Page:Job and Solomon (1887).djvu/95

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

Theologie, i. 563 &c.), and is now supported by Kuenen.[1] If there were an allusion to the doctrine of the Resurrection, in xix. 26, or if the portraiture of Job were (as Kuenen thinks it is) partly modelled on the Second Isaiah's description of the Servant of Jehovah, I should in fact be driven to accept this view. I have stated above that I cannot find the Resurrection in Job, and in Isaiah, ii. 267 that the priority of Job seems to me to be made out. I need not combat Clericus and Warburton, who ascribe the authorship of Job to Ezra. For Jeremiah (Bateson Wright) or the author of Lamentations (i.e. Baruch, according to Bunsen) something might perhaps be said, but—Ezra!

As to the place of composition. Hitzig and Hirzel think of Egypt on account of the numerous allusions to Egypt in the book; and so Ewald with regard to xl. 15-xli. 34. 'Die ganze Umgebung ist egyptisch,' says Hitzig with some exaggeration.[2] More might be said in favour of the theory which places the author in a region where Arabic and Aramaic might both be heard. Stickel, holding the pre-Exile origin of the book, supposed it to have come from the far south-east of Palestine. Nowhere better than in the hill-country of the South could the poet study simple domestic relations, and also make excursions into N. Arabia. He thus accounts[3] for the points of contact between the Book of Job and the prophecy of Amos of Tekoa (see below, Chap. XI.), which include even some phonetic peculiarities (the softening of the gutturals and the interchange of sibilants). To me, the whole question seems well-nigh an idle one. The author (or, if you will, the authors) had travelled much in various lands, and the book is the result. The place where, is of far less importance than the time when it was composed.

  1. Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1873, p. 538.
  2. Das Buch Hiob (1874), p. xlix.
  3. Das Buch Hiob (1842), p. 276.