketches which, so far from denying,
any one of the friends might have rejoiced to claim
as his own.

The description as a whole forcibly recalls that
in Sartor Resartus : " That stifled hum of Midnight,
when Traffic has lain down to rest ; and the chariot-
wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through
distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed-in,
and lighted to the due pitch for her ; and only Vice
and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are
abroad ; that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet
slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven ! Oh,
under that hideous coverlet of vapours, and putre
factions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-

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The Problem of Pain

vat lies simmering and hid ! The joyful and the
sorrowful are there ; men are dying there, men are
being born ; men are praying, — on the other side
of a brick partition, men are cursing ; and around
them all is the vast, void Night. The proud
Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or
reposes within damask curtains ; Wretchedness
cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken
into its lair of straw. . . . The Lover whispers
his mistress that the coach is ready ; and she, full of
hope and fear, glides down, to fly with him over the
borders : the Thief, still more silently, sets-to his
picklocks and crowbars, or lurks in wait till the
watchmen first snore in their boxes."1 Like the
world which Teufelsdrockh saw from the pinnacle
of Weissnichtwo, the world reflected in these sketches
is immoral and miserable enough. But considering
their general tone, the divergence into an alien
metre, and the obvious irrelevance of the last des
cription, many scholars are inclined to believe that
the present chapter was substituted by pious hands
for a challenge far more terrible, so terrible as hardly
to bear transcription in a sacred book in which the
later Church was wont to seek its edification. They
believe that, as Job's last speech had powerfully
challenged the moral order by a lurid exhibition of
the prosperity of the wicked, so this speech which is
similarly introduced, and whose conclusion suggests
that its contents were appalling, was a possibly even
more audacious indictment by reason of its revela
tion of the unmerited sufferings of the righteous.
1 Book i., ch. iii.

Job's Second Indictment

Dillon1 puts it tellingly thus : " There is obviously
a sudden break in the text just when heterodoxy
merges into blasphemy."

This, of course, can never be more than a con
jecture, though it is a probable one, as we have
already seen that there are scarcely any limits to the
intellectual audacity of Job. If the conjecture be
correct, it is a thousand pities that we have for ever
lost a speech which so shocked the later copyists
that they could not bring themselves to transcribe
it. Its contents, we may imagine, would move along
the lines of the immortal sketch in Isaiah liii. It
would be folly to attempt to reconstruct a speech,
of which ex hypothesi not a fragment is extant.
But for the sake of giving body to the void, we may,
with our eye on the companion picture, in ch. xxi.,
assume that in essence it was something like this :

"Why are righteous men suffered to perish,

To die, cut off in their prime ?
Their seed is destroyed before them,

Their children in sight of their eyes.
Their homes are haunted by terror,

The rod of God is upon them,
Like a flock they send forth their young children,

But their boys and their girls are crushed.
They finish their days in disaster,

And in anguish go down to the grave,
Though they said unto God, ' We praise Thee,

All the day we delight in Thy ways.'"

Of two things we may be sure — that whatever Job
said in his reply to Eliphaz, it was terrible, and it
was true, however incomplete : and he ends by
hurling his unanswerable challenge.

1 The Sceptics of the Old Testament, p. 55.

BILDAD'S DECLARATION OF GOD'S WISDOM AND
POWER (Job xxv. and xxvi.)

The friends are by this time sufficiently accus
tomed to the shock of Job's heresies, or blasphemies,
as they seemed to them to be. But those utterances
had been, for the most, incidental, thrown out in the
heat of an overpowering emotion. His last two
challenges, however, had been of a peculiarly sus
tained and deliberate nature, and Bildad instinctively
feels that in effect they are an impeachment of the
wisdom and the power with which God rules the
world. They seem to him to suggest that, in His
distribution of prosperity to the wicked and of
calamity to the righteous, God is either unintelligent
or unjust, or, if just and intelligent, then unable to
give effect to His will. To Bildad either alternative
is unthinkable. In his very first speech, he had con
tended that God, being Almighty, could not con
ceivably " pervert justice " (viii. 3). He therefore
now addresses himself to the task of convincing
Job of the wisdom and the power of the Creator, and
he does this by showing, in terms largely borrowed
from mythology, that the universe is replete with
evidence that God is limited neither in the one
attribute nor in the other. But both in the argument
and in the development of it, one cannot resist the
impression that the friends are coming perilously
near the end of their dialectic resources The writer
Still lets them clothe their arguments in language

God's Wisdom and Power

which, for varied splendour, has no parallel in the
world, but the arguments themselves are increasingly
tenuous. Bildad begins in an ironical vein :r

"How well thou hast aided the weak,

And supported the arm of the strengthless !
How well thou hast counselled the foolish,
And shown thine abundance of wisdom !
Who inspired thee to utter such words,

And whose spirit is it that comes forth from thee ? *'

(xxvi. 2-4).

God is the weak and foolish One, who forsooth
will be glad to be reinforced by the wisdom and
might of Job — an irony all the more stinging, when
we look at the unhappy man to whom it is addressed,
lying worn and crushed upon his ash-heap, a man
whose sinful folly, as Bildad supposes, has brought
him to the pass in which he is, and who is impotent
to deliver himself from its consequences. Bildad
mockingly asks him to declare the source of the
inspiration of his blasphemous speech, meaning
thereby to suggest the wicked folly of attempting
to criticize the government of one so wise and mighty
as God. He naturally then proceeds to expatiate
upon the divine power :

"Dominion and fear are with Him,

On His high places He maketh peace.
His hosts — are they not beyond counting ?

Whom doth not His ambush surprise ? " (xxv. 2f)

1 In view of the contents of chap, xxvi., which is spoken from the
standpoint of the friends — had Job uttered it, he would hardly have
needed the rebuke of xxxviiif — and in view of the fresh intro
duction to chap, xxvii. (" and Job took up his parable again and
said ") which would be wholly unnecessary if chap, xxvii. were really
a continuation of chap. xxvi.,. it seems natural to assign chap. xxvi.
(as well as chap, xxv.) to Bildad. That xxvi. 2-4 should be trans
posed to the beginning of Bildad 's speech, where it is very natural
find elective, is a highly probable conjecture,

'75

The Problem of Pain

God is the Lord of the universe, and His dominion
is such as to fill mortal man with awe instead of
inspiring him to audacious criticism. The universe
is far vaster than Job has any idea of. Not only on
earth, upon whose problems Job's gaze is concen
trated so fiercely, but in the spacious halls of
heaven and among rebellious angels, His mighty rule
is manifest. Who is Job to criticize such a God ?
For he, like other men — as Bildad long ago reminded
him — is but of yesterday, and knows nothing (viii. 9).
Also who is he to hurl these long-winded challenges
of which Bildad has twice before complained
(viii. 2, xviii. 2), but never with such astonishment
as now ? Job has been indignantly asking why
innocent men suffer ; but in language strongly
reminiscent of Eliphaz (iv. lyff, xv. 14), and
intended perhaps to suggest the timid and unoriginal
quality of Bildad's mind, he contends that there is
no such thing as innocent suffering : there is not an
innocent man in all the world. Every man is
unclean, and we have to do with an all-seeing God
whom the tiniest speck of impurity cannot elude.

" How can man then be just before God ?

How can one born of woman be pure ?
See ! the moon herself is not clear,

And the stars are not pure in His sight.
How much less is man — a mere maggot,

And the son of man — but a worm ? " (xxv. 4-6).

This depreciatory estimate of man is characteristic.
There is nothing here of " how noble in reason !
how infinite in faculty ! " From Bildad's mighty but
unloving God it is an easy inference to his degrading
view of man, He has nothing of that sense of the

God's Wisdom and Power

gracious condescension of the infinite One which
glows in the eighth Psalm, " What is man that Thou
art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou
visitest him ? " If Job, in his despair, had seen in
those gentle words nothing but a mockery of the
visitation wherewith it had pleased God to visit
him (vii. 17!"), Bildad had seen in them nothing at
all. Job's savage application of the words springs
from his passionate longing for the love of such a
God as they describe, while such a God is not in all
Bildad's thoughts. He is more concerned for God's
attributes than for His friendship.

The text of Bildad's homily, then, is the wisdom
and especially the power of God ; and on this con
genial theme he descants with a truly noble eloquence,
drawing his illustrations from the heavens above
and the earth beneath, from, the waters beneath the
earth and from Sheol beneath the waters.

"Before Him in pain writhe the giants,

Whose home is beneath the waters.
Sheol is naked before Him,

Uncovered lieth Abaddon.
He stretcheth the north o'er the void.

And He hangeth the earth over nothing.
In His thick clouds He tieth the waters,

Yet the clouds are not torn with the weight.
He closeth the face of His throne,

And over it spreadeth His cloud.
A circle He drew on the deep

To the confines of light and of darkness.
The pillars of heaven fell a-rocking,

Astonished at His rebuke.
By His power He stirred up the sea;

By His wisdom He smote clean through Rahab.
His breath made the heavens fair ;

His hand pierced the serpent that fleeth.

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The Problem of Pain

See ! these are the fringe of His ways ;
Yea, 'tis only a whisper we hear :
Who can tell how mighty His thunder ? " (xxvi. 5-14)

In His contest with the great primeval monsters
God displayed His victorious might ; and scarcely
less wonderful than the might attested by the uni
verse is the mystery which pervades it — how the
earth, for all its unthinkable weight, remains
suspended over nothing ; how the thin clouds do not
burst with the mighty burden of waters tied up in
them ; how the breath of God chases away the
clouds from the sky, leaving it clear and fair. And
all this that we can see and hear is as nothing to the
vaster things than can neither be seen nor heard :
they are as the whisper to the thunder. What a God
then must He be, who is behind and above the
immeasurable universe ! and this is the God, implies
Bildad, whom Job has been so wantonly blaspheming.

There is not the faintest possibility that this
argument, though urged so earnestly and eloquently,
will make the least impression upon Job ; for the
very simple reason that he is already as fully con
vinced as Bildad, and with that more intimate
knowledge which comes from personal experience,
of the mysterious power of God. Indeed, in his very
first answer to Bildad (ch. ix.) he had described that
power in colours as vivid and more terrible.
Job is only too deeply convinced of the power that
pervades the universe ; but is there anywhere in
it a Justice and a Love ? That is his question, and
Bildad cannot help him there.

THE LAST CLASH — BETWEEN JOB AND ZOPHAR
(Job xxvii.)

In the great debate which is drawing to a close, the
intellectual bankruptcy of the friends is becoming
very evident. It is seen in the increasing irrelevance
of what they have to say, in their tendency to borrow
from another, in their proffering of arguments which
have been already used more powerfully by Job
to pulverize their position. But if the traditional
text be accepted, the crowning proof of their bank
ruptcy would lie in the simple fact that Zophar, the
third speaker in the first two cycles, has vanished
from the debate altogether. According to the
present text, none of the friends speaks again after
Bildad has spoken in ch. xxv. : Job has the field
entirely to himself from ch. xxvi. (or at any rate
ch. xxvii.) to ch. xxxi.

It must be confessed that this is rather improbable.
The intellectual exhaustion of the friends could have
been just as fittingly indicated by another and a last
conventional speech from Zophar as by his complete
disappearance from the scene. Besides, the actual
contents of a large part of ch. xxvii. — practically all
of it from v. 7 to the end, with the exception of
v. 12 — constitute a faithful reproduction of the spirit
and teaching of the friends ; while most of it is
unsuitable, and much of it simply impossible, upon

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The Problem of Pain

the lips of Job. For example, " when the wicked
man's children grow up, it is for the sword, and his
offspring shall not be satisfied with bread" (v. 14) :
Job ^.ould not conceivably have said that ; indeed,
in one of his recent impeachments of the existing
order of things, he had said the very reverse — that
they went merrily forth like a flock, singing and
dancing to the sound of music (xxi. nf.). But this
is precisely the doctrine of the friends, expressed
with that curious callousness which we have more
than once seen to characterize their allusions to
children, in contexts which must recall to Job's
mind the fate of his own (v. 4, Eliphaz ; viii. 4,
Bildad).

One scholar explains this by assuming that Job
" forgets himself sufficiently in ch. xxvii. to deliver
a discourse which would have been suitable in the
mouth of one of the friends." But surely this is
absurd and impossible. Job may lose his temper,
but never his point of view, and nothing but a fit of
temporary insanity, which there is not the smallest
reason for ascribing to him, could ever have induced
him for a moment to adopt a position which again

and again he had combated with all the strength of
his ironical eloquence. But we can even go further
and, with tolerable confidence, definitely assign
the passage (vv. 7-23) to Zophar. The speaker
introduces his account of the fate of the wicked in
the words :

" The wicked man's portion from God is this,

And the lot the Almighty bestows on the tyrant."

(xxvii. 13).

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The Last Clash

But this bears an unmistakable resemblance to the
words with which, in the last cycle, Zophar had ended
a very similar description (xx. 29) ; and this raises
the presumption to a practical certainty that it is
Zophar who speaks in this passage — for the third and
last time.

We are therefore left with the first six verses of
ch. xxvii. and v. 12, which is all that remains of
Job's reply to the speech in which Bildad, with an
abundance of mythological allusion, had expatiated
upon the power of God. Here, as in Job's last
utterance, it is difficult to believe that something has
not been suppressed. Bildad's emphasis upon the
divine power, which Job had never doubted, leaves
him unconvinced of the wisdom and the justice in
which he is longing to believe, but for which he can
find no evidence in the world as he knows it ; and
it is easy to believe that Job launched forth once
more upon some superb audacity which later trans-
scribers hesitated to copy ; though of course there
is always the possibility that it was dropped acci
dentally. But two or three points are reasonably
clear : first, that Job must have said more than is
contained in the five or six verses here assigned
to him ; secondly, that he spoke as a wronged and
embittered man — his opening words (v. 2) leave no
doubt about that ; and lastly, that what he said was
terrible and undeniable — the words of v. 12, which
presumably once formed the close of his speech, make
this practically certain :

" Ye have all, with your own eyes, seen it :
Wherefore then this idle folly ?

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The Problem of Pain

We are irresistibly reminded of the very similar
conclusion to the sustained and impassioned
challenge which he had hurled at the moral order in
ch. xxi.

" Why, then, offer your idle comfort ?

Your answers leave nothing but falsehood."

(xxi. 34).

Let us look then at this last collision between Job
and his friends. The debate now hardly wears
even the semblance of an argument : each speaker
goes his own way, harping upon his favourite thought
— Job on his innocence, Zophar on the doom of the
wicked. Unimpressed by Bildad's eloquent
exposition of the divine power, Job sweeps past his
mythology and on to the only thing that now matters
to him — his own innocence. This he begins by
solemnly asserting, prefacing his assertion with the
most extraordinary oath in the whole range of
Scripture :

" As God Almighty liveth,

Who hath wronged and embittered my soul —
For within me my life is yet whole,

And the spirit of God in my nostrils —
I swear that my lips speak no falsehood,

My tongue doth not utter deceit." (xxvii. 2-4).

His body is wasted, but he is still in full possession
of all his faculties, as his glorious speeches show ;
and thus, though the oath may seem that of a
madman, he swears — with his mental energy, as he
asserts, unimpaired — " by the God who has robbed
him of his right," swears that the charge he has
deliberately brought against the order of the world
which crushes innocent men like himself — or, if

182

The Last Clash

you like, against the God who ordains such a doom
• — is no impiety, it is the truth : witness be God
Himself who has wronged him. Job's assertion of
innocence in the face of the God who, as he believes,
has outraged him, and of the men who accuse and
denounce him, is sublime : the one thing he will not
abandon is the testimony of his own conscience :

"God forbid I should grant ye were right;
I will cling to mine innocence till I die.
I maintain to the end I am guiltless ;

Not an hour of my life do I blush for." (xxvii. pf).

Robbed as he is of everything, of health and home
and friends, of happiness and honour and reputation,
this abides his inalienable possession, which neither
man nor devil nor God Himself can take from him.
At this point the sense of the injustice which has
been meted out to him seems to have driven him to
another and a last vehement challenge of that
inexplicable Providence which dooms the innocent
to disaster — a challenge which, resting upon facts
which the friends themselves cannot fail to have
observed, they are helpless to refute. Why, then,
continue their idle discussions any longer ?

" Ye have all with your own eyes seen it ;

Wherefore, then, this idle folly?" (xxvii. 12).

In point of fact these " idle discussions " are at
last concluded by a few gorgeous truisms from
Zophar. It is long since he has abandoned the hope
of converting Job, but he will at least clear his
conscience by reminding him for the last time of the
doom of the godless :

183

The Problem of Pain

" Perish my foe like the wicked,

Mine enemy as the unrighteous.
For what is the hope of the godless,

When God requireth his soul ?
Will God give ear to his cry

In the day when distress comes upon him ? "

(xxvii. 7-9).

Eliphaz had promised Job that, in the event of peni
tence, he would once more delight himself in the
Almighty (xxii. 23-26), but for the obstinate and
impenitent Job that prospect exists no more :

"Will the Almighty be then his delight ?

When he calleth, will God be entreated ? "

(xxvii. 10).

Zophar now assumes the role of the teacher and
proceeds to expound, in the conventional way now
so familiar to us, what the sinner has to look for in
life and in death :

"I will teach you how God wields His arm,

And not hide the Almighty's behaviour.
The wicked man's portion from God is this,

And the lot the Almighty bestows on the tyrant.
If his children grow up, the sword claims them ;

His offspring are stinted for bread.
By death shall his remnant be buried :

Their widows shall make no lament.
Though silver he heap up like dust,

And prepare (costly) raiment like clay,
Yet the just shall put on what he stored,

And the silver shall fall to the innocent.
Like a spider's the house which he builded,

Like booth which the vine-keeper maketh.
He lieth down rich, but he wakes not ;

He openeth his eyes, and he is not.
He is caught in a flood of terrors ;

In the night he is stolen by a tempest.
The east wind bears him away,

It sweepeth him out of his place.

184

The Last Clash

God hurleth at him without mercy;

Fain would he escape from His hand.
His hands He clappeth at him,

And He hisseth at him from His place."

(xxvii. ii, 13-23).

