not with his lips. True, a curse does fly from them at last; the silent sympathy of the Friends evokes from him what no pressure of loss and misery could extort from his constant soul: but when he opens his lips he curses,—not God, but—himself, and the day which gave him birth.

Jehovah, then, has already gained the victory over the Adversary. Satan has exhausted his resources; he has nothing more that he can do; and he sullenly acknowledges his defeat by flight. His baneful figure vanishes from the Poem. We see him no more; no, not even at the end of the Drama, when the other persons of the Story come forward to receive the final sentence of Jehovah. For God and for us, to heaven and to earth, the patient Job has demonstrated that a genuine and unselfish goodness, a goodness which can not only dispense with reward but can also endure every form of loss, indignity, pain, is possible to man even here upon the earth and under the inauspicious conditions of time.

CHAPTER I.-There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. This man was perfect and upright, and one who feared God and eschewed evil. 2. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. 3. His cattle also were seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred sheasses, and [he had] a very large household; so that this man was great before all the Sons of the East.

4. Now his sons were wont to make a banquet each of them at his house on his day; and they used to send and bid their three sisters to eat and to drink with them. 5. And so it was, when the days of the banquet had gone round, Job sent for them, and hallowed them; and he gat him up early in the morning, and offered up burnt offerings according to their number: for Job said, Haply, my sons have sinned and renounced God in their hearts. Thus did Job alway.

6. Now it happened on a day, when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, that Satan also came among them. 7. And the Lord said to Satan, Whence comest thou? And Satan answered the Lord and said, From hurrying to and fro in the earth, and from going up and down in it. 8. Then said the Lord to Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job? for there is none like him on the earth, a perfect man and an upright, one that feareth God and escheweth evil. 9. And Satan answered the Lord and said, Is it for nought that Job feareth God? 10. Thou, hast Thou not made a fence round him, and round his house, and round all that he hath? Thou hast blessed the work of his

hands, and his cattle spread themselves abroad over the land. 11. But only put forth thine hand and touch all that he hath,' [and then see] if he will not renounce Thee to thy face. 12. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thine hand; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord.

13. Now it happened on a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the first born, (14) there came a messenger to Job and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses grazing close by, (15) when the Sabæans fell upon them, and carried them off; and they smote the young men with the edge of the sword; and I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 16. While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, A fire of God fell from heaven, and burned the flocks and the young men, and consumed them; and I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 17. While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, The Chasdim formed three bands, and rushed upon the camels, and carried them off, and smote the young men with the edge of the sword; and I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee. 18. While he was yet speaking, there came another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in the house of their brother, the first born, (19) when, lo, there came a great wind from across the desert, and smote the four corners of the house, so that it fell on the young folk, and they are dead; and I am escaped, even I alone, to tell thee.

20. Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head; and he fell on the ground and worshipped, (21) saying: Naked came I from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave,

and the Lord hath taken; blessed be the name of the Lord.
22. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God with wrong.

CHAPTER II.-Again it happened on a day, when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, that Satan also came to

The ellipsis of verse 11 requires to be filled up with some such words as "and see," or, "then see." Similar ellipses are not uncommon in Oriental literature. Thus in the Corân we read (Sura xxv. verses 9 and 22): "They say, What sort of apostle is this? He eateth food and walketh the streets. Unless an angel be sent down and take part in his warnings, or a treasure be thrown down to him, or he have a garden that supplieth him with food, . . . and these unjust persons say, Ye follow but a man enchanted.” And again: "They who look not forward to meet us say, If the angels be not sent down to us, or unless we behold our Lord. . . . Ah, they are proud of heart, and exceed with great excess." In each of these cases we must supply the words " we will not believe," in order to complete the sense. Many such ellipses may be found in the Corân alone.

present himself before the Lord. Then said the Lord to Satan, Whence comest thou? 2. And Satan answered the Lord and said, From hurrying to and fro in the earth, and from going up and down in it. 3. And the Lord said to Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on earth, a perfect man and an upright, one that feareth God and escheweth evil? And still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou didst move me against him, to swallow him up without cause. 4. And Satan answered the Lord and said, A skin for a skin, and all that a man hath will he give up for his life: (5) but only put forth thine hand, and touch his bone and his flesh, [and then see] if he will not renounce Thee to thy face. 6. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold him in thine hand; only spare his life.

7. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with a grievous ulcer from the sole of his foot even to his crown. 8. And he took him a sherd to scrape himself withal as he sat among the ashes. 9. And his wife said to him, Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? Renounce God, and die! 10. But Job said to her, Thou speakest as one of the impious women speaketh. Shall we, then, accept the good from God, and shall we not accept the evil?

In all this Job sinned not with his lips.

