with which to dilute it. It could only seem to orthodox editors brutally blasphemous.

It should be noted here that, instead of reconstructing Bildad's third speech out of chs. 24 and 30 as we have done, many scholars reconstruct it out of ch. 26. Indeed this is the favorite method with those who attempt its reconstruction at all. In favor of this procedure the names of Grill, Kuenen, Bickell, Duhm, Peake, and McFadyen may be quoted. Marshall, like the others, couples the two chapters, but thinks that they form a speech of Zophar. With none of these scholars can we agree. Zophar's third speech is, as we shall see, embedded now in ch. 27, but ch. 26 seems clearly to belong to Job. It has been claimed that it is out of harmony with Job's present mood, but that statement does not appear to be well founded. Job in ch. 24 had not said that God would favor the wicked man; he had said that God's ways are hidden from man, that man does not see God's day, and that for the present God gives the wicked security. The whole speech was an irritable and suffering invalid's statement of the irritating side of the fact that we cannot understand the ways of God. In ch. 26 Job takes up the same theme again. He enlarges upon God's greatness and power, declaring that we see the outskirts of his ways only, but that no one can understand the greatness of his power. Upon this same thought Job had dwelt in chs. 7, 9, 12 with indignation, because of the treatment which he was receiving at the hands of God; here his thought is slightly more calm, because his mind is for the moment turning a little away from himself.

The general thought is not, therefore, inconsistent in the mouth of Job, and the argument from the poetry and the allusions is in favor of assigning the speech to him. The poet places his greatest poetry in Job's mouth. Bildad is a commonplace man, as he is portrayed, and deals in commonplace thoughts. Zophar is a rough, ruthless fellow, the strains of whose speech are uniformly

harsh. Chapter 26 is neither commonplace nor harsh. It is a magnificent flight of imagination vigorously and poetically expressed. Its vigorous figures are many of them borrowed from the Babylonian Creation Epic (see notes). These allusions give great vigor to the poetry wherever we find them. Elsewhere the poet puts allusions to that Epic into the mouth of Job only (see chs. 3 and 9), and this is a strong argument for supposing that he wrote ch. 26 for the lips of Job also. We accordingly conclude that the poet intended ch. 26 as Job's reply to Bildad's third speech.

Passing now to ch. 27, it, like ch. 24, contains considerable material which is unsuited to Job's whole point of view. This material is found in vs. 7-11, 13-23, and, as Stuhlmann, Kuenen, Bickell, Duhm, Peake, and McFadyen agree, this material constituted the third speech of Zophar. It is impossible that it should have been uttered by Job unless he renounced altogether the point of view held by him both before and afterwards; it is, on the other hand, quite in the style of Zophar.

This speech of Zophar originally followed ch. 26, while Job's last address to the friends and appeal to Jehovah was composed of 27:1-6, 12; 29: 2-25; 30:1, 2, 9-31; 31:1-34, 38-40, 35-37.

When the original order of these chapters is restored and the various interpolations are removed, it appears that the form of the poem was symmetrical to the end, and that the artist who composed it exhibited to the very last his masterly skill indeed some of the finest manifestations of that skill came at the end of the work. It is only due to later editors that that skill is not now patent to every reader of the book.

The motive of this editorial work is not far to seek. The poet had made Job a relentless critic of orthodox opinion and even of God, and yet had allowed the epilogue to say that his course was more pleasing to Jehovah than that of the friends who had defended orthodox views and

had championed God. Such literature seemed to orthodox readers of the book most irreverent, and this transfer of material from the speeches of the friends to those of Job was no doubt undertaken in order to make it appear that he came around to the orthodox point of view, at least in some degree. In other words the motive was the same as that which led to the Elihu interpolation break the force of the great heresy of the poem.

