state, but it must also have been felt among their neighbours, and freedom of speech has always, in historical times, been an Arab characteristic. Putting aside the anachronism of placing Job in the patriarchal age, does not the poet himself appear to hint that it was so felt by the names and tribal origins of the speakers in the great religious discussion?
(2) As to the Arabisms and Aramaisms of the language of Job (see Appendix). Jerome already says that his own translation follows none of the ancients, but reproduces, now the words, now the sense, and now both, 'ex ipso hebraico arabicoque sermone et interdum syro.' In the 17th and 18th centuries, De Dieu, Bochart, and above all Schultens made it a first principle in the study of Job to illustrate it from Aramaic and especially Arabic. Schultens even describes the language as not so much Hebrew, as Hebræo-Arabic, and says that it breathes the true and unmixed genius of Arabia. This is every way an exaggeration, and yet, after all reasonable deductions, our poem will stand out from the Old Testament volume by its foreign linguistic affinities. It is not enough to say that the Arabisms and Aramaisms have from the first formed part of the Hebrew vocabulary, and were previously employed only because the subjects of the other books did not call for their use. Unless a more thorough study of Assyrian should prove that the Arabism (for of these I am chiefly thinking) belonged to northern as well as to southern Semitic, it will surely be more natural to suppose that the author of Job replenished his vocabulary from Arabic sources. There is not a little in the phraseology of Job which is still as obscure as in the days of Ibn Ezra, but which receives, or may yet receive, illustration from the stores of written and spoken Arabic.[1]
May we not, in short, conjecture that the poem of Job is a grand attempt to renovate and enrich the Hebrew language?[2]
