Job, Book Of (continued) – Joel (1)

Job, Book Of (continued)

The writer of the book has not committed the literary fatuity of describing the whirlwind, except as Elihu has seen its oncoming, first with conceit of knowledge, then with wild access of terror--a description in which his essentially vapid personality is reflected. For the readers the significance of the whirlwind is in the Voice it encloses, the thing it says. And here the writer has undertaken the most tremendous task ever attempted by the human imagination: to make the Almighty speak, and speak in character. And one fatuity at least he has escaped; he has not made God bandy arguments with men, or piece together the shifting premises of logic. The whole of the two discourses from the whirlwind is descriptive; a recounting of observable phenomena of created nature, from the great elemental things, earth and sea and light and star and storm, to the varied wonders of animal nature--all things in which the questing mind of man may share, laying hold in his degree on its meaning or mystery. Thus, as a sheer literary personation, it fails at no point of the Godlike. It begins with a peremptory dismissal of Elihu: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?" (Job 38:2). Then Job is bidden gird up his loins like a strong man, and listen and answer. The fact that Job alone, of all the company, can stand, as it were, on common terms with God is premonitory of the outcome. Of the two Divine discourses, the first (Job 38:1–41; Job 39:1–30) emphasizes more especially the unsearchable wisdom of creation; and the lesson it brings home to Job is that a being who is great enough--or presumptuous enough--to criticize and censure is great enough to resolve his own criticism (40:2). To this, of course, Job has no answer; he has presented his plea, which he neither adds to nor takes back (40:3-5). Resuming, then, the Voice in the second discourse (40:6-41:34) goes on to describe two great beasts, as it were, elemental monsters of Nature: Behemoth--probably the hippopotamus--vast in resisting and overcoming power, yet unaware of it, and easily subduable by man; and Leviathan--probably the crocodile--a wonder of beautiful adaptedness to its function in Nature, yet utterly malignant, unsubduable, untamable. And the lesson brought home to Job by this strange distribution of creative power is that he, who has called in question God's right to work as He does, had better undertake to lower human pride and "tread down the wicked where they stand" (40:12), thus demonstrating his ability to save himself and manage mankind (40:14). By this illuminating thought Job's trenchancy of demand is utterly melted away into contrition and penitence (42:1-6); but one inspiring effect is his, the thing indeed which he has persistently sought (compare 23:3): God is no more a hearsay, such as the friends have defended and his Wisdom has speculated about; his eye sees Him here on earth, and in his still unremoved affliction, no stranger, but a wise and communable Friend, just as his confident faith had pictured he would, in some embodied sphere beyond suffering (19:27).

3. The Thing That Is Right:

Two of the parties in the story have met the august theophany, and it has wrought its effect on them according to the spirit of the man. The self-constituted interpreter, Elihu, has collapsed as suddenly as he swelled up and exhibited himself. The man of integrity, Job, has reached the beatific goal of his quest. What now of the friends who came from far to confirm their Wisdom, and who were so sure they were defending the mind of God? they are not left without a sufficing word, addressed straight to their spokesman Eliphaz (Job 42:7); but their way to light is through the man whose honesty they outraged. Eliphaz' closing words had promised mediatorial power to Job if he would return from iniquity and acquaint himself with God (22:30); Job is now the mediator, though he has held consistently to the terms they reprobated. And the Divine verdict on them is: "Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (42:7). These are the words of the Being who acknowledged that in permitting this whole trial He was `swallowing Job up causelessly' (2:3). Job's honest and immensely revelatory words, anger, remonstrance, bold arraignment of God's way and all, were "the thing that is right." There is no more tremendous Divine pronouncement in all Scripture than this.

