Page:03.BCOT.KD.HistoricalBooks.B.vol.3.LaterProphets.djvu/1328

general obtains only in a national connection; here (used as in Pro 27:2) it excludes the three: none other but Job, by which he means his opponents, will see God rising up for him, taking up his cause. ראוּ is praet. of the future, therefore praet. propheticum, or praet. confidentiae (as frequently in the Psalms). His reins within him pine after this vision of God. Hahn, referring to Job 16:13, translates incorrectly: “If even my reins within me perish,” which is impossible, according to the syntax; for Psa 73:26 has כלה in the sense of licet defecerit as hypothetical antecedent. The Syriac version is altogether wrong: my reins (culjot) vanish completely away by reason of my lot (בּחקּי). It would be expressed in Arabic exactly as it is here: culâja (or, dual, culatâja) tadhûbu, my reins melt; for in Arab. also, as in the Semitic languages generally, the reins are considered as the seat of the tenderest and deepest affections (Psychol. S. 268, f), especially of love, desire, longing, as here, where כּלה, as in Psa 119:123 and freq., is intended of wasting away in earnest longing for salvation.
Having now ended the exposition of the single expressions, we inquire whether those do justice to the text who understand it of an absolutely bodiless future beholding of God. We doubt it. Job says not merely that he, but that his eyes, shall behold God. He therefore imagines the spirit as clothed with a new spiritual body instead of the old decayed one; not so, however, that this spiritual body, these eyes which shall behold in the future world, are brought into combination with the present decaying body of flesh. But his faith is here on the direct road to the hope of a resurrection; we see it germinating and struggling towards the light. Among the three pearls which become visible in the book of Job above the waves of conflict, viz., Job 14:13-15; Job 16:18-21; Job 19:25-27, there is none more costly than this third. As in the second part of Isaiah, the fifty-third chapter is outwardly and