Job meditates suicide, just as we have seen in the American legends that hundreds slew themselves under the terror of the time: 

“21.  For now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.”

The Chaldaic version gives us the sixteenth and seventeenth verses of chapter viii as follows: 

“The sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof faileth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth, so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways.”

And then Job refers to the power of God, seeming to paint the cataclysm (chap. ix): 

“5.  Which removeth the mountains, and they know not which overturneth them in his anger.

“6.  Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.

“7.  Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.

“8.  Which alone spreadeth out the heavens and treadeth upon the waves of the sea.”

All this is most remarkable:  here is the delineation of a great catastrophe—­the mountains are removed and leveled; the earth shakes to its foundations; the sun fails to appear, and the stars are sealed up.  How?  In the dense masses of clouds?

Surely this does not describe the ordinary manifestations of God’s power.  When has the sun refused to rise?  It can not refer to the story of Joshua, for in that case the sun was in the heavens and refrained from setting; and Joshua’s time was long subsequent to that of Job.  But when we take this in connection with the fire

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falling from heaven, the great wind, the destruction of men and animals, the darkness that came at midday, the ice and snow and sands of the sea, and the stones of the field, and the fact that Job is shut up as in a prison, never to return to his home or to the light of day, we see that peering through the little-understood context of this most ancient poem are the disjointed reminiscences of the age of fire and gravel.  It sounds like the cry not of a man but of a race, a great, religious, civilized race, who could not understand how God could so cruelly visit the world; and out of their misery and their terror sent up this pitiful yet sublime appeal for mercy.

“13.  If God will not withdraw his anger, the proud helpers do stoop under him.”

One commentator makes this read: 

“Under him the whales below heaven bend,” (the crooked leviathan?)

“17.  For he shall crush me in a whirlwind, and multiplieth my wounds even without cause.” (Douay ver.)

And Job can not recognize the doctrine of a special providence; he says: 

“22.  This is one thing” (therefore I said it).  “He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.

“23.  If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the trial of the innocent.