The astonishing thing in the wager that brings this about is that God should lend Himself so readily to a game of chance, as if to Him, as to Satan, Job's conduct were a matter of hazard and guesswork. Natural enough to an unprincipled, unattached spirit like Satan, it does not look beseeming to God; He ought, one would think, to be surer of His own handiwork. But if one may dare say a thing so anthropomorphic of God - His consent to Satan's experiment was not a gamble. It was a faith. He had faith in the essential Godlikeness of human nature, a certitude that Job was loyal not for reward or self-appeasement but because it was in him to be loyal to the Godlike. The Godlike was his truer element. If the experiment proved this true, then the severity of the test, instead of breaking Job down, would but affirm in deeper and surer terms the intrinsic worth of his manhood.

And that is how the wager was won. The agreement in heaven, we will remember, was outside the scene; it was Job who, all unwittingly, won it by the confirmed integrity of his own human personality. The successive strokes of his affliction as they fell found him steadfast and loyal in spite of wife's reproach and life's utter closure. So far as Satan's part was concerned, the wager was won speedily: the human in Job had won it. So far as God's share of the experiment was concerned, however, it was only just beguh. It was the Godlike in Job that more than won it. The failure of friends, the futility of the conventional notions of Wisdom, the hard sense of God's dealings urged upon him by friends and suffering alike, spurred the Godlike in Job to a sturdy creativeness. Out of the blank denial that seemed everywhere to have blighted the face of being he gradually shaped an Everlasting Yea. His creative unit was the imperative demand for sympathy, mutualness, sincerity, in the free relations of life, the thing wherein the friends failed him (cf. vi, 14–30; xii, 4, 5; xix, 13–22), nor human

friends only but the whole divine-human order of things (ix, 1-12). He could not bear that this should be remote, one-sided, arbitrary. Accordingly, as human friendships and theories failed, his heart began to reach out, as by timid tentacles, toward a sympathy which would not fail, a responsive heart which somewhere, somehow, would accord him justice and understanding. (This, I think, is the main surge of Job's constructive spirit, an intuition based on his own consciousness of right and mercy (ix, 21-24). Beginning with the sense of what is not but ought to be, a personal medium of exchange (ix, 32-35), his longing shapes itself into a plea (xiii, 20-22), then grows in clearness and certitude until the imaged umpire (ix, 33) is believed in as a witness on high (xvi, 19-21) and then strongly asserted as his Redeemer (xix, 25-27, go'el; lit. "next of kin ") in consequence of kin") whose advocacy God will no more be a stranger. On this uprise of the Godlike in man toward the manlike in God hangs all the rest of Job's complaint and ideal. As he identifies his disease with the immediate stroke of God his appeal is from the God arbitrary and ruthless to the God compassionate and friendly (x, 3-7). As his leprous body draws near the grave, with no hope of vindication on this side, he endeavors to turn the negative analogies of nature into a suggestion of life beyond (xiv, 7-17); but whether this may be affirmed or not, his final words proclaim him ready to enter upon it bearing before God the record of his earthly life with the pride of a prince (xxxi, 35–37). Thus as we may say, the potent surge of the Godlike in Job's personality rises above earthly hardness and falsity and creates the thing that ought to be, the coöperative sympathy and fellowship wherein God and man respond to each other in freedom of spirit. The wager has ceased to be an experiment, has proved itself not motiveless but purposeful on the part of God. It has opened the way, God's way, to strong and creative manhood.

And Jehovah turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends" (xlii, 10). After the struggle to light and humble reconcilement comes intercession, with Job himself, as Eliphaz had blindly promised (cf. xxii, 26–30) and as Elihu had self-confidently offered (cf. xxxiii, 5-7), acting as advocate and daysman. One thinks of another captivity, a literal fact of Hebrew history, a captivity eventually turned to restoration, wherein an unnamed personage who was esteemed "stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted" (Isa. liii, 3, 4; cf. Jer. xxii, 28), yet "bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." It yields an untold wealth of significance to meditate on these two captivities together, with their personal avails, as told in the Second Isaiah and the Book of Job; they belong alike to the supreme disciplines and disclosures of human life.

