A maiden, her royal admirer, ladies of the court, the girl’s brother and her shepherd lover, appear and disappear in animated conversation.  The country maiden is wooed away from her shepherd lad by the allurements of a royal admirer, who employs all the resources of fervid flattery and passionate persuasion to win her as a new attraction for his harem.  He is foiled, however, by her simple, steadfast loyalty to her absent lover, to whom she at length returns, triumphant in her virtue.  In a corrected version, the sensuousness of our English translation disappears in the ordinary richness of Eastern imagery, and the poem becomes a pure picture of loyal love.  It reveals thus the healthy moral tone of Jewish society in that early age.  This sound domestic virtue of the people, which looked with abhorrence on the licentiousness of the court, becomes all the more striking in contrast with the polygamous customs of the surrounding nations.  We see the social foundation on which Israel builded such a noble structure of ethical religion.  The people whose literature opens with such a laud of loyal love might well rise into the pure splendors of a Second Isaiah.

Such a poem fitly introduces the canon of Scripture; since, into whatever heights Religion aspires to lift the fabric of civilization, she must lay its corner-stone in the marriage bond, and rear the church and the state upon the family.

Perhaps we may also find in this Hebrew Song of Songs that mystic meaning, not uncommon in Eastern love-songs, at least in later readings of them, which Edwin Arnold has so vividly brought out in the Hindoo Song of Songs; and may understand how the Church came to take it as a parable of the love of the soul for its Heavenly Ideal, seen in the Christ.

Job, thus read, becomes a semi-dramatic poem, in which the problem of the disconnection of goodness and good-fortune, the lack of any just ordering of individual life, is discussed in the persons of an upright and sorely afflicted patriarch and his three friends, who come to condole and counsel with him.  Through their interchanging colloquies, that bring up one after another the stock theories of the age of the author, the argument moves along without really getting on.  No solution is found for the perplexing puzzle, in which man’s moral instincts beat vainly against the hard facts of life.  Once, for a moment, the thought of a future life flashes up, as the true solution of the injustice of earth, in that thrilling cry of the tortured soul: 

    I know that my Redeemer liveth,
    And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: 
    And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body,
    Yet out of my flesh shall I see God;
    Whom I shall see for myself,
    And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

But the vision fades upon an atmosphere unready for it, and the poet does not return to follow this clue out into the sunshine.