4. The Restored Situation:

Here certain myopic students of the Book of Job think the story should end. It offends them, apparently, to see Satan's work undone; if they had had the making of the story they would have left Job still suffering, as if disinterested virtue could not be its own reward without it. The author, at least the final author, evidently did not think so; in the ideals and sanctions that prevailed in his age he knew better what he was about. It is not my business to cut the book to modern pattern, but to note what is there. Job is restored to health, to double his former wealth, to family and honor and a ripe old age. These were what the friends predicted for him on condition of his owning to guilt and calling injustice desert; but in no word of his has he intimated that worldly reinstatement was his wish or his object, the contrary rather. And what he sought he obtained, in richer measure than he sought; obtained it still in suffering, and on earth, "in the place where may see" (compare 34:26 margin). It is no discount to the value of this, nor on the other hand is it an essential addition, to express it not only in spiritual terms, but in terms current among men. And one fundamental thing this restored situation shows, or at least takes for granted, namely, that the quarrel has not been with Wisdom itself, its essence or its sanctions, but only with its encroaching false motive. Deepened, not invaded, its Newtonian law that it is well with the righteous, ill with the wicked, remains intact, an external sanction to live by, in spite of temporal exceptions. A spiritual principle of great significance, too, seems to be indicated, as it were, furtively, in the words, "And Yahweh turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends." He had stood on his integrity demanding his right, and became a self-loathing penitent; out of dust and ashes he prayed for his friends, and became again such a power in health and wealth as he had been in his "autumn days."

IV. The Problem and the Purpose.

1. Beyond the Didactic Tether:

If the foregoing section has rightly shown that the main thrust and interest of the Book of Job lies not in its debate but in its narrative, we have therein the best clue to its problem and its purpose. The sublime self-portrayal of a man who held fast his integrity against God and man and death and darkness tells its own story and teaches its own lesson, beyond the power of didactic propositions or deductions to compass. The book is not a sermon but a vital, throbbing uprising of the human spirit. It is warm with the life of sound manhood; the inner life with its hopes, its doubts, its convictions, its supreme affiance; to impose on this any tether of didacticism is to chili its spirit and make it dogmatic and academic. The reading of its problem which mainly holds the field today is expressed in the question, "Why does God afflict the righteous?" and so the book is resolved into a theodicy, a justification of God's ways with man. Well the friends of Job do their best to make their interpretation a theodicy, even outraging palpable fact to do it; they monopolize the didactic element of the poem; but their chief contention is that God does not afflict the righteous but the wicked, and that Job is a flagrant case in point who adds rebellion to his sin (compare 34:37). Job does not know why God afflicts the righteous; he only knows that it is a grievous fact, which to him seems utterly un-Godlike. God knows, undoubtedly, but He does not tell. Yet all the while an answer to the question is shaping itself in personality, in intrinsic manhood, in the sturdy truth and loyalty of Job's spirit. So, going beyond the didactic tether, we may say that in a deeper sense God is justified after all; if such a result of desperate trial is possible in man, it is worth all the rigor of the experiment. But it is as truly an anthropodicy (excuse the word!) as a theodicy; it puts the essential man on a plane above all that Satan can prove by his lying sneers of self-interest, or the friends' poisoning of the wells by their theory of natural depravity. It comes back after all to the story of Job; he lives the answer to the problem, his personality is the teaching.

2. What Comes of Limiting the Purpose:

It is from this point of view that we can best judge of the critical attacks that have been made on the structure and coherence of the Book of Job. The book has suffered its full share of negative disintegration at the hands of the critics; mostly subjective it seems to me, coming from a too restricted view of its problem and purpose, or from lack of that long patient induction which will not be content until it sees all the elements of its creative idea in fitting order and proportion. To limit the purpose to the issue of a debated theodicy, is to put some parts in precarious tenure; accordingly, there are those to whom the Epilogue seems a superfluity, the Prologue an afterthought, Job 28:1–28 a fugitive poem put in to fill up--not to go on to still more radical excisions. On the score of regularity of structure, too, this limitation of design has had equally grave results. Elihu has perhaps fared the worst. He must go, the critics almost universally say, because forsooth he was not formally introduced in the Prologue; and naturally enough, as soon as he has received notice to quit, the language which in one view fits him so dramatically to his part begins to bristle with Aramaisms (`of the kindred of Ram,' 32:2) and strange locutions, the alleged marks of a later bungling hand. Then, further, Zophar must needs round out the mechanical three-times-three of structure by coming up the third time; accordingly, Job is levied upon to contribute some of his words (27:13-23) to help him out. I need not go into further detail. The foregoing section has done something, I hope, to justify my conviction that the book has a homogeneous design and structure just as it is. Whatever its vicissitudes since the first draft was made, it may turn out after all that the last edition is the best.

