Part 5 (1/2)
[50] Lagarde seems to have hit the mark when he affirms that the poet's faith in G.o.d reduces itself to a vague belief in the divine.
a.n.a.lYSIS OF THE POEM
The popular legend of Job, which was current among the Hebrews and probably among their Semitic neighbours for centuries before the poem was composed, is embodied in the prologue and epilogue,[51] which are written in prose. The data it contains are utilised by the author for the purpose of clearly stating, not of elucidating, the main problem, and it would be a grave mistake on the part of the reader to attempt to supplement the reasoning of Job's friends by arguments drawn from the details narrated in the legend. Thus, the conversation between Jahveh and the Satan is obviously intended to establish the all-important fact that Job, although not a member of the chosen people, a believer in their priestly dogmas, nor an observer of their religious rites and ceremonies, was none the less a truly just man, the perfect type of the righteous of all times and countries. On the other hand, the circ.u.mstances that his sufferings were no more than a probation, and that they were followed by fabulous wealth and intensified happiness, are dismissed by the poet as wholly irrelevant to the question at issue. Nor, considering their purely exceptional character, would they have tended in any degree to solve it. If Job's misery was an ordeal, all unmerited suffering cannot be pressed into the same convenient category. His individual privations and pains may have been compensated for by subsequent plenty and prosperity; but there are other just men who rot on the dunghill and die in despair. The author, therefore, wisely refrained from drawing on the legend more extensively than was absolutely needful for the materials of his poem, and from thus reducing a universal problem to the dimensions of an individual case.
The folk-story of the just man, Job, is conceived in the true spirit of Eastern legendary lore. The colours are laid on with an ungrudging hand.
He was not merely well-to-do and contented, he was the happiest mortal who had ever walked the earth in his halcyon days, and the most hopelessly wretched during his probation.
But although wont, as the Preacher recommends, to fill up his cup with the wine of life, ”pressing all that it yields of mere vintage,” he was anything but an egotist. The broad stream of his sympathy flowed out towards all his fellows, nay, to all things animate and inanimate. The sheep, the lion, the eagle, and the oxen, were his comrades, the fire and the wind his kinsmen. Even for his worst enemies he had no curse, nor did he ever rejoice in their merited misfortunes. So blameless and upright was his living and working, so completely had he eschewed even heart-sins, that he might have carried windows in his breast that all might see what was being done within.
Now, in accordance with the retribution-theory then in fas.h.i.+on--small temporary profits and quick returns--he had amply merited his good fortune, and might have reasonably expected to enjoy it to the close of a long life, which for him was the end of everything. In fact, he had no longer any serious grounds for apprehending the gathering of clouds of misfortune to darken the suns.h.i.+ne of his existence, seeing that he had already attained to a ripe age, was possessed of vast herds of cattle and thousands of camels, was blest with a numerous family, and pa.s.sed for ”the greatest of all the children of the East.” But the most specious theological theories are as powerless to guarantee the just man from the blows of adversity as to hinder the worm from finding the blus.h.i.+ng rose's ”bed of crimson joy”; and whether pain and sorrow be labelled ”probation”
or ”just punishment,” they will never cease to figure among the commonplaces of human existence.
At one of the social gatherings of the courtiers of heaven, Jahveh takes occasion to laud the virtue of the just man, Job, whereupon the Satan, who not only understands, but sees through the righteousness of the bulk of mankind, expresses his conviction that it has its roots in mere selfishness. Jahveh then empowers the Adversary to put it to the test by depriving Job of his possessions and his family. On this, the hero's wealth and happiness vanished as suddenly as the smile on the face of an infant, and in a twinkling, so to say, he was changed into a perfect type of human wretchedness.
By one of those extraordinary miracles which are characteristic of Oriental fiction, in the course of a single day Job's four hundred yoke of oxen were seized and carried off by the Sabeans, his seven thousand scattered sheep were sought out and consumed by lightning, his three thousand camels were driven away by Chaldeans, and his sons and daughters killed by the falling of a house. Being but human, Job's soul is harrowed up by grief; but, recognising the emptiness of all things, he endures his lot manfully and without murmur or complaint.
When the sons of G.o.d met again in the council chamber of heaven, Jahveh triumphantly inquired of the Adversary what he now thought of Job's virtue and its taproot. But the Satan still clung tenaciously to his low view of the mainspring of the hero's conduct. ”Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face.
