be and must be and the sad realities of life. Upon this Bildad tries to frighten Job into submission by a picture of God's irresistible power, as exhibited not only in heaven and earth, but even beneath the ocean depths in the realm of the shades (xxv., xxvi. 5-14). Not a very comforting speech, but fine in its way (if Bildad may really be credited with all of it), and the speaker frankly allows its inadequacy.
Lo! these are the outskirts of his ways,
and how faintly spoken is that which we hear!
but the thunder of his power who can understand? (xxvi. 14.)
In a speech, the first which is described as a mashal,[1] Job demolishes his unoriginal and rhetorical opponent, and with dignity reasserts his innocence (xxvi. 1-4, xxvii. 1-7). He may have said more; if so, it has been lost. But, in fact, all that was argumentative in Bildad's speech was borrowed from Eliphaz, and though Job had the power (see chaps. ix., xii.), he had not the will to compete with his friends in rhetoric. The only speaker who is left is Zophar, and, as it is unlikely that the poet left one of his triads of speeches imperfect, we may conjecture that xxvii. 8-10, 10-23 belongs to the third speech of Zophar.[2] Certainly they are most inappropriate in the mouth of Job, being in direct contradiction to all that he has yet said. If so it seems very probable that besides the introductory formula a few opening verses have dropped out of the text. The verses which now stand at the head of the speech transport us to the disputes of those rival schools of which Job and his friends were only the representatives. Hence the use of the plural in ver. 12, of which an earlier instance occurs in the second speech of Bildad (xviii. 2). What Zophar says is in effect this: Job's condition is desperate, for he is an 'impious' or 'godless' man. It is too late for
- ↑ On this characteristic word for parallelistic poetry, see on Proverbs.
- ↑ Note that xxvii. 13 is repeated from an earlier speech of Zophar (xx. 29). There it concludes a sketch of the 'impious' man's fate; here it begins a similar description. Verses 11 and 12 of the same chapter would stand more properly (Bickell and virtually Hirzel) immediately before chap. xxviii. Mr. B. Wright is very near doing the same; following Eichhorn, he takes vv. 13-23 as a specimen quoted by Job of the friends' 'inconsequential' style of argument (a less natural hypothesis than that adopted here).
