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The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job Koheleth Agur

E >> Emile Joseph Dillon >> The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job Koheleth Agur




"Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,
Or any searcher know with mortal mind?
Veil after veil will lift--but there must be
Veil upon veil behind."

Unless we assume some such sudden illumination of the mind as Buddha
obtained under the shadow of the fig-tree and the author of the 73rd
Psalm among the ruins of the kingdom of Juda, it is impossible to account
for Job's unforeseen and entire resignation, or to bring his former
defiant utterances into harmony with the humble sentiments to which he
now gives expression. For nothing but his mind had meanwhile undergone a
change. All the elements of the problem remained what they were. The
evils that had fired his indignation were not denied by their presumptive
author, nor was any explanation of them vouchsafed to him. No remedy was
promised in this life, no hope held out of redress in a possible world to
come. On the contrary, Jahveh confirms the terrible facts alleged by His
servant; He admits that pleasure and pain are not the meed of deeds done
upon earth, and that the explanation we seek, the light we so wistfully
long for, will never come; for human existence is not a dark spot in an
ocean of dazzling splendour, but a will'-o'-the-wisp that merely
intensifies the murkiness of everlasting Night.

Moreover, Job was detached from the world already. He had overcome all
his passions and kept even his legitimate affections under control. He
had no word of regret on losing his cattle, his possessions, his
children. During his most exquisite sufferings, he declared that he held
only to his good name. This, too, he now gives up and demanding nothing,
avers that he is satisfied. "I resign and console myself. Though it be in
dust and ashes." Complete detachment from existence, and not for the sake
of some other and better existence (for there is none) is the practical
outcome of Job's intuition. But in a God-created world made for the
delectation of mankind, to forego its pleasures would be to offend the
Creator, if indeed stark madness could kindle His ire. But to curb one's
thirst for life and to spurn its joys because one holds them to be the
tap root of all evil, is an action at once intelligible and wise. And
this is what Job evidently does when he practises difficult virtues and
undergoes terrible sufferings without the consciousness of past guilt or
the faintest hope of future recompense.

As Buddha taught his followers: "When the disciple has lost all doubt as
to the reality of suffering; when his doubts as to the origin of
suffering are dispelled; when he is no longer uncertain as to the
possibility of annihilating suffering and when he hesitates no more about
the way that leads to the annihilation of suffering: then is he called a
holy disciple, one who is in the stream that floweth onwards to
perfection, one who is delivered from evil, who is guaranteed, who is
devoted to the highest truth."[21]


Footnotes:

[14] One of the best accredited exponents of this theory, which is now
generally accepted by Catholic divines, is Father (now Cardinal)
Mazella.

[15] And Job more than once applies it.

[16] _Cf._ Editio Princeps, Oxford, 1681, p. 287.

[17] Many pious Christians who scoff at such emotions, without
endeavouring to understand them, would do well to remember that
whatever truth there is in the dogma of the immorality of the soul,
is dependant upon this proposition, that time, space, and the law of
casuality have no real existence whatever, but are merely the
furniture of the human mind--the forms in which it apprehends. As
time exists only in our consciousness, and as beginning and end can
take place only in time, they can affect only our consciousness,
which ends in death, but not our souls, which are distinct from mind
and consciousness.

[18] Job, who rejected all secondary causes whatever, could not in logic,
and did not in fact, believe in free will as it is commonly
understood in our days.

[19] _Cf_. Matt. xii. 33-35.

[20] Even the Bible is not wholly devoid of traces of the same symbol
employed to convey the same ideas; _cf._ Matt. xi. 14, John ix. 2,
for the New Testament, and Ps. xc. 3 for the Old. The apparent inner
absurdity of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls arises
mainly from our inability to grasp and realise the two propositions
which it presupposes--viz., that there is no such thing as time
outside of the human mind, and therefore no past or future; and,
secondly, that soul is but individualised will momentarily illumined
by the intellect which is a function of the brain. Metempsychosis was
originally no more than a symbol.

[21] "Samyuttaka-Nikayo," vol. iii. chap. iii. p. 24. _Cf._ Dr. K.
E. Neumann's "Buddhistische Anthologie," Leiden, 1892, p. 204.