With this picture of an unlovely God, clapping
His hands in derision, like a malicious man, over
the impenitent sinner, and hissing him out of the
world, the contribution of the friends to the solution
of the great world-problem is brought to an end.
The God they believe in is a fitting counterpart of the
men who represent Him and defend His ways.

185

JOB'S GREAT DEFENCE AND His LAST APPEAL
(Job xxix.-xxxi.)

The debate is now over1. The loneliness of Job
is complete — forsaken as he is, or thinks himself to
be, by God, by man, by all save his good conscience.
Having no one else to speak to, he speaks to his own
heart. He passes his life in review, his former
happiness and his present misery, before he makes
his one last appeal to the God who has hitherto, with
such inexplicable consistency, refused to appear in
answer to his most desperate calls. A melancholy
beauty pervades his whole retrospect. The vivid
contrasts suggest the infinite sorrow of the man who
who had passed so mysteriously from the one to the
other : but the old bitter polemic has vanished ;
for, whether the friends have departed or not, Job
is no longer conscious of their presence — he speaks
not to them but to himself.

His opening words are as characteristic of his piety
as of his misery.

" O to be as in months long gone,

As in days when God used to keep me." (xxix. 2).

The first thing he mentions about the happy days
now vanished is that they were days " when God
used to watch over him." He had lived in the
Presence, and there was no loss like that loss : that

1 For ch. xxviii. see p. 273.

186

Job's Great Defence

is why he puts it first. The touch of that vanished
Hand, and the sound of that Voice which had
been so strangely still — to lose these things was to
lose that loving-kindness which, for such a man as
Job, was better than life. The fearfulness of the
change his misery had wrought in his conception of
God is vividly suggested by a comparison of this
with other passages in which the thought of those
watchful eyes had filled him with terror, and his most
earnest prayer had been that God would be gracious
enough to look away from him, and leave him alone ;
for now He was watching him only too cruelly well
(vii. 17-19), setting a " watch " over him (vii. 12) —
it is the noun of the verb which he now uses to des
cribe God's former vigilant care of him — as if he were
some mighty monster endangering the peace of the
universe. Then He had watched over him, now He
watches him. Wistfully he turns to the days
" when His lamp shone over my head," as it shines
now no more. How Bildad would find in this con
fession, if he heard it, the confirmation of his
prophecy that the lamp would one day be put out
in the tent of ungodliness (xviii. 51). But in those
days when Job had the light, he had walked in it :

" His lamp shone over my head,

And I walked by His light through the darkness."

(xxix. 3).

If only he could be once again

" As I was in the days of mine autumn,

When God protected my tent,
While still the Almighty was with me,

And my children were round about me ;
When my steps were bathed in milk,

And the rock poured me rivers of oil." (xxix. 4-6)

187

The Problem of Pain

Too deep for tears or comment are the exquisitely
simple words, " when my children " — those children
who are now lying dead — " were round about me."
It is a moving testimony to the joy and beauty of
Job's home life that in the opening verses which
describe the happy past and are filled with the
presence of God, the only other presence alluded to
is that of his children. His God and his home, the
Almighty and his children — these are placed side by
side as the most precious things in all the world to
Job.

From these he turns to the thought of the honour
and the influence which had once been his, but which
now are gone for ever — how, alike on street and
market-place, old and young, high and low, did him
reverence : how in the council-chamber his words
were listened to with grateful and admiring silence,
falling upon the ear like refreshing rain upon the
thirsty land :

" When I went to the city gate,

Or took up my place in the open,
The youths, when they saw me, hid,

The old men rose and stood.
Princes refrained from speech,

And laid their hand on their mouth.
The voice of the nobles was hushed,

And their tongue would cleave to their palate.
They hearkened to me and they waited,

Kept silence till I should give counsel ;
After / spoke, they spake not again,

My speech fell like rain-drops upon them.
They waited for me as for rain —

Open-mouthed, as for latter rain." (xxix. 7-10, 21-23)

an exquisite touch, when we remember the welcome
that men give in drought-cursed lands to rain.

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Job's Great Defence

" When I smiled upon them, they were strengthened ;

The light of my face cheered the sorrowing.
I chose out their way and sat chief,

Enthroned like a king in his army." (xxix. 241).

But Job had been expert in action no less than in
speech, he had been benefactor as well as counsellor.
He had cared more for opportunity than for honour —
for the opportunity of helping those who could not
help themselves, especially those whom it was in the
East the fashion of the mighty to exploit and oppress.

" I was blessed by the ear that heard me,

The eye bore me witness that saw me ;
For I rescued the poor when he cried,

The fatherless and the helpless.
The wretched gave me their blessing;

The widow's heart I made sing.
I put on the garment of righteousness,

A robe and a turban of justice.
Eyes was I to the blind,

Feet to the lame was I ;
A father was I to the poor,

And I searched out the cause of the stranger.
I shattered the jaws of the wicked,

And hurled the prey from his teeth." (xxix. 11-17).

Job was not one of those who are " too proud to
fight." The passion with which throughout the
debate he had defended his own case, because the
high interests of eternal justice were involved, he
had been equally willing to expend on behalf of any
one, be he friend or unknown stranger, whose rights
were being ignored or trampled upon. Behind the
last two lines quoted we can see a mighty struggle
waged by the indignant Job with some incarnate
fiend, from whose greedy jaws he had snatched the
prey. The splendour of the picture is only fully
appreciated when we remember that the ideal Job

189

The Problem of Pain

here claims to have fulfilled is just the ideal to
which prophet after prophet had summoned Israel
with such passion and persistence. To the last
detail he fulfils the prophetic programme. ;< Let
justice roll down like water, and righteousness like
a perennial stream " (Amos v. 24) ; " I desire mercy
and not sacrifice " (Hosea vi. 6) ; and still more
aptly, " Seek justice, restrain the violent, do right
by the fatherless, plead for the widow " (Isa. i. 17).
Job is the man, come at last, for whom the prophet
heart had yearned.

But the relevance of this picture to the discussion
is only completely grasped when we consider it in
the light of the cruel charges which Eliphaz had
invented in order to support his shallow contentions.
He had accused Job of stripping the naked of their
clothing, of refusing drink to the weary and bread to
the hungry, of sending widows empty away, of
breaking the arms of the fatherless (xxii. 6-9) ; and
point for point Job dissipates those wicked and base
less calumnies by a simple statement of the facts.
" I put on the garment of righteousness, a robe
and a turban of justice." Fearlessly he stands
forth before God and men as righteousness incarnate.
So he thought, as well he might — trained as he had
been in the faith that goodness guaranteed a long
and happy life — that all would go well with him till
the end and in the end :

"So I thought, ' I shall die with my nest; '
As the sand my days shall be many.

' A reference to the legendary phoenix, a bird which was said to
live five hundred years, when it burnt itself in its nest and rose to a
new life from the ashes.

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Job's Great Defence

My root is spread out to the waters,
All night lies the dew on my branches.

Within me my glory is fresh,

And my bow is renewed in my hand.' " (xxix. 18-20)

" But now " — abruptly comes the startling con
trast between the happy then and the dreadful now.
He had hoped for length of days with strength un
impaired and undiminished glory : instead, he is
going down to the grave before his time as a leper
accursed of God and abhorred of men, his body
covered with sores and gnawed with pain, his soul
pierced with sorrow, and clothed in darkness. There
is little observable order here in the enumeration of
his miseries. His heart is hot and seething, as he
tells us later, with the tumult of them. Body, mind,
and spirit are all alike shattered in a common ruin —
now it is the heat of fever or the lacerating pains,
now it is the alienation and the unbroken silence of
God ; but it is perhaps not without significance that
he puts here first the scorn and loathing of men, which
comes with all the more force after his gracious
picture of the reverence with which, in happier days,
he had been everywhere received:

" But now am I become their song,

Yea, I am a by-word among them.
In horror they stand far aloof,

And they spare not to spit at the sight of me. "

(xxx. 91).

There are hints throughout the book which go to
show how deeply the writer had been impressed by
the fickleness of human friendship : this may explain
the passion with which he makes his hero yearn for
the heavenly Friend. Job's sketch of the past,

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The Problem of Pain

crowded with deeds of kindness, shows how he had
loved men, and how intimately he had been touched
with the feeling of their infirmities : all the more
bitter therefore to him must have been the ingrati
tude of those whom he had shielded from the con
sequences of poverty and injustice. It was sad
enough to be scorned and shunned by men for the
leper that he was, but sadder still was the hostility
of God, who stormed upon him, as if he was some
fortified city, with all the terrors of His infinite
resources :

" He hath slackened my bow-string and humbled me,

Flung down my banner before me.
Against me His hosts stand up ;

They raise deadly ramparts against me
My path they tear up clean,

My tracks they destroy altogether.
His archers ring me around,

As through a wide breach they come in,
Rolling on in the midst of the ruin.

Terrors are turned upon me ;
My weal is the sport of the winds,

And my welfare is passed like a cloud." (xxx. 11-15).

Then he comes back to the thought of his physical
misery — his pain, his emaciation.

" And now is my soul poured out,

The terrors of misery seize me.
The night boreth into my bones,

And the pains that gnaw never slumber.
From sore wasting my garment is shrunk ;

It clingeth to me like my vest." (xxx. 16-18).

But it is God who is responsible for his misery : he
therefore turns upon Him with bitter reproaches for
the cruelty of a silence which He refuses to break

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or breaks only with another lash of His scourge,
or another roar of His pitiless storm :

" God hath plunged me into the mire,

So that I am like dust and ashes.
I cry, but Thou givest no answer ;

Thou standest and heedest me not.
Cruel to me art Thou turned,

With the might of Thy hand Thou dost scourge me.
Thou settest me to ride on the wind,

And I melt in the roar of the storm.
For I know Thou wilt bring me to death,

To the house where all living assemble." (xxx. 19-23).

He knows that he must die, but he is dying before
his time, and in tumult, not in peace — for this, he
had once said, is the privilege of the wicked (xxi. 13)
— he is riding to death on the wings of the storm.
Tortured as he is by pain and grief, and hastening
to the grave uncomforted, is there anything to wonder
at in his strong crying and tears ? Has he not at
least the right of the mourner to weep or of the
drowning man to cry aloud for help ? If his
plaintive wails make him a fit companion for the
wolf and the ostrich, at least those wails are wrung
from a body tortured unto agony and from a soul
grieved well nigh unto despair.

" Yet sinking men stretch out their hand,

And cry for help as they perish.
He whose days are hard—does he weep not ?

Is the soul of the needy not grieved ?
For instead of the good I had hoped for came evil,

Instead of the light I awaited came darkness.
My heart is hot and restless,

And misery daily confronts me.
I go with my sorrow uncomforted,

Standing where jackals are gathered.

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Brother am I to the wolves,

And of ostriches the companion.
All blackened my skin peels from off me ;

My bones are burned with the heat." (xxx. 24-30)."

The contrast between the happy past and the
sorrowful present he gathers up in the expressive
words :

"So my lyre is turned into mourning,

My pipe to the voice of lament." (xxx. 31).

But Job's ambition is not to indulge in the luxury
of grief : it is to assert and defend his innocence —
if possible, in the presence of Almighty God. He
therefore proceeds to draw a detailed portrait of
himself, in which he lets us see not only the nature
of his conduct but the quality of his inner life. This
description is of supreme value, revealing as it does
the noble heights to which ancient Hebrew piety
could soar. It embodies indeed the noblest ideal
in the Old Testament, and one of the noblest in the
world. It fills in the vague outlines in which Job
was sketched at the beginning of the book as " a
man blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning
evil." It shows us what these large and simple
words meant, when translated into the details of
daily intercourse with men and women 'of every kind,
and it is the final and crushing answer to the baseless
charges which Eliphaz, under the stress of his rigid
theory, was obliged to invent, in order to defend his
indefensible position (ch. xxii.). Let us look now
at the features which go to make up this immortal
picture of a good man.

He begins, as we might expect, by asserting that
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he had practised the presence of God. His whole
life had been controlled by the thought that God's
eyes were upon him — not only upon its general drift,
but upon its every detail. His faith had been not
only that God is, but that He was actively interested
in all that he did ; that He is the rewarder of them
that diligently seek Him, and the punisher of those
who ignore Him and defy His moral will :

" A tryst I made with mine eyes

To give no heed unto folly.1
For how doth the high God reward it—

The Almighty in heaven requite it ?
Is not for the wicked misfortune,

Disaster for workers of wrong ?
Doth He not see my ways,

And number my steps every one ?" (xxxi. 1-4).

It is strange and almost startling to find Job here
asserting misfortune for the wicked and disaster
for the workers of wrong. Is not this precisely
the doctrine of the friends which Job throughout the
whole course of the debate has been denying with all
the vehemence of his soul ? Some scholars have
fastened upon the fact that these verses are not found
in the original text of the Greek version, to prove
that they did not form, as it is held they could not
have formed, any part of Job's original speech. But
it is fairer to interpret them as a statement of his
ancient faith, of the faith by which he had lived before
the blows fell which shattered it, at least in that
form, to pieces.

After this assertion of his governing sense of the
presence of God, he proceeds formally to disclaim

1 A general term for sin, peculiarly appropriate at the beginning.
Dr. Peake's highly probable emendation for the virgin of the text.

The Problem of Pain

the practice and the temper of covetousness, and of
that falsehood by which the covetous disposition
too often seeks to secure its ends :

" If ever I walked with falsehood,

Or my foot hath made haste unto fraud —
Let God only weigh with just balance,

Mine innocence He must acknowledge —
If my step ever swerved from the way,

Or my heart hath gone after mine eyes,
Then what I sow may others enjoy,

And all produce of mine be uprooted." (xxxi. 5-8).

Not content with Tightness of conduct, Job has
preserved his Tightness of heart. The stream of his
life is pure, because the hidden source from which it
flows is pure. He is not afraid to lay it bare before
the eyes of God, and to challenge the verdict of Him
whom no bribe can purchase. The fine courage of
this challenge reminds us of the similar challenge of
the Psalmist,

"Search me, O God, know my heart:

Try me, and know my thoughts," (Ps. cxxxix. 23)

— a challenge which was possible to him, as to Job,
only because he, too, was conscious of living in
the Presence :

"O Lord, Thou searchest and knowest me;

When I sit, when I rise — Thou knowest it,

Thou perceivest my thoughts from afar.
When I walk, when I lie — Thou siftest it,

Familiar with all my ways.
There is not a word on my tongue,

But see ! Lord, Thou knowest it all.
Behind and before Thou besettest me ;

Upon me Thou layest Thy hand." (Ps. cxxxix. 1-5).

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Job's Great Defence

The noble audacities of Job and of the Psalmist
are a fine testimony to the cleansing power of the
presence of God.

But a man's relation to women tests the quality of
his life even more severely than his attitude to the
property of others, and here again Job claims for
himself the most stainless purity, alike of heart and
of conduct :

"If my heart hath been lured by a woman,

If I lurked at my neighbour's door,
May my own wife grind to another,

And let others bow down upon her.
For that were an infamous crime,

An iniquity calling for judgment,
A fire that devours to Abaddon

And would all mine increase consume." (xxxi. 9-12).

Adultery is a crime punishable by the law of man,
but far more terrible to Job is the thought of the
inextinguishable fire which it kindles in the con
science and which brings a man's home and happiness
down in red ruin. With all the nobility of this
speech, it is interesting to note how, in not unimpor
tant ways, Job is entangled in the thought of his
time. The wife of the guilty man, who would herself
be the most deeply wronged, was to be, according to
Job's imprecation, subjected to the further indignity
of being reduced to the most menial bondage
(cf. Exod. xi. 5). This is only possible because the
wife is not regarded as a wholly independent person
ality, but to some extent as the property of her
husband, to be disposed of according to his pleasure.
The claim that follows is perhaps the most
wonderful of all :

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The Problem of Pain

"iNever spurned I the cause of my servant —

Of man or of maid — when we strove :
Did not He that made me make him,

Dfd not One fashion us in the womb ?" (xxxi. 13, 15).

Here is the brotherhood of man indeed, in its
sublimest form : not the brotherhood of social
equals — a sentiment which is hard enough even yet
to compass — but of master and servant, an idea
which, with our implacable modern war between
labour and capital, seems hardly even yet more than
a wild and all but impossible dream. What slave
owner in the ancient or modern world could have
said or conceived such a thing ? To the most com
prehensive of all Greek intellects, the slave was
nothing but the tool of his master ; and that has
been, for the most part, the modern practice,
whatever the theory may have been. But note the
theory underlying Job's practice. Here, as every
where, his conduct is rooted in his conception of
God. The God who made him made the slave as
well. They are brethren, because Oi e is the Creator
and Father of them both. He does not name the
Father here, though he hints at this relationship
(as does the writer of Psalm ciii. 13) a little further
on ; but that is essentially his meaning. And in
this he soars far above the thought of Malachi when
he asks, " Have we not all one Father ? hath not one
God created us ? " (ii. 10). The prophet is thinking
of a brotherhood within the Jewish family, a brother
hood which his whole prophecy shows that he does
not dream yf extending beyond the confines of his
people, but Job's profound and searching words
leap across all national barriers and class distinctions,

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resting as they do the relationship of men to one
another upon their indefeasible relationship to a
common Creator. There is a noble pathos, too,
about this argument of Job, when we remember
the grim use he had made in an earlier passage of
this very thought of God. The Almighty, he had
then argued (x. 8ff), might have been expected to
care at least as much for His creatures as a potter
for the vessel he has so cunningly made ; but God's
hands had made him only to destroy him. Here he
maintains that he had treated the humblest of his
fellow-creatures with that kindly thoughtfulness
which he himself had looked for — it would seem in
vain — at the hands of God Himself.

From the humble within his home he turns to the
weak and defenceless beyond it, the poor and the
needy, the widow and the orphan, the naked and the
hungry, and he claims, in words which would have
made the heart of the prophets sing for joy, to have
helped them in every way opened to him by the
abundance of the resources with which God had
blessed him :

"Ne'er denied I the wish of the poor,

Nor brought grief to the eyes of the widow.
Never ate I my morsel alone,

Without sharing thereof with the orphan.
Else what should I do, when God rose ?

When He visited, what should I answer ?
For, father-like, He brought me up from my youth,

And my Guide has He been from my mother's womb.
Never saw I one naked and perishing —

Needy, with nothing to cover him —
But I warmed him with fleece from my lambs,

And his loins gave me their blessing."