III. THE Five MegilloTH

Immediately succeeding the Book of Job in this literary section of the Hebrew canon are five short Scripture books which by Hebrew readers came to be known as "the five Megilloth" (lit. "the five rolls "), for which term we might fitly substitute "the five little classics," such being the popular estimate in which they were held. These, in the most usual Hebrew order, are: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. The fact that they are grouped by themselves, with a distinctive name for the collection, gives them a place of their own in the make-up of Biblical literature; their individual meanings also as classics of special value call for their due of consideration.

I

Uses and Estimates of the Group. Some notion of the peculiar distinction accorded to these Megilloth may be gathered from the fact that the reading of them was associated with the observance of the recurring festival seasons in

Jerusalem. Whether this was by public appointment or by a spontaneous social arrangement is not clear; the latter In Jewish seems more likely. Nor is it immediately plain, Social Life except in the case of Lamentations and Esther, what connection was felt between the sentiment of the books and that of the feasts. One thinks most naturally of them as read not for stiff edification, as a didactic exercise, but for recreation, as a sweetener of reunion and genial intercourse. To such use they are well adapted. They may be regarded as their age's vehicle of popular entertainment and instruction, analogous to the drama of Shakespeare's time and the novel of our own. Thus it came about in the finished organization of the Jewish commonwealth, with its social and religious customs, that the Song of Songs was regularly read at the Feast of Passover, Ruth at the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, Ecclesiastes at the Feast of Tabernacles, Esther at the Feast of Purim, and Lamentations on the Ninth of Ab, the fast day observed in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem.

Of these five occasions four are festival seasons, only one, the one marked by the central book of the group, being a fast day. The general connotation of them was not legal nor prophetic, not austere at all but care-free and joyous; times when, as it were, the mind and mood of the people could let itself go. Its sense of freedom and well-being is fitly indicated in Nehemiah's advice to the people when on the birthday of Judaism they were minded to take their law weeping: "Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy unto our Lord; neither be ye grieved; for the joy of Jehovah is your strength" (Neh. viii, 10; cf. also Esth. ix, 19, 22). Freedom, deliverance, confidence, - such was the unspoken language of these festival occasions, a sentiment that the one memorial of the nation's dispersion did not avail to impair.

It is not without significance that these Megilloth, or little classics, should have come to be associated, as by a natural In Literary affinity, with the unprescribed observances of the Appreciation feasts. They too, in a sense not so true of other Scripture, are literary works in which the free Hebrew mind has let itself go. Written neither in criticism nor in propaganda, they have not the fear of orthodoxy nor the awe of mystic revelation before their eyes. They represent the thoughts and sentiments in which the popular mind can take pleasure or find itself reflected, without reference to the big monitions of priest or prophet. Perhaps that is why three of these books, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, did not attain to a confirmed status in the canon until late and after much hesitation of estimate. They were, in a word, literary works that gave free rein to the sincerest thought and feeling, letting the question of official sanction take care of itself. If the canon was eventually liberal enough to include them, so much the more hospitable and tolerant the canon.

Nor should we fail to note here the variety and the artistic quality observable in these works. All the leading Hebrew types of literary workmanship -song, idyl, elegy, mashal, plotted story -are in turn represented, each by what may be called a cabinet masterpiece, a specimen of finished literature in its kind. This fact does not look fortuitous. It is as if the Hebrew literature, proudly conscious of itself, were minded to come out from its ancient seclusion and measure itself by the standards of the world.1 It was in a ripened and highly cultured period that this final section of the Old Testament was made up, a period wherein the most influential literature in the world was its rival. We do well to give this fact its due among the Hebrew men of letters in whose care were the uniquely educated people of a book.

1 Cf. p. 431, above,