And I brake the jaws of the wicked,

And plucked the spoil out of his teeth.
So I thought I should grow old with my nest,
And I should multiply my days as the phoenix. (?)

But now despicable folk have me in derision,
[Whose fathers I would have disdained

To have set with the dogs of my flock. (?)

To what purpose could I have used the strength of their hands,

For it was dried up by want and famine? (?)

They gnaw the wilderness

Places desolate and waste. (?)

They pluck mallows beside the bushes,

And roots of broom to warm themselves therewith.

They are driven forth from among men,

(Who cry after them as after a thief),

To dwell in dreary ravines,

In holes of the earth and of the rocks.

Among the bushes they bray;

Under the nettles they are gathered together.

Children of fools, yea, children of base men:

They are hunted out of the land.]

And now am I become their song,

Yea, I am their byword.

They abhor me, they keep far from me,

And spare not to spit in my face.

For he hath loosened my bow-string and humbled me;
He hath cast down my banner before my face. (??)

Terrors assail me:

My honour is chased away as the wind:
And my welfare passeth as a cloud.

And now my soul is poured out within me;
Days of affliction hold me fast.

JOB'S AGONY

The night pierceth my bones:

And

my gnawing pains take no rest.

By the greatness of his power my flesh is disfigured; (?)

He hath cast me into the mire,

I

And I am become like dust and ashes.

cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me:

I stand up, and thou regardest me not.

Thou art become a tyrant unto me:

With thy strong hand thou persecutest me. Thou liftest me up to the wind;

Thou causest me to ride upon it,

And dissolvest me in the roar of the tempest. For I know that thou wilt bring me back to death, And to the house of meeting for all living.

Yet doth not a drowning man stretch out his hand,
Doth he not cry for help in his calamity?
Doth not he weep whose day is hard,

Is not the soul of him that perisheth sorrowful? (?)
I looked for good, but evil came unto me;

I waited for light, but there came darkness.

My bowels boil, and rest not:

Days of affliction have befallen me.

I go mourning without comfort;

I stand up in the congregation and cry. (?) I am become a brother to jackals,

And a companion to ostriches.

My skin is black upon me,

And my

bones are burned with heat.

My harp hath turned to mourning,

And my pipe into the voice of them that weep.

[I made a covenant with mine eyes;

How then should I gaze upon a maid?

For what were my portion from God above,

And what my heritage from the Almighty on high?

Is it not destruction to the wicked,

And calamity to the workers of iniquity?

Doth not he see my ways,

And count all my steps?]

175

If I have walked with falsity,

Or if my foot hath hasted to deceit—
Let him weigh me in an even balance,
And let God know mine integrity-
If my step hath turned out of the way,
And mine heart walked after mine eyes,
And if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands;
Then let me sow, and let another eat;

Yea, let my produce be rooted out.

If mine heart have been enticed by a woman,
Or if I have laid wait at my neighbour's door;
Then let my wife grind unto another,

And let others enslave her.

For this is an heinous crime;

Yea, it is an iniquity to be punished by the judges. For it is a fire that consumeth unto Sheol,

It would destroy all mine increase unto the root.

If I did despise the cause of my manservant

Or of my maidservant, when they did plead with me; What then should I do when God riseth up?

And when he visiteth, what should I answer him? Did not he that made me make him,

And did not one God fashion us both?

If I have withheld the poor from their desire,

Or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail;

Or have eaten my morsel myself alone,

And the fatherless hath not eaten thereof;

(For from my youth I brought him up as a father, And I have guided her from of old :)

If I have seen any perish for want of clothing,

Or any poor without covering;

If his loins have not blessed me,

And if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep:

If I wept not for him whose day was hard,

If my soul were not grieved for the needy;

If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless,
When I saw my help in the gate:

Then let my shoulder fall from my neck,

And mine arm be broken from the bone.

THE OATH OF CLEARING

For destruction from God was a terror to me,
And before his majesty I was powerless.

If my land cry out against me,

And the furrows thereof weep together;

If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money,
And have caused the soul of its owners to expire:
Let thistles grow instead of wheat,

And cockle instead of barley.

If I have made gold my hope,

Or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence; If I rejoiced because my wealth was great,

And because mine hand had gotten much;

If I beheld the sun when it shined,

Or the moon moving in brightness;
And my heart hath been secretly enticed,
And my mouth hath kissed my hand;

This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judges:
For I should have denied God that is above.

If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me,
Or exulted when evil found him,

(Yea, I suffered not my mouth to sin
To ask, with a curse, his life);
If the men of my tent did not say,
'Who is not satisfied by his flesh?'

If the stranger lodged in the street,

And I opened not my doors to the traveller;

If I covered my transgressions as with earth,
Hiding mine iniquity in my bosom,
Because I feared a great multitude,

And the contempt of the families terrified me,

So that I kept silence, and went not out of the door :

Oh that I had One who would hear me !—

:

177

Behold, my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!And that I had the charge which mine adversary hath written!

Surely I would carry it upon my shoulder,

And bind it upon me as a crown;

I would declare unto him the number of my steps;

As a prince would I draw near unto him!

The 'despicable folk' in the fourth paragraph seem to refer to some pariah inhabitants of the steppe, familiar to the author. The passage seems to be an interpolation or misplaced. It is possibly akin to the description of the mournful outcasts in a former chapter. Certainly Job, who knows that slave and free have one Maker, would not have spoken thus contemptuously of any wretched flotsam and jetsam of humanity; yet in this present connexion the words must be given a contemptuous connotation. There is surely something wrong with the text: the bracket is justified. The obscure fifth paragraph, beginning 'And now am I become their song,' would seem to indicate in strained and exaggerated language that these outcasts insulted Job in his affliction and added to his miseries. If I beheld the sun when it shined'; the reference is to secret idolatry. If I covered my transgressions as with earth'; Job means that he had no transgressions to cover, and had therefore no one to fear and nothing to conceal. The last line of the paragraph, 'So that I kept silence and went not out of the door,' should probably be omitted as a gloss. For if he hid his iniquity for fear of the people and the families' (i.e. the nobles), he would not also have been afraid to go out of doors.

§31. The first speech of Elihu.--We now come to a very unexpected incident. A fifth speaker over and above Job and his three friends is suddenly introduced to us. His name is Elihu. Most scholars now believe that his speech is an interpolation; in other words, that it was not written by the original author of our book. The reasons which they give are many and weighty; I can only allude briefly to some of them. (1) Elihu is not referred to before nor is he referred to afterwards. (2) The appearance of God is unnecessarily delayed by Elihu. He breaks the connexion. His speech can only be justified if it contain the author's intended solution of the entire problem. Professor Budde thinks it does. But if so, God's speech is robbed of its purport. For then (3) God neither gives the solution himself nor declares it insoluble. He merely comes to censure Job for his presumptuous language, though in the epilogue he also praises him for his 'rightness' of speech. God never alludes to Elihu, nor to the all-important fact that he has given the true solution of the problem. Why would it be beneath his dignity to do so? (4) Elihu's solution is that suffering is purifying, and that in Job's case (as Professor Budde thinks) it purified a man who, while he had not sinned, was yet in danger of sinning, a man whose character was becoming slowly tainted and undermined by