(xxxi. 14, 16-20).

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The Problem of Pain

Here again his morality is determined by his religion
the motive of his conduct is rooted and grounded in
God. He thinks of the God he worships as a God of
justice, to whom the interests of the defenceless
are specially dear — as a God who will one day rise up
to make inquisition : and what would he answer
in that dread day, if he had crushed or even neglected
God's poor ? He feels himself to be debtor to all
whom he can help, because his own debt to God
is so heavy. Gratitude to the God who " like a
Father, had brought him up from his youth, and
guided him even from the womb of his mother " —
immortal words — must express itself in playing the
part of father to God's needy children.

And as Job has always used his power to help the
helpless, so he had never abused it by smiting the
innocent (whom we may suppose to be a rival) even
when he could count securely on plenty of support.
He is willing that his arm, if ever lifted in such a
cause, should be broken :

"If, because I saw help in the gate,
I ever set hand on the innocent,
Let my shoulder fall from its blade,

And mine arm from the socket be broken."

(xxxi. 2if).

Job was prompted to the beneficence which he has
just described, and the hospitality he is yet to des
cribe, by his own noble heart : but without his
wealth it would have been impossible for him to
exercise it on so extensive a scale ; and there was the
danger that he should make of the means an end.
The love of money is a root of evil of all kinds, and

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Job's Great Defence

no one ever emphasized the peril of it more than our
Lord Himself, and its fatal power to shut men out
of the Kingdom. But Job is as free from the love
of his own gold as of another man's ; he put his trust
in the Giver and not in His shining gifts. He had
learned the lesson so eloquently urged by Deuter
onomy (viii. 171) — or rather it was the impulse of
his own unspoiled nature — to remember that it is
" Jehovah thy God who giveth thee power to get
wealth," and he had never been tempted to say,
" My power and the might of my hand hath gotten
me this wealth."

" Never set I my trust upon gold,

Nor called the fine gold my confidence.
Mine abundant wealth never elated me,

Nor all that my hands had gotten." (xxxi. 241).

Nothing in the universe claimed the homage of
Job but God Himself. As God was the Giver of
the wealth which some men are tempted to worship,
so He was the Creator of those glorious bodies which
hung in the firmament, " fretted with golden fire,"
which tempted the homage of others : but Job was
as little allured by the one as by the other. The
very intelligible worship of the heavenly bodies was
wide-spread in the East, and even the less imagina
tive West feels the spell of them. It was against
this worship that the writer of the great prose-poem
with which the Old Testament opens wrote the
words, " God made the two great lights ; the greater
light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the
night : He made the stars also ; and God set them
in the firmament " (Gen. i. i6f). God made them

2OI

The Problem of Pain

and set them there, not to be worshipped as though
they were independent beings, but to do His bidding,
to rule and shine for Him. Job had given his heart
to the Creator, and not to any of His creatures how
ever splendid :

"Never, watching the shining lights,

Or the moon as she walked in her splendour.
Did my heart feel their subtle allurement,
Or my hand throw a kiss to my mouth."

(xxxi. 26-28).

Through his noble disclaimer we cannot help feeling
how his poetic heart was thrilled by the glories of
the midnight sky ; but for him idolatry was as
repellent as adultery (v. u).

"This, too, were a crime for the judges.

For to God above I had lied." (xxxi. 28).

At this point he makes one of his most wonderful
claims, one which lifts him to a lonely eminence
among the saints of his people. The average pious
Israelite welcomed the downfall of his enemy —
for this, apart from any personal reason — as a visible
vindication of the moral order in which he believed.
There are psalmists who look forward with joy to the
day when they shall wash their feet in the blood of
the wicked (Ps. Iviii. 10). But Job scorned such a
thought :

"Ne'er rejoiced I at enemy's fall,

Nor triumphed when evil befel him,
Nor suffered my mouth to sin

By demanding his life in a curse." (xxxi. 2$f).

How little he would have cared for, how thoroughly
he must have despised, Bildad's promise that " those

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Job's Great Defence

that hated him would be clothed with shame "
(viii. 22) ; and how impossible it is that he could
have uttered the wish which the traditional text
ascribes to him, " Perish my foe like the wicked,
mine enemy as the unrighteous " (xxvii. 7). His
enemy was God's creature ; and of him he would
have said, as he said of his servant, " Did not He
that made me make him, did not One fashion us in
the womb ? " (xxxi. 15). One great scholar has
said, " If ch. xxxi. is the crown of all ethical develop
ment in the Old Testament, v. 29 is the pearl in this
crown."

The kindness Job had showered upon the poor
showed itself as generosity to his dependants, and
as hospitality to strangers and travellers :

" The men of my tent will declare

None has ever been stinted of food.
Not a stranger e'er lodged in the street,

For I opened my doors to the wayfarer." (xxxi. 3 if).

Further the justice and the pity which he exercised
towards men, he exhibited no less in his relation to
the soil : the earth was the Lord's, and he treated
it as such, respecting its rights no less than the rights
of the men who owned it.

" If my land ever cried out against me,

Her furrows all weeping together ;
If her strength I have drained without cost,

Or have poured out the life of her owner ;
Let thorns take the place of wheat,

And foul-smelling weeds — of barley." (xxxi. 38-40).

This man of the stainless life knew no fear but
the fear of God. He had nothing to conceal, and he
concealed nothing. His life was naked and open in

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The Problem of Pain

the eyes of his clansmen as well as of his Creator :
he could bring it out into the open and stand before
them without fear and without shame.

" No fear of the crowd ever led me

To hide my sin among men.
No contempt of the clans ever scared me

To stay behind closed doors in silence." (xxxi. 331).

What an ideal and what an achievement !
Infinitely transcending in its inner purity and its
positive beneficence the merely negative demands of
the Decalogue and even the more or less external
demands of most of the prophets. How much
nobler and ampler than the life described in the
fifteenth and twenty-fourth Psalms, and how much
more winsome than the high-minded man of Aris
totle,1 who " claims much and deserves much,"
and whose loftiness comes perilously close to
haughtiness. There is much indeed in Job which
reminds us of Jesus. It is an altogether glorious
description of a great ethical personality ; yet,
though it is a self- vindication from end to end, with
the greatest skill every suspicion of self-praise is
avoided. Mark Rutherford has truly said, " In
discernment of the real breadth and depth of social
duty, nothing has gone beyond the book of Job."
Many traits are omitted, because they go without
saying — his love for his friends, his affection for his
wife whom we may be sure he loved as dearly as
Ezekiel did her who was " the desire of his eyes "
(xxiv. 16). But how rich this man was in social
relationships : as governor, as counsellor, as

1 Nicomachean Ethics, iv. 3.
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Job's Great Defence

employer, as landowner, as host, as benefactor, he
stands continually in kindly and helpful relations
to all sorts and conditions of men. Profoundly
significant of the whole tenor of his life is the simple
claim that he " ate not his morsel alone." As the
one word suggests his frugality, the other suggests
his delight in men and in doing good. He does not
live either to himself or by himself : in a world so
full of need and wrong, he cannot bear to dwell,
like a star, apart. Though not of the world, he is
in it.

And this is the man, so pure and so good, who has
suffered so mysteriously — living like a saint and
perishing like a felon. The hour has struck for his
last great appeal to God, and it excels in majestic
audacity everything that has gone before :

" O for One who would listen to me.

Behold ! there is my cross !

Let Almighty God give me His answer.
O would that I had the indictment

Mine Adversary hath written.
For, bearing it high on my shoulder,

And winding it round like a crown,
Every step of my life I would tell Him ;

Like a prince I would enter His presence."

(xxxi. 35-37)-

If only God Almighty would appear, Job, in the
proud consciousness of his integrity, would face
Him with unspeakable joy, whether to hear what
answer God had to give to the assertion of innocence
to which he affixes his signature, or to hear what
indictment God had to bring against him in justifi
cation of the awful suffering to which He had sub
jected him, God Himself is the Adversary : but

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The Problem of Pain

Job is not afraid — so conscious is he of the rectitude
of his life as he has just revealed it, and of the essen
tial justice of the invisible God he is so eager to meet.
And what a meeting ! The poor, disfigured, ema
ciated leper, rising up from his ash-heap — wasted in
body, but a Titan in spirit — to face the terrible
God of the eclipse, the earthquake, and the storm ;
and facing Him not cringingly like a suppliant, but
proudly like a prince, and wearing his indictment
like a garland. Could anything be more sublime
than this ? It is not Christian ; but it is magnificent.

206

ACT IV
(Job xxxviii., xxxix., xl. 2-14, xlii. 2-6)

ACT IV

THE ANSWER OF THE ALMIGHTY* (Job xxxviii.,
xxxix., xl. 2, 8-14)

Then Jehovah answered Job — at long last the
answer ! But out of the whirlwind — the very sort
of answer that Job had from his first appeal feared
and deprecated (ix. 34, xiii. 2of). But, however
strange and at first sight irrelevant it may seem,
let us not forget that it is an answer, God's own
answer. It is expressed with a wealth of eloquence
and imagination which, even after all we have seen
of the writer's literary genius, is nothing less than
astonishing. " No one," as Kautzsch has truly said :
" would be surprised if, after the composition of
nineteen speeches, the creative power of the poet
should gradually flag : but precisely the contrary
is the case. The speeches of God surpass in energy
and sublimity everything that has gone before."
The divine appeal to Job to " gird up his loins like a
man " is, as has been said, an echo of the demand
the poet must have made upon himself. But the
tone of the opening words is more than surprising :

" Who is this that darkeneth counsel

By words that are empty of knowledge ?
Gird up thy loins like a man :

I will ask of thee — do thou enlighten Me."

(xxxviii. 2f).

1 In this chapter I have drawn freely from my The City with
Foundations, pp. 147-153.

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The Problem of Pain

The weary Job, who has just emerged from one
long struggle with the friends, is now invited to
prepare for another — this time with the omnipotent
God to whom he has made his appeal ; and, instead
of the gracious answer to which he had looked so
confidently forward, he is buried beneath an
avalanche of questions. There is a touch of some
thing that must have sounded to Job like mockery
in the words " Who is this ? " — this man, who
in his impotence and ignorance, has presumed to
challenge Omniscience and Omnipotence. It does
not promise well. Yet from this first seemingly
scornful question flashes the gleam of a gospel for
Job. He has been only too thoroughly convinced
by his sorrowful experience of the power of God :
but the word " counsel " suggests His wisdom. The
system at which Job has railed, not only evidences
irresistible power, it is subtly interfused with a
sense of purpose : and, on the very threshold, he,
and we, are by implication invited to look out for
evidences of that purpose in the splendid panorama
of Creation which is about to be unrolled.

And first there pass before us the wonders of the
inanimate world. The Almighty begins with the
wonder of the world itself, which is compared to a
Building of mighty proportions, constructed with
infinite architectural genius to the music of the
spheres.

" Where wast them, when I founded the earth ?
Declare out of the depths of thine insight.
Dost thou know who appointed her measures,
Or who stretched upon her the line ?

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The Answer of the Almighty

Whereupon were her pedestals sunk,

Or who laid her corner-stone,
When the morning-stars sang together,

And the sons of God shouted in chorus ?"

(xxxviii. 4-7).

No haphazard construction this : it is built according
to " measures and lines," evidence of the law and
order, the purpose and plan, by which it is inspired.
But what had Job to do with the making of it, and
where was he then ? His indignant " whys " and
" wherefores " are answered by the question,
" Where wast thou ? " And this is only the first of
many. The next picture is an inimitable description
of the sea, that turbulent child of chaos, likened to a
giant baby, with swaddling-band of clouds :

" Who shut up the sea with doors,

When it burst its way out of the womb ? —
When I gave it its robe of cloud,

And its swaddling-band of the dark cloud ;
When I broke off its border for it,

And set on it bars and doors,
Declaring ' Thus far, but no further,

And here shall thy proud waves be stayed.'"

(xxxviii. 8-1 1).

Here, too, is evidence of power instinct with order.
Once the ocean monster had threatened to over
whelm God's wonderful building of a world ;
but on it, too, His authority was imposed : it has
bars and doors, and a border which it dare not pass.
Then, in fine contrast to its blustering, comes the
quiet, gracious miracle of the dawn, when the world
stands forth in sudden brightness :

" Didst thou ever give charge to the morning,

Or appoint to the day-star her place,
To take hold of the skirts of the earth,
And to shake out the wicked from off it ?
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The Problem of Pain

It is changed as clay under the seal,

And the world stands forth (bright) as a garment.'

(xxxviii. 12-14).

Then are disclosed the sources of the sea, the mystery
of the world of the dead, with the grim porters who
guard its gates, and the breadth of the earth.
But of sources and breadth and depth Job
knows nothing at all. The power and the order
everywhere manifest reigned countless ages before
him, and are sustained independently of him :

•• Hast thou entered the springs of the ocean,

Or walked in the depths of the sea ?
Have the gate- ways of Death been unveiled to thee ?

Hast thou looked on the porters of Hades ?
The breadth of the earth hast thou noted ?
How great is it ? Tell, if thou knowest.'

(xxxviii. 16-18).

Then comes the marvel of the light, which is regarded
as having a home of its own in some corner of God's
universe :

" Which way leads to the home of the light ?

And where is the place of the darkness ?
Canst thou fetch it out unto its border,

Or lead it back home to its house ?
Thou wast born then, so doubtless thou knowest —

The tale of thy years is so great." (xxxviii. 19-21).

In the last two lines the irony is particularly keen.
The universe is a great store-house where the God of
battles keeps His treasures of snow and especially
of hail, ready to hurl — as did indeed happen in some
of Israel's historic battles (cf. Josh. x. n) — against
His adversaries : but has Job ever visited the arsenal
where those weapons are stored ?

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The Answer of the Almighty

" Hast thou entered the store-house of snow ?
Hast thou looked on the guardians of hail,
Which I hoard for the time of distress,

For the day of assault and of battle ?" (xxxviii. 22f).

Then follows the miracle of the rain, which God has
so strangely tied up in the thick clouds (xxvi. 8),
and which nevertheless falls so finely, each drop
along its appointed line, as the lightning flash along
the path appointed for it :

" Which way are the vapours divided,

That scatter on earth the cool water ?
Who cleft for the torrents a channel,

A path for the flash of the lightning —
Sending rain on the desolate land,

On the uninhabited desert,
Thus gladdening the wilderness waste,

And the thirsty land clothing with verdure ?"

(xxxviii. 24-27).

In a sense, as we shall see, the last four lines hold the
key to the riddle of the universe, suggesting as they
do that even the uninhabited desert is not beyond
God's care. His love extends to every part of the
world which He made, and is showered in refreshing
rain even upon the waste and desolate land " where
no man is." Then comes the wonder of the dew and
the frost and the ice. How is it that running water
can harden ? Does Job know ?

" Say, hath the rain a father ?

Or who hath begotten the dew-drops?
Out of whose womb issued the ice ?

And the hoar-frost of heaven — who hath borne it ?
The waters are frozen like stone,

And the face of the deep remains hidden."

ixxxviii. 28-30).

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The Problem of Pain

From the earth Job's eyes are lifted to heaven
to behold the mighty miracles being perpetually
enacted there :

" Dost thou fasten the chain of the dog-star,

Or loosen the bonds of Orion ?
Dost thou bring out the stars in their season ?

The Bear with her young dost thou lead ?
Dost thou lay down the law to the heavens,

Or establish their rule in the earth ? " (xxxviii. 31-33).

There is no confusion there: it is surely no helpless
or witless God that rules there. The heavens above,
no less than the earth beneath and the waters round
about the earth, are within the reign of law—a law
which it is very certain Job did not impose upon
them. Note again the irony, which is still further
enhanced by the following questions touching the
wonder of the clouds :

" Dost thou lift up thy voice to the clouds,

That abundance of waters obey thee ?
Dost thou send on their mission the lightnings ?

To thee do they say, ' Here we are ' ?
Who hath set in the fleecy clouds wisdom,

Or given to the meteor insight ?
Who spreadeth the clouds out in wisdom ?

Who tilteth the pitchers of heaven,
When the dust runneth into a mass

And the clods cleave firmly together ? "

(xxxviii. 34-38).

Only a poet who loved the world could have
written this glorious chapter, and it is no surprise
that he loved the living creatures upon it as well,
" all things both great and small." From the
wonders of the inanimate creation the great Ques
tioner now passes to the wonders of the animal
world ; and here, as there, it is not the exceptional

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things, but everything, that is wonderful — the ox,
the ass, the goat, the horse, the hawk, the lion, and
behind them all the wonderful love of God. Never
surely were more living pictures than these. First
comes the lion, king of beasts :

" Dost them hunt for the lion his prey

Or the young lions' craving appease,
When low in their lairs they crouch,

Lying in wait in the thicket ?
Who provideth at even his food,

When his young ones cry unto God,
Open-mouthed, for the food that is lacking ?"

(xxxviii. 39-41).

The poet means that God cares and provides for the
wild beasts : for it is assuredly not Job who procures
for the lion his food. Man would rather destroy
such creatures : but the God who made them pro
vides food for their young ones, when they cry unto
Him — a touch which reminds us of the generous
outlook of some of the Psalmists (civ. 14, 28, cxlv. 16,
cxlvi. 9). Then come the wild goats, with the
miracle of their speedy parturition :

"Dost thou fix the birth-times of the wild goats

Or watch o'er the calving of hinds ?
Dost thou number the months they fulfil

Or determine the time of their bearing ?
They cower and bring forth their young,

Swiftly ridding themselves of their birth-pangs.
Their young ones grow strong in the open,

Go forth and come back not again." (xxxix. 1-4).

What an appreciation of the wild life of the open
breathes through these last two lines ; and still
more in the amazingly vivid picture of the wild ass,
which abhors the city (as perhaps the poet did) and
rejoices in the free life of the wilderness,

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The Problem of Pain

" Who let out the wild ass free ?

Who loosened the bonds of the wild ass,
Whose home I have made the steppe,

And the salt land the place of his dwelling ?
He laughs at the din of the city,

No driver roars in his ears.
The mountains he scours as his pasture,

And every green thing is his quest." (xxxix. 5-8).

