what has been stated in the section on Job. I have not attempted to decide precisely where the poet heard both Arabic and Aramaic. Dillmann accepts the view mentioned on p. 75. But Gilead, too, was at all times inhabited by Arab tribes, both nomad and settled,[1] and the region itself was called Arabia.[2]
11. Pages 106-111.—Herder (to whom I gladly refer the student) is perhaps the best representative of the modern literary point of view. Whatever he says on the Hebrew Scriptures is worth reading, even when his remarks need correction. No one felt the poetry of Job more deeply than Herder; to the religious ideas of the poem his eyes were not equally open. Indeed, it must have been hard to discern and appreciate these adequately in the eighteenth century; the newly-discovered sacred books of the East, with their deep though obscure metaphysical conceptions, for a time almost overshadowed the far more sobre Hebrew Scriptures. Like Carlyle (who is to some extent his echo) Herder underrates the specifically Hebrew element in the book, which is of course not very visible on a hasty perusal. One point, however, that he sees very dearly, though he does not use the expression, is that Job is a character-drama. He denies that the speeches are monotonous.
'So eintönig für uns alle Reden klingen, so sind sie mit Licht und Schatten angelegt und der Faden, oder vielmehr die Verwirrung der Materie, nimmt zu von Rede zu Rede, bis Hiob sich selbst fasset und seine Behauptungen lindert. Wer diesen Faden nicht verfolgt und insonderheit nicht bemerkt, wie Hiob seinem Gegner immer den eigenen Pfeil aus der Hand windet; entweder das besser sagt, was jener sagte, oder die Gründe jenes eben für sich braucht—der hat das Lebendige, Wachsende, kurz die Seele des Buchs verfehlet' (Hiob als Composition betrachtet, Werke, Suphan, ii. 318).
He has also clearly perceived the poet's keen sympathy with mythology, and this, combined with the (supposed) few imitations of Job in the Old Testament, confirmed him in the erroneous view that the original writer of Job was an Edomitish Emeer. On the limited influence of Job he has some vigorous sentences, the edge of which, however, is turned by more recent criticism. It is of the prophets he is chiefly thinking, when he finds so few traces of acquaintance with Job in the Scriptures, and of the pre-Exile prophets. 'Wie drängen und drücken sich die Propheten! wie borgen sie von einander Bilder in einem ziemlich engen Kreise und führen sie nur, jeder nach seiner Art, aus! Diese alte ehrwürdige
