22

As one of Adam's sons doth for his brother plead.
For a few years will come and go ;21
And I shall go whence I shall not return.

with God;" but the mystery, the strange idea, contained in
the tearful prayer which his extreme and helpless misery
forces from the soul of Job is cleared up in the New Testa-
ment. UMBREIT also gives this translation, making God the
subject of, but the view he presents of it is certainly
characteristic: Job, in a melancholy, but ingenious way,
says to God, that he must stand by him against God (Gott
muss mir beistehen gegen Gott), for it is He who lets him

suffer, and He is the only one who knows how innocent he
is." Melancholy, indeed, it is to think how blind the other-
wise acute eye of the Rationalist to the deep spirituality of a
thought so tender, and at the same time so sublime!
20 Ver. 21. As one, In the 1 is comparative, as is
often the case.

ובן

21 Ver. 22. Come and go, The Hebrew includes both directions, like the Greek epxouat. It demands here its full meaning.

4

Ah! who is He that gives His hand for mine!

(Not they). Their heart from insight Thou hast closed;
Therefore Thou wilt not raise them (over me).

1 Ver. 1. My breath is short. It seems best here to follow the primary sense of an to bind tight—funem adstrinxit, contorsit. It is stricture and shortness in the breathing, 2 Ver. 1. Quenched. -W7. Their light is gone out. See Prov. xiii. 9.

3 Ver. 2. Were it not. D makes a strong affirming when there is supposed to be a silent apodosis. It is a kind of imprecation, as though one should say coarsely, or strongly, “I'll be cursed, if it is not so, or so." In this way it comes in Hebrew, and is very frequent in Arabic. There are two reasons against it here, though adopted by so many commentators: 1st, There is nothing in the context that demands anything so strong; 2d, the idea of a silent apodosis is not to be resorted to where there is an open one so clearly ex ressed. The conjecture may be hazarded that by mockeries, here, ' (illusiones) Job had in view the mocking fiends, whom his imagination, or something more real, perhaps, had brought out, as in xvi. 9, 10-the "gaping mouths," the "gnashing teeth," the "glaring eye." They may be supposed to come from the same cause, whether it be his bodily or mental state, that produced the "scaring visions," vii. 14. It was these mocking illusions that drove him to frenzy. Were it not for these, he could more calmly bear the taunts of his friends, one of which may have been, perhaps, the very language which Job repeats from them, ver. 5.

4 Ver. 3. Calmly rest: Literally, lodges; in Kal., pernoctare, to lodge all night. DELITZSCH, lingers; CONANT, dirells. An affecting picture of helpless suffering-spoken of them, but addressed to God-as 5 Ver. 3. Lay down now. Ver. 3. Be my surety.

appears in next verse.

`: lay down the pledge.
; the same word used

in Hezekiah's supplication, Isaiah xxxviii. 14. Addressed to God. The same wondrous thought we have xvi. 21.

7 Ver. 3. Ah who. The interrogative, here, does not so much express doubt as wonder at the thought of Him, the marvellous Surety.

8 Ver. 4. From insight, that is, from seeing this mystery of God pleading with God for man, and becoming surety with himself.

9 Ver. 5. For booty, pḥnḥ, for a division of the spoil.

This verse looks like a proverbial saying which Job quotes
against their faithlessness. In the direct order, as he gives
it, it would be rendered thus:

For booty he betrays his friends;
His children's eyes shall fail;-

the second clause being consequential; as proverbs of this kind sometimes stand in Solomon's collection. We are compelled to supply a relative, or a particle. Or it may be that he is repeating, as before said, one of their own taunts or bywords; and thus suggesting the language of the next verse. 10 Ver. 6. Vilest of the vile. is literally a spitting, or something to be spit upon; one on whose face any one may spit; (onomatopic like Greek #rú). In such a case as this, translating literally is translating falsely, if it gives the modern reader the idea that the e is ment the very action lexically expressed. It is not easy to believe that Job's face was actually spit upon; and therefore it is best to render the phrase by what it represents, and of which the action itself, as pictured, may be called the language.

1 Ver. 7. My moulded limbs, 3-from 73 to form, fashion. The contrast between his limbs in their original form and proportion, and their shrunken state.

12

13

14

15

16

My plans asunder1 rent,

[PAUSE].

My soul's most cherished thoughts.

For day, they give13 me night,

To the face of darkness light is drawing's near..
If I should hope, Lo, Sheol is my home.
Yes, in the darkness have I spread my couch.
To corruption have I said-my father thou;-
My mother and my sister-to the worm.
And where, then, is my hope?

My hope, alas ! who seeth it?

To the gates of Sheol it is going down,
When once it finds a resting place in1 dust.

