5.  The design of the book of Job will best appear if we first take a brief survey of its plan.  Job, a man eminent above all others for his piety and uprightness, is accused by Satan as serving God from mercenary motives.  To show the falsehood of this charge, God permits Satan to take from the patriarch his property and his children, and afterwards to smite him with a loathsome and distressing disease.  Thus stripped of every thing that could make life valuable, he still holds fast his integrity, and returns to his wife, who counsels him to “curse God and die,” the discreet and pious answer:  “Shall we receive good at the hand of the Lord, and shall we not receive evil?” His three friends, who have come to comfort him, amazed and confounded at the greatness of his calamities, sit down with him in silence for seven days.  At last Job opens his mouth with vehement expressions of grief and impatience, and curses the day of his birth.  The three friends sharply rebuke him, and in a threefold round of addresses (only that the third time Zophar fails to speak), enter into an earnest controversy with him assuming the false ground that the administration of God’s government over this world is strictly retributive, so that special calamity comes only as a punishment for special wickedness, and is therefore itself a proof of such wickedness.  They accordingly exhort him to repent of his sins, and seek God’s forgiveness, as the sure means of removing his present misfortunes.  Conscious of his integrity, Job, with much warmth and asperity, repels their unjust charges, and refutes their false arguments by an appeal to facts.  The ground he takes is that, by some inscrutable plan of God, calamity comes alike upon good and bad men.  He passionately beseeches God to show him why he thus deals with him; and, according as faith or despondency prevails in his soul, he sometimes expresses the hope that he shall come out of his troubles like gold tried in the fire; and then, again, the fear that he shall speedily sink down to the grave under the weight of his sorrows, and nevermore see good.  Having put to silence his three friends by an array of facts to which they can make no reply, he freely expresses the belief that the hypocrite’s end shall be destruction (chap. 27); shows that the wisdom by which God governs the world is above man’s comprehension, whose true wisdom lies in fearing and obeying his Maker (chap. 28); contrasts his present calamities with his former prosperity (chaps. 29, 30); and closes with a solemn protestation of his integrity (chap. 31).

Elihu, a young man who has hitherto been a silent witness of the controversy, now takes up the argument on the ground that trouble is sent by God upon men as a discipline, that by it they may be made aware of their errors and infirmities; and that, if they make a right improvement of it, by bearing it with patient submission and looking to God in penitence and prayer for its removal, it will end in renewed