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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




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ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

The popular legend of Job, which was current among the Hebrews and
probably among their Semitic neighbours for centuries before the poem was
composed, is embodied in the prologue and epilogue,[51] which are written
in prose. The data it contains are utilised by the author for the purpose
of clearly stating, not of elucidating, the main problem, and it would be
a grave mistake on the part of the reader to attempt to supplement the
reasoning of Job's friends by arguments drawn from the details narrated
in the legend. Thus, the conversation between Jahveh and the Satan is
obviously intended to establish the all-important fact that Job, although
not a member of the chosen people, a believer in their priestly dogmas,
nor an observer of their religious rites and ceremonies, was none the
less a truly just man, the perfect type of the righteous of all times and
countries. On the other hand, the circumstances that his sufferings were
no more than a probation, and that they were followed by fabulous wealth
and intensified happiness, are dismissed by the poet as wholly irrelevant
to the question at issue. Nor, considering their purely exceptional
character, would they have tended in any degree to solve it. If Job's
misery was an ordeal, all unmerited suffering cannot be pressed into the
same convenient category. His individual privations and pains may have
been compensated for by subsequent plenty and prosperity; but there are
other just men who rot on the dunghill and die in despair. The author,
therefore, wisely refrained from drawing on the legend more extensively
than was absolutely needful for the materials of his poem, and from thus
reducing a universal problem to the dimensions of an individual case.

The folk-story of the just man, Job, is conceived in the true spirit of
Eastern legendary lore. The colours are laid on with an ungrudging hand.
He was not merely well-to-do and contented, he was the happiest mortal
who had ever walked the earth in his halcyon days, and the most
hopelessly wretched during his probation.

But although wont, as the Preacher recommends, to fill up his cup with
the wine of life, "pressing all that it yields of mere vintage," he was
anything but an egotist. The broad stream of his sympathy flowed out
towards all his fellows, nay, to all things animate and inanimate. The
sheep, the lion, the eagle, and the oxen, were his comrades, the fire and
the wind his kinsmen. Even for his worst enemies he had no curse, nor did
he ever rejoice in their merited misfortunes. So blameless and upright
was his living and working, so completely had he eschewed even
heart-sins, that he might have carried windows in his breast that all
might see what was being done within.

Now, in accordance with the retribution-theory then in fashion--small
temporary profits and quick returns--he had amply merited his good
fortune, and might have reasonably expected to enjoy it to the close of a
long life, which for him was the end of everything. In fact, he had no
longer any serious grounds for apprehending the gathering of clouds of
misfortune to darken the sunshine of his existence, seeing that he had
already attained to a ripe age, was possessed of vast herds of cattle and
thousands of camels, was blest with a numerous family, and passed for
"the greatest of all the children of the East." But the most specious
theological theories are as powerless to guarantee the just man from the
blows of adversity as to hinder the worm from finding the blushing rose's
"bed of crimson joy"; and whether pain and sorrow be labelled "probation"
or "just punishment," they will never cease to figure among the
commonplaces of human existence.

At one of the social gatherings of the courtiers of heaven, Jahveh takes
occasion to laud the virtue of the just man, Job, whereupon the Satan,
who not only understands, but sees through the righteousness of the bulk
of mankind, expresses his conviction that it has its roots in mere
selfishness. Jahveh then empowers the Adversary to put it to the test by
depriving Job of his possessions and his family. On this, the hero's
wealth and happiness vanished as suddenly as the smile on the face of an
infant, and in a twinkling, so to say, he was changed into a perfect type
of human wretchedness.

By one of those extraordinary miracles which are characteristic of
Oriental fiction, in the course of a single day Job's four hundred yoke
of oxen were seized and carried off by the Sabeans, his seven thousand
scattered sheep were sought out and consumed by lightning, his three
thousand camels were driven away by Chaldeans, and his sons and daughters
killed by the falling of a house. Being but human, Job's soul is harrowed
up by grief; but, recognising the emptiness of all things, he endures his
lot manfully and without murmur or complaint.

