are required for the power of God, we have strange un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, “the sweet influences of the seven stars,” and the glittering fragments of the sea-snake Rahab trailing across the northern sky.  Again, God is not the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind.  We cannot believe that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.  In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some aner polutropos who, like the old hero of Ithaca,

pollon anthropon iden astea kai voon egno polla d’ hog’en tonto tathen algea hon kata thumon, arnumenos psuchen

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to baffle curiosity, as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.

No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of the opening.  Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words.  The history of Job was probably a tradition in the east; his name, like that of Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the problem of philosophers.  In keeping with the current belief, he is described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man upon the earth, “and the same was the greatest man in all the east.”  So far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the popular theory required.  The details of his character are brought out in the progress of the poem.  He was “the father of the oppressed, and of those who had none to help them.”  When he sat as a judge in the market-places, “righteousness clothed him” there, and “his justice was a robe and a diadem.”  He “broke the jaws of the wicked and plucked the spoil out of his teeth;” and, humble in the midst of his power, he “did not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they contended with him,” knowing (and amidst those old people where the multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful, to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master’s pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it) knowing “that He who had made him had made them,” and one “had fashioned them both in the womb.”  Above all, he was the friend of the poor, “the blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon him,” and he “made the widow’s heart to sing for joy.”