was a contemporary of Jeremiah.  Ewald is a high authority in these matters, and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received among biblical scholars.  In the absence of proof, however, (and the reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures) these opposite considerations may be of moment.  It is only natural that at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was generally at its best:  but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions of another kind.  The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude, dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was filling round them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise.  Finding themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God will not leave them forever, and in his own time will take his chosen to himself again.  But such a period is an ill-occasion for searching into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot conceive of as possible.

The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the central falsehood of his own people’s creed, he must have divorced himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.  Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from the narrow littleness of “the peculiar people.”  The language, as we said, is full of strange words.  The hero of the poem is of strange land and parentage, a Gentile certainly, not a Jew.  The life, the manners, the customs, are of all varieties and places—­Egypt, with its river and its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia; the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people.  No mention, or hint of mention, is there throughout the poem, of Jewish traditions or Jewish certainties.  We look to find the three friends vindicate themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai.  But of all this there is not a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of them, when witnesses