When the sons of God met again in the council chamber of heaven, Jahveh
triumphantly inquired of the Adversary what he now thought of Job's
virtue and its taproot. But the Satan still clung tenaciously to his low
view of the mainspring of the hero's conduct. "Skin for skin, yea, all
that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now,
and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face.
And the Lord said unto the Adversary: "Behold he is in thine hand; only
spare his life." Whereupon he was smitten with the most loathsome disease
known in the East, which together with the moral suffering resulting from
utter abandonment, besieged him, "even to the gates and inlets of his
life." But firm and manful, with strength nurtured by the witness of his
own conscience, and the conviction that true virtue is independent of
reward, he maintains the citadel unconquered, refusing to open the
portals even to Jahveh Himself.

Nothing can subdue Job, not even the bitter fruits of the diabolical
refinement of the Adversary who, having permission to slay all the hero's
kith and kin, spares his spouse, lest misery should harbour any
possibilities unrealised.

At last three of Job's friends come from the uttermost ends of the earth
to visit and console him. Travelling over enormous distances, and setting
out from opposite points of the compass, they all contrive to reach the
sufferer at the same moment; and at the sight of the deformed and
loathsome figure of their friend are all three struck dumb with grief.
Without any previous consultation among themselves, they sit silent and
sad for seven days and seven nights, gazing with fascinated horror on the
misshapen figure on the dunghill. This curious manifestation of
friendship unmans the hero whose fortitude had been proof against the
most cruel physical and moral suffering; utterly breaking down, he "fills
with woes the passing wind," and bitterly curses his existence. Awe at
first keeps him from censuring God's ways; truthfulness from condemning
himself. He cannot understand why he suffers, whether there be any truth
or none in the traditional doctrine of unfailing retribution upon earth;
for he has certainly done everything to merit happiness and nought to
deserve punishment. Society, however, is there in the person of his
friends to dispel this delusion. They hold a brief for the cut-and-dried
theology of the day which tells them that in Job there was a reservoir of
guilt and sin filling up from youth to age, which now, no longer able to
hold its loathsome charge, burst and overwhelmed with misery their friend
and his family. They play their parts very skilfully, at first softly
stroking, as it were, the beloved friend, as if to soothe his pain, and
then vigorously rubbing the salt in the gaping wounds of the groaning
victim.

The campaign is opened mildly by Eliphaz, a firm believer in the spooks
and spectres of borderland, who, in reply to Job's complaint, assures his
friend that no really innocent human being ever died in misery as he now
seems to be dying, and gently reminds him that "affliction shooteth not
from the dust, neither doth trouble sprout up from the ground;" they need
the fertile soil of sin, which Job must have provided, unknown to his
easy-going friends who, taking him at his own estimation, heretofore
considered him a just man. But even if he were what he would have them
believe he is, he has no ground for just complaint: for "happy is the man
whom God correcteth." To this the hero replies, accentuating his
innocence, and pouring forth his plaint in "wild words," for God "useth
me as an enemy." He seeks not for mercy, he explains, but for justice,
nay, he is magnanimous enough to be content with even less. He only asks
of God,

"That it would please him to destroy me,
That he would let go his hand and cut me off;"[52]

and this request having been refused, suicide, the ever "open door" of
the Stoics, invited him temptingly in, but he withstood the temptation,
and comforted himself with the knowledge that all things in time have an
end.

"My soul would have chosen strangling,
And death by my own resolve.
But I spurned it; for I shall not live for ever."[53]

The arbitrary and incomprehensible will of the deity may, in ultimate
analysis, be the changeful basis of right and wrong, but, if so, divine
justice differs from human not merely in degree but likewise in
character, and not apparently to its advantage. The tuneful Psalmist had
sung in ecstatic wonder at the mercy of God: "What is man, that thou art
mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory
and honour."[54] Job, having looked upwards in the same direction, not
for mercy but for simple justice, and looked in vain, parodies with
bitter irony those same verses of the Psalm:

"What is man that thou shouldst magnify him?
And that thou shouldst set thine heart upon him?
That thou shouldst visit him every morning,
And try him every moment?"[55]

Bildad, the Traditionalist _par excellence_, then addresses a sharp
reproof to the just man who refused to recognise as mercy in God the
conduct which, were a man responsible for it, he must needs condemn as
wickedness. He bids him inquire of bygone generations what they thought
of the goodness of the Creator, and asks him to be guided by the wisdom
of his fore-fathers, who lived and throve on the spiritual food of
retribution which he now rejects with loathing. This attack provokes a
new outburst on the part of Job, who ironically paraphrases and develops
the ideas of his comforters, deriding the notion that the deity can
change right into wrong or that true morality needs the divine will as a
basis.

