It will be seen that there is here no direct imputation of crime against Job. Eliphaz holds generally nevertheless to the belief that crime is followed by punishment. A certain want of connection and pertinence is observable in Eliphaz. A man who is made up of what he hears or reads always lacks unity and directness. Confronted by any difficulty or by any event which calls upon him, he answers, not by an operation of his intellect on what is immediately before him, but by detached remarks which he has collected, and which are never a fused homogeneous whole. In conversation he is the same, and will first propound one irrelevant principle and then another—the one, however, not leading to the other, and sometimes contradicting it. The transition from Eliphaz to Job in this respect is very remarkable. The sixth and seventh chapters are molten from end to end, and run in one burning stream. He complains that Eliphaz is beside the mark. “How forcible are right words! but what doth your arguing reprove?” Eliphaz is like the torrent which the caravans expected, but, when they came to it, it had been consumed out of its place, and they were ashamed. Barren sand was all that was offered instead of the living water. Everything which can be said by a sick man against life is in these chapters. The whole of a vast subsequent literature is summed up here, and he who has once read it may fairly ask never to be troubled with anything more on that side. Death to Job is as the shadow for which he looks as an hireling looks for the reward of his work. He calls upon God to remember that his life is wind; that as a cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more; and therefore he prays for consideration. What is man, too, that the Almighty should set Himself against him? “Supposing I have sinned, what can I do unto Thee? Why set me up as a mark against Thee? Why dost Thou not pardon my transgression?” There is nothing in all poetry more sublime than this: it was a complete answer to Eliphaz, and is a complete answer to all those who suppose that God, after the fashion of a man, proposes to punish man deliberately for his trivial misdeeds, and to punish him, too, not that he may be cured, but because the dignity of the Maker has received an affront.
Bildad, unaffected by what he has heard, referring to it in no way whatever, reiterates the old tale. It is the testimony of the fathers. We are but of yesterday, and know nothing. Age after age has declared that although the wicked may be green before the sun, and his branch shoot forth in his garden, he will be destroyed, and God will not cast away a perfect man. The confidence of Bildad and his friends upon this point is very remarkable. It must have been based upon something. Such a creed did not grow up without some root; and it is equally curious if it was the result of a philosophy, a felt impossibility to consider God as unjust, or if it was an induction from observed facts. If it was due to a philosophy, it at least bears testimony to the authority of the ought in the minds of these men and the depth of the distinction between justice and injustice; injustice being so hateful to them, that in spite of everything which seems to prove the contrary, they were unable to ascribe it to God. If it was an induction from the facts—an induction which, as I have before observed, might in those times be perfectly valid—then it is no less remarkable that such a theocracy should ever have existed.
Job makes no direct answer. “How shall I contend with Him? I cannot answer one of His thousand questions!” The conception of God in Job’s mind has greatly enlarged, and he dwells upon His incomprehensibility. He is the maker of Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades, of that which is farthest from us. “He goeth by me, and I see Him not; He passeth on also, but I perceive Him not.” He is forever before me and about me; what He does I see perpetually, but I know Him not. How can I plead with such a Being? “If I had called, and He had answered me, yet I would not believe that He had hearkened unto my voice.” One thing Job knows. “He destroyeth the perfect and the
