comprehensive diversified literature. But all this rests on invalid grounds, false observation, and deceptive conclusions. Indeed, the assumption that a book which sets forth such a fearful conflict in the depths of affliction must have sprung from a time of gloomy national distress, is untenable: it is sufficient to suppose that the writer himself has experienced the like, and experienced it at a time when all around him were living in great luxury, which must have greatly aggravated his trial. It would be preferable to suppose that the book of Job belongs to the time of the exile (Umbreit and others), and that Job, though not exactly a personification of Israel, is still לרשׂראל משׁל,[1] a pattern for the people of the exile (Bernstein); for this view, interesting indeed in itself, has the similarity of several passages of the second part of the book of Isaiah in its favour: comp. Isa 40:14 with Job 21:22; Isa 40:23 with Job 12:24; Isa 44:25 with Job 12:17, Job 12:20; Isa 44:24 with Job 9:8; Isa 49:4 with Job 15:35; Psa 7:15. These, however, only prove that the severely tried ecclesia pressa of the exiles might certainly recognise itself again in the example of Job, and make it seem far more probable that the book of Job is older than that period of Israel's suffering.
The literature of the Chokma began with Solomon. First in the time of Solomon, whose peculiar gift was worldly wisdom, a time which bears the character of peaceful contemplation resulting from the conflicts of belief of David's time,[2] the external and internal preliminary conditions for
- ↑ Vid., c. 90 of Ez chajim, by Ahron b. Elias of Nicomedia, edited by Delitzsch, 1841, which corresponds to More Nebuchim, iii. 22-24. The view that the poet himself, by Job intended the Israel of the exile (according to Warburton, the Israel of the restoration after the exile; according to Grotius, the Edomites carried into exile by the Babylonians), is about the same as the view that the guilty Pericles may be intended by King Oedipus, or the Sophists by the Odysseus of the Philoctetes.
- ↑ Thus far Gaupp, Praktische Theol. ii. 1, 488, is in some degree right, when he considers the book of Job a living testimony of the new spirit of belief which was bursting forth in David's time.