"How should man be in the right against God?
If he long to contend with him,
He cannot answer him one of a thousand."[56]

"Lo, he glideth by me and I see him not;
And he passeth on, but I perceive him not."[57]

His friends had recommended him to pray for pardon and repent, and had
promised him the return of his happiness as a consequence. But Job scouts
the idea. His righteousness, if he indeed possess it, is his own; no
prayers can add to, no punishment can take from, that.

"I must make supplication unto his judgment,
Who doth not answer me, though I am righteous!"[58]

And as for a God who being almighty is yet unjust, prayer would be
superfluous, no supplications would avail aught with Him; He would cause
even incarnate holiness to appear wicked in its own eyes.

"Though I were just, my own mouth would condemn me;
Though I were faultless, he would make me crooked."

For even the will of a created being is in the hands of its Creator, and
is not, cannot be, free. Job feels and knows that he is right-minded and
good, and he puts the testimony of his own conscience above the decrees
of any beings, human or divine, which, whatever else they may achieve,
cannot shake the foundations of true justice and morality, which are
eternal.

"Faultless I am, I set life at naught;
I spurn my being, therefore I speak out."[59]

And the outcome of his outspokenness is a solemn charge of injustice
against God,[60] a sigh of profound regret that he was ever born into
this miserable world, and a wish that his sufferings might "come to an
end before he should return to the land of darkness and of gloom" whence
he came.

After this, Zophar, the third comforter, opens his lips for coarse
vituperation rather than sharp rebuke, and regrets that God Himself does
not feel moved to give a practical lesson of wisdom to the conceited
"prattler," who persists in believing in his own innocence in spite of
the unmistakable judgment of his just Creator and the unanimous testimony
of his candid friends. Job's reply to this vigorous advocate of God is
even more powerful and indignant than any of the foregoing. He repeats
and emphasises his indictment against the Deity. No omnipotent being who
was really just and good could approve, or even connive at, much less
practise, the scandalous injustice which characterises the conduct of the
universe and the so-called moral order, and of which his own particular
grievances are a specimen. Not that the curious spectacle that daily
meets our eye, wherein wickedness and hypocrisy are prosperous and
triumphant while truth and integrity are trampled under foot, is
necessarily incompatible with absolute and eternal justice; it is
irreconcileable only with the attributes of a personal deity, an almighty
and just creator, who would necessarily be responsible for these evils as
for all things else, if he existed. If the world be the work of an
omnipotent maker, its essential moral characteristic partakes of the
nature of his attributes; and the main moral feature of our world is
evil, and not good. This is the ever-recurring refrain of Job's
discourses. Nor does he hesitate when occasion offers to proclaim his
conviction in the plainest of plain language, for he entertains no fear
of what may further befall him.

"Lo, let him kill me, I cherish hope no more,
Only I will justify my way before his face."[61]

The three friends return a second time to the charge, each one speaking
in the same order as before, and each one eliciting a separate reply, in
which Job reaffirms his innocence, reiterates his indictment against the
Most High, and reproaches his comforters with their off-hand condemnation
of an attitude resulting from sufferings which they are slow to realise
and from knowledge which they are unable to grasp. In his rejoinder to
Zophar, he lays special stress upon the prosperity and success of the
wicked who scoff at the laws of God and yet "while away their days in
bliss." If God will not punish them, is He just? If He cannot, is He
almighty? As He does not, why speak of the moral order of His world or of
the moral attributes of Himself?

Ehphaz opens the third series of speeches by accusing his friend of
selfishness, dishonesty, hard-heartedness and avarice, on no better
grounds than the assumption that God's justice warrants us in believing
that where punishment is inflicted there also must sin have been
committed. Job, instead of condescending to refute the charge, ironically
admits it, and then bitterly remarks that he would like to know how God
would justify His conduct and convict him of sin if only they both could
argue out the question together on terms of equality. But in all the
universe he looks for God in vain:

"Behold, I go forward, but he is not there,
And backward, but I cannot perceive him."[62]

Bildad then proceeds to emphasise the omnipotence of the Creator with
whom the human worm, the maggot, dares to enter into judgment, and Job
replies to all three, refuting them out of their own mouths. His
conscience, he tells them, is proof sufficient of his right conduct,
whereas his misery, by their own admission, proves nothing at all.

