punishment of his misdeeds, he would be compelled to despair of God, if he were not willing to regard even the incredible as unfailing, this, viz., that God will not permit this mark of wrath and of false accusation to attach to his blood and dust. That the conclusion of the drama should be shaped in accordance with this future hope, is, as we have already observed, not possible, because the poet (apart from his transferring himself to the position and consciousness of his patriarchal hero) was not yet in possession, as a dogma, of that hope which Job gives utterance to as an aspiration of his faith, and which even he himself only at first, like the psalmists (vid., on Psa 17:15; Psa 49:15, Psa 73:26), had as an aspiration of faith;[1] it was, however, also entirely unnecessary, since it is indeed not the idea of the drama that there is a life after death, which adjusts the mystery of the present, but that there is a suffering of the righteous which bears the disguise of wrath, but nevertheless, as is finally manifest, is a dispensation of love.
If, however, it is a germinating hope, which in this speech of Job is urged forth by the strength of his faith, we can, without anachronistically confusing the different periods of the development of the knowledge of redemption, regard it as a full, but certainly only developing, preformation of the later belief in the resurrection. When Job says that with his own eyes he shall behold Eloah, it is indeed possible by these eyes to understand the eyes of the spirit;[2] but it is just as possible to understand him to mean the eyes of his renewed body (which the old theologians describe as stola secunda, in distinction from the stola prima of the intermediate state); and when Job thinks of himself (Job 19:25)
- ↑ The view of Böttcher, de inferis, p. 149, is false, that the poet by the conclusion of his book disapproves the hope expressed, as dementis somnium.
- ↑ Job's wish, Job 19:23, is accomplished, as e.g., Jam 5:1 shows, and his hope is realized, since he has beheld God the Redeemer enter Hades, and is by Him led up on high to behold God in heaven. We assume the historical reality of Job and the consistence of his history with the rest of Scripture, which we have treated in Bibl Psychol. ch. 6 §3, on the future life and redemption. Accordingly, one might, with the majority of modern expositors, limit Job's hope to the beholding of God in the intermediate state; but, as is further said above, such particularizing is unauthorized.