12 Ver. 11. Asunder rent, 'p♫]. The figure of the weaver's loom; UMBREIT. Compare Isaiah xxxviii. 12.

Arabic verbs of nearness are generally followed by 1♫ in-
stead of, and especially is this the case with this very
verb, where it has the sense of being near (propinquus
fuit). Near from, they say, instead of near to. This seems
to be SCHLOTTMANN's rendering, and CONANT's expressive ver-
sion is closely allied to it: "light is just before darkness,"-just
going out. DILLMANN and others take as comparative:
nüher als das Angesicht der Finsterniss; but this makes no clear

13 Ver. 12. They give-light is drawing near.
-They put. But who are they? See Note Job vii. 3.
They may be the invisible enemies whom Job fears to name;
or if he refers to the friends it may be with a like aversion.
The first is the more probable. The common grammatical
explanation: the active used for the passive, is an evasion. Many
commentators almost reverse the sense above given, by sup-
posing Job to have represented the sophistical reasoning of
14 Ver. 15. Alas! The interjection is justified by the
the friends: They put (as they suppose) day for night" DE-
LITZSCH, They explain night as day,"-a vey forced render-pathos of the repetition: My hope; yes, my hope, alas; with
the emphasis on the pronoun.

ing. UMBREIT: "They would change night into day"—that is,
encourage and flatrer Job. They had ever done this, or, in
any way, tried to make things look fair to him; since the
verses, ch. xi. 16-19, are only conditional predictions. There
seems, moreover, no good reason why in D may not
have the sens above given to it as most literally translated:
for day-instead of day. The second clanse, too, has been
made more difficult than would seem necessary. It is true
that in Hebrew the preposition following is usually
or ; but in such a case as this, there is nothing unnatu-
ral in regarding it as denoting a short distance from, so as to
make the proper preposition-just like the Lain prope
abest. The light is near (that is but a short distance from)
the face or edge of the darkness (see Job xxvi. 10), like the
sun in an eclipse just going into the penumbra, or into the
total shadow. And this agrees admirably with the context.
Relationally. and, though seeming opposites, are so
near akin that they ar sometimes united to denote both
from and to the point which may be regarded as either that

of contact, or of separation: As Deut. iv. 32,

2 am. vii. 1; Haggai ii. 18, and other places, for which see NOLDIUS, Concord. Partic., pa. 441. The naturalness of this is more easily acknowledged when it is considered that the

sense.

15 Ver. 16. Gates: 1 UMBREIT, ROSENMUELLER, and
others, render it solitidudines (Oeden), deriving the idea from
the supposed primary sense of 7, 770 (724, solus). But
the better view comes in another way-from the true pri-
mary sense of separation. So most distinctly the Arabic 79.
Hence the sense of vectes, bar, that which separates, so often
used in Exodus, etc., in the description of the tabernacle.
Hence it may well be rendered gates, as above, giving an idea
the same with the
gates of death (gutes of Sheol)

Job xxxviii. 17; Ps. cvii. 18. It is the idea of returnless

ness

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn,

No traveller returns.

HOMER uses this same figure of gates or bars. See Iliad xxi.
72, πúdas Aidao, the gates of Hades. In the Odyss. x. 571,
Hades is called evρurvλès dw, "the house of the wide gates to
indicate the vast population it encl ses." There is the same
idea of separation in a strange Arabic word Barzach, mean-
ing the interstice, or separating interval, whether of space or
time, between the present and the coming world. Among
in the Koran, see Surat. xxiii. 102, "Behind

other places the Barzach, until the day of the Resurrection."

16 Ver. 16. In dust., yy, here, must have the same meaning with ¬y, vii. 22.

1

The noose shall hold him fast.

His cord lies hidden in the earth;

His trap in ambush by the wayside path.
All round about do terrors frighten him;
[At every step] they start him to his feet.
His woe is hungering for its prey;

A dire disease stands ready at his side;-
To eat the very partings of his skin;
Yea, Death's First Born his members shall devour.
Torn from his tent, his strong security,

Thus to the King of Terrors doth it march him on.

15

16

17

Who dwell within his tent are none of his;

And o'er his pleasant1o place is showered11 the sulphur-rain.
Beneath, his roots dried1 up-

Above, his branch cut off.

His memory perished from the land,-

No name now left in all the plain,

"T

Bariλeus verúcoσi Kaтabliμévolo-king of the wasted dead, make it more universal-the feminine in Hebrew thus sup-the imagery being drawn from the last stages of emaciating, plying the place of the lacking neuter. disease in this life. It is the idea in the word Job io Ver. 15. His pleasant place, or home, . xxvi. 6; xxviii. 22. the Abaddon of Rev. ix. 11, or the one 11 Ver. 15. Is showered: , lit. is scattered; but described, Heb. ii. 14, as τὸν τὸ κράτος ἔχοντα τοῦ θανάτου. here seems to denote a shower like that which fell on Sodom If not in sound, yet in idea, would it be a more fearful epiand Gomorrah. thet than the other, as calling up the pallida Mors of the classic poet, and, above all, that most awful image of wasting, emaciating disease, the XAwpòs immos, the "pale horse" of Rev. vi. 8, with "him who sat thereon, whose name was Death, and Hades following hard after him." The thought of terror merely, falls far below the soul-awing, yet still fascinating, power of such a representation.

12 Ver. 16. His roots dried up-his branch cut off, etc. It makes it more vivid to render the verbs in this verse and the next, as participles with a nominative independent.