* * * * *

DATE OF THE COMPOSITION

The question which frequently exercised the ingenuity of former
commentators, whether the poem of Job is the work of one or of many
authors, has no longer any actuality. It is absolutely certain that the
book, as we find it in the Authorised Version, and even in the best
Hebrew manuscripts, is a mosaic put together by a number of writers
widely differing in their theological views and separated from each other
by whole centuries; and it is equally undoubted that, restored to its
original form, it is "a poem round and perfect as a star"--the
masterpiece of one of the most gifted artists of his own or any age. To
the inquiry where he lived and wrote, numerous tentative replies have
been offered but no final answer. To many he is the last of the venerable
race of patriarchs, and his verse the sweet, sublime lisping of a
childlike nature, disporting itself in the glorious morning of the
world.[22]

This, however, is but a pretty fancy, which will not stand the ordeal of
scientific criticism, nor even the test of a careful common-sense
examination. The broader problems that interest thinking minds of a late
and reflective age, the profounder feelings and more ambitious
aspirations of manhood and maturity, are writ large in every verse of the
poem. The lyre gives out true, full notes, which there is no mistaking.
The hero is evidently a travelled cosmopolitan, who has outgrown the
narrow prejudices of petty patriotism and national religious creeds to
such an extent that he studiously eschews the use of the revealed name of
the God of his people, and seems to believe at most in a far-away and
incomprehensible divinity who sometimes merges into Fate. In the God of
theologians he had no faith. His comforters, who from the uttermost ends
of the earth meet together in a most unpatriarchal manner to discuss the
higher problems of philosophy, allude to the views in vogue in the
patriarchal age as to traditions of bygone days before the influence of
foreign invaders had tainted the purity of the national faith; and
passages like xii. 17, xv. 19, seem to point to the captivity of the
Hebrew people as an accomplished fact. In a word, the strict monotheism
of the hero, which at times borders upon half-disguised secularism, has
nothing in common with the worship of the patriarchs except the absence
of priests and the lack of ceremonies. The language of the poem,
flavoured by a strong mixture of Arabic and Aramaic words and phrases,
and the frequent use of imagery borrowed from Babylonian mythology, to
say nothing of a number of other signs and tokens of a comparatively late
age, render the patriarchal hypothesis absolutely untenable.[23] This, at
least, is one of the few results of modern research about which there is
perfect unanimity among all competent scholars.

If the date of the composition of Job cannot be fixed with any approach
to accuracy, there are at least certain broad limits within which it is
agreed on all hands that it should be placed. This period is comprised
between the prophetic activity of Jeremiah and the second half of the
Babylonian Exile. The considerations upon which this opinion is grounded
are drawn mainly, if not exclusively, from authentic passages of Job
which the author presumably borrowed from other books of the Old
Testament. Thus a comparison of the verses in which the hero curses the
day of his birth[24] with an identical malediction in Jeremiah (xx.
14-15), and of the respective circumstances in which each was written,
leads to the conviction that the borrower was not the prophet whose
writings must therefore have been familiar to the poet. This conclusion
is confirmed by a somewhat far-fetched but none the less valid argument
drawn from the circumstance that Ezekiel,[25] who would probably have
known the poem had it existed in his day, obviously never heard of it;
for this prophet, broaching the question, apparently for the first time
among his countrymen, as to the justice of human suffering, denies point
blank that any man endures unmerited pain,[26] and affirms in emphatic
terms that to each one shall be meted out reward or punishment according
to his works.[27] And this he could hardly have done had he been aware of
the fact that the contradictory proposition was vouched for by no less an
authority than Jahveh Himself.

Again, it is highly probable, although one would hardly be justified in
stating it as an established fact, that certain striking poetic images
clothed in the same form of words in Job and in the Second Isaiah,[28]
are the coinage of the rich imagination of the latter,[29] from whose
writings they must consequently have been taken by the author of Job. If
this assumption be correct, and it is considerably strengthened by
collateral evidence, we should have no choice but to assign to the
composition of the poem a date later than that of the Second Isaiah who
wrote between 546 and 535 B.C. The ingenious and learned German critic,
Dr. Cornill, holds it to be no less than two or three hundred years
younger still, and bases his opinion principally upon the last verse of
the last chapter of the Book of Job, where the expression (Job died) "old
and full of days," is, in his opinion, borrowed from the Priests' Code.
It is, however, needless to analyse this argument, seeing that the verse
in question was wanting in the Septuagint[30] version, and must therefore
be held to be a later addition.