Wonder upon wonder ! The irony reaches its
climax in the astonishing picture of the wild ox
which will never be bent to the service of Job or of
any man :

" Will the wild ox be willing to serve thee,

Or spend the night in thy crib ?
Wilt thou fasten a rope on his neck ?

Will he harrow thy furrows behind thee ?
Wilt thou trust his magnificent strength,

Or put him in charge of thy labour,
Expect him to come again,

And gather thy seed to thy threshing-floor."

(xxxix. 9-12).

The rather obscure and difficult passage which follows
describes the curious habits of the ostrich :

" The wing of the ostrich beats joyously,

But her pinions and feathers are cruel,
For she trusteth her eggs to the ground,

And she setteth them down in the dust,
Forgetting that foot may crush them,

Or beast of the field tread upon them.
Her young she treats harshly, as strangers,

Unmoved though her toil be in vain.
For God hath not dealt to her wisdom,

Nor allotted to her understanding.
She scuddeth along in her flight,

At the horse and his rider she laugheth."

(xxxix. 13-18).

But of all the astonishing pictures in this astonishing
panorama of animal life, surely none can compare

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with that of the war-horse with his wild delight in
battle :

" Dost thou give to the war-horse his strength,

Clothe his neck with the quivering mane ?
Dost thou make him to leap like a locust

With snort that is splendid and terrible ?
He paweth the valley exulting,

As forth to the fight he fares.
He laughs undismayed at the terror,

He turneth not back from the sword.
Against him the quiver may rattle,

The glittering spear or the dart ;
He devoureth the ground in wild rage,

Without turning to right hand or left.
At the trumpet alarm he saith ' Ha ! '

For he scenteth the battle afar,

The thunder of captains, the shouting." (xxxix. 19-25),

No comment is possible upon lines like these. The
wonderful description closes with a sketch of the
hawk and the keen-eyed eagle, whose home is on the
heights :

"Doth the hawk soar aloft by thy wisdom,

And spread out her wings to the south ?
Doth the eagle mount up at thy bidding,

And make her nest high on the mountains ?
The cliff is her home where she lodges —

The peak of the cliff and the fortress.
She spieth her prey from the heights

With those eyes which see from afar.
Her young ones suck up blood :

Where the slain are, there is she." (xxxix. 26-30).

After passing before the eyes of Job this glorious
panorama of animate and inanimate creation, replete
with evidences of the divine wisdom and love, the
Almighty now turns to him with the severe and
humbling words :

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The Problem of Pain

" Shall a caviller strive with the Almighty ?

He that argues with God — let him answer.
Wilt thou disallow My right,

And condemn Me that thou mayest be justified ? "

(xl. 2, 8).

Job has repeatedly and vehemently criticized the
existing order of things : now that he has seen it
as God has revealed it, in all its immensity, depth,
and implications, what has he to say to it now ?
What does he think of it ? of his criticism of it ?
of himself ? " Why," as Schmidt puts it, "does he
presume to censure God who has created all things,
and in His wisdom directs and provides for His
world ? " Job had not only maintained that he
himself was right, he had implied that God was
wrong ; and he has to learn that his own reputation
is not to be secured at the expense of God's ; that
the divine righteousness and his own are not incom
patible.

The speech of the Almighty closes with a magni
ficently ironical invitation to Job to sit upon the
throne of the universe and assume the reins of
government :

"Hast thou an arm like God ?

With a voice like His canst thou thunder ?
Now deck thee with pride and with majesty,

Clothe thee with glory and splendour.
Pour forth the floods of thine anger,

And all that is lofty abase.
Every proud one lay low whom thou seest,

And crush thou the wicked beneath thee.
Hide them together in dust,

And bind up their faces in darkness.
And 7 then will render thee praise

That thy right hand hath won thee the victory."

(xl. 9-14).

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The Answer of the Almighty

The invitation is couched in a form which implies
that there is a great gulf fixed between man's ways
of governing and God's. Man in general, Job in
particular, if elevated to the throne, would immedi
ately play the petty tyrant, treating the rebellious
with all the unconsidered and short-sighted indig
nation which he had vainly expected God to display,
and annihilating them on the spot. But God, who
not only spares the wild animals but loves them and
feeds them, does not habitually drive the wicked
instantly into the outer darkness, but shows upon
them something of that mercy which is over all His
works, something of that large patience which is
natural to One to whom a thousand years are but as
a day. The very quality in God which provokes
and perplexes Job is only another of His glorious
attributes, and in no way incompatible with His
hatred of wrong. But when Job has shown how
much better he can conduct the universe with his
methods of blood and iron, God will be ready to
render him the praise which normally man renders
to God. Could irony any further go ?

This whole speech of Jehovah is no less astonishing
than many of Job's own — astonishing alike in its
irony and in its seeming irrelevance. With the
exception of its suggestive conclusion, it seems at
first a totally unethical answer to an intensely
ethical problem, Indeed, in spite of the claim of the
words which introduce it (xxxviii. i), many have
maintained that it is not an answer at all, but simply
a majestic reiteration of much that had already been

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The Problem of Pain

well said by the friends, and brilliantly by Job
himself. All the disputants were agreed about the
wonder of the universe and of the power behind it ;
and those who see in the speech no more than that,
rightly refuse to regard it as a satisfactory or even
as a relevant answer to a man in the case of Job.

From any point of view, it can scarcely be main
tained that its relevance is immediately obvious.
It contains not a syllable about Job or his sorrow,
not a word that acknowledges his integrity or
commends his endurance, not a ray of light upon the
particular grief that is breaking his indignant heart,
not a solitary allusion to the problems of the moral
world that have been discussed with such vehemence
by him and his friends, not a hint of another world
in which the wrongs of this will be righted and its
sorrows comforted for evermore. The speech offers
no theory — such as the friends have incidentally
offered — of suffering, whether as punitive, disci
plinary, educative, or redemptive. It says simply
nothing at all about human life and its problems :
which has led some scholars to the conclusion that
the writer had nothing to say. Instead of the con
solation and the vindication with which Job had
dreamed his heavenly Friend would soothe his
wounded heart, there is hurled out of the whirlwind
a volley of ironical questions, which have nothing to
do with him or his grief, or even with human life at
all, but which gather round the mysterious processes
of nature — the steadiness of the earth, the move
ment of the sea, the marvel of the heavens with
their stars and clouds, the invisible sources of the

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The Answer of the Almighty

snow, the rain, the hail, followed by inimitable
sketches of animal life. Where was Job, the Voice
asks, when these wonderful processes were inau
gurated, and what has he to do with the sustaining
of them ? It seems cruel of the great Friend thus
to overwhelm the broken-hearted man who had
appealed to Him so confidently. His spiritual
cravings are simply ignored. It would seem as if
the Creator had more interest in His stars and in
His wild beasts than in the most wonderful creature
in His whole creation. The case which Job had
hoped to present to a sympathetic ear, he has now no
opportunity even of stating : he is simply struck
dumb. God does not even express the remotest
approval of the servant who had served Him so
well. The speech seems to suggest the same sort
of bankruptcy within the sphere of ethical inter
pretation as had so often provoked Job to ridicule
in the friends : so much so that some interpret it
as indicating the impotence of man to solve the
world enigma, and the certainty — since this is
all the Almighty has to say — that no solution is
possible.

As against this, it has to be noted, at the outset,
that the speech is, at the very least, a noble appeal
to fact — to the secrets of nature which are open to
every observant and reverent eye. The passion for
fact which has characterized Job's every statement
and demand is here, if not satisfied — of this more
hereafter — at least met. Job had cried out in his
loneliness, " Oh, that I knew where I might find
Him " (xxiii. 3). The wonders of the world in

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The Problem of Pain

which Job lives and moves and has his being, pass
in majestic procession before him, and the Voice
says, " Behold ! He is there." How infinitely more
impressive is this revelation than Eliphaz's fantastic
and abnormal vision of the night (iv. izff).

Again, it is truly wonderful to find this great poet-
thinker resolutely refusing to find his final solution
on the other side of Death, that is, in a region beyond
the control of evidence. Intuitions, no doubt, may
be as valuable as evidence — may even, in their own
place, be evidence ; and we have already found that,
in a moment of exaltation, Job leaps to the great
thought of the Beyond, and clasps to his torn
heart the comfort of it (xix. 25). That is part of his
solution, a part which we believe he could never
again let go ; but he will not stake the whole of his
case on that. The other world must be the refuge
of faith and not of despair : the possession of God
there must be the issue of the discovery of Him here.
The future must be the happy consummation, not
the negation, of experiences enjoyed in this present
world ; and though the writer, like his hero, believes
in the rectification, on the other side, of injustices
and anomalies on this, he never allows the thought
of the future to dominate his discussion ; and here,
in the divine speeches — where, if anywhere, we may
fairly look for a solution of the riddle — he does not
allow it to emerge at all. He has faced the problem
at its very hardest, and deliberately rejected its
easiest solution ; and nothing could be more
indicative of his immense intellectual courage and
candour than this stern repudiation of the tempta-

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The Answer of the Almighty

tion to cut the knot of his problem by placing its
solution in the world beyond.

But in what sense is the speech of Jehovah an
answer ? What effect might it reasonably be
expected to produce upon Job or upon us ? For
one thing, it suggests that, in perplexity or sorrow,
it is good for us to get away from ourselves — " to
forget ourselves," as one has said, " in the glorious
creation of which we form a part." When those who
look in learn to look out, there will be at least the
possibility of depression merging into self-forget-
fulness, it may be even into illumination and
exaltation. Job desperately appeals to God for a
revelation of Himself and for light upon his misery ;
and, for answer, God passes before Him the glorious
panorama of Creation — of earth and sky and sea, with
the wild and happy things that are therein. To a
broken heart, such an answer may seem a mockery ;
but it is God's own answer, and it means, at the
least, that so long as we have eyes for nothing but
our problems, the problems will remain. If we do
not solve them, we can at least for a while forget
them, by looking away to the wonders of the
immeasurable universe. Job was made to feel that
God had purposes that extend to creatures other than
man and to worlds other than ours.

The first feeling that comes over us, as we look,
is a sense of overwhelming mystery. Job has no
answer to give to any of the questions that fall upon
his terrified ears. He does not know where the light
dwells. He does not know where God keeps His
treasures of snow and hail. He does not really know

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The Problem of Pain

anything of the wonderful world about him. Nor do
we. We have watched the great processes, and
given them names, and spoken of cause and effect,
of the conservation of force, and the transformation
of energy ; but, in the last resort, we are as ignorant
as Job. " Behold, we know not anything." We are
not in the secret counsels of the Almighty any more
than he.

The world is a mystery which we have to accept
without being able to explain : and this was doubt
less one of the lessons which the panorama of nature
was designed to bring home to the desolate soul of
Job. Mystery, mystery, on the right hand and on
the left ! If he could not answer the simplest
questions that could be asked about the familiar
phenomena of the natural world, how could he hope
to understand the infinitely more intricate problems
that gather about the moral world and human life ?
Our problem, frightful as it is when looked at by
itself, shrivels almost into insignificance, when seen
against that background of infinite mystery. Ours
is but a little bit of the mystery in which the whole
universe is enwrapped, and before which it is wisdom
to bow in silence.

This were, however, after all but a melancholy
consolation — resignation rather than consolation ;
and the glorious vision of nature can do more for the
sorrowful heart than that. The majestic speech of
the Almighty, which suggests that the universe is
a mystery, suggests also that it is an orderly mystery.
Behind it is Mind. Its phenomena do not happen
in any order, they happen in a particular order ;

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The Answer of the Almighty

their sequence can be depended upon. Its God is a
God of order, not of confusion. Through the
centuries this order has run inexorably on — seed
time and harvest, summer and winter, day and
night — and this, we believe, will continue while the
earth remaineth. It is surely no unwisdom to
trust the Being who " made all that/'

In spite of the mystery that baffles and besets
us behind and before, the world of which we form a
part is a world in which things are in their places.
The stars in their courses obey His laws. The earth
has its " measures and lines." Sea and land have
each their bounds assigned them.

" Who shut up the sea with doors,

Declaring, ' Thus far, but no further,

And here shall thy proud waves be stayed ' ? "

The sea is not allowed to overwhelm and devastate
the land. In the physical world things are where
they should be, and will it not also be so in the world
of human life ? Sorrow has its place, like the sea,
but no more than the sea will it be allowed to work
wreck and ruin. " Thus far shalt thou come, but
no further." A mighty Intelligence pervades the
whole universe, and lifts up, we may be sure, into its
comprehensive purpose the things that men call
evil. This is the real answer to Kenan's charge that
" instead of explaining the universe to man, God
contents Himself with showing the smallness of the
place man occupies in the universe/' It is, in short,
a universe in which we live and of which we form a
part. " The earth is the Lord's, and all tha t fills it,"
including ourselves. Job is no outcast from intelli-

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The Problem of Pain

gible law. He and we find our places within the
system, not beyond it ; and the sufferings of this
present time, alike for Job and for us, are woven into
the fine web of God's mighty purpose.

The world we live in is a world whose order we
have a right to trust. It is full of meaning and pur
pose. And as we watch the unfailing regularity with
which its great processes go on ; as we think of the
Mind by which they are directed, and the unweary
everlasting arms upon which they are sustained, we
too shall find something of that quiet order which
pervades the universe, enter and take possession of
our own souls, as we begin to trust that infinite
Mind and to lean with all our weight upon those
mighty arms.

But in the mystery by which we are surrounded
there is more than order ; there is love. As Mr.
Chesterton has put it, the secret " is a bright and not
a sad one." The system of things is not cruel or
indifferent ; it is an order at the heart of which is
love. Surely this thought was never expressed with
more tenderness or beauty than in the lines :

" He sends rain on the land where no man is,
On the wilderness, where there is no man,
To gladden the waste and the wilderness,
And to clothe the parched land with green."

This thought also shines through the lines which
describe God's care for the young lions. The God
who is kind to His wild creatures can be no less than
kind to the noblest of all His creatures. The God
who lavishes His love upon the waste and desolate
ground, will surely not forget His men and women.

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The Answer of the Almighty

with their wasted and desolate hearts. The great
poet who gave us this immortal book does not actually
say so, indeed he deliberately avoids saying so —
for in these speeches he persistently keeps our eyes
turned away from human life and its problems —
but that is what he means. If God cares for the
wilderness and for the young lion, will He not also
care for the man ? If He pours His love even upon
the place where no man is, He can surely be trusted
to remember the places where the men are. It is
the Old Testament anticipation of the words of Jesus :
" If God so clothe the grass of the field, shall He not
much more clothe you ? " As has been well said,
the solution offered here is one " which does not
solve the perplexity, but buries it under the tide of a
fuller life and joy in God."

The impression made by the whole speech recalls
words spoken by Carlyle, when an old man, in his
Rectorial address to the students of Edinburgh
University : " No nation that did not contemplate
this wonderful universe with an awe-struck and
reverential feeling that there was a great, unknown,
omnipotent, all-wise, and all-virtuous Being, super
intending all men in it and all interests in it — no
nation ever came to much, nor did any man either,
who forgot that." The universe, as interpreted by
this solemn and wonderful speech of Jehovah, is
seen to be governed by the same God of order and
of grace as the Hebrew historians find in the great
expanses of history.

In the Book of Job, as throughout the Bible, the
essence and climax of revelation is the thought of

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The Problem of Pain

God as Love. With all his passion for facts, this is
a fact which Job had only spasmodically grasped.
It is indeed the fact, which makes all other facts
endurable, even when they are not completely
intelligible : the fact which has uplifted men to sing
songs in the night and to rejoice in all things ever
more. Often Job had sternly summoned the atten
tion of his friends to facts which they were disposed
to ignore or explain away : now his own attention
is summoned by the Almighty to a fact which he had
often doubted and sometimes denied, but which
turns out to be the most pervasive, as it is the most
exhilarating, fact in all the world. Nature which,
in words that bordered on impiety, he had denounced
as terrible, is now for him transfigured by the presence
of the love revealed within it. The thought of God
as mere power, which had driven him to rebellion,
is now reinforced by the thought of Him as love,
which brings him peace. He might have said with
Rabbi ben Ezra :

" Praise be Thine !

I see the whole design,
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too :

Perfect I call Thy plan :

Thanks that I was a man !
Maker, remake, complete — I trust what Thou shalt do 1"

So, though clothed in the garb of irony and severity,
the answer to which Job had looked forward with
such wild expectation, turns out to be a gracious
answer after all. It is a tacit rebuke of the merely
retributive theory of the universe which the friends
had so stubbornly defended and which Job himself
had been reluctantly forced by the logic of facts to

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The Answer of the Almighty

deny. It presents us with a God who loves the whole
world which His own fingers framed, who " maketh
His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth
His rain on the just and the unjust," and even upon
the thirsty desert land, where there are neither just
nor unjust.

Even this ancient poet, who very keenly felt the
mystery that lies about the world, and human life,
yet learned from nature that it was not an unillumin-
ated mystery — that it was lit up by the love of God.
He saw that love shining in the most unlikely places
and he had faith to believe that it shines always
and everywhere, whether men have eyes to see it,
or not. We do not always see it plainly ; but we,
who have looked upon Jesus, know Him and what
He is ; and we believe that the mind that is behind
the universe is the same mind that was in Him.
As we can trust Him, no less surely may we trust
It. The mystery of life is not thereby abolished, but
it is illuminated. It can be faced with quietness and
confidence by those who believe that behind it is
that Love " which is showered upon the wilderness
where no man is, to satisfy the waste and desolate
ground."

229

JOB'S HUMBLE AND PENITENT REPLY (Job xl. 3-5,
xlii. 2f, 5f.). l

It is part of the writer's greatness that he does not
involve God in the sort of discussion with Job that
the latter had desiderated. He lets Him appear in
His glory — the glory of His power, His wisdom,
His pity ; and Job, who could assail the friends with
such eloquent vehemence, is dumb or all but dumb
in this glorious Presence — much like the prophet
Isaiah after he had seen the Lord God of hosts whose
glory filled the whole earth (ch. vi.). It is not that
he is crushed ; nay, he is transfigured, standing as
he does within a universe itself transfigured by the
all-pervasive presence of a glorious God of grace.
But before this immensity he feels himself to be
infinitely insignificant, and his criticism of it to be
pathetically inept ; never again will he make so
foolish a venture.