THE ART OF THE BOOK

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The book of Job has sometimes been called a drama. If by this designation it is intended to class the poem with the dramas of Shakespeare or Euripides, the term is a misnomer. There is not in Job the action and the development of a plot necessary to a drama. A drama intended for acting would never have had all the actors sitting on a dunghill throughout the play and moving only their tongues! The ancient Semitic world had no drama; even the Song of Songs is not an exception. Such dramatic elements as the poem of Job possesses are inherent in all Oriental life. The Orientals are much more expressive than we of the West. All their speech and gestures have an element which appears to an Occidental dramatic. Job is a dramatic poem only in the sense that it is true to Oriental life; but it is not a drama in the sense that it develops a plot which can be revealed by action. The poem depicts the growth of a soul when tried by suffering. Genung has happily named it "The Epic of the Inner Life." It is a powerful and artistic portrayal of the struggles of such a soul, of its wild and unreasonable arraignment of life as it suffers acutely and its suffering is aggravated by disordered nerves (see, e.g., ch. 3); of the way a vigorous intellect, quickened by suffering, brushes aside false and inadequate theology and seeks to ground itself upon reality; how such a soul, as it is driven to accuse Providence of injustice, is as inevitably

driven, if it is thoroughgoing, to find its one hope of justice in God, there being no refuge from God but God; how the inadequacy of the present life for a reasonable theodicy leads to faith in a hereafter; and, finally, how the mystic experience of God is the one solution for life's baffling problems.

The poet possessed the splendid artistic genius which touches the common things of life and transfigures them. Like all who live in Palestine, he was familiar with farming, cattle raising, the reaping of grain, the winnowing of wheat. The struggle of the weary slave through the long hot day's work, the calving of the hinds, the patience of the ox in the furrow, become in his hands luminous pictures of the toil and sorrows of man. He was an acute observer of nature. The calamity which the drying up of a spring brings, the suggestiveness of the way the roots of trees seek water and the roots of an old stump send up sprouts, the marvels of thundercloud and snowflake, all become in his hands beautiful figures; and their own wonder and beauty seem the greater as the poet's fine presentation of them makes them revealers of things human and divine. With a few powerful words he makes the wild ox, the wild ass, the ostrich, and the horse stand before us, each caught in a characteristic attitude, as though by an instantaneous photograph. Clouds floating in the sky are like bottles filled with water. dawn is a beautiful woman peeping over the hills; the rays of light are her eyelashes.

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The book is studded with exquisite figures, and the speech of Jehovah is, for sustained dignity and beauty, unsurpassed in the world's literature. It is the product of the highest genius.

The poet has devoted his best efforts to the speeches of Job and Jehovah. These contain his finest poetry, and in depicting the character of Job his skill in catching the mixture of good and bad, sane and foolish in an invalid who has a really noble nature, is masterly. The char

acters of the friends are less well done. They interested the poet less. Nevertheless each of them stands out with an individuality of his own: Eliphaz, the dignified orthodox wise man, who has just a touch of mysticism; Bildad, the commonplace mind who finds in the out-worn proverbs of the past the basis of life's philosophy; and Zophar, the rough debater, who cares less for the form of his argument or for the feelings of his friend than he does for carrying his point.

The book of Job is one of the world's masterpieces. It stands beside the greatest of the works of Eschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, or Dante's Divina Comedia, or Goethe's Faust as an immortal portrayal of the struggles of the soul.

DATE OF THE POEM

It is no longer necessary to discuss seriously the Talmudic opinion (Baba Bathra, 15a), which was also shared by the translators of the Syriac Bible, that the poem of Job was written by Moses. Critical and historical study has made it quite clear that the problems discussed in this poem were not yet problems in that early time. The elements in the language and coloring of the poem which were formerly thought to confirm that opinion are now seen to be in part due to the skill of the poet in adapting his picture to the supposed situation. The linguistic indications are now understood to be inconsistent with this view and to point to a later date.

The points of contact with the book of Deuteronomy (compare Job 24: 2 with Deut. 19: 14; 27: 17; Job 31:26 with Deut. 4:19; 17:3-7, and Job 31:9 with Deut. 22:22) point conclusively to a date for Job later than Josiah's reform in the year 621 B.C.

In the present state of our knowledge a date earlier than Jeremiah is out of the question. The poem is written from an absolutely monotheistic standpoint. There is no hint in it that there can be any god but One.