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stranger; for entirely for his profit, in order that he may bask in the light of His countenance, will He reveal himself.
This is the picture of the future, for the realization of which Job longs so exceedingly, that his reins within him pine away with longing. Whence we see, that Job does not here give utterance to a transient emotional feeling, a merely momentary flight of faith; but his hidden faith, which during the whole controversy rests at the bottom of his soul, and over which the waves of despair roll away, here comes forth to view. He knows, that although his outward man may decay, God cannot, however, fail to acknowledge his inner man. But does this confidence of faith of Job really extend to the future life? It has, on the contrary, been observed, that if the hope expressed with such confidence were a hope respecting the future life, Job's despondency would be trifling, and to be rejected; further, that this hope stands in contradiction to his own assertion, Job 14:14 : “If man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my warfare would I wait, till my change should come;” thirdly, that Job's character would be altogether wrongly drawn, and would be a psychological caricature, if the thought slumbering in Job's mind, which finds utterance in Job 19:25-27, were the thought of a future vision of God; and finally, that the unravelling of the knot of the puzzle, which continually increases in entanglement by the controversy with the friends, at the close of the drama, is effected by a theophany, which issues in favour of one still living, not, as ought to be expected by that rendering, a celestial scene unveiled over the grave of Job. But such a conclusion was impossible in an Old Testament book. The Old Testament as yet knew nothing of a heaven peopled with happy human spirits, arrayed in white robes (the stola prima). And at the time when the book of Job was composed, there was also neither a positive revelation nor a dogmatic confession of the resurrection of the