Another question, once a sure test of orthodoxy, the discussion of which
has become equally superfluous to-day, is to what extent the narrative is
based upon historical facts. The second council of Constantinople
solemnly condemned Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia, one of the most
enlightened Fathers of the Church, for having advanced the opinion that
the story of Job was a pious fiction and the doctrine it embodies
irreconcileable with orthodoxy. It would be rash to say what conclusion a
council sitting at the end of the nineteenth century would be likely to
arrive at. But it would hardly find fault with the majority of
contemporary critics who hold that the prologue and epilogue, which are
in prose and contain in outline the popular legend of Job, were anterior
to the colloquies between the hero and his friends, bear in fact the same
relation to the poem that the mediaeval legend of Johan Faustus does to
the masterpiece of Goethe. And it was to the popular legend, not to the
poem, that Ezekiel alluded in the passage in which he instances Job as
the type of the just man. But one must needs be endowed with a strong and
child-like faith to accept, in the light of ancient history and modern
science, as sober facts the familiar conversation between Jahveh and the
Adversary in the council-chamber of heaven, the sudden intervention of
the latter in the life of Job, the ease with which he breaks through the
chain of causality and bends even the human will to his purpose, the
indecent haste with which he overwhelms the just man with a torrent of
calamities in the course of one short day, the apparition of Jahveh in a
storm-cloud, and many other equally improbable details. Improbability,
however, is the main feature of all miracles; and faith need not be
dismayed even by the seemingly impossible. In any case where it is
hopeless to convince, it is needless to discuss, and if there still be
readers to whose appreciation of the poem belief in its historical truth
is absolutely indispensable, it would be cruel to seek to spoil or even
lessen their enjoyment of one of the most sublime creations known to any
literature of the world.


Footnotes:

[22] One of the main grounds for this opinion is the absolute ignorance
of the Mosaic law manifested by the author of Job. The line of
reasoning is that he must have been either a Jew--and in that case
have lived before or simultaneously with Moses--or else an Arab, like
his hero, and have written the work in Arabic, Moses himself probably
doing it into Hebrew. To a Hebrew scholar this sounds as plausible as
would the thesis, to one well versed in Greek, that the Iliad is but
a translation from the Sanscrit. The Talmud makes Job now a
contemporary of David and Solomon, now wholly denies his existence.
Jerome, and some Roman Catholic theologians of to-day, identify the
author of the poem with Moses himself, a view in favour of which not
a shred of argument can be adduced. _Cf._ Loisy, "Le Livre de Job,"
Paris, 1892, p. 37; Reuss, "Hiob.," Braunschweig, 1888, pp. 8 ff.

[23] The subject of the date and place of composition has been treated by
Cornill, "Einleitung in das Alte Testament," 235 fol., by Prof.
Duhm, "The Book of Job" (_cf._ "The New World," June, 1894), and
others. But the most lucid, masterly, and dispassionate discussion of
the subject is to be found in Prof. Cheyne's "Job and Solomon,"
chaps. viii.-xii.

[24] Job A.V. iii. 3-10.

[25] 592-572 B.C.

[26] Ezek. xviii. 2, 3.

[27] _Ibid._ 4-9.

[28] "The Second Isaiah" is the name now usually given to the unknown
author of one of the sublimest books of the Old Testament, viz.,
chaps, xl.-lxvi. of the work commonly attributed to Isaiah. It was
composed most probably between 546 and 535 B.C.

[29] They may be found by referring to the parallel passages given in the
margin of the Authorised Version of Job; for instance, chap. xiv.
One example may suffice: In the Second Isaiah, xl. 6-8, we read
"The Voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is
grass, and all the goodliness thereof _is_ as the flower of the
field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of
the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people _is_ grass. The grass
withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for
ever." In Job we find the winged word embodied in the verse 2, chap.
xiv. A.V. (strophe cxxi.).

Man that is born of a woman,
Poor in days and rich in trouble;
He cometh forth as a flower and fadeth,
He fleeth like a shadow and abideth not.

[30] For the value of the testimony of the Septuagint, _cf_.
following chapter.

