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CHAPTER XLII.

(7.) And it came to pass that, after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My anger is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends, because ye have not spoken of me aright, like my servant Job. (8.) Therefore, now, take to you seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer them up as an offering on your behalf; and Job my servant shall intercede for you; for I will surely accept him, and not deal out to you according to your impiety: for ye have not spoken of me aright, like my servant Job. (9.) Then Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuchite, and Zophar the Naamathite, went and did as the Lord bade them; (10) and the Lord accepted Job; and the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he interceded for his friends: and the Lord gave to Job twice as much as he had before.

(11.) Then came to him all his brothers, and all his sisters, and all who had known him aforetime, and ate bread with him in his house; and condoled with him, and comforted him, for all the evil which the Lord had brought upon him. And they every one gave him a kesitah, and every one a gold ring. (12.) Thus the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning; for he had fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses. (13.) He had also seven sons, and three daughters; (14.) and he called the name of the first Jemima, and the name of the second Cassia, and the name of the third Keren-happuch: (15.) and in all the land were no women so fair as the daughters of Job. And their father gave them an inheritance among their brethren. (16.) After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years, and beheld his sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations.

(17.) So Job died, old and full of days.

Chapter xlii. Verse 7.-Even in the First Colloquy Job had detected a certain base courtier tone in the apologies of the Friends, and had warned them (Chap. xiii. 7–11) both that they were speaking wrongfully for God, and that He would "heavily rebuke" them for saying what they thought would be welcome to Him rather than what they knew to be true. And now his prevision is verified. No sooner has Jehovah reconciled Job to Himself than He turns on the Friends with the rebuke: "Mine anger is kindled against you, for ye have not spoken of me aright, like my servant Job." But had not Job spoken wrongfully of God? Yes, often; but he had not spoken wrongfully for God. He had

criticised, censured, condemned whatever seemed unjust in the ways of God with men, not stopping to consider whether he were competent to judge, whether he understood the ways he condemned; and for this " presumptuous sin" he had been punished and corrected, his heaviest punishment being the misery which his own suspicions and misconceptions had caused him; but he had never belied his honest convictions. It was his very fidelity to his convictions which had led him to charge God foolishly. He had dared to believe (Chap. xvi. 21) that, if God had wronged him, He would “right a man even against Himself, and a son of man against a fellow" of the Lord of hosts. And in this he had thought rightly of God, and spoken rightly; while the Friends had thought wrongly and spoken wrongly. If Job had condemned God to clear himself (Chap. xl. 8), they had condemned Job to clear God; and whereas he had spoken sincerely, they had paltered with their conscience and forced themselves to believe that Job must have sinned rather than admit that there was more in the moral government of God than their theology had dreamed of.

For this sin an atonement must be made. The atonement demanded of them is (Verse 8) that they should recognize and confess their sin; that they should humble themselves before the very man whom they had condemned as a sinner above all men, and beg him to intercede for them with the God whom they seem to have regarded as their property rather than their Lord, whom they certainly regarded as with and for them and against him. It was a terrible downfall, a bitter but wholesome humiliation, for men who were so familiar with all the secrets of Heaven; and one hardly knows with what face Zophar, who had reviled Job so loudly and harshly, could urge such a prayer as this upon him.

There is a fine stroke in Verse 10; for here the Penitent brings forth fruit meet for repentance. Job had been forgiven his trespass against God, the proof of his forgiveness being that God had convicted him of his sin; and now he forgives those who had trespassed against him, and proves his forgiveness by interceding on their behalf. And the Poet marks this moment of magnanimity and forgiveness as at once the crown,

climax, and consummation of his virtue, and the turningpoint in his career. It was when, if not because, Job prayed for his unfriendly Friends that God delivered him from his captivity to loss and pain and shame. His flesh came back to him like that of a little child, and a new day of grace and favour dawned upon him.

