his Weissagung und Erfüllung he expressed the opinion that it belongs to the Mosaic period), are agreed in this.[1]
8. Echoes in the Later Sacred Writings
It may be readily supposed, that a book like this, which is occupied with a question of such vital import to every thinking and pious man, - which treats it in such a lively manner, riveting the attention, and bespeaking sympathy, - which, apart from its central subject, is so many-sided, so majestically beautiful in language, and so inexhaustible in imagery, - will have been one of the most generally read of the national books of Israel. Such is found to be the case; and also hereby its origin in the time of Solomon is confirmed: for at this very period it is to Ps 88-89 only that it stands in the mutual relation already mentioned. But the echoes appear as early as in the חכמים דברי, which are appended to the Salomonic משׁלי in the book of Proverbs: comp. the teaching from an example in the writer's own experience, Pro 24:30. with Job 5:3. The book of Job, however, next to the Proverbs of Solomon, was the favourite source of information for the author of the introductory proverbs (Prov 1-9). Here (apart from the doctrine of wisdom) we find whole passages similar to the book of Job: comp. Pro 3:11 with Job 5:17; Pro 8:25 with Job 15:7; Pro 3:15 with Job 28:18.
Then, in the prophets of the flourishing period of prophetic literature, which begins with Obadiah and Joel, we find distinct traces of familiarity with the book of Job. Amos describes the glory of God the Creator in words taken from it (Amo 4:13; Amo 5:8, after Job 9:8; cf. Job 10:22; Job 38:31).
- ↑ Also Professor Barnwell, in the Carolina Times, 1857, No. 785, calls the book of Job “the most brilliant flower of this brighter than Elizabethan and nobler than Augustan era.”