* * * * *

THE TEXT AND ITS RECONSTRUCTION

Our Authorised Version of Job is based upon the text handed down to us in
existing Hebrew manuscripts and upon Jerome's Latin translation. None of
the manuscripts, the most important of which are those of the
Vatican,[31] of Alexandria[32] and of Sinai,[33] go further back than the
fourth century A.D. And some of the modifications, made by Jerome in the
Latin translation, particularly in chap. xxi. 25-27, into which he
introduces the Christian idea of the Resurrection, were not based upon
the various readings of the Codices, but inspired by a pious desire to
render the work more edifying. As our Hebrew manuscripts are all derived
from a single copy which was probably contemporaneous with the reign of
the Emperor Hadrian,[34] the words and the corrections of which they
reproduce with Chinese scrupulosity, the utmost we can expect from them
is to supply us with the text as it existed at that relatively late age.

The comparative indifference that reigned before that time as to the
purity of the text of the most important books of the Canon, and the
utter carelessness with which down to the first century of the Christian
era the manuscripts of the Hagiographa[35] were treated, render it highly
probable that long before the reign of Hadrian the poem of Job had
undergone many and serious modifications. The ease with which words
written with consonants only, many of which resembled each other, were
liable to be interchanged, strengthens this probability; while a detailed
study of the various manuscripts and translations transforms it into
certainty. The parallel passages alone of almost any of the books of the
Old Testament yield a rich harvest of divergences.

But involuntary errors of the copyists are insufficient to explain all
the bewildering changes which disfigure many of the books of the Sacred
Scriptures. The gradual evolution of the Hebrew religion from virtual
polytheism to the strictest monotheism seemed peremptorily to call for a
corresponding change in the writings in which the revelation underlying
it was enshrined. A later stadium of the evolution--which, of course, was
never felt to be such--might naturally cause the free and easy views and
lax practices which once were orthodox and universal to assume the odious
form of heresy and impiety, and a laudable respect for the author of
revelation was held to impose the sacred duty of bringing the documentary
records of ancient practices into harmony with present theories. This was
especially true of the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, in which not only
was the general tone lacking in respect for all that the Jewish community
held sacred, but likewise long and eloquent passages directly called in
question the truth of revelation and blasphemously criticised the
attributes of the Most High.

Gauged by the narrow standards of the Jewish community,[36] some of Job's
most sublime outbursts of poetic passion must have seemed as impious to
his contemporaries as to the theologians of our own country the
"blasphemies" hurled by Byron's Lucifer against the "Everlasting Tyrant."
There can be no doubt that it is to the feeling of holy horror which his
plain speaking aroused in the minds of the strait-laced Jews of 2400
years ago that we have to ascribe the principal and most disfiguring
changes which the poem underwent at the hands of well-meaning censors. It
is quite possible even now to point out, by the help of a few disjointed
fragments still preserved, the position, and to divine the sense, of
certain spiritful and defiant passages which, in the interest of
"religion and morals," were remorselessly suppressed, to indicate others
which were split up and transposed, and to distinguish many prolix
discourses, feeble or powerful word-pictures and trite commonplaces which
were deliberately inserted later on, for the sole purpose of toning down
the most audacious piece of rationalistic philosophy which has ever yet
been clothed in the music of sublime verse.

The disastrous results of these corrections which were made at various
times and by different persons is writ large in the present text of Job
as we find it in the Hebrew manuscripts and our Authorised Version, which
offer us in many places a jumble of disjointed fragments, incoherent,
irrelevant or self-contradictory.

In addition to common sense aided by cautious text criticism which
enables us to recognise interpolations, to correct copyists' errors and
occasionally even to determine the place and the tendency of expunged
passages, the means at our disposal for the restoration of the poem are
principally two: The laws of Hebrew poetry (parallelism and metre) on the
one hand, and a comparison of the Hebrew text with the ancient Greek
translation of the Septuagint,[37] on the other. A judicious use of these
helps which are recognised as such even by the most conservative
Christians, who condemn without hearing the tried methods and least
doubtful conclusions of biblical criticism, enables one to accomplish all
that is now possible towards restoring the poem of Job to its original
form.