3. The Book's Own Import of Purpose:

We are not left in the dark as to the large purpose of the Book of Job, if we will follow its own indications consistently. Satan's question at the beginning, "Doth Job fear God for nought?" sets us on the track of it. To give that question a Godlike and not a Satanic answer, to prove in the person of Job That man has it in him to make his life an unbought loyalty to the Divine, is a purpose large enough to include many subsidiary purposes. But behind this appears, on the part of the author, a purpose which relates his story intimately to the intellectual tendencies of his day. The book embodies, especially in theories of the friends, a searching epitome of the status to which the wisdom philosophy of his time had arrived. That philosophy was a nobly founded theory of life; Job himself had been and continued (compare 28:28) thoroughly at one with it. Soundly identified with righteousness and piety, Wisdom had in religious idiom defined the elements of right and wrong living, and had in no uncertain terms fixed its sanctions of reward and penalty. But from a warm, pulsating life it had become an orthodoxy. Its rigid world had room for only two classes of men: the righteous, bound for the sure rewards of life; the wicked, bound for sure failure and destruction. It brooked no real exception to this austere law of being. But two grave evils were invading its system. One was its hard blindness to facts, or, what is as bad, its determination at all hazards to explain them away. From the psalms of the period (compare e.g. Psalms 37; 49; 73) we can see how the evident happiness and prosperity of the wicked was troubling devout minds. The other was that under this prevailing philosophy life was becoming too cold-blooded and calculable a thing, a virtual feeder of self-interest. The doubt lay very near whether conduct so sanctioned was a thing intrinsic and sincere or a thing bought and sold. This equivocal state of things could not long endure. Sooner or later Satan's question of motive must stab it to the heart; and we may be sure that to the author of the book the impulse to ask the question was not all Satanic. The interests of true wisdom, no less than of skepticism, demanded that the question of inner motive be raised and solved. Nay, Yahweh Himself, whom Satan mocked as abettor of the situation, was on trial. Have we not material here, then, for a sublime purpose, a mighty epic of test and trial and victory? Out of it, not Job alone, but Wisdom must emerge purified, enlightened, spiritualized.

4. Problem of the Intrinsic Man:

So much for the purpose of the book. The problem corresponds to it. If we take it as the baffling problem of suffering, or more specifically why God afflicts the righteous, the sufficing answer is, Job is why. To give such essential integrity as his its ultimate proof and occasion is worth the injustice and the unmerited pain. In other words, the problem is more deeply concerned with man's intrinsic nature than with God's mysterious dealings. When God created man in His own image, did He endow him most fundamentally with the spirit of commercialism, or with the spirit of unbought loyalty to the Godlike? And when created man was made fallible and mortal, did that mean an inescapable inherent depravity, or was the potency of noblest manhood still left at the center of his being? Here again Job is the embodied answer. The friends, veritable Calvinists before Calvin, urge depravity; they would exalt God by making man His utter contrast. But Job's stedfast integrity proves that man, one man at least, is at heart sound and true. And if one man, then the potency of soundness exists in manhood. The book is indeed a theodicy; but still more truly it is a boldly maintained anthropodicy, a vindication of the intrinsic worth of man.