"Till I die, I will not yield up my integrity!
My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go,
My heart doth not censure any one of my days."[63]

As for the argument from punishment to sin, all three friends had in the
course of their speeches laid it down that the lines on which the
universe is governed are known to no man. If this be so, who are they
that have surprised the secret and found the clue to the enigma? Who
revealed to them that retribution is the basis of the moral order? Man
knows nothing, can never hope to know anything, of the inner working of
the world, of the why and the wherefore of our miserable being and of the
existence of all things. The Godhead alone could fathom these
mysteries,[64] if He existed.

Job takes no notice of the succeeding brief remarks of Zophar in his
final and longest discourse which, replete with sorrowful reminiscences
of his past happy life, is less defiant than any of those that preceded.
Wandering in thought through the necropolis of buried hopes, fears and
achievements, he seems to inhale an atmosphere of soothing melancholy
that softens and subdues his wild passion. The vibration of past efforts
and of deeds long since done, trembling along his tortured frame, causes
even saddest thoughts to blend with sweet sensations. Then turning from
what once was to what now is, and missing the logical nexus between the
two states, he solemnly calls upon God to produce it, if He can:

"Here is my signature; let the Almighty answer me,
And hear the indictment which my adversary hath written."[65]

Scarcely has Job finished speaking when Jahveh appears in a whirlwind and
the heart of the clouds is cloven by a voice of thunder startling the
silent air. The purpose of His coming is to prove men's ignorance, not to
enlighten it, at least not beyond the degree involved by affixing the
highest seal to the negative views expressed by the hero. He plies Job
with a number of questions on cosmology, astronomy, meteorology, &c.,
with a view to show that we are ignorant of the ultimate reason of even
the most familiar objects and phenomena, and practically know nothing
about anything. The natural conclusion is that they are unknowable, and
that intellect, knowledge, consciousness, is something secondary,
accidental, and as transitory as the life it accompanies. To make an
exception in favour of Jahveh Himself, would be to lose sight of the
important fact that His apparition was never meant by the poet to be
taken literally.[66]

It is neither more nor less than a symbol of the insight which Job
obtains into the nature of things, of the light which enables him to see
that there is naught but darkness now and for ever. He perceives by the
simplest, clearest, and most conclusive of all mental processes, a direct
intuition, the truth of the ideas to some of which he had but coldly
assented before--viz., that things are but shadows and existence an evil;
that underlying every being, animate and inanimate, there is a force
existing outside the realm of time and space, and that it is at bottom
identical with the human will; that eternal justice lies at the root of
everything, is the ultimate basis of all existence; that the sufferings
of men, innocent or guilty, and the prevalence of evil are incompatible
with a personal creator; that intellect is secondary, and barely
sufficient for the practical needs of life, after which it ceases to be
an attribute of whatever of man may outlive his body; and, finally, that
as we can know nothing beyond the bare fact that there is an absolute law
of compensation from which there is no exemption, it behoves us to
cultivate ethics rather than science, and to resign ourselves
uncomplainingly to the inevitable.

However unpalatable these final conclusions may appear to pious readers
accustomed to seek in the Book of Job for the most striking proofs of
some of the principal teachings of the Christian dispensation, it is
difficult, not to say impossible, to study the work in its restored form
and arrive at any other. With Job, God and wisdom are synonymous. And of
the latter he says:

"But wisdom--whence shall it come?
And where is the place of understanding?
It is hid from the eyes of all living,
Our ears alone have heard thereof."[67]

These words were uttered before he had obtained the insight which brought
resignation in its train. He alludes to them in his last brief discourse.

"I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,
But now mine eye hath beheld thee;
Therefore I resign and console myself,
Though in dust and ashes."[68]

Professor Bickell puts the matter very lucidly in his short but
comprehensive introduction to the poem: "As long as Job, solicitous for
his understanding, demanded an explanation of his unutterable suffering,
whereby the mysterious, piteous condition of mankind is shadowed forth,
his seeking was vain, and he ran the risk of loosing himself in the
problems of eternal justice, the worth of upright living, and even the
existence of God; for an unjust, ruthless, almighty being is no God. But
by means of the theophany--which is to be understood merely as a process
in his own heart, and which clearly shows him the impotence of feeble man
to unravel the world-enigmas--he attains to insight; not, indeed, of a
positive kind such as a knowledge of the ways of God would confer, but
negative insight by means of that resignation which flows from excess of
pain. It is thus that his own heroic saying is fulfilled about the
reaction of unmerited suffering upon the just man."[69]

"But the righteous holds on his way,
And the clean-handed waxeth ever stronger."[70]


Footnotes:

[51] The prologue is contained in chaps. i.-ii.; the epilogue in chap.
xlii. 7-17 of our English Bibles.