"Then Job answered Jehovah and said:
Ah, how small am I ! What can I answer ?

I lay my hand on my mouth.
Once indeed have I spoken — enough :
Yea twice — but not ever again." (xl. 3-5).

1 The vivid but somewhat grandiloquent descriptions of behemoth
(the hippopotamus, xl. 15-24) and leviathan (the crocodile, chap,
xli.) are generally believed to be additions of later writers, who
imagined these huge animals to be more impressive witnesses of
Jehovah's might than the ordinary animals mentioned in chap.
xxxix.

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Job's Reply

After all his doubts and denials, his protests and
challenges, he returns to the simple humility he had
displayed in the Prologue when the first blows fell
(i. 21). His intellectual doubts have not been solved,
not at least by intellectual methods ; but they have
been absorbed in the great certainties that have
swept over his soul as he contemplated the vision —
the certainties of God and of His love ; and his
heart fills alike with peace and rapture too deep for
many words. He is not merely resigned, he is at
rest ; he is not merely at rest, but a flood of silent
joy wells up within him. The wonderful thing that
has happened to transform his protests into sub
mission and his passion into peace, is just his new
experience of God. He sees his little life included
within an infinitely transcendent and kindly purpose,
by the glory of which the sufferings of this present
time are transfigured. " From the dark and narrow
field of personal experience he is led into a vast
cosmos which is luminous with God/'1 Formerly he
had been sure of himself, of his own innocence and
integrity; now he is sure of God and His love, as he
sees it " writ large " upon the pages of the world
of which he forms a part : it is the combination of
these two assurances, and most of all the latter, that
brings him peace. The good man has tasted and
seen that God, too, is good ; and so with quiet heart
he can lie down upon his bed of anguish or face the
death he believes to be impending, inspired by the
assurance that the God who sustains the universe is
sustaining him as well. There falls upon his heart

1 J. Strahan, The Book of Job, p. 345.
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The Problem of Pain

" that peace which follows upon the right under
standing of all great experiences."1

11 1 acknowledge that Thou hast prevailed,

There is nothing too hard for Thee.
Therefore spake I without understanding,

Of wonders beyond my knowledge.
I had heard of Thee but by hear-say,

But now with mine eyes I have seen Thee ;
And therefore I spurn (my words)

And repent in dust and in ashes." (xlii. 21, 5f).

Job's criticism of the existing order was not
illegitimate : the God who has given men a " palate "
cannot be angry with them when they present their
independent report of the " taste " of the world
(xii. n). But, however legitimate, it was inept,
as all criticism must be which is exercised in ignor
ance of essential facts. It is the breadth and the
depth of the vision that have convinced him of the
grotesque inadequacy of his criticism, and of the
shallowness of his protests. He had been speaking,
as critics not uncommonly do, of things " beyond
his knowledge," with the result that his new ex
perience of God has brought him to a better
knowledge of himself, and he spurns his former
hasty words, sincere though they had been. His
earlier criticisms, he now discovers, had been far
more dominated by tradition than he could ever
have been willing to believe. He had flung them
forth with all the ingenuous passion of an utterly
sincere soul : nevertheless they really rested on the
theory of mechanical retribution which he had
denounced with scorn when it had been presented

1 John Bailey, Milton, p. 249.
232

Job's Reply

by his friends. His soul had been agitated to its
depths, just because he had brought to his criticism
of the world the retributive theory in which he had
been trained and which he found did not uniformly
or even frequently correspond to the facts either
of his own experience, or of the world which his
own sorrow had taught him to observe so keenly.
He was, as he confessed, far more of a traditionalist
than he knew : not indeed of Bildad's sort, who
clung to the pronouncements of the fathers (viii. 8),
even after they had been discredited by innumerable
facts ; but in the sense that he brought traditional
standards to the interpretation of life, and was
exasperated when the tradition was not supported
by the facts. That is what he means when he
says, " I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the
ear/' But now he has seen the world with " larger,
other eyes " ; he has a sense of that gracious
Presence interfused through all things : more simply,
he has seen God. " But now " — after the
marvellous panorama has been unrolled — " mine
eye hath seen Thee." It is the difference between
the rumour of God and the vision of God. Con
fused by the inadequate interpretations he had
heard, he was steadied, strengthened, comforted,
inspired, by the sight which he had seen of God
upon the throne of the universe, wielding His
sceptre of love.

The real force of these simple words, " But now
mine eye hath seen Thee," is only fully appreciated
when we recall the similar words uttered by Job in
one of his most exalted moments under the spell

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of an earlier vision, less elaborate but hardly less
fascinating. As with the eye of faith he had
rapturously contemplated the Almighty attesting
his integrity on the other side of Death, the assur
ance had risen within his heart that this blessed
experience would one day be vouchsafed to his
bodily eyes.

"As Sponsor shall I behold — God,

Whom mine eyes shall behold, and no stranger's."

(xix. 26f).

The words here and there are the same. The
book is throughout pervaded by such intense
dramatic quality and all its parts are so compact
and fitly joined together that we cannot but believe
these widely separated words to have been written
with each other in view. A pessimist might main
tain that the later use of the words is designed as
a gentle, but deliberate, rebuke of the earlier ; that
the daring hope of a vision and a meeting in the
world beyond was not to be fulfilled : and that the
only vision of God Job need ever hope to receive
was such as had already been vouchsafed in the
wonders of the universe that had moved in stately
procession through the divine speech. " Now mine
eye hath seen Thee " — as if the writer meant to imply
that the old hope which Job had cherished was a
delusion and a snare. But surely this interpretation
is unnecessarily austere. There is no incompatibility
at all between the two visions : rather is the one the
fruition of the other. The God of this side is also
the God of that. The speech of the Almighty has
done little for us if it has not taught us how great

234

Job's Reply

God is, and how mindful of His creatures. The God
whom Job will one day see is the God whom he has
already seen. What is to hinder the kind and
omnipotent Creator, who has revealed Himself
already, from revealing Himself again and otherwise
to the man whom He honoured as His servant and
His friend ?

The effect of the vision of God is very striking —
the more so as with that the poem ends. It leads
Job, not to modify his criticism, but to abandon it
altogether. There is nothing here of Henley's
defiance :

" Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed."

Whether that had ever been Job's mood or not,
it certainly is not now. It is not chance, but God
with whom now, as always, he knows himself to be
dealing ; and his head is bowed " in dust and
ashes." Face to face with the immensity and
complexity of the universe which he now sees to
be luminous with a Presence as gracious as it is
strong, he recognizes again the inevitable and
pathetic inadequacy of his own criticism of it.
His wild challenges were sincere, but they were
shallow — as oblivious of one order of facts, and
indeed of the spirit of the whole, as the friends had
been of the other. So he repents in dust and ashes.

But we must beware of reading too much into this
confession. It does not mean that Job at last
regards himself as a miserable sinner: he is not
making the confession for which the friends have
been long and patiently waiting. He is not admit-

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The Problem of Pain

ting, and never will admit, that he is a sinner at all
in their sense : he does not ask for forgiveness.
One of the most interesting features in the demeanour
of Job throughout the whole discussion is his
deliberate refusal to regard sin as the key to the
present order of the world, or to the differences
observable in the fortunes of men. This is the
friends' contention, but never Job's ; and that
the writer is expressing his own mind through the
words of his hero is confirmed by the same significant
absence of sin from the speech of the Almighty.
Nor is Job's phrase intended to imply that discussion
and criticism are in themselves sinful : this great
thinker-poet sympathizes too profoundly with his
hero to believe that. But he means that discussion,
to be adequate, must be informed, and a criticism
that is ignorant of essentials must for ever remain
inept. It is no moral obliquity that Job is here
confessing, but an intellectual incompetence — which
expressed itself no doubt at times in hasty and shallow
protests — to "grasp this scheme of things entire."

There is a tribute of discussion and a tribute of
silence ; and when the soul that has wrestled with
its doubts has been rewarded by the vision which
brings peace, in penitent shame for its unworthy
doubts and foolish challenges it humbly bows in
grateful and adoring silence before the Lord of all.
" The conclusion of the whole matter is that, when
we have uttered all our arguments and registered
all our protests, we are driven back on those in
spirations of the soul which nothing can destroy."1

1 B. J. Snell, The Value of the Old Testament, p. 99.
236

Job's Reply

And thus the mighty drama ends — with Job
bowed upon his ash-heap prostrate before the Lord
God Almighty, wasted in body, but with his mind
filled with a strange peace marred only by the
memory of its former presumption, and with a quiet
rapture in his heart.

THE EPILOGUE
(Job xlii. 7-17)

THE EPILOGUE

THE RESTORATION OF JOB (Job xlii. 7-17)

THE tragedy has ended in the repose of reconcile
ment. Job now knows that, whether living or
dying, he is the Lord's. We have been powerfully
reminded by the speech of Jehovah of " the con
nection of the limited world of ordinary experience
with the vaster life of which it is but a partial
appearance."1 Even if Job were to die, we should
part from him with the impression, as Professor
Bradley3 has nobly said in another connection,
that this " heroic being, though in one sense and
outwardly he has failed, is yet in another sense
superior to the world in which he appears : is, in
some way which we do not seek to define, untouched
by the doom that overtakes him ; and is rather set

free from life than deprived of it The

tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its
error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality
but only a part of reality taken for the whole, and,
when so taken, illusive ; and . . . if we could see
the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place in
it, we should find them, not abolished, of course,
but so transmuted that they had ceased to be strictly
tragic — find, perhaps, the suffering and death

1 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 174.
» Op. cit. p. 324.

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The Problem of Pain

counting for little or nothing, the greatness of the
soul for much or all, and the heroic spirit, in spite of
failure, nearer to the heart of things than the smaller,
more circumspect, and perhaps even ' better ' beings
who survived the catastrophe." The function of the
speech of the Almighty is to enable us to " see the
whole."

But the natural human instinct, and still more
the old Hebrew instinct, for a happy ending could
not let the story end there. Mark Rutherford has
said toward the close of his fine comments on the
book : " God is great, we know not His ways.
He takes from us all we have, but yet, if we possess
our souls in patience, we may pass the valley of the
shadow and come out in sunlight again. We may
or we may not. " But for the old Hebrew-story
teller, we not only may, but we must ; so he
rounds off his tale with the complete material
restitution of his sorely-tried hero. Whether this
sketch could have come from the hand of the great
writer who has already brought the story to so
noble a conclusion, it is not the province of this
volume to discuss, though there is really no adequate
reason for doubting it ; it is enough to say that, as
far back as we can trace it, it has formed part of
the book we are considering ; and the conclusion,
so full of suggestion, is such that on deeper con
sideration, so far from resenting it, we receive it
with the most cordial welcome.

" So, after Jehovah had spoken these words to
Job, He said to Eliphaz the Temanite, ' My anger
is hot against thee and thy two friends ; because

242

The Restoration of Job

unlike My servant Job, ye have not spoken the truth
about Me/ ' The sublime speeches of Job (xxix.-
xxxi.) and the Almighty (xxxviii.f) have long ago
pushed the friends out of our mind. But God has
not forgotten them. He is angry with them ; and
His first words, addressed to their chief spokesman,
are very stern. Zophar (xi. 5) had prayed long ago
that God would speak and open His lips against
Job ; and lo ! when He does open His lips, it is to
speak against himself and his friends. He tells
them very plainly that they have not spoken the
truth about Him, " as My servant Job " hath done.
Here, then, is one element, and far from an un
important one, in the restitution of Job. The friends
had defended the Almighty with every argument,
honourable or dishonourable, known to controversy ;
and for their pains they are rewarded with His fiery
indignation. Job had been the great heretic,
challenging their truisms with a vehemence that
savoured often of impiety and bordered once or
twice upon blasphemy ; yet it is he, and not they,
who comes out of the conflict with the seal of the
divine approval. It is easy to see where the
sympathies of the writer lie. He is saying as plainly
as words can put it, that the God in whom he believes,
the God of his hero, is on the side of honest, fearless,
even daring inquiry ; that the frankly critical
discussion of beliefs universally held by the contem
porary church is no crime ; that the challenge of
the most venerable religious opinions is no impiety.
Nay, more, he is saying that these discussions and
challenges may themselves even be brilliant con-

243

The Problem of Pain

tributions to a larger truth ; may do the world an
infinitely deeper religious service than blind adherence
to an orthodoxy, which only remains orthodoxy so
long as it is not effectively challenged ; and that,
if uttered by a man like Job, with his passion for
God and for truth, they are peculiarly well-pleasing
to God, who is honoured by the active and not by
the stagnant mind.

Job was right and the friends were wrong. Job
was wrong in many particular things he said, and, as
we have seen, he humbly takes to his heart the rebuke
of the vision ; but he was right in his intellectual
temper, in the drift, the impulse, the sheer intrepid
honesty of his thought. The friends were right in
many particular things they said ; but they were
wrong — how painfully wrong we see in the kindling
of the divine anger — in their intellectual torpor
and inhospitality, in their timidity, in their stubborn
adherence to the past and the present, to the opinions
of the fathers and the brethren, in their refusal to
face the uncongenial and the unfamiliar, in their
preference for dogmas and doctrines to facts, in
their scorn of experiences they did not understand,
in their readiness to imagine any hypocrisy and
invent any calumny rather than face the simple
truth. Out of all the welter of the discussion, Job
stands forth as the champion of intellectual and
religious freedom, with the seal of the God of truth
stamped upon his disfigured brow. As he believes in
God, so he believes in the right and still more in the
duty of private judgment, however clamorous and
overwhelming the opposition ; and, for so believing,

244

The Restoration of Job

God lifts him to the highest honour. Again and
again — four times over within two verses — He calls
him " My servant Job/'

Here, in this high title deliberately repeated, is
another element in Job's restitution. Servant
before, when all went well (i. 8), he is " my servant "
still. "But now go to My servant Job with seven
bullocks and seven rams " — great offering for a great
crime — " and offer them as a burnt offering for
yourselves, and My servant fob shall pray for you ;
for, out of regard for him, I will not put you to con
fusion for your failure to speak the truth about me,
as My servant Job has done." The Greek version
puts this with engaging candour : " For, but for
him, I would have destroyed you." Notice how
deliberately the contrast is again emphasized between
the truth of Job and the falsehoods of the friends :
the writer is clearly putting himself into this.

Once more Job stands forth in radiant light.
We know him already as a man of superbly
courageous intellect : here we see him as a man of
prayer. But this, after ?11, is no surprise ; for one
of our first glimpses of him was in intercession for
his children. Here is yet another element in the
restitution of Job, that he is privileged to be an
intercessor whom the Lord will hear : he takes his
place with Abraham (Gen. xx. 7) and the prophets
(cf. Amos vii. 3) and the great Servant of Isaiah
liii. who made intercession for the transgressors ;
and he is worthy thus to mediate between God and
man, because of the things which he suffered. The
fate of his friends, whose theology had almost turned

345

The Problem of Pain

them into enemies, will be nothing less than terrible,
unless Job stands between them and God ; and he
does. Whatever reparation may ultimately be made
to Job for his shattered health and ruined fortunes,
we feel that notning can surpass these spiritual
tokens of the divine favour, and we are more than
grateful to the Epilogue for recording them. Even
if nothing else should happen, Job is now reinstated
in deed and in truth ; and the peace that was already
gathering upon us at the close of the tragedy is being
confirmed by every fresh sentence of the Epilogue.
" So Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and
Zophar the Naamathite went and did as Jehovah
told them, and Jehovah had regard unto Job. So
when Job prayed for his friends, Jehovah changed
his fortunes, giving him double of all he had before."
Jehovah had regard unto Job. How simple, how
sweet, how comforting, after all the storm !
Jehovah regarded Job first of all by hearing his
prayer for his friends. It is good that this should
come first, before the story of his material restitution.
But this follows very quickly — follows indeed as the
consequence of the other. It was when Job was
praying for his friends that his own fortunes were
transformed. How much spiritual insight lies in
words like these.

This transformation is now described with
picturesque detail. He received from the hand of
the Lord, whose love for His creatures has already
been so nobly illustrated in the vision of Creation,
twice as much as he had before. Seven sons and
three daughters — the fairest women in all the world —

246

The Restoration of Job

were born to him, to take, so far as that was possible,
the place of the dead ; and friends came with
presents to rejoice and feast with him in the old
home to which he nad now returned. " Then his
brothers and sisters and old friends came — every one
of them — and dined with him at his home ; and they
condoled with him, and comforced him for all the
misery that Jehovah had brought upon him.
Besides, each of them made him a present of a piece
of money and a gold ring." It is hard not to see in
all this a gentle satire on the fickleness of human
friendship, which recalls Job's mournfully beautiful
words uttered in the first sorrow of his abandon
ment. The friends who had been to him as " a
treacherous brook" (vi. 15), who had stood afar
off and forgotten him in the hour of his adversity
(xix. 14), now that he does not need them so sorely
— though Job is a lover of men (ch. xxxi.) and will
gratefully welcome them — come flocking with their
presents " to comfort him for all the misery that
Jehovah had brought upon him." This writer
knows the human heart to its depths.

But most strange of all is it to see trooping into
the picture " fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand
camels, one thousand yoke of oxen, and one thousand
she-asses." What, we ask, have these creatures
now to do with the blessedness of Job ? Is it not
just a little disappointing — something of the nature
of an anti-climax — after the magnificent conclusion
of the drama, which leaves Job bowed with sub
mission and at peace with the glorious God, and
after seeing him crowned, in the earlier part of the

247

The Problem of Pain

Epilogue, once and again with the glory and honour
of the divine approval ? So some have thought :
nay, this very material compensation has seemed to
some to be a blow struck, all unconsciously it may
be, at the whole teaching of the drama, which is
that a good man is willing to serve God for nought —
a reversion indeed to the position of Satan in the
Prologue. Cheyne, for example, has characterized
it as " a sad concession to a low view of providential
dealings." But this is to make too much of what is,
after all, only a minor trait. The material reward
is, in any case, not much more than a sort of poetic
justice. It is indeed an outward and visible sign
of the relation subsisting between Job and his God ;
but it is hard to believe that the genius who fought
his way to such a solution as appears in chs. xxxviiif.
would himself have laid much, if any, stress upon it.
Yet it i* not inappropriate or irrelevant. Job's
sufferings had their origin in Satan's denial of his
integrity ; and now that Satan has been convinced
— for Job has clung in the deepest darkness to the
God of his conscience — it is only just that Job
should be restored to his former state. Besides,
no earthly possessions or prosperity have any power
to injure the soul of this man who has been through
the furnace seven times heated, and come forth as
gold.

