entangle their argument from the Oriental intricacy and illustration that surround them, so far as a long and loving study of them permits.1

Job at last opens his mouth with a curse on the day of his birth. It is more than that; it is the old human cry, Why was I born, or, if I had to be born, why did I survive my birth?

For now should I have lien down and been quiet;
I should have slept; then had I been at rest,
With kings and councillors of the earth
Which built solitary piles for themselves
There the wicked cease from troubling ;
And there the weary be at rest.2

The whole of this curse, contained in the third chapter, should be compared with Adam's lament in the Tenth Book of Paradise Lost. Milton must surely have had Job's words strongly in his mind when he wrote these lines :

1 I use the text of the Revised Version, including marginal alternatives, as it appears in Prof. Moulton's Book of Job, with its Redistribution of Speeches in the third round of Colloquies.

2 III, 13-14, 17.

His doom is fair,

That dust I am, and shall to dust return.
O welcome hour whenever! why delays
His hand to execute what his decree

Fixed on this day? why do I overlive?

Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality, my sentence, and the earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap! There I should rest,
And sleep secure; his dreadful voice no more
Would thunder in my ears; no fear of worse
To me and to my offspring would torment me
With cruel expectation.

THE FRIENDS'

"Eliphaz leads the case for the Friends, Sec. (a). both on account of his superior age and ACCUSATION. also because he is a native of a reputed land of wisdom, Teman, a district on the north-east of Edom, within easy reach of the Hauran. Its inhabitants were long famed for wisdom throughout the East, and especially for the wisdom which clothes itself in proverbs, parables, and dark oracular sayings." He takes Job's despairing, impatient mood, as clear evidence that the

1 Cox's Commentary, p. 57.

Patriarch's calamities have been occasioned

by sin :

Who ever perished being innocent?

Or where were the upright cut off? . . .

For affliction cometh not forth of the dust,
Neither doth trouble spring out of the ground.1

It is probable that Eliphaz and his two comrades may, on their first arrival, have gone to Job's house, and there Eliphaz may have learnt from the Patriarch's wife what an uncompromising attitude of mind his old friend was showing; for it is clear that her husband's mental condition was well known to her, from her question, Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? It is perhaps for this reason that Eliphaz seems to anticipate Job's reply to his impeachment, or it may be that he tries to soften the direct personal attack from motives of charity. At all events, he makes the doctrine that he has enunciated, that sin is the cause of calamity, applicable to all men, by the consideration that to be human is to be sinful :

IV, 7; V, 6.

Shall mortal man be just before God?
Shall a man be pure before his Maker?

Behold he putteth no trust in his servants
And his angels he chargeth with folly.

How much more them that dwell in houses of clay,
Whose foundation is in the dust. . .

Man is born unto trouble

As the sparks fly upward.1

Therefore, he says, submit, repent:

Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth;
Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the
Almighty.

For he maketh sore, and bindeth up;

He woundeth and his hands make whole.2

Such is the indictment to which Job must plead that whereas suffering is a proof of sin, therefore Job, being mortal and smitten by calamity, grief, and disease, has committed sin; and whereas all men are sinners in God's sight, it is impious to protest innocence. Eliphaz repeats this doctrine in his two other speeches, and it is common to the three of Bildad

3

3 There is a curious passage in Brooke's Fool of Quality that shows the persistence of this belief, as to disease. P. 322.

and the three of Zophar; in fact, the Friends repeat each other and repeat themselves, and the delicate shades of difference between their arguments that ingenious. commentators have fancied they could detect were hardly worth discovering. The challenge to the Patriarch's conscience, delivered by Eliphaz in his first speech, is maintained, essentially unaltered, throughout the poem ; although, as the argument proceeds and the tension between the disputants increases, the accusation is expressed in various forms, culminating in Zophar's description of the miner and his operations, and the grand proverbial words :

Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
And to depart from evil is understanding.1

There is, as we shall see, a very sound and sufficient reason why the Friends should

1 XXVIII, 28. See Psalms cxI, 10, and Proverbs 1, 7, and VIII-IX, IO. As already explained, I follow Professor Moulton's arrangement of speeches ("substantially that of Grätz"). In our Bible the whole of this speech is given to Job. The reasons for the correction are given in Professor Moulton's Book of Job, p. 125.