“19.  And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

We have here the record of a great convulsion.  Fire fell from heaven; the fire of God.  It was not lightning, for it killed the seven thousand sheep, (see chap. i, 3,) belonging to Job, and all his shepherds; and not only killed but consumed them—­burned them up.  A fire falling from heaven great enough to kill seven thousand sheep must have been an extensive conflagration, extending over a large area of country.  And it seems to have been accompanied by a great wind—­a cyclone—­which killed all Job’s sons and daughters.

Has the book of Job anything to do with that great event which we have been discussing?  Did it originate out of it?  Let us see.

In the first place it is, I believe, conceded by the foremost

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scholars that the book of Job is not a Hebrew work; it was not written by Moses; it far antedates even the time of Abraham.

That very high orthodox authority, George Smith, F. S. A., in his work shows that—­

“Everything relating to this patriarch has been violently controverted.  His country; the age in which he lived; the author of the book that bears his name; have all been fruitful themes of discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!"[1]

Job lived to be two hundred years old, or, according to the Septuagint, four hundred.  This great age relegates him to the era of the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants, among whom such extreme ages were said to have been common.

C. S. Bryant says: 

“Job is in the purest Hebrew.  The author uses only the word Elohim for the name of God.  The compiler or reviser of the work, Moses, or whoever he was, employed at the heads of chapters and in the introductory and concluding portions the name of Jehovah; but all the verses where Jehovah occurs, in Job, are later interpolations in a very old poem, written at a time when the Semitic race had no other name for God but Elohim; before Moses obtained the elements of the new name from Egypt."[2]

Hale says: 

“The cardinal constellations of spring and autumn, in Job’s time, were Chima and Chesil, or Taurus and Scorpio, of which the principal stars are Aldebaran, the Bull’s Eye, and Antare, the Scorpion’s Heart.  Knowing, therefore, the longitudes of these stars at present, the interval

[1.  “The Patriarchal Age,” vol. i, p. 351.

2.  MS. letter to the author, from C. S. Bryant, St. Paul, Minnesota.]

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of time from thence to the assumed date of Job’s trial will give the difference of these longitudes, and ascertain their positions then with respect to the vernal and equinoctial points of intersection of the equinoctial and ecliptic; according to the usual rate of the precession of the equinoxes, one degree in seventy-one years and a half."[1]