V. Considerations of Age and Setting.

1. Shadowy Contacts with History:

The questions who was the personal author of the Book of Job, and what was its age, are at best only a matter of conjecture; and my revised conjecture, arrived at since I wrote my Epic of the Inner Life, must go for what it is worth. It seems to me much better to regard a story so homogeneous and interrelated as in the main the composition of one mind than to distribute it, as some critics do, among various authors, supplementers, and editors. As to its age, there is so little identifiable contact with political or ecclesiastical history that its composition has been ascribed to many periods, from the time of Abraham to late in post-exilic times. The fact that its scene is laid in the patriarchal past and in a land outside of Palestine indicates the author's design to dissociate it from contemporary events and conditions; such contact with these as exist, therefore, must be read between the lines. The book does not hold with full consistency to patriarchal conditions. Job's friends appeal with the complacency of wisdom-prospered men to the ancient tenure of the land (15:19); and yet, as Job complains, the heartless greed of the landholding class in removing landmarks and oppressing the poor (24:2-12) connotes the prevalence of such outrages as were denounced by Isaiah and Micah before the Assyrian crisis. Such evils would not decrease under Manasseh and Jehoiakim, and might well be portrayed in reminiscence by an exilic writer. On the top of this consideration may be cited the most definite reference to a historical event that the book contains: the passage Job 12:17–25, which vividly describes, by an eyewitness ("Lo, mine eye hath seen all this," 13:1), a wholesale deportation and humiliation of eminent persons, just like that told of Jehoiachin and his court in 2 Kings 24:13–15. To my mind this is illuminative for the age of the book. It seems to have been written by one who saw the Chaldean deportation of 587 BC. May I be suffered to carry the suggestion a step farther? It will be remembered that the chief personage of that deportation was for 37 years a state prisoner in Babylon, at the end of which time he was "taken from durance and judgment" (compare Isaiah 53:8 the King James Version) and lived thenceforth honored with kings (2 Kings 25:27–30 = Jeremiah 52:31–34). I take him to have been the original of the individualized Servant of Yahweh described and describing himself in Second Isa. In one of his self-descriptions he says that Yahweh has given him "the tongue of them that are taught" (Isaiah 50:4); in another that Yahweh has made his "mouth like a sharp sword" and himself "a polished shaft" (Isaiah 49:2). What he said or wrote is of course unidentifiable; but it is certain that in some cultural way he was a hidden power for good to his people. What if this Book of Job were a prison-made book, like Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote, but as much greater as the experience that underlay it was more momentous? I do not see but this suggestion is as probable as any that have been made; and some expressions of the book become thereby very striking, as for instance, the reference to prisoners (3:18,19), to the servant longing for release (7:2), the general sense of being despised, the several references to Job as "my servant Job" (1:8; 2:3; 42:7,8), the description of his restoration as a turned captivity, and his successful intercession for the friends (42:10; compare Isaiah 53:12). I would merely suggest the idea, however, not press it.

2. Place in Biblical Literature:

If the Book of Job is a product of the time of Jehoiachin's imprisonment, it is in worthy and congenial literary company. Isaiah, fostering the faith of a new-born spiritual "remnant," had gathered the elements of that sublime vision (Isaiah 1:1) of Israel's mission among the nations which a later hand was even now, four generations after, working to supplement and finish, in a prophecy (Isaiah 40:1–66:24) which, as all recognize, constitutes the closest parallel in spirited idea to our book. Seers, priests and singers had long busied themselves with the literary treasures of the past; drawing out of dusty archives and putting into popular idiom the ancient laws and counsels of Moses (Deuteronomy; see under JOSIAH); Collecting and adapting the old Davidic psalms and composing new ones, as Hezekiah's reorganization of the worship required. Ezekiel was at Tel Abib planning for the reconstruction of the temple, and perhaps by his use of the name "Job" veiling a cryptic reference (Ezekiel 14:14,Ezekiel 14:20). The affiliations of the Book of Job, however, were more specifically, with the wisdom literature; and long before this the "men of Hezekiah" (Proverbs 25:1) had gathered their aftermath of the Solomonic proverbs, to supplement the maxims which had been the educative pabulum of the people (see under PROVERBS, THE BOOK OF). It was with the care and principle of this diffused instruction, now the most popular vein of literature, that the Book of Job concerned itself. That had become apparent as soon as the maxims were coordinated in an anthology, and an introduction to the collection had been composed, extolling Wisdom as the guide and savior of life. To a spiritually-minded thinker with the Hebrew genius for religion the motivation of Wisdom must sooner or later come. With its values should be apprehended also its unguarded points and tendencies. It was exposed to the one-sided drift of all popular things. In an age when revision and deeper insight were the literary order of the day, Wisdom would come in with the other strains of literature for purification and maturing; and there was not wanting an experience, the basis of an almost unbelievable report (compare Isaiah 53:1) to give depth and poignancy to Job's personal story of suffering and integrity.