" After this Job lived a hundred and forty years.
Thus he was spared to see not only his children
but his grandchildren — four generations." Then
comes the inevitable end — " Job died, old and full
of days." Yet the Greek version refuses to consider

248

The Restoration of Job

this the end, and makes the extraordinarily interest
ing addition, " And it is written that Job will rise
again with those whom the Lord doth raise." Who
shall say that this addition was unjustified ? It
was made at a time when men were more fully and
clearly persuaded of immortality than in the days
when the book was written ; besides, there were
daring expressions of this very hope and faith in
the book itself — though found upon no other lips
than Job's. The addition is in strict line with his
loftiest aspirations. The writer of it could not let
Job end in death. He carried him beyond it
through the resurrection to that world in which,
face to face, he was destined to behold his Redeemer
and his heavenly Friend.

349

ELIHU'S INTERPRETATION OF
SUFFERING

(Job xxxii.-xxxvii.)

ELIHU'S INTERPRETATION OF SUFFERING
(Job xxxii.-xxxvii.)

EVERY generation has felt the spell of this wonderful
book, and already in very early times this fascination
kindled the imagination of thoughtful readers to
make supplementary contributions to the text. Of
these the most elaborate is the section devoted to
the speeches of Elihu (xxxii.-xxxvii.),1 added by
some one who felt that Job's audacity needed
rebuke, and who, dissatisfied equally with the
arguments of his friends and the speech of the
Almighty, was eager to illuminate the problem of
suffering from a somewhat different angle. His
contribution which, though not without interest
and value, is diffuse, and in places very obscure,
has not much to offer that is really new : his
leading ideas and sometimes even his language are
obviously suggested by the speeches of the original
book, notably those of Eliphaz and Jehovah.

Broadly speaking, while the friends regard suffering
as penal, Elihu regards it as corrective, disciplinary,
educative. But let us look at the speeches them
selves :

1 This section violently interrupts the fine transition from the
appeal of Job (xxxi.) to the reply of Jehovah (xxxviii.). Besides,
Elihu is not mentioned in the Prologue, nor yet in the Epilogue.
For reasons against the authenticity of this section, see my Intro
duction to the Old Testament, pp. 272-274.

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The Problem of Pain

" I am but young in years,

While ye are aged men :
So I was timid and feared

To set mine opinion before you.
I felt that days ought to speak,

And that years gave the right to teach wisdom.
But the spirit enlighteneth men,

The Almighty inspires them with insight.
It is not the old men that are wise,

Nor the aged that understand truth ;
And so, I pray, listen to me —

I, too, would set forth mine opinion." (xxxii. 6-10).

Though young, Elihu is conscious of divine
illumination, and believes that what he has to say
will bring to Job's mind the conviction which the
friends have failed to bring.

" I awaited what you had to say,

I lent mine ear to your reasons ;
Yea, I gave heed unto you,

While ye searched out what to say.
But see ! none brought conviction to Job,

Not a man of you answered his words.
Say not, ' Here we have come upon wisdom :
'Tis God must confound him, not man. ' '

(xxxii. 11-13).

These last two lines mean that he does not agree
with the original writer in thinking a theophany
to have been necessary to convince and convict Job.
He is conscious of the power to present incontrovert
ible arguments, and this he promises to do with
absolute impartiality :

"He has not yet debated with me,

Nor will I give him answer like yours.

I, too, will answer my share :

I too will set forth mine opinion.

For filled with words am I ;

The breath in my body distresses me.

354

Elihu's Interpretation of Suflering

Like wine without vent is my belly,

Like new wine-skins ready to burst%
I must speak and so find me relief,

I must open my lips and make answer.
I would show my favour to none,

And give flattering titles to no man.
Of flattery I know nothing —

Else soon would my Maker remove me.'*

(xxxii. 14, 17-22).

Of the last two lines one critic facetiously remarks,
" It is not quite so tragic as all that."

This rather bombastic exordium would no doubt
be less amusing to an Oriental audience than to us :
at the same time it is difficult to believe that a very
lofty solution of the burning problem is to come
from a young man who maintains that he is ready
to burst, if he is not to have the opportunity to
deliver himself of his speech. He proceeds with
the same conceit and diffuseness, promising not to
overawe Job as the theophany had done — another
indirect polemic against the divine speech in chs.
xxxviiif. :

" But listen, Job, pray, to my words,

And give ear unto all that I say.
Behold ! I have opened my mouth,

My tongue in my palate hath spoken.
My heart poureth forth words of knowledge,

Unfeigned is the speech of my lips.
Then answer me this, if thou canst :

Stand up and debate with me.
See ! I am in God's sight as thou ;

I, too, was fashioned of clay.
The spirit of God hath created me;

My life is the breath of Almighty.
See ! no terrors of mine need appal thee,

Nor shall my hand lie heavy upon thee."

(xxxiii. 1-7)

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The Problem of Pain

He then proceeds, in a manner not unknown to
controversialists, to build his case upon misrepresent
ation :

"Thou hast certainly said in my hearing,

Thy voice I heard thus maintaining,
' Pure and sinless am I,

I am clean, there is no guilt in me.
But He findeth pretexts against me,

He counteth me as His foe.
He setteth my feet in the stocks,

Keepeth watch over all my ways.
Behold ! when I cry, comes no answer ;

God hideth himself from men/" (xxxiii. 8-12).

Job, of course, had said nothing of the kind. In
spite of the noble record which he claims in his
great speech of vindication (xxxf.) he had frankly
admitted his " transgression " (vii. 21), and " youth
ful sins" (xiii. 26) ; but he had refused to admit
that these venial and inevitable failings were
sufficient to explain and justify the colossal disaster
by which he had been overwhelmed. Job — Elihu
alleges — had maintained that God is silent. Nay,
answers Elihu : He speaks loudly enough, especially
in two clear and notable ways ; and it is at this
point that Elihu' s contribution to the discussion is
most distinctive.

The first way is by means of dreams and visions :

" Now why dost thou plead against Him

That He giveth thy words no answer ?
For God hath one manner of speech,

Yea, two — and He doth not revoke it.
In a dream, in a vision of night,
'When deep sleep falleth on men/

In slumbers upon the bed,
Then He opens the ears of men,

And sendeth them fearful warnings,

256

Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

To turn men aside from wrong.

And to bring human pride to an end —

To keep back man's soul from the pit

And his life from descending to Sheol." (xxxiii. 13-18).

Just at this point where Elihu promises to be
original, his debt is most obvious. He draws heavily
upon the mysterious apparition of Eliphaz, whose
words he even quotes (iv. izfL) — the chief difference
being that, whereas Eliphaz regards his vision as
exceptional, Elihu considers such visitations as
normal experiences with men whom God is seeking
to wean from their sin. His allusion to the dreams
in which God visits men rests on words of Job's
own (vii. 14). But how Job would have scorned
these edifying exhortations of Elihu !

" Thou scarest me with dreams,

And with visions dost so affright me,
That gladly would I be strangled :

Death itself I spurn in my pain." (vii. i^f).

The dreams which Elihu maintained were sent by
a gracious God to instruct him and to save him
from himself, only filled Job with terrors so appalling
that death would have been an infinitely welcome
release.

But God speaks to men through pain and sickness
as well as through visions and dreams :

"Or on bed of pain he is chastened,

And all his bones are benumbed.
His soul has a loathing of bread,

And the daintiest food he abhorreth.
His flesh is lean and wasted;

His bones are all but bare.
His soul draweth nigh to the pit,

And his life to the angels of death." (xx*iii. 19-22).

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The Problem of Pain

In those hours of weakness and loneliness God sends
His angel to interpret to the sufferer his chastisement
and to win him through contrition and penitence
from the angel of death who has laid his icy hand
upon him ; and the man who accepts this discipline
and visitation in humility will assuredly be restored
and live to sing his grateful song of praise before the
congregation :

"Then over him there is an angel
Interpreter, one of a thousand,
Who expounds unto man his chastisement,
Takes pity on him and says :

I Let him not go down to the pit ;

I have found for his soul a ransom.'
Then his flesh becomes fresher than child's.

He returns to the days of his youth.
He prays unto God with acceptance,

He looks on His face with joy,
Tells the story of his salvation.

And sings before men this song ;

I 1 have sinned and perverted the right,
Yet He hath not requited my sin.

He hath ransomed my soul from the pit,

That alive I behold the light.'
See ! all these things God doeth,

Twice, yea thrice, with a man,
To bring back his soul from the pit,

With the light of life's sunshine upon him.1*

(xxxiii. 23-30).

Though this is but the elaboration of a hint in
the first speech of Eliphaz (" Happy is the man
whom God correcteth," v. 17), there is much here
that is beautiful and true and nobly said. It is really
spoken from the inside ; it grasps very firmly the
great truth of the love of God adumbrated in the
speech of Jehovah, and applies it in a more intimate
and personal way than that speech had done.

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Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

Strictly, of course, it does not meet the case of Job
who, we must never forget, both at the beginning
and the end of the book is described as " My
servant," " a man, blameless and upright, fearing
God and shunning evil." He at least does not need
those terrible visitations to purify him ; but it is
nevertheless a profoundly suggestive interpretation
of the place of suffering in human life generally,
" protecting a man by a shield of pain from the
greater evil of sin "x — a gift whereby character is
deepened, strengthened, purified, and lifted God-
wards. As Cornill has finely said, " If a man
recognizes the educative character of suffering and
takes it to heart, the suffering becomes for him a
source of infinite blessing, the highest manifestation
of divine love." Has Job any answer to offer to
this?

"Be attentive, Job, listen to me,

Be thou silent, and I will speak.
If aught thou canst say, then answer me :

Speak, for my wish is to clear thee.
But if not, listen thou unto me :

Be silent, while I teach thee wisdom." (xxxiii. 31-33).

Again Elihu returns to the attack on Job in a
passage marked this time by misunderstanding as
well as misrepresentation :

" Listen, ye wise, to my words,

And give ear to me, ye that have knowledge.
For the ear is the tester of words

As the palate the taster of food.
Let us choose for ourselves what is right.
Recognize by ourselves what is good.

* W- B. Macleod, The Afflictions of the Righteous, p. 241.

The Problem of Pain

For Job claimeth to be in the right :

' God/ he says, ' hath deprived me of justice.

Though right, I am counted a liar ;

And though sinless, He wounds me past healing.*
Where is the man like Job,

That drinketh up scorning like water,
That leagues with the workers of wrong,

And that walketh with wicked men ?
For he saith that a man hath no profit

From being the friend of God." (xxxiv. 2-9).

True disciple of Eliphaz here as before, Elihu does
not scruple to invent wicked calumnies in support
of his doctrine. Job's stainless record is the proof
that he had never " leagued with the workers of
wrong or walked with wicked men." Besides, in
accusing Job of mockery, of " drinking up scorning
like water," he shows his complete inability to under
stand the man. The last two lines may be an allusion
to the probably suppressed speech of Job in ch.
xxiv., in which he had maintained that the friends of
God were rewarded with disaster. But Eliphaz
does not see that what he took for scepticism and
impiety in the utterances of Job was really the
obverse of his passionate yearning for God.

In the baldest possible fashion Elihu now lays
down the old and, in Job's eyes, completely dis
credited doctrine of exact retribution ; but he gives
it a new and extraordinarily interesting turn. It is
simply inconceivable, he argues, that the great
Ruler of the universe can be other than just. It is
His spirit that unceasingly sustains all things : the
withdrawal of it would mean universal collapse.
He is supreme and His dominion unchallengeable ;
what temptation could He have to injustice ? what

260

Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

interest of His could be served by it ? The whole
of history, crowded as it is with evidence that wrong
is punished in high and low alike, confirms his con
tention that there is One above who watches over
nations and men in the interests of the moral order :

"So, ye men of intelligence, listen.
Far be it from God to do evil,

And from the Almighty to err.
For the work of each man He requiteth,

He bringeth His way back upon him.
God assuredly cannot do wrong,

The Almighty would not pervert justice.
Who entrusted the earth to His charge ?

And who watcheth over the universe ?
If He should recall His spirit

And gather His breath to Himself,
All flesh together would perish,

And man would return to the dust.

If thou art wise, listen to this,

And give ear to the sound of my words.
Could One rule to whom justice were odious ?

Condemn'st Thou the Just and the Mighty One
Who saith to a king, ' Thou villain 1 '

To nobles, ' Ye infamous men ! ' —
Who showeth no favour to princes,

Regardeth not rich more than poor ?
For the work of His hands are they all ;

In a moment they die — at midnight.
The rich are convulsed, they pass :

He mysteriously removeth the mighty.
For His eyes are over man's ways,

Every one of his steps He beholdeth.
No darkness is there and no gloom

Where the workers of wrong may be hidden.
No time doth He set for man

To appear before God in judgment :
He shatters the strong without trial,

And others He sets in their place.
For He giveth heed to their works;

In the night He doth overturn them.

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The Problem of Pain

Beneath their crimes they are crushed ;

He smites them in presence of witnesses ;
For they turned from following Him,

And they gave no heed to His ways.
So the crushed were driven to cry to Him,

And the call of the wretched He heard." (xxxiv. 10-28).

In the light, then, of all this incontestable proof
of the justice of the Omnipotent One, will it not be
common prudence in the rebellious Job to abandon
alike his criticism and his wickedness, and turn to
God with penitence and confession of sin ?

" Say to God, ' I have borne my sin,

I will not offend any more.
Now I see it : O teach me Thyself.

Have I sinned ? I will do so no more.'
Must He recompense after thy wishes,

That thou hast rejected (His ways) ?
'Tis for thee to decide — not for me ;

Then utter the thing that thou knowest.
Men of intellect will admit —

Men of wisdom who listen to me —
That Job hath not spoken with knowledge,

His words are not marked by insight.
O that Job might be tried to the end

For the wickedness of his answers ;
For he addeth rebellion to sin,

And multiplies words against God." (xxxiv. 31-37).

Job, Elihu alleges, had maintained that religion
was unprofitable (xxxiv. 9). This he now proceeds
to controvert, showing himself once more an apt
pupil of Eliphaz. He repeats his master's awful
doctrine that God is too exalted to be interested
in or affected by the conduct of His creatures
(xxii. 21). He sits upon his distant, lonely throne
in the heavens, unmoved alike by their sin and
their righteousness. It is true that Job's religion,
if he were religious, could bring no profit to God :

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Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

but he would find that it would be immensely
profitable to himself. One hardly knows whether
to abhor more this utilitarian conception of religion
or this heartless conception of God — a conception,
by the way, essentially at variance with the better
things Elihu had not long before said about the
immanence of God (xxxiv. 141). Elihu's philosophy
is as poor as his theology :

"Thinkest thou this to be just,

Dost thou call it thy right before God,
To ask, ' What advantage is mine ?

What the better am I, if I sin not ? '
Well, I will give thee an answer,

And thy three friends as well.
Look to the heavens and see,

And observe the clouds high overhead.
What effect hath thy sin upon Him ?

What cares He for thy many transgressions ?
What gain comes to Him from thy righteousness ?

What receives He from thy hand ?
Tis to men like thyself thy sin matters,

Tis mortals thy righteousness touches."

(xxxv. 2-8).

These shallow contentions are followed by a really
fine and searching passage which shows how easily
the true inward meaning of adversity is missed.
The cry which rises from the depths is too seldom
a genuine yearning for God, it is for the most part
only an animal cry for deliverance. It is relief, and
not God, that men want, and that is why the dis
cipline so often ends in nothing.

"Under sore oppression men cry

For help from the tyrannous arm ;
But none saith, ' Where is God my Creator ? ' —

The Giver of songs in the night,
Who grants us more knowledge than beasts,

And more wisdom than birds of the air.

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The Problem of Pain

Then they cry, but receive no answer,

Because of their impious pride.
For to idle cries God will not listen,

Nor will the Almighty regard them.
But when He seems not to regard thee,

Be still and wait patiently for Him." (xxxv. 9-14).

Elihu, who is full of matter, begins again to
"justify his Creator" with all the comprehensive
knowledge and presumptuous self-importance of
youth.

" Wait, I pray, but a while ; I will show thee :

I have yet to say somewhat for God.
With knowledge fetched from afar

I will justify my Creator.
For truly my words are no lie,

One in knowledge complete stands before thee."

(xxxvi. 2-4).

His defence of the Almighty moves along two
lines of evidence — history and nature — each of which
is elaborated with a fulness intended to justify
his claim to " knowledge fetched from afar."
First, then, history abundantly illustrates the saving
power of suffering.

" Behold, God spurneth the stubborn,

The wicked He spareth not :
But He granteth the rights of the wretched,

Withdraws not their due from the just.
It has happened to kings on the throne,

Seated in pride and glory,
That prisoners in chains they became,

Held fast in the cords of misery :
Then He set forth before them their doings,

Their proud and rebellious behaviour ;
He opened their ears to instruction

And bade them turn back from sin.
If they hearken and do Him homage,

They finish their days in prosperity.

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Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

But if stubborn, they pass to Sheol;

They die without coming to knowledge.
For, godless at heart, they grow sullen ;

They cry not for help when He binds them.
They die in the days of their youth,

Like sodomites they perish.
The sufferer He saveth through suffering;

Adversity opens his ear." (xxxvi. 5-15).

In the last two lines there is real insight, noble
truth pointedly expressed. " God delivers the
afflicted," as Professor Strahan finely comments,
" not only in, but through, their affliction, saving
them by that from which they would fain be saved."
The moral for Job is obvious : the penalty for
sin has fallen, and the price of restoration will have
to be paid : it is paid in a willing unmurmuring
submission to the Hand that has justly smitten
him :

" But thou hast been lured by thy freedom,

By ease at the jaws of distress,
By the fat on thy well-filled table,

And the absence of trouble to haunt thee.
The full fate of the wicked is thine,

Thou art held in the grasp of His judgment;
Let not chastisement make thee resentful,

Nor let the high ransom deflect thee.
Wouldst thou marshal thy plaint against Him,

And all the resource of thy might ?
Beware, and incline not to sin,

Nor make choice of sin rather than suffering."