It is as we study the final paragraph of the Epilogue that we most need to remember the conditions under which the Poet worked. No doubt, as I have admitted, a modern Christian poet would have carried the story to a different close. He would have felt that the gifts of Fortune were but a sorry compensation for a tried and perfected virtue like that of Job: that it would be but a poor comfort to him to be fawned upon once more by the kinsfolk and acquaintance who had abandoned him in the long day of his destitution and misery; and that the children born to him in the years of his recovered prosperity could not in any way "make up" to him for the children he had lost. And hence he would probably have translated Job, so soon as his love and trust were restored, to that ampler and serener world of which he had caught some glimpses in the dark night of his sorrow, and which men so seldom see till they can see nothing else. But such a close, however natural and satisfactory it might be to us, would have been unnatural, unsatisfactory, dispiriting to the men whether of Job's day or of Solomon's. And so, for their teaching and encouragement, the inspired Hebrew Poet submits to the limitations of his age; he abandons the higher dénouement which he himself probably was perfectly capable of grasping-as we may infer from the hints scattered through the Poem proper-and carries his story to a conclusion such as his own generation was able to receive. He pourtrays him as receiving "double" for all his losses (Verses 10, 12); as submitting to the caresses of his brothers, sisters, and all who had known him aforetime, although they had stood aloof from him while the hand of God was heavy upon him (Comp. Verse 11 with Chap. xix. 13-19); and as having seven sons and three daughters born to him, to replace the ten children of whom he had been bereaved (Verse 13).

We need not therefore assume, however, that Job " committed himself" to the kinsfolk and acquaintance, who were as "ready chorus" to the favour as to the apparent anger of the Almighty; and it would be monstrous to suppose that a father could be content so that he had children round him, and the same number of children, even if they wore new faces and were called by new names. Job could not forget the goodly sons and daughters whom the Lord had taken from him because it pleased the Lord to give him other sons and daughters as goodly. Even in the ancient world, even in the East-although to many these phrases seem to explain everything, however contrary to nature-a father's heart was made of more penetrable stuff than that, and could be as fond and constant as if it were beating now. What, for example, could have compensated Abraham for the loss of Isaac, or Isaac for the loss of Esau, although he was not the son of the promise? And did not Jacob utterly refuse to be comforted for the loss of Joseph, although many stalwart sons were left to him, and Benjamin, the darling of his old age, was there to take the vacant place? No, we are not to imagine that Job was "past feeling" because he was an Oriental of the antique world; but we are to admit that to the ancient Eastern world, as indeed to the great bulk of the world, both Eastern and Western, to this day, a catastrophe which did not replace suffering Virtue in all opulent and happy conditions would have seemed a sin alike against art and against morality.

Hence it was, I take it, that the Poet surrounded Job, after his trial, with troops of friends, with goodly sons, and daughters so fair that no names could adequately express their charms; and lavished on him droves, and herds, and flocks-all of which, although they were the usual and coveted signs of wealth and enjoyment, must have been but a very little thing to "the man who had been in hell," and who, even in torment, had lifted up his eyes and seen that, for him at least, heaven was not very far off.

The kesitah of Verse 11 is commonly taken, as in the Septuagint, to be a silver coin stamped with the figure of a lamb. The simple fact is that no one knows what it was. But the best authorities incline to think that it was not a coin at all,

but a lump, bar, or wedge of silver. Thus Madden, in his learned and elaborate History of Jewish Coinage, says: "The real meaning of kesitah seems to be a portion,' and it is evidently a piece of silver of unknown weight." Whatever it may have been, and whether the "rings" presented with the kesitahs were ear-rings or nose-rings, they constituted, I suppose, the nuzzur, or present-such as Orientals still make on paying a visit of ceremony-offered to Job by those who had known him aforetime when they came to condole with him and comfort him.

The names of Verse 14 are, of course, significant. Jemima, according to its Arabic derivation, means "dove;" according to its Greek derivation, it means " day." Cassia is simply the cassia, or cinnamon, of our commerce, a sweet and fragrant bark. And Keren-happuch may be either the Hebrew form of the Greek “cornucopia," or, more probably, “horn of pigment -the pigment used by Eastern women for enhancing the beauty of their eyes.

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These names were given to Job's daughters to denote the excellent beauty of these fair women; and that these dazzling beauties were what their names implied we are expressly told in Verse 15. Here, too, we are told that their father gave them an equal portion with his sons; and this fact is doubtless noted in order to suggest that his new children lived together on terms as frank and kindly as those which had obtained among the children he had lost.1

Women so fair and well endowed were not likely to lack husbands. And, in Verse 16, it is implied that his sons found wives and his daughters husbands; and that Jehovah vouchsafed both to them and their offspring that "heritage from the Lord" which Orientals most covet. It was only when Job was "old and full of days" (Verse 17), when he was satisfied, or even satiated with life, only when he had seen his children's children to the fourth generation, that he died-died unto men, to live more truly and more fully unto God.

Here the Story ends-in the Hebrew; but in the Septuagint there is the following significant addition to it: "It is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raiseth; 1 See Note on Chap. i. Ver. 4.

2 Psalm cxxvii. 3.

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