IV.  The Poem of Job.  In the later poetic version of the story (which begins with the third chapter) Job himself is the embodiment of the problem of innocent suffering.  His friends’ suppositions and condemnations add still another burden to his weight of woe.  More intolerable, however, than loss of possessions, health, and reputation is his sense of being forsaken and condemned by Jehovah.  Job cannot shake himself entirely free from the belief, which had been inculcated in his mind from earliest infancy, that calamity was a sign of divine displeasure, and therefore of sin on the part of the victim.  In the series of monologues and dialogues between Job and his friends he voices every phase of the great problem and makes it concrete and objective.  With marvellous psychological truth and insight the author has presented the different phases of feeling through which an innocent sufferer in Job’s position naturally passes.  At times Job is intemperate in his speech and at other times he yields to despondency; again his faith overleaps all obstacles and he holds for the moment a clear belief in the ultimate vindication not only of himself but of Jehovah’s justice.

His friends, on the other hand, formulate at length the current Explanation of suffering.  Job in his sharp retorts makes clear the Inapplicability of the arguments and the limitations of the dogmas which they constantly reassert.  In the concluding speeches of Jehovah the author with masterly skill takes Job out of his little circle into the larger world of nature, and brings him face to face with the evidences of Jehovah’s might, wisdom, and gracious rulership of the great universe and of the complex life of those who inhabit it.  Above all, Job learns to know God, not through the testimony of others, but by direct personal experience, and this knowledge begets humility and trust.

V. Progress in Job’s Thought.  The thought of the book of Job is characteristically Oriental.  Instead of moving straight on from premises to conclusion it constantly reverts to the same themes yet advances along independent, parallel lines.  Its progress is not objective, as is usually the case in a drama, but almost entirely subjective.  These parallel lines of progress are:  (1) the conviction gradually crystallizing into certainty that the current explanations of suffering are in certain cases inadequate and false.  While viewed from one point of view this conclusion is merely negative, it nevertheless opened the eyes of Job and his generation to a larger conception of Jehovah and a far broader interpretation of the universe and of the laws which regulate it.  The second is that he is guilty of no crime commensurate with the calamity which had overtaken him.  Overwhelmed by misfortune and the reiterated charges of his friends, only through a superhuman struggle did Job ultimately attain the unshaken conviction that he was indeed innocent in the sight of God and man.  The third line of progress is that, if not in the present life, in that beyond the grave his reputation would not only be vindicated but he himself would be fully conscious of that vindication.