3. Parallels and Echoes:

In the amazing sureness and vigor. of its message the Book of Job stands out unique and alone; but it is by no means without its lesser parallels in faith and doubt, above which it rises like a mountain above its retinue of foothills. Mention has been made above of a number of Psalms (e.g. 37; 49; 73) which with different degrees of assurance witness to the struggle of faith with the problem of the rampant and successful wicked. Psalms 49:1–20, one of the psalms of the sons of Korah, is especially noteworthy, because it expressly employs the popular mashal, that is, the Wisdom vehicle, to convey a corrective lesson about unblest riches, drawing a conclusion not unlike that of Job 27:8–23, though in milder tone. Not less noteworthy also is the note of suffering and its mysteriousness which pervades many of the psalms, especially of Asaph and Heman; Psalms 88 and 102 might both have been composed with special reference to Hezekiah's sickness and set beside his psalm in Isaiah 38:1–22, but also they are so fully in the tone of Job's complaint, especially Psalms 88:1–18, that Professor Godet, not unplausibly, conjectures that the Book of Job was written by its author Heman. Hezekiah's deadly sickness itself (Isaiah 38:1–22), which was of a leprous nature, banishing him from the house of God, and which was miraculously healed--an experience regarding which Hezekiah's own writing (Isaiah 38:10–20) is strikingly in the key of Job's complaint--furnishes the nearest parallel to, or adumbration of, Job's affliction; but also in the accounts of the Servant of Yahweh there are hints of a similar stroke of God's judgment (compare Isaiah 52:14; Isaiah 53:3). The passage Job 7:17,Job 7:18 has been called "a bitter parody" of Psalms 8:4; it may be so, but the conditions are in utter contrast, and nothing can be concluded as to which is original and which echo. As to expression, the most remarkable parallel to Job, perhaps, is the passage Jeremiah 20:14–18, in which, like Job, the prophet Jeremiah curses the day of his birth. This curse in Job would naturally be remembered by all readers as one of the most characteristic features of the book; and in like manner the curse in Jer may have stood out in the memory of his disciples, of whom the writer of Job may have been one, and figure in a similar literary situation. Ezekiel's naming of Job along with Noah and Daniel (Ezekiel 14:14,Ezekiel 14:20), as a type of atoning righteousness, is doubly remarkable if the writer of Job was a contemporary; he may have taken the name from a well-known legend, and there may have underlain it a double meaning, known to an inner circle, referring cryptically to one whose real name it might be impolitic to pronounce. Whenever written, the outline and meaning of Job's momentous experience must have won speedily to a permanent place in the universal Hebrew memory; so that centuries afterward James could write to the twelve tribes scattered abroad (5:11), "Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord."

LITERATURE.

