Golden Treasury called 'The Book of the Righteous'? or shall we follow those bolder critics who suppose the author of Job to have lived in the post-Exile times, when he may easily have had access to both parts of our Book of Isaiah? These are questions not to be evaded on account of their difficulty, but not to be decided here.
Our next halt may be made at the Book of Proverbs, the three concluding sections of which composite work belong at the earliest to the last century of the Jewish state. Among the clearest literary allusions in Job are those to this book, and some of these are especially important with regard to the disputed question of the relation between our poem and the introduction to the Book of Proverbs (Prov. i.-ix.) That the latter work is the earlier seems to me clear from a comparison of the general positions indicated by the following passages from Prov. i.-ix. and the Book of Job. Compare—
Prov. i. 7 with Job xxviii. 28
— iii. 11 — — v. 17
— iii. 14, 15} — — xxviii. 15-19
— viii. 10, 11}
— iii. 19, 20 — — xxviii. 26, 27
— viii. 22, 25 — — xv. 7, 8
— viii. 29 — — xxxviii. 10.
It will be seen by any one who will compare these passages that the case here is different from that of the parallelisms in Job and the second part of Isaiah. The latter do not perhaps allow us to determine with confidence which of the two books is the earlier. But, as Prof. Davidson has amply shown,[1] the stage of intellectual development represented by Job is more advanced than that in the 'Praise of Wisdom.' The general subjects may be the same, but in Job they have entered upon a new phase.—We now pass to the earliest of the proverbial anthologies (Prov. x.-xxii. 16). Here of course the relation is reversed: the proverbs are the originals to which the author of Job alludes. Compare—
Prov. xiii. 19 } with Job xviii. 5, 6, xxi. 17
— xxiv. 20 }
— xv. 11 — — xxvi. 6
— xvi. 15 — — xxix. 23, 24.
- ↑ The Book of Job (1884), pp. lx.-lxii.