(xxxvi. 16-19, 21.)

The second and concluding argument is drawn
from the evidence afforded by nature. There God's
incomparable wisdom and majesty are so plain to
the open eye that criticism becomes a sort of
blasphemy ; and Job's duty is to join the mighty

265

The Problem of Pain

chorus of praise which rises evermore from the lips
of reverent men :

" See ! God by His power doeth loftily —

Who is a teacher like Him ?
Who hath enjoined Him His way ?

Or who hath said, ' Thou doest wrongly * ?
Remember to magnify Him

For His work whereof men have sung.
All men look with pleasure thereon,

Though man seeth it but from afar." (xxxvi. 22-25).

The phenomena which illustrate the power and
the wonder of God are then enumerated in a way
that is vivid and striking enough, but marred some
what by the prolixity which runs through all Elihu's
utterances. This passage has been clearly suggested
by the speeches of the Almighty, but it is to them as
the whisper to the thunder (xxvi. 14). With a later
age's somewhat more scientific knowledge of nature,
Elihu discourses to Job — whom he bids to " stand
still and consider the wonders of God" — of the clouds
and the rain, the thunder and the lightning, the snow
and the ice and the hail, the wind and the sky.

" Behold I God is great beyond knowledge,

The tale of His years beyond search.
For He draweth up drops from the sea,

Which He poureth in rain from His vapour,
Wherewith, as the clouds distil,

They drop down in showers upon men.
Who can tell how the clouds are spread out,

How He thunders from His pavilion ?
He spreadeth His vapour around Him;

He covers the tops of the mountains.
Therewith He sustaineth the nations,

And food in abundance He giveth.
He wrappeth His hands in the lightning,

And biddeth it fly to its mark.
His thunder announces His coming;

His anger is kindled at wrong.

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Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

At this doth thy heart not tremble,

And leap right out of its place ?
Hark, hark to His voice tempestuous,

To the roar that goes forth from His mouth.
'Neath the whole sky He letteth it loose,

And His flash to the fringe of the world;
In the wake of it roareth His voice,

With His voice majestic He thunders;
Nor holds He the lightnings back,

Whensoever His voice is heard.

God letteth us see His wonders ;

Great things beyond knowledge He doeth.
For He saith to the snow, ' Fall earthwards ' ;

Likewise to His strong rushing rain.
He sealeth up all mankind,

That His work may be known of them all.
The beasts go into their lairs,

And within their dens remain.
The tempest comes out of its chamber,

And out of its store-house the cold.
By the breath of God ice is given,

The broad waters lie in constraint.
Yea, He loadeth the thick cloud with hail,

And the cloud doth scatter His lightning.
This way and that it darteth,

Turning about by His guidance,
Doing whate'er He commands it

Over the face of His world,
Whether for curse and correction

Or in mercy He sendeth it forth.

Hearken to this, Job ; stand still,

And consider the wonders of God.
Dost thou know how God doeth His work ;

How He flashes the light of His cloud ?
Dost thou know how the thick clouds are poised ;

How He pours down a flood when it thunders,
What time thy garments grow hot

From the south wind which laps earth in silence ?
Like Him canst thou spread out the sky,

Which is strong as a molten mirror ? "

(xxxvi. 26-xxxvii. 18),
267

The Problem of Pain

Much of this is very fine ; but it lags behind the
great speeches of the Almighty in xxxviiif. as much
in penetration as in literary power. There are none
of those inimitable glimpses1 into the benevolence
which is there seen to irradiate the world. It is
the power and the splendour of God that attract
Elihu — a splendour more dazzling than the most
dazzling light. How foolish, then, and how wicked
to challenge, as Job had done, the mighty system
controlled by such a One :

" How then shall we speak of Him ? Tell me ;

For helpless we are in our darkness.
Shall one cavil at Him when He speaketh ?

Or shall a man say that He errs ?
Now no man can look on the light,

So dazzling bright in the sky,
When the wind has passed over and cleared it,

And radiance comes out of the north :
But the splendour of God — how terrible !

The Almighty we cannot find out." (xxxvii. 19-23).

It is significant that Elihu concludes this elaborate
demonstration of the divine power, with a meagre
but pointed allusion to the divine justice. The All-
powerful is the All- just, and therefore men must
fear Him :

" Powerful He is and all-righteous.
And justice He will not pervert.
For this cause ought mortals to fear Him :

But the heart of conceit He despiseth." (xxxvii. 231).

There is Power and there is Justice ; but where
is Love ? Elihu had seen it upon the sick-bed
(xxxiii. 1911), but he does not see it, as the speeches
of the Almighty reveal it, in the universe. There

1 The solitary equivalent is xxxvii. 136.
268

Elihu's Interpretation of Suffering

is here the same philosophical failure as we noted
before in his inability to combine the transcendent
and the immanent — the failure to see the world
as one. And this is only part of his failure to under
stand Job and the writer of the original book : for
while that great genius accords to Job the honour of
a theophany, Elihu can only end with the ominous
warning that God gives no heed to those who, like
Job, are wise in their own conceit and dare to criticize
the system under which they live. God will ignore
such, says Elihu : " God in His glory will appear "
— says the older and greater poet. It is the difference
between mediocrity and originality, between con
vention and inspiration

269

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE
MATTER

THE MYSTERY OF THE DIVINE WISDOM (Job xxviii.)

THE fine poem which constitutes ch. xxviii. is very
generally believed by scholars to be a later addition
to the book. " It does not connect well either
with the preceding or the following chapter. The
serenity that breathes through ch. xxviii. would
not naturally be followed by the renewed lament
ations of ch. xxix., and k would further be
dramatically inappropriate for a man in agony to
speak thus didactically. It is a sort of companion
piece to Proverbs viii. ; it is too abstract for its
context, and lacks its almost fierce emotion."1 But
it has a deep interest and beauty of its own, and is
valuable as a specimen of later Jewish thought,
apparently after that had begun to be influenced
by the philosophy of Greece. Its theme is Wisdom
— by which, as the later verses (23-27) show, is meant
the Divine Reason inherent in the created world —
and its unattainability by man or any other created
thing. The various stanzas gather round a refrain,
with which the poem seems originally to have begun.

Metals can by skill and dangerous effort be
extracted from mines — here follows a remarkable
description of ancient mining operations — but no
skill or effort can bore a way to Wisdom :

1 See my Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 277.
273

The Problem of Pain

"As for wisdom — whence cometh she?

Understanding — where hath she her home ?
For a mine there is for the silver,

And a place where the gold is refined.
Iron is taken from dust,

And copper is smelted from stone. •

Man explores the dark to its limits,

Seeks stones from the blackest gloom.
He breaketh a shaft through the ground :

Forgotten, they hang without foothold,

They swing to and fro far from men.
From the surface of earth cometh bread,

While, beneath, it is raked as by fire.
Her stones are the home of the sapphire,

The dust thereof is gold.
He puts forth his hand on the rock;

At their roots he o'erturneth the mountains.
Channels he cuts in the rocks,

And he bindeth the streams that they weep not.
Each precious thing his eye seeth;

He bringeth the secret to light." (xxviii. 1-6, 9-11).

No bird or beast or man has ever been to the haunts
of Wisdom, nor is there any mart in which she can
be purchased even at the costliest price :

" But Wisdom — whence cometh she ?

Understanding — where hath she her home?
The pathway is strange to the vulture.

Unseen by the eye of the hawk,
By the sons of pride untrodden, :

Nor ever by fierce lion skirted.
The way to her no man knoweth;

In the land of the living none finds her.
The deep saith, ' She is not in me ; '

And the sea saith, ' She is not in me.*
No fine gold for her can be given,

Nor silver be paid as her price.
Not in Ophir gold can she be valued,

In precious onyx or sapphire.
Gold and clear glass are no match for her,

Jewels of gold no exchange for her.

274

The Mystery of the Divine Wisdom

Speak not of coral or crystal ;

More precious than rubies is Wisdom.
The topaz of Cush is no match for her;

In pure gold she cannot be valued."

(xxviii. 71, 12-19).

This Wisdom is hidden from all but God.
She is the Idea which He employed and expressed
in His creation of the world :

' But Wisdom — whence cometh she ?

Understanding — where hath she her home ?
She is hid from the eyes of the living,

Concealed from the birds of the air.
Abaddon and Death declare,

' A rumour of her we have heard.'
But the way to her God understandeth,

And He alone knovveth her home.
For He looks to the end of the earth

And all things under heaven He beholds.
When He settled the weight of the wind

And meted the waters by measure,
Created a law for the rain,

And a path for the flash of the lightning,
Even then did He see and declare her,

Establish and search her out." (xxviii. 20-27).

The main idea of the poem — that Wisdom is
unattainable by man and known to God alone —
receives another turn in the triplet with which it
closes :

" And He said unto man, ' Behold 1
The fear of me — that is Wisdom,
And turning from wrong — Understanding.' "

(xxviii. 28).

The Wisdom here commended is a piety expressing
itself in morality, or a morality rooted in religion.
This is the dominant ideal of the Old Testament
(cf. Mic. vi. 8), completely incarnate, for example,

375

The Problem of Pain

in the person of Job, as we learn from the Prologue
(i. i), where the words are identical. This is the
wisdom attainable by man, and to be striven after
by him : the other is God's own unattainable
secret.

This charming poem contributes nothing to the
solution of the problem which agitates the whole
discussion.

THE MYSTERY OF THE DIVINE
WISDOM

(Job xxviii.)

THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER

Now that we have traversed the whole book and
made ourselves familiar with the drift and progress
of its thought, it will be well to ask ourselves what,
if any, is its specific contribution to the ever present
and ever urgent problem of suffering. The discussion
presented by the book is not in any case exhaustive,
as it curiously ignores the profound solution embodied
in the immortal picture of Isaiah liii., that suffering
may be vicarious. The Hebrew genius, which was
not speculative, deals with its problems in the
concrete ; in the book of Job, therefore, not so
much with suffering as with a sufferer. The book
throbs with life ; it is warm with the glow of a real
human experience. Its hero is the writer's other
self ; it is his own doubts and fears and struggles
that he has thrown into imperishable literary form :
and it is living men, of narrow conventional outlook,
who debate the high theme with him and who, by
contrast, in the clash of the debate reveal him to
us in all his lonely grandeur. This is one of the
many qualities that give the book its strange power
over the human heart and its indefeasible place in
the literature of the world.

Whatever solution it has to offer — and to that
we shall come presently — it was felt by its very
earliest readers that the original book at any rate

279

The Problem of Pain

had not completely solved the mystery with which
it deals. Scholars are all but universally agreed
that the speeches of Elihu form no part of that
book : they are — we need not say a protest — but
at any rate an attempt to supplement its teaching,
and to present an aspect of truth which seemed to
a later age to have been insufficiently presented in
the book itself ; and it is not improbable that it is
to this later addition, conceived in the spirit of
orthodoxy, that we owe the preservation of the older
book which hurled its mighty challenge against the
easy and comfortable tenets of the time. Whether
Elihu' s own contribution is adequate or exhaustive
is another matter ; but at any rate all this goes to
show how keenly every thoughtful age has felt the
mystery, and how the fascination of it has ever
urged men on to new solutions of that which, after
all is said, must ever remain in large measure shrouded
in mystery. As Illingworth1 has remarked, " Suffer
ing is not a subject on which anything new can be
said. It has long ago been probed, to the utmost
limit of our capacity, and remains a mystery still."
But we can make no headway at all, until we
have learned the first lesson of the Epilogue, that
God loves an independent thinker. It has been
said that, where God has left off teaching, man
should leave off learning. But God is a Teacher
who never leaves off. Evermore He is presenting
to us, as to Job (xxxviiif), His wonderful world,
and He invites and expects us to open our eyes, to
look at it and learn from it — reverently indeed, but

1 Lw/r Mnndi, p. 113.
280

Conclusion

honestly, fearlessly, incessantly. This is the soul
alike of science and religion — to keep the eye and the
heart ever open to the wonder of God. Intellectual
integrity is a part of true religion. There is more
genuine religion in an intelligent and even a
passionate challenge than in a wooden, passive,
languid acquiescence. We are not bound, and we
are not likely, to solve the riddle of the world ; but
as brave, intelligent, and reverent men, we are bound
to try. It was not the friends who said the correct
things, but the man who said the terrible things in
the desperate honesty of his soul, that won from
the Lord the " Well done, thou good and faithful
servant." " Ye have not spoken the truth about
Me as My servant Job hath done. Him will I
accept " (xlii. 8). The attitude of the friends is
always thoroughly conventional ; in their defence
of the Almighty and His ways they remind us of
Matthew Arnold's bishops and their effort " to do
something," as they said, " for the honour of Our
Lord's Godhead." Job is original and emancipating.
This, then, is the temper in which the great
writer attacks his problem. What does he make of
it ? It is one of the many proofs of his greatness
that he does not claim to have completely solved it.
He is too great a man to think that he can expound
the universe.

" Ah, how small am I ! What can I answer ?
I lay my hand on my mouth." (xl. 4).

It is difficult to resist the impression that he

intended his ultimate solution to lie in the speeches

which he attributes to the Almighty : but the first

a&x

The Problem of Pain

impression they make — and it remains with us to
the end in overwhelming force — is that the universe
I is an infinite mystery. To the questions which are
1 hurled out of the whirlwind, Job has no answer at
[ all : all he can do is to lay his hand on his mouth.
He stands in the presence of something, of^some One,
that transcends him infinitely ; and it would be the
sheerest insanity in him, who holds so utterly
insignificant a place in the immeasurable scheme of
things, to suppose that he completely understands
it or the mighty Power that created and controls it.
He cannot accept the ironical challenge to ascend
the throne of the world (xl. 10-14), for who and what
is he ? Clearly it is no philosopher with a full
blown system who writes these glorious speeches ;
it is some reverent, adoring soul, smitten into wonder
and silence by the vast system within which he
lives. Suffering is a feature of the world as we know
it ; and, if we cannot adequately explain the simpler
part, to say nothing of the whole, is it matter for
wonder that we cannot explain the more intricate
part ? The poet is reading to us as plainly as he
can the lesson of reverent agnosticism.

But the fact that we cannot know completely
is no proof that we cannot know at all, and no reason
why we should not try to know ; and though the
writer has no system, he has inspirations and
intuitions which are worth a thousand systems,
and they flash from many points of the book. So
far from being a philosophical discussion, it is hardly
a discussion at all ; for, though the psychological
interest of the situation is heightened by every

282

Conclusion

speech, there is practically no development in the
argument. The friends grow more excited and
unfair, Job grows more calm and dignified : but,
so far as argument is concerned, neither he nor they
affect each other. The drama is, what Renan aptly
calls it, " a shower of sparks," and even the severely
handled friends are not without their measure of
illumination. They are men of average intelligence
and of conventional religious type. They represent
the truth that has descended from the fathers and
that is cherished by the contemporary church ; and
this can never be the complete illusion which Job
so mercilessly anathematized. His denunciations
were justified in so far as it was truth which they
believed without examination, accepted without really
assimilating. But some of the things they said were
true all the same.

We do not speak here of their penal conception
of suffering. The book is a fierce attack upon that
view, and the writer must have abhorred it as a
ludicrously inadequate explanation of human misery.
His own experience and observation rose up to testify
against it. He saw no mechanical adaptation of
human fortunes to desert, but a totally undiscrimin-
ating distribution of the goods and the evils of life.
He saw the sun of prosperity rise upon the unjust,
and he saw the tower fall upon innocent men
and bury them beneath the ruins. True, in the
Epilogue, everything moves according to the
traditional scheme : the " wicked " friends would
have been destroyed but for the intercessory prayer
of Job, and the righteous Job is rewarded not only

a83

The Problem of Pain

with spiritual privileges, but also with those material
things dear to ancient Israel's heart. But the poem,
in which the writer utters himself most distinctively,
is a sustained and passionate protest against the
penal view of suffering. The amazing courage of
this protest is only fully appreciated when we
remember that this conception was held not only
by ancient Israel, and by the conventional spirits
of every age, but by the historians and even by the
prophets themselves — at any rate in its application
to the nation. But Job will have none of it. One
would have liked to see the friends argue their case,
as the punitive conception of suffering has never
been without its defenders : but men who take their
opinions from ancient or contemporary authority
find it easier to state their case than to defend it
elaborately or convincingly. It is almost too much,
perhaps, to expect that the friends should argue it,
for to them there is no problem. God is just, men
get what they deserve — and there is an end of the
matter. " Who ever perished, being innocent ? "
The man who is innocent will not perish, and the
man who perishes is not innocent. What more is
there to be said ?

But there is real illumination in these words of
Eliphaz : " Behold, happy is the man whom God
correcteth ; therefore despise not thou the chasten
ing of the Almighty. For He maketh sore, and
bindeth up ; He woundeth, and His hands make
whole " (v. 17). The fact that the admonition was
not strictly relevant to Job's case does not affect
its essential truth. Suffering, in the providence of

284

Conclusion

God, may have a disciplinary value. If resented,
it will harden and embitter the man whom it visits ;
but, when borne with meekness and uncomplaining
faith, it has been recognized by many a sufferer to
be a veritable gift of God, cleansing the character
of its dross, developing in it unfamiliar graces and
virtues — tenderness, patience, humility, sympathy,
refinement, strength, beauty — and bringing with it
a revelation of God, of His presence and sustaining
power, which without it would have been in that
degree impossible. The unremoved thorn will be
accompanied by an experience of that abounding
grace of God which is always sufficient for those who
expectantly wait for it ; so that what begins as pain
ends as power, and the weeping that tarries for the
night is transformed into the joy of the morning.
The wound is bound up and healed by hands that
the sufferer learns to confess as none other than God's
own, and the discipline of pain and sorrow is seen in
the end, though seldom at the beginning, to be one
of His most blessed gifts. This is the truth more
fully elaborated by Elihu in the passage where he
describes sickness and pain as one of the ways in
which God speaks to men (xxxiii. 19-28) in order
to teach, to cleanse, and redeem them. The soul
is let down to the depths that it may be lifted up
again and set upon the rock, ransomed and rejoicing.
Then " they are glad, because it is quiet ; they are
brought to the haven they long for " (Ps. cvii. 30) ;
and with chastened heart the sufferer can sing,

" He hath ransomed my soul from the pit,

That alive I behold the light." (Job xxxiii. 28).