11. Now three of Job's friends heard of all this evil that had befallen him; and they came each from his place-Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuchite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had concerted together to come and condole with him and to comfort him. 12. But when they lifted up their eyes from afar and knew him not, they lifted up their voice and wept; and they rent their mantles, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. 13. So they sat down with him upon the ground for seven days and seven nights; and none spake a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.

CHAPTER 1. Verse 1.-The derivation of the word "Job" is still undetermined. Some, deriving it from an Arabic root, contend that it means "the penitent one,"-a conjecture confirmed, if not suggested, by the fact that, in the Corân, Job is designated, "he that turns or repents." But, with more reason, most Commentators assume it to be derived from a Hebrew verb which signifies to fight against, to persecute: in which case, the word being here used in its passive sense, it would mean "the persecuted one," the man who has known afflictions, in short, the man of sorrows" of the antique world. All we certainly know of it is that the name was borne by a son of Issachar (Gen. xlvi. 13), and by the hero of this great Poem.

The catholi

A man in the land of Uz," i.e. a Hauranite. city, or universalism, of the Poet comes out in the very selection of his hero. He saw, as Professor Davidson remarks, "that God was not confined to the Jew, but was and must be everywhere the Father of his children, however imperfectly they attained to the knowledge of Him; he saw that the human heart was the same, too, everywhere, that it everywhere proposed to itself the same problems, and rocked and tossed under the same uncertainties; that its intercourse with Heaven was alike, and alike awful, in all places; and away down far in that great Desert, stretching into infinite expanse, where men's hearts draw in from the imposing silence deep still thoughts of God, he lays the scene of his great Poem. He knows, Jew though he be, that there is something deeper far than Judaism, or the mere outward forms of any Dispensation; that God and man are the great facts, and the great problem" their relation to each other.

The description of this Verse gives a complete view of Job's character. The word translated "perfect" does not imply that he was absolutely without sin, but that he was simple, single-hearted; that his character was woven of one piece throughout, that there was no duplicity in it; that by confession and sacrifice he had been absolved from such offences as he had committed, so that he was free from conscious, wilful, habitual sin. In short, he was what Shakespeare calls a man of " a clear spirit." The epithet "perfect," as distinguished from and complemented by "upright," signifies that he was inwardly lacking in none of the qualities and attributes of a righteous man, and that this inward righteousness and completeness wrought itself out in a well-balanced and erect life.

The first two epithets of the Verse depict him as he was in himself; the second two in his relation to Heaven. He walked in that "fear of the Lord" which is both the beginning and the end of wisdom, and necessarily, therefore, maintained a stedfast abhorrence of evil in every form. There can be no doubt that the four epithets taken together are intended to set Job before us as an ideally perfect man, a man not only morally blameless but also both sincerely and scrupu

lously religious; a man whose virtue and piety are beyond suspicion for this is the fundamental assumption of the Poem, the fact on which the whole Story turns and proceeds ; moreover Jehovah Himself is introduced as attesting and confirming it (Chap. i. 8; and Chap. ii. 3). The best commentary on the whole verse is contained in Chapters xxix. and xxxi., in which Job depicts himself as he was in the happy days when "the Almighty was yet with him.”

Verse 3 describes the possessions of Job. The word rendered "substance" in the Authorized Version, and here rendered "cattle," always means "live stock." Ritter tells us that a Hauranite who now owns five yoke of oxen is held to be a man of station and opulence; "five hundred yoke" would make a prince of him. As these oxen are, and were, mainly used for ploughing, Job must have held a large landed estate. The "seven thousand sheep" imply, of course, that he was a wealthy sheep-master, as well as a farmer on a large scale. The "three thousand camels" imply, probably, that he was also a princely merchant, sending out large caravans to trade in the cities and among the tribes of the East,-as perhaps we might also infer from the frequent references to these travelling caravans in the body of the Poem. The "five hundred she-asses" confirm the impression of vast wealth,the she-ass being held to be far more valuable than the male, because of the milk she yielded; this milk, then as now, being greatly prized in the East. The word rendered "household," and in the margin of our English Bible "husbandry," is of somewhat dubious import; but it probably indicates that, for the various uses of trade and agriculture, Job possessed a vast retinue, a large clan, of ploughmen, shepherds, camel-drivers, with their guards, overseers, traffickers, and scribes. If we combine the several items of this enumeration we can well understand how Job may have been reckoned the greatest prince among the beni-Kedem, or "Sons of the East,"-a name given to the Arab tribes on the east of Palestine, all of whom claimed, as they still claim, to be Abrahamides, i.e. the sons of Abraham; the vast "motley race," as Jeremiah calls them, who haunted the wide tracts.

1 Cf. Chap. vi. 15—21.