The nature and the laws of Hebrew metre, the discovery of which is
indissolubly associated with the name of Prof. Bickell,[38] are identical
with those of Syriac poetry. The unit is the line, the syllables of which
are numbered and accentuated, the line most frequent containing seven
syllables with iambic rhythm. Accentuated syllables alternate regularly
with unaccentuated, whereby the penultimate has the accent; and the
poetic accent always coincides with the grammatical, as in Syriac poetry
and in the Greek verse of early Christian times, the structure of which
was copied from the Syriac. Compare for instance the following:

[Greek:
Hae parthenos saemeron
Ton epouranion tiktei,
Kai hae gae to spaelaion
To aprosito parechei.]

with a strophe from Job:

Shamáti khéllä rábbot:
Menáchme 'amal koól' khem,
Hakeç ledíberé rooch?
Ma-yámriç'khá, ki táhnä?

The second characteristic of Hebrew poetry, which is occasionally to be
found even in prose, is that repetition of the same thought in a slightly
modified form which is commonly known as parallelism. Thus, in the poem
of Job the second line of the strophe expresses an idea very closely
resembling that embodied in the first; and the third and fourth run
parallel in like manner. For instance, Eliphaz, expounding the
traditional teaching that the wicked man is punished in this life, says:

"His offshoot shall wither before his time,
And his branch shall not be green;
He shall shake off his unripe grape, like the vine,
And shall shed his flower, like the olive."

The second important aid to emendation is a careful comparison of the
Hebrew text with the Greek translation known as the Septuagint (LXX.),
which, undertaken and completed in Alexandria between the beginning of
the third and the close of the second century B.C., offers the first
recorded instance of an entire national literature being rendered into a
foreign tongue. The extrinsic value of this work is obvious from the fact
that it enables us to construct a text which is centuries older than that
of which all our Hebrew manuscripts are servile copies, and is over a
thousand years more ancient than the very oldest Hebrew codices now
extant.[39] Not indeed that the poem of Job had undergone no changes
between the time of its composition and the second century B.C. On the
contrary, some of the most important interpolations had already been
inserted[40] and various excisions and transpositions made before the
translator first took the work in hand. But at least the ground is
cleared considerably, seeing that no less than four hundred verses which
we now read in all our present Bibles, Hebrew and vernacular, were tacked
on to the poem at a date subsequent to the Greek translation and
therefore found no place in that version. These additions may, on the
faith of the Septuagint, be struck out with all the less hesitation that
both metre and parallelism confirm with their weighty testimony the
trustworthy evidence of the orthodox translation that the strophes in
question are insertions of a later date.

But the value of the Septuagint depends upon its greater or less immunity
from those disfiguring changes which render the Hebrew text
incomprehensible and from which few ancient works are wholly free. And
unfortunately no such immunity can be claimed for it. What happened to
the original text likewise befell the Greek translation. Desirous of
putting an end to the disputes between Jews and Christians as to the
respective merits of the two, a proselyte from Ephesus, Theodotion by
name, undertook to do the Bible into Greek anew somewhere between 180-192
A.D. The basis of his work was the Septuagint, of which he changed
nothing that in his opinion could stand; but at the same time he
consulted the Hebrew manuscripts and vainly endeavoured to effect a
compromise between the two. Among other innovations, he inserted in his
translation the four hundred interpolated verses which, having been added
to the Hebrew text after it had been first rendered into Greek, could not
possibly have formed part of the Septuagint version. Later on (232-254
A.D.) Origen, anxious to throw light upon the cause of the divergences
between existing translations and the original text, and to provide the
means of judging of the respective merits of these, undertook one of
those wearisome works of industry, which later on constituted a special
feature of the activity of the Benedictine monks. The result of his
researches was embodied in the Hexapla--a book containing, in six
parallel columns, the original text in Hebrew and in Greek letters, the
Greek translation by Aquila, another by Symmachus, the text of the
Septuagint edited by himself, and Theodotion's version. Now Origen,
acting upon the gratuitous assumption that the passages wanting in the
Septuagint had formed part of the original Book of Job and had been
omitted by the translators solely because they failed to understand their
meaning, took them from Theodotion and incorporated them in his edition
of the Septuagint as it appeared in the Hexapla, merely distinguishing
them by means of asterisks. Unfortunately, in the course of time these
distinctive marks disappeared partially or wholly, thus depriving the old
Greek translation of its inestimable value as an aid to text criticism;
and there remained but five manuscripts in which they were to some extent
preserved.[41]

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