285

The Problem of Pain

Another aspect of suffering is suggested by the
Prologue. It is a test. It reveals to a man how
weak or how firm is his grasp of the eternal things ;
it tests the motives of his goodness. Satan main
tains that if only a heavy enough hand be laid upon
Job, the faith that is in him will be crushed. He
is good, because it is worth his while ; but if his
faith be subjected to the strain of adversity, there
is a point at which it will snap. There is a real
truth in this view, cynical as are the assumptions
which underlie it. Adversity is a searching test,
alike of a man's character and of his religion.
Terrible things can come upon individual lives,
colossal tragedies can be enacted upon the broad
stage of international life and history ; but the
faith which suffers itself to be -shattered by these
things is not the mighty faith kindled by the vision
of chs. xxxviiif., of a world sustained evermore upon
gracious and mighty arms. The faith which is to
be truly adequate at any point must be adequate
at every point. It must be for ever insufficient,
unless it have an all-sufficient God. It must be able
to face every possible contingency and terror from
which the natural man recoils, with the triumphant
words of Paul, " In all these things we are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us : for I am
persuaded that neither life nor death nor angels
nor principalities nor things present nor things to
come nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate us from the love
of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom.
viii. 381).

286

Conclusion

The love of God which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord. Therein lies the difference between the
Old Testament and the New. The love of God,
so precious to the saints of the older covenant,
was not yet so persuasively revealed as it is
in the face of Jesus Christ. The cry of the older
time was " O that I knew where I might find
Him " (xxiii. 3) ; and not till long afterwards
did the Word become flesh and dwell among us, full
of grace and truth. But even so, there were men
in the olden time who could endure, as seeing Him
who is invisible. The words, " Though He slay me,
yet will I trust in Him" (xiii. 15) — it is pretty
generally agreed — do not represent what Job said
or could have said in that particular context ; but
they do represent the whole attitude of the man.
Job had often called for a revelation : he is himself
a revelation. Deep down below all the protests
and challenges wrung from his agony of body and
soul is the simple trust so finely expressed in the
Prologue : " Jehovah gave, Jehovah took : the
name of Jehovah be blessed " (i. 21). The man who,
after losing his all, can still say that, has stood the
test. Suffering tests.

Another fine thought of the Prologue is that
suffering is woven into the heavenly plan of human
life. It is not only not unknown to God, it is actually
drawn within His purpose. The one intolerable
thing is that what we are called to suffer should have
no meaning — no high origin and no fruitful issue.
It is a comfort to know, as we have already seen, that,
if we let it do its work upon us, it has an issue —

287

The Problem of Pain

cleansing, refining, strengthening. This alone is
enough to suggest that it has a purpose, that purpose.
But the fact of the purpose is made clear beyond
cavil in the wonderful opening scenes where, for
the highest ends — to prove the power of religion and
the lovableness of God — what is to happen on earth
is decreed in the councils of heaven. On the earth,
the fierce sorrows and the fiercer discussions : and
above, the explanation of it all. It is part of God's
purpose and plan that Job is permitted, nay privi
leged, to suffer. When the divine decree has been
issued and the heavenly council dispersed, the blows
begin to fall thick and fast. Job does not know why,
but God knows. He means him well, the very
best. He is trusting His own reputation, as it were,
into the hands of His servant. He is conferring
upon him the unspeakable honour of refuting in
his own person, once for all, by his fidelity, the
cynical estimate of human nature and the utilitarian
conception of religion.

How different this sorrowful earth would seem, if
we could see it over-arched by the purposeful heavens.
As a modern thinker has said, " Every special
incoming of God into human experience is prepared
in the unseen, before it appears in the seen." The
sense that all the vicissitudes of our life are elements
in God's individual plan for us ought to lift us into
a peace which chances and changes cannot mar.
How calmly life might be lived and sorrow borne, if
we believed that some great purpose lay behind it
all, and was through it to be fulfilled. Nay, not so
much a purpose as a Person. Above our little lives

288

Conclusion

is One upon the throne who has prepared a place
for us in His universe, and designed for us experi
ences through which He is calling us to honour Him
by unflinching fidelity. The picture in the Prologue
is but the application to the experience of sorrow, of
the great thought which sustained the prophet
Jeremiah throughout his tempestuous career — the
thought that, before he was born, he had been in the
mind of God. " Before thou earnest forth out of the
womb, I set thee apart and appointed thee" (Jer. i. 4).
As the Prologue suggests that there is a purpose
behind life's seeming accidents, so the speeches of
the Almighty reveal the character of that purpose
as Wisdom and Love, and the extent of it as com
prehending the universe. It stimulates at once our
L trust, our affection, and our imagination. The
! suffering inevitable to human life is an element in
ia world created by wisdom and sustained by love.
It may be true that no explanation of it can ever be
adequate, but it is equally true that every explana
tion of it must be wholly inadequate which ignores
these facts. In an order which testifies at every
point to one supreme Intelligence, nothing can be
unmeaning or unrelated ; and the infinite Heart
that cares for all created things and provides for
their needs, must care most deeply for the highest
creature of them all, and it provides for his sorest
need by a revelation of Itself. To trust such a
Person, such a purpose, so wise, so kind, so com
prehensive, is to be at rest. In experiences of suffer
ing and sorrow the man who knows this trust may
say with the Psalmist :

289

The Problem of Pain

" I laid me down and slept :

I awoke, for the Lord did sustain me." (iii. 5).

The darkness and the light are both alike to God and
to those who put their trust in Him.

There is yet another ray of light cast by the book
upon the problem of suffering — this time from the
world beyond. Nowhere is the tragedy, the dark
ness, the finality of death expressed more powerfully
than in some of the gloomier utterances of Job :

" Like the cloud that is spent and that passeth away,

He that goes down to Sheol shall come up no more.
He shall never come back to his house again,

And the place that was his shall know him no more."

(vii. 9f).

That other country is

" The land of darkness and gloom,
The land of murky darkness,
Of gloom and utter confusion,

Where the very light is as darkness." (x. 2if).

There is hope for a tree that is cut down, but none
for the man whom death has laid low (xiv. 7ff).
Yet it is nothing less than wonderful to see how
Job simply refuses to believe in death's finality.
He looks wistfully at the hope suggested by the ana
logy of the tree. He begins to cherish the faith that
God may one day yearn for him and summon him
back from the dark world in which for a time He
i has hidden him. And in the atmosphere of this
\ hope and faith he soars, in one magnificent moment,
1 to the sublime assurance that, one day in the world
beyond, he will stand before the living God, face to
face, and hear at last from those lips the solemn
vindication for which in this world he had so long

290

Conclusion

and patiently waited, but in vain (xix. 256*. )• It is a
mighty triumph of faith, worthy of the mighty
hero whose struggles the book immortalizes.

The Epilogue ends by assuring us that all was well
in the end. This is true, in a far deeper sense than
the Epilogue intends. " Great is your reward
in heaven." The full reward is never here, but
there. It is fortunate for the discussion that the
writer does not operate much with this conception,
for that would have been to take his problem too
lightly. But it is even more fortunate that he does
not ignore it, for that would have been to take it too
meanly. Not upon the narrow stage of this life can
the great drama of the soul be completely enacted.
Spirits of finer mould have always felt that the
experiences of this present world — the wrongs un-
expiated, the sufferings unjustly inflicted and
patiently borne, the yearnings incompletely satisfied,
the fellowship with men and with God which to
mortal eyes is sundered by death — that these
experiences point beyond themselves. " On the
earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect
round." Even Jesus, we are told, endured the cross
and despised the shame for the joy that was set
before Him ; and His greatest servant bore with joy
his innumerable toils and hardships, his stripes
and stonings, his exposure to the assaults of calumny
and hatred, his multitudinous perils by land and on
the sea — sustained by the assurance that " the
sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be
compared with the glory which shall be revealed."

291

19ft

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS
Aked, C. F. The Divine Drama of Job, in The Short Course Series.

Blake, B. The Book of Job and the Problem of Suffering.

Bradley, G. G. Lectures on the Book of Job.

Bruce, A. B. The Moral Order of the World. Lecture vii

Caird, E. Lay Sermons, pp. 283-312 ; The Faith of Job.
Chesterton, G. K. The Book of Job (Illustrations by C. M. Tongue).
Cheyne, T. K. Job and Solomon ; Jewish Religious Life after the

Exile, pp. 158-172 ; Article on Job in Encyclopedia Biblica.
Cobern, C. M. A New Interpretation of the Book of Job ; in

The Methodist Review, May, 1913, pp. 419-439.

Davidson, A. B. Old Testament Theology, pp. 466-495.

Davidson, A. B., in Book by Book, pp. 136-149.

Davison, W. T. The Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament ;

Article on Job in Hastings' Dictionary oj the Bible, vol. ii.
Dawson, J. Job and His New Theology.
Dillon, E. J. The Sceptics of the Old Testament.
Driver, S. R. The Book of Job in the Revised Version, edited with

Introductions and Brief Annotations.

Fairbairn, A. M. The City of God, pp. I43ff.

Fowler, H. T. A History of the Literature of Ancient Israel,

ch. xxiii.

Froude, J. A. Essay on the Book of Job : now in Everyman's
Library ; (Froude's Essays in Literature and History).

Genung, J. F. The Epic of the Inner Life.

Godet, F. Studies on the Old Testament, pp. 183-242.

293

Bibliography

Gordon, A. R. The Poets of the Old Testament, pp. 202-254.
Gunkel, H. In Die orient all sch en Liter aturen, pp. giff.

Harvey-Jellie, W. The Wisdom of God and the Word of God, pp.

86fr, i28ff, 1648, iSgff.

Herder, J. G. Vom Geist der Ebraischen Poesie, IV. and V.
Hutton, W. B. Expositor, 1888, pp. 127-151.

Jastrow, M. A Babylonian Parallel to the Story of Job : in the
Journal of Biblical Literature., 1906, pp. 135-191.

Kautzsch, E. The Literature of the Old Testament, pp. 154-162.

Die Poesie und die poetischen Biicher des Alten Testaments,

pp. 89-109.

King, E. J. Early Religious Poetry of the Hebrews, pp. 81-90.
Knox, W. J. The Problem of the Book of Job : in Queen's Quarterly,

(Kingston, Canada), January, 1910, pp. 181-192.
Komg, E. Die Poesie des Alten Testaments, pp. 89-117.

Lowth, R. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, xxxii.-
xxxiv.

Macdonald, D. B. Article on Job in the Standard Bible Dictionary.
Macleod, W. B. The Afflictions of the Righteous.
Moulton, R. G. The Literary Study of the Bible, pp. 1-41.

Peake, A. S. The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament,
ch. v.

Renan, E. Le Livre de Job.

Rutherford, M. Notes on the Book of Job.

Schmidt, V. The Messages of the Poets, in The Messages of the

Bible Series.

Seligsohn, M. and Siegfried, C. in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. vii.
Sprague, H. B. The Book of Job with Introductory Essay and

Explanatory Notes.

Volz, P. in Die Schriften des Alten Testaments.

Watson, R. A. The Book of Job in the Expositor's Bible Series.
Wright, C. H. H. Biblical Essays.

294

Bibliography

COMMENTARIES
Addis, W. E. in the Temple Bible series.

Barton, G. A. in the Bible for Home and School series.
Budde, K. in the Handhommentar zum Alien Testament series.

Cox, S. Commentary on the Book of Job.

Davidson, A. B. Chapters i.-xiv. (1862) ; Job in the Cambridge Bible

series.
Duhm, B. in the Kurzer Handkommentar zum Alien Testament series.

Ewald, H. Vol. xxviii. of the Theological Translation Fund Library.
Gibson, E. C. S. in the Westminster Commentaries series.
Jennings, W. The Dramatic Poem of Job.

Marshall, J. T. in the American Commentary on the Old Testament
(American Baptist Publication Society).

Peake, A. S. in the Century Bible series.

Strahan, J. The Book of Job (a commentary full of illumination).

Wright, G. H. B. The Book of Job.

INTRODUCTIONS TO THE OLD TESTAMENT, WITH USEFUL DISCUSSIONS
OF THE BOOK OF JOB

Besides the Introductions by Baudissin, Budde (Gcschichie der
althebraischen Litteratur) Cornill, Reuss, Sellin, Steuernagel,
Strack, may be mentioned the following in English :

Driver, S. R. in The International Theological Library.
Gray, G. B. in the Studies in Theology series.

McFadyen, J. E. (Hodder and Stoughton).
Moore, G. F. in the Home University Library*

TRANSLATIONS

Blake, B. In the Book of Job and the Problem of Suffering.
Cox, S. In his Commentary on the Book of Job.
Dillon, E. J. The Sceptics of the Old Testament.

295

Bibliography

Genung, J. F. In the Epic of the Inner Life.
Gilbert, G. H. The Poetry of Job.

Jennings, W. The Dramatic Poem of Job.

King, E. G. The Poem of Job, Translated in the Metre of the
Original.

Schmidt, N. The Messages of the Poets, in the Messages of the

Bible series.
Sprague, H. B. The Book of Job, the Poetic Portion versified etc.

Wilson, P. The Book of Job, Translated into English Verse.

BOOKS OF INDIRECT VALUE

Blake's Vision of the Book of Job, with Reproductions of the Illus
trations. A Study by Joseph H. Wicksteed.

Giran, £tienne. A Modern Job : an Essay on the Problem of Evil.

2Q6

INDEX

Abel

Achan
Adultery
Agnosticism
Amos v. 24
Amos vii. 3

PAGE

109
149
197
282
190
245

Anticipation of end, 49, 63,
66, 77, 80, 87, 163, 243
Aristotle 204

Arnold, Matthew 281

Avarice 2oof.

Bailey 232

Bildad 31, 6ifif, Ii6fif, 1740".

Bradley, A. C. 241

Bradley, G. G. 90

Caird, E. 28
Callousness

46, 6 if, 79, I2of, 1 80

Carlyle 17 if, 227

Chesterton 226

Cheyne 6, 29, 248

Clough 64f.

Common sense 78

Cornill 259

Covetousness 198

Death 37, 55, 249

Deuteronomy viii. i ji. 201
Deuteronomy xxiv. 16 150
Dillon 29, 173

Dramatic quality

63.70, 77, 136, i62f.
Duhm 60

Ecclesiastes iii. 16, iv. i,

v. 8 70

Ecclesiastes ix. 2 151

Elihu 253ff, 280, 285

Eliphaz 31, 4 iff, ggfi,

i57ff, 190,194,242,284
Exodus xi. 5 197

PAGE

Exodus xxii. 26f. 159

Ezekiel xviii. 4 150

Ezekielxxiv. 16 204

Fatherhood of God 198-200
Friendship 52, 191, 247

Genesis i. i6f. 201

Genesis iv. 10 109

Genesis xx. 7 245

Greek Version 142, 245, 248

Habakkuki. 13, 17 ; ii. 3 140

Henley 235

Hosea vi. 6 190

Hospitality 203

Houghton, L. S. 29

Illingworth 280

Immortality 75, 92f, 137, 2gof.
Independence of thought,

82, 244, 280
Intellectual hospitality,

io3f, 152, 154

Isaiah i. 17, 190 ; vi. 230 ;
Iii. 14, 31 ; liii., 173, 245,
279 ; Ixii. 5, 158.

James, Epistle 5

Jeremiah i. 4 289

Jeremiah xx. 14-18 36

Jesus 62, 204, 227, 287

Job. i.-xxvii., 11-185 ; xxviii.

273!! ; xxix.-xxxi. 186-

206 ; xxxii.-xxxvii. 253-

269 ; xxxviii.-xlii. 209-249

Job's wife 28

John i. 18 165

Joshua vii. 24f. 149

Judas 18

Kautzsch

209

297

Index

Literary art
Love of God

55. 93, ii-
Luke xiii. 4f.
Luke xv. 10
Lux Mundi

Macleod
Maeterlinck
Malachi i. 2f.
Malachi ii. 10
Matthew xi. 28
Micah vi. 6-8
Moral order
Mystery

PAGE
21

150, 2261.

159

280

259
83
II

198

165

12, 275

61, 149
223f, 282

Oedipus Coloneus 37

Omar Khayyam 73

Omnipotence 67ff, 84, 167

Paul 286

Peake, A. S. 195

Prayer 14, 245

Presence of God 186

Private judgment

82, 244, 280

Prosperity 13, 22, 242

Proverbs iii. 12 47

Proverbs xiii. 9, xxiv. 20 148
Psalms iii. 5, 290 ; viii. 3f,
58, 177 ; xv., xxiv., 204 ;
xxxiv. 8, 83 ; xxxvii. if, 10,
140 ; xxxix 5f, 20 ;
Iviii. 10, 202; Ixxiii. ii,
161 ; Ixxiv. lof, 22f, 140 ;
Ixxvii. io, 50 ; Ixxxiv. 7,
133 ; ciii. I3f, 45, 158, 198 ;
civ. 14, 28, 215 ; cvii. 30,
285 ; cxxvii. 3-5, 13 ;
cxxxvii. 7, ii ; cxxxix. 1-5,
13-18, 73, 196 ; cxxxix. 23,
196 ; cxlv. 16, 215 ; cxlvi.

PAGE

Purpose

Rabbi ben Ezra 228

Renan 225, 283

Responsibility of the Creator,

Retributive theory 145^,

228, 233, 260, 283
Revelation 43

Romans viii. 18 291

Romans viii. 35-37 40, 286
Rutherford, Mark 32, 204, 242

Sartor Resartus 17 if.

Satan 15, 26

Sea-monster 57

Sin 39, 59, 90, 105, 123, 236
Snell, B. J. 236

Solidarity 149

Star- worship 20 if.

Strahan 71, 231, 265

Suffering, as discipline

47, 78, 2581, 284f.
Suffering as test 25, 286f.

Tennyson
Tradition

152
103

Unconscious prophecy

62, 66, 77, 80, 86f, 162!. 243

Volz 25

Weirdness 43

Wisdom 273-276

Woman in Old Testament 29

Zophar

31, 76ff, I38ff, 1791, 243

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Full text of "The problem of pain : a study in the Book of Job"

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