A.B. Davidson, "The Book or Job" (Cambridge Bible for Schools), 1884; A.S. Peake, "Job" (New Century Bible), 1905; S.R. Driver, The Book of Job in the Revised Version, 1906; J. T. Marshall, The Book of Job, 1904; J.F. Genung,. Epic of the Inner Life, 1891; G.G. Bradley, Lectures on Job in Westminster Abbey, 1887; F.C. Cook in The Speaker's Commentary, 1882. Among German writers, A. Dillmann, Hiob erklart, 1891; K. Budde, Das Buch Hiob ubersetzt und erklart, 1896 (see The Expositor T, VIII, iii); B. Duhm, Das Buch Hiob erklart, 1897; G. Beer, Der text des Buches Hiob untersucht, 1897; Gibson, "The Book of Job" (Oxford Commentaries), 1899.

John Franklin Genung

Job, Testament Of

See APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE.

Jobab

jo'-bab (yobhabh, perhaps "howling"; Iobab):

(1) "Son" of Joktan (Genesis 10:29; 1 Chronicles 1:23).

See TABLE OF NATIONS.

(2) An Edomite king (Genesis 36:33,Genesis 36:14; 1 Chronicles 1:44,1 Chronicles 1:45).

(3) King of Madon (Joshua 11:1).

(4) 1 Chronicles 8:9; and (5) 1 Chronicles 8:18, Benjamites.

The name is confused with that of Job in Septuagint of Job 42:17.

Jochebed

jok'-e-bed (yokhebhedh, "Yahweh is glory"): Daughter of Levi, wife of Amram and mother of Moses (Exodus 6:20; Numbers 26:59). According to Exodus 6:20, she was a sister of Kohath, Amram's father.

Jod

jod "y": Yodh, the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

See ALPHABET; JOT; YODH.

Joda

jo'-da (Westcott-Hort, Greek New Testament, Ioda; Textus Receptus of the New Testament, Iouda):

(1) A Levite, whose sons were "over the works of the Lord," corresponding to Sudias (1 Esdras 5:26), Hodaviah (Ezra 2:40), Judah (Ezra 3:9), Hodevah (Nehemiah 7:43).

(2) An ancestor of Jesus in Luke's genealogy (Luke 3:26, the King James Version "Juda").

Joed

jo'-ed (yo`edh, "Yahweh is witness"): A "son" of Benjamin (Nehemiah 11:7), wanting in 1 Chronicles 9:7.

Joel (1)

jo'-el (yo'el, popularly interpreted as "Yahweh is God"; but see HPN, 153; BDB, 222a):

(1) The firstborn of Samuel (1 Samuel 8:2; 1 Chronicles 6:33), and supplied in the Revised Version (British and American) of 1 Chronicles 6:28, correctly).

(2) A Simeonite prince (1 Chronicles 4:35). (3) A Reubenite chief (1 Chronicles 5:4,1 Chronicles 5:8).

(4) A Gadite chief, perhaps the same as (3) (1 Chronicles 5:12). He might be the chief of "a family or clan whose members might be reckoned as belonging to either or both of the tribes" (Curtis, Chronicles, 122).

(5) A Levite ancestor of Samuel (1 Chronicles 6:36), called "Shaul" in 6:24 (Hebrew 9)).

(6) A chief of Issachar (1 Chronicles 7:3).

(7) One of David's mighty men (1 Chronicles 11:38), brother of Nathan. 2 Samuel 23:36 has "Igal son of Nathan," and the Septuagint's Codex Vaticanus has "son" in 1 Chronicles, a reading which Curtis adopts.

See IGAL.

(8) A Levite (1 Chronicles 15:7,1 Chronicles 15:11,1 Chronicles 15:17), probably the Joe of 1 Chronicles 23:8 and 26:22.

(9) David's tribal chief over half of Manasseh (1 Chronicles 27:20).

(10) A Levite of Hezekiah's time (2 Chronicles 29:12).

(11) One of those who had married foreign wives (Ezra 10:43) = "Juel" of 1 Esdras 9:35.

(12) A Benjamite "overseer" in Jerusalem (Nehemiah 11:9).

(13) Ioel, the prophet (Joel 1:1; Acts 2:16). See following article.

David Francis Roberts