times such popularity was a source of danger to the text, and hasty copyists left their mark on many a corrupt passage. Is there any remedy for this?
Dr. Merx's book, Das Gedicht von Hiob (1871), has the merits and defects of pioneering works, but his introduction should by all means be studied. Two points in it have to be examined, (1) the relative position given by Merx to the chief ancient versions, and (2) the use which he makes of his own strophic arrangement for detecting interpolations or gaps in the text. More, I think, is to be gained from his discussion of the use of the versions than from his strophic arrangement; and yet before quite so much importance is attached to the text of the Septuagint, ought we not to be surer than we are of the antiquity and of the critical value of the Septuagint Job? That version may not be of as recent origin[1] as Grätz would have it, but can hardly be much earlier than the second century B.C. Before this date the text of Job had time to suffer much from the usual causes of corruption. Besides this, there are special reasons for distrusting the literal accuracy of the translator. He seems to have been in his own way an artist, and to have sought to reproduce poetry in poetical language. In this respect his vocabulary differs from that of all the other Septuagint translators; he thinks more of his Greek readers than of his Hebrew original. Had he been more mechanical in his method, the critical value of his work would have been greater. I agree therefore with H. Schultz that even where the Septuagint and the Peshitto are united against the Massoretic reading, the decisive arguments for the reading of the former will be, not the external one of testimony, but the internal one (if so be it exists) of suitableness.
Mr. Bateson Wright goes almost farther than Dr. Merx in his opinion of the corruptness of the received text. His work on Job (1883), however unripe, shows remarkable independence, and contains, among many rash, a few striking emendations. That he does not restrict himself to corrections suggested by the versions, is not in the least a defect; the single drawback to his work is that he has not pondered long enough before writing. Purely conjectural emendation was doubtless often resorted to by the old translators themselves; it was and still is perfectly justified, though to succeed in its use requires a singular combination of caution and boldness which even older critics have not always attained. Special attention is devoted by Mr. Wright to the poetical features of the speeches in Job. Dr. Merx had already observed that most of the [Greek: stichoi] contain eight
- ↑ 'A child of the first Christian century,' Grätz's Monatsschrift, p. 91. Nöldeke dates this version about 150 B.C. (Gott. gel. Anzeigen, 1865, p. 575).
