Here is a book which has for its subject not this or that remote question which touches us only in idle or careless moods; it is book which deals directly with one of the deepest problems which have occupied the mind of man.
We are a long way towards understanding anything under our consideration when we have properly laid it open, even without comment. Job is a wealthy and blameless man in whom God takes pride, and when Satan presents himself before God, God asks him whether he has considered Job. God thinks Job something worth consideration. Satan stands for the sceptic. He sneers at Job’s virtue. Job is well paid for his piety. It is easy for a pious man to be good, but if his prosperity departs he will curse; his creed is the product of his circumstances. God, who is Job’s Maker, is, on the other hand, a believer. He stands by Job, puts a stake on him, and authorises Satan to try him. Job loses all his children and his property, and he knows not what is intended by the loss. He is ignorant of what has passed between God and Satan; the secret transactions of the high heavens are unrevealed to him, but nevertheless he is steadfast. What he loses was not his, and in the depths of his sorrow he blesses the name of the Lord. Satan again presents himself before God, and God justly claims the victory—“he holdeth fast his integrity.” Satan replies that Job as yet has not known the worst, and that sickness is the test of all tests. With health a man may endure anything, but if that fail, it will be seen what becomes of his religion. God is still confident, and Job is smitten with sore boils from head to foot. The torment cannot be surpassed, for not only is it extreme taken by itself, but it is aggravated by the contrast with his former condition. Death of course presents itself to him as the welcome end, and he thinks of suicide, suggested to him by his wife. If he could have but a word of explanation he could bear all with patience. But no word comes; the sky gives no sign. Separation from those he has loved, loathsome disease infecting him up to his very brain, are terrible, but the real agony is the silence, the ignorance of the why and the wherefore, the sphinx-like imperturbability which meets his prayers. Nevertheless he sins not. “What! we have received good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” God had been gracious to him; he recollects all the benefits bestowed on him, and he refuses to turn upon Him because of present reverses. He submits; he is unable to explain, but still he submits.
His three friends forsake him not, but visit him. When they see him afar off they rend their mantles, sprinkle dust upon their heads, and coming near to him, say nothing for seven days and seven nights, for they see that his grief is very great. The consolation offered by these three men to Job has passed into a proverb; but who that knows what most modern consolation is can prevent a prayer that Job’s comforters may be his? They do not call upon him for an hour, and invent excuses for the departure which they so anxiously await; they do not write notes to him and go about their business as if nothing had happened; they do not inflict on him meaningless commonplaces. They honour him by remaining with him, and by their mute homage; and when they speak to him, although they are mistaken, they offer him the best that they have been able to think. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, sitting in the dust with Job, not daring to intrude upon him, are forever an example of what man once was and ought to be to man.
After a while, Job “opened his mouth and cursed his day,” in words which are so vital that they are an everlasting formula for all those of the sons of men whose only hope is their last sleep. There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master. One touch, that in the twenty-fifth verse of the third chapter, is so intense, that it must be the record of a very vivid experience. “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me,” or more correctly, “For I fear a fear; it meets me; and what I shudder at comes to me.” The object of the dread which haunts us does not generally become real to us, but to Job the horror of all his worst dreams had become actual.
Job’s three friends begin their reply, and Eliphaz is the first. He asserts generally the just rule of God, and the connection between doing good and prosperity on the one hand, and between evil doing and adversity on the other, ending with an amplification of the text that the man is happy whom God correcteth, for by chastisement are we redeemed. Nothing that Eliphaz says is commonplace, although it has no direct bearing on Job’s case. If he had been a fool he would never have been dear to Job, nor would he have been one of the three amongst all Job’s acquaintances who came to him from afar. We must remember, too, that in a simple, honest society righteousness and temporal prosperity, sin and poverty, may be more immediately conjoined than they are with ourselves, and that Eliphaz may have felt that much that he said was true, although to us it is mere talk. Eliphaz is partly a rhetorician, and, like all