[52] Strophe xxxv.

[53] Strophe lii.

[54] Psa. viii. 4, 5.

[55] Strophe liii.

[56] Strophe lxv.

[57] Strophe lxix.

[58] Strophe lxxi.

[59] Strophe lxxiii.

[60] Strophe lxxiv-lxxviii.

[61] Strophe cxv. _Cf_. strophe clxix., where he dares his friend to
prove him guilty of blasphemy when he is merely giving expression
to the truth:

"If indeed ye will glorify yourselves above me,
And prove me guilty of blasphemy;
Know, then, that God hath wronged me!"

[62] Strophe ccxvii.

[63] Strophe ccxxx.

[64] As Professor Bickell rightly remarks: "At bottom what Job means is,
that God alone knows the meaning of our sorrowful existence, if,
indeed, He does know it" ("Das Buch Job," p. 5).

[65] Strophe cclxxvi.

[66] The mere circumstance that the Deity is no longer called by His
usual name when He appears in the whirlwind is of itself an
indication that the poet was not alluding to God.

[67] Strophe ccxxxiv.

[68] Strophe cccix.

[69] _Cf._ Bickell, _op. cit._ pp. 8-9.

[70] Strophe clvi.




KOHELETH

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[Greek: Archaen men mae phynai epichthonioisin ariston Maed' eisidein
augas oxeos aeëliou. Phynta d'hopos okista pylas Aidao peraesai, Kai
keisthai pollaen gaen epamaesamenon.]

Theognis.

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CONDITION OF THE TEXT

Of all the books of the Old Testament, not excepting the Song of Songs,
none offers such rich materials to the historian of philosophy or such
knotty problems to the philological critic as Koheleth[70] or
Ecclesiastes. This interesting treatise is, in its commonly received
shape, little more than a tissue of loose disjointed aphorisms and
contradictory theses concerning the highest problems of ethics and
metaphysics. The form of the work is characterised by an utter lack of
plan; the matter by almost impenetrable obscurity. So completely
entangled are the various threads of thought, that few commentators or
critics possessed the needful degree of hope and courage to set about
unravelling them. One paragraph, for instance, is saturated with
Buddhistic pessimism; another breathes a spirit of religious resignation,
of almost hearty hopefulness; this sentence lays down a universal
principle which is absolutely denied by the next; the thesis is followed
by proofs, in the very midst of which lurks the antithesis; a series of
profound remarks upon one subject is suddenly interrupted by bald
statements about another, the irrelevancy of which is suggestive of the
ravings of a delirious fever patient. Thus one verse begins[71] by
recommending men to make the most of their youth by following the bent of
their inclinations and the desire of their eyes, such enjoyment being a
gift of God,[72] and finishes by threatening all who act upon the advice
with condign punishment to be ultimately dealt out by God Himself; and
the very next verse proceeds to draw the logical conclusion, which oddly
enough, runs thus: "_therefore_ drive sorrow from thy heart, and put
away evil from thy flesh." In one place[73] the writer solemnly and sadly
affirms that the destiny of the upright and the wicked, the wise and the
foolish is wholly alike; in another[74] he seems to proclaim that the
unrighteous shall suffer for their evil-doing, while the God-fearing
shall be rewarded with long life, which again he stoutly denies shortly
before and immediately afterwards. It is impossible to read chap. ii. 11
and 12 without coming to the conclusion that we either have to do with
the incoherent ravings of a disordered mind, or else that the leaves of
the original manuscript were dislocated and then put together
haphazard.[75] The "for" that connects the seventh and eighth verses of
chapter vi. is forcibly suggestive of the line of argument which made
Tenterden Steeple the cause of Goodwin Sands, while the nexus between the
sixth and seventh verses of chapter xi. is scarcely more obvious than
that which is to be found between any two of the nonsense verses that
amuse intelligent children in "Alice in Wonderland." And yet this
production, in its present chaotic condition, has been, and is still,
gravely attributed to the pen of King Solomon in his character as the
ideal sage of humanity![76]

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