13 Ver. 18. Do they drive. For such use of they, see Note vii. 3. Comp. Ps. xlix. 15, . They put (or drive) them into Sheol. Comp. also Job xix. 26. 14 Ver. 18. And chase. The idea of Ps. xlix. 15 is also in Prov. xiv. 32, though there it is expressed passively,

Ver. 14. Doth it march him on. DELITZSCH SAYS that "the 'it' here is a secret power, as elsewhere the feminine prefix is used to denote the dark power of natural and supernatural events, though sometimes the masculine is thus employed." This would make it a kind of impersonal fate, inya, "the wicked man is driven away in

or fatality, of which, it is true, there are some traces to be found in the book (see INT. THEISM, pа. 23). But there is no need of finding the subject of the verb 13 in such an abstract conception. It may be regarded, in strict grammatical construction, as the hungry woe, or the first-born of Death, although the gender is changed to the feminine to

TT

his wickedness."

TT:

15 Ver. 20. Men of the West. For the reasons of this rendering, see UMBREIT, DELITZSCH, and others. CONANT, however, adheres to the old rendering.

10 Ver. 21. Unrighteous men; 70: Here taken collectively.

-the cha) נכר as the Hiphil of the Hebrew root הכרו

1 Ver. 3. Act as strangers. The translator abides generally get its sense from the Arabic, and render it here by E. V. The rendering is obtained by regarding stun, or confound. But that is straining the Arabic word, which means simply to affect with admiration, besides leaving racteristic preserved) with the sense of the piel. SCHUL- wholly unexplained the preposition that follows. This is TENS, according to GESENIUS, thus regards it as for quite natural to the Hebrew verb, and also to the really corresponding Arabic; as in the V. Conj., to be estranged, to act like a stranger to any one.

with which he compares 77. Jerem. ix. 2. See also

8 Ver. 6. Cast me down. There is no need of going beyond, here, to get the sense of injustice, as some do. UMBREIT well renders it, mich beugt, bent down, humbled me. ZÖCKLER also gives it clearly by gekrummet, crooked, or curved me. There is indeed complaint in the next verse, but it does not amount to a direct charge of injustice. It may be said, too, that in the language of the 7th verse Job had the friends in view. It was their wrong he cried out against.

↑ Ver. 10. I am gone- Compare a similar pathetic use of oixoual by the Greek Dramatic poets. See Soph. Ajax, 896, οίχων, όλωλα.

of the prose portion. With this rendering would well agree what follows if we keep the common familiar sense of in, whether regarded as an infinitive (like Лip, Ezek. xxxvi. 3) or as a plural feminine noun-my yearning, or yearnings, my tender feelings for the dear ones lost, for my desolate household (see Xxvi. 7 and note). She repels me from her (he seems to say) even in the manifestation of my deepest grief. The sense of is very uniform in the Hebrew-tender feeling-gracious feeling-a going out of the soul towards anything. Hence, in Hithpahel, a tender supplication for grace and mercy, coming like the nouns

and

from the frequent Kal imperative, have mercy upon me. Prayer is the saying over of this tender formula. The verb, it is true, has the direct accusative for its object; but in the infinitive it would require the preposition of direction, and none more appropriate than or. This is the preposition following it in Arabic; and here it may be remarked that there is hardly another case of two words of the same form, in Hebrew and in Arabic, that so closely agree in all their applications and derivatives. "He was or became affected with a yearning, longing, or desire, or an intense emotion of grief or of joy:" Such is the definition that Lane gives from an extended study of the most copious native Arabic Lexicons. This is the very spirit of the Hebrew root. The rendering

Ver. 17. My temper-strange. That aversion in some sense is intended here cannot be doubted; but in what way is it signified? The translator had much doubt in respect to 1, rendered generally breath, but which he has here ventured to translate temper, as the word is used, Prov. xxv. 28, where it is indeed translated spirit, but in the sense of passion, animus agitatus et commotus. This agrees with the immediate context, as well as with what is said of the wife in the Prologue. His spirit was alien to her. She did not understand him, his mind, his feeling, his state of soul. When he said, "the Lord gave, the Lord hath taken, etc,' she regarded it as stoical indifference. She knew nothing of the deep feeling underlying the declaration, his yearning for the lost as measn ing the depth of his resignation, before insufferable bodily agony drove him to the outcry of chap. ii. (see Int. Theism, pa. 28). She said to him, "Curse God and die." She was not at all the woman to appreciate Job, and my breath is not inconsistent with it. The breath under a sense of this he might well say, that she had come tor gard him with aversion; and perhaps she had wholly abandoned him. Certainly the absence of all such allusion to incidents mentioned in the prologue would be more strange than their presence. It would furnish an almost unanswerable argument to those who maintained the later authorship

may be taken for that which is most familiar in the perso nality; or if regarded as denoting offensiveness, it may be said to have caused the unfeeling woman to repel everything in him, even his yearning for, or any mention of, his lost children. To get this idea of offensiveness, however, we must give an unusual sense to (strange) making it the same