And the Lord said unto the Adversary: ”Behold he is in thine hand; only spare his life.” Whereupon he was smitten with the most loathsome disease known in the East, which together with the moral suffering resulting from utter abandonment, besieged him, ”even to the gates and inlets of his life.” But firm and manful, with strength nurtured by the witness of his own conscience, and the conviction that true virtue is independent of reward, he maintains the citadel unconquered, refusing to open the portals even to Jahveh Himself.
Nothing can subdue Job, not even the bitter fruits of the diabolical refinement of the Adversary who, having permission to slay all the hero's kith and kin, spares his spouse, lest misery should harbour any possibilities unrealised.
At last three of Job's friends come from the uttermost ends of the earth to visit and console him. Travelling over enormous distances, and setting out from opposite points of the compa.s.s, they all contrive to reach the sufferer at the same moment; and at the sight of the deformed and loathsome figure of their friend are all three struck dumb with grief.
Without any previous consultation among themselves, they sit silent and sad for seven days and seven nights, gazing with fascinated horror on the misshapen figure on the dunghill. This curious manifestation of friends.h.i.+p unmans the hero whose fort.i.tude had been proof against the most cruel physical and moral suffering; utterly breaking down, he ”fills with woes the pa.s.sing wind,” and bitterly curses his existence. Awe at first keeps him from censuring G.o.d's ways; truthfulness from condemning himself. He cannot understand why he suffers, whether there be any truth or none in the traditional doctrine of unfailing retribution upon earth; for he has certainly done everything to merit happiness and nought to deserve punishment. Society, however, is there in the person of his friends to dispel this delusion. They hold a brief for the cut-and-dried theology of the day which tells them that in Job there was a reservoir of guilt and sin filling up from youth to age, which now, no longer able to hold its loathsome charge, burst and overwhelmed with misery their friend and his family. They play their parts very skilfully, at first softly stroking, as it were, the beloved friend, as if to soothe his pain, and then vigorously rubbing the salt in the gaping wounds of the groaning victim.
The campaign is opened mildly by Eliphaz, a firm believer in the spooks and spectres of borderland, who, in reply to Job's complaint, a.s.sures his friend that no really innocent human being ever died in misery as he now seems to be dying, and gently reminds him that ”affliction shooteth not from the dust, neither doth trouble sprout up from the ground;” they need the fertile soil of sin, which Job must have provided, unknown to his easy-going friends who, taking him at his own estimation, heretofore considered him a just man. But even if he were what he would have them believe he is, he has no ground for just complaint: for ”happy is the man whom G.o.d correcteth.” To this the hero replies, accentuating his innocence, and pouring forth his plaint in ”wild words,” for G.o.d ”useth me as an enemy.” He seeks not for mercy, he explains, but for justice, nay, he is magnanimous enough to be content with even less. He only asks of G.o.d,
”That it would please him to destroy me, That he would let go his hand and cut me off;”[52]
and this request having been refused, suicide, the ever ”open door” of the Stoics, invited him temptingly in, but he withstood the temptation, and comforted himself with the knowledge that all things in time have an end.
”My soul would have chosen strangling, And death by my own resolve.
But I spurned it; for I shall not live for ever.”[53]
The arbitrary and incomprehensible will of the deity may, in ultimate a.n.a.lysis, be the changeful basis of right and wrong, but, if so, divine justice differs from human not merely in degree but likewise in character, and not apparently to its advantage. The tuneful Psalmist had sung in ecstatic wonder at the mercy of G.o.d: ”What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”[54] Job, having looked upwards in the same direction, not for mercy but for simple justice, and looked in vain, parodies with bitter irony those same verses of the Psalm:
”What is man that thou shouldst magnify him?
And that thou shouldst set thine heart upon him?
That thou shouldst visit him every morning, And try him every moment?”[55]
Bildad, the Traditionalist _par excellence_, then addresses a sharp reproof to the just man who refused to recognise as mercy in G.o.d the conduct which, were a man responsible for it, he must needs condemn as wickedness. He bids him inquire of bygone generations what they thought of the goodness of the Creator, and asks him to be guided by the wisdom of his fore-fathers, who lived and throve on the spiritual food of retribution which he now rejects with loathing. This attack provokes a new outburst on the part of Job, who ironically paraphrases and develops the ideas of his comforters, deriding the notion that the deity can change right into wrong or that true morality needs the divine will as a basis.
”How should man be in the right against G.o.d?
If he long to contend with him, He cannot answer him one of a thousand.”[56]
”Lo, he glideth by me and I see him not; And he pa.s.seth on, but I perceive him not.”[57]