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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
The thinkers of old Israel, whether Psalmists, historians or teachers of Wisdom, were supremely serene and confident men. Their world was established, and could not be moved (1 Sam. 2.8; Ps. 93.1); God's favour and victory were with his people (Deut. 33.26f); his covenant was benign and Israel's king reigned in Zion (Ps. 72.17f; 133); and everyone but the fool knew his proper place and was content, and life's rewards seemed fair and consistent (1 Kings 4.25; Prov. 10.14–15; 12.9; 13.14–16; 14.1, 30 etc.). Evil and tragedy were present, but they were not allowed to pose any ultimate problem, since they were known to be firmly under God's control and part and parcel of the divine economy (Gen. 45.5; 2 Sam. 17.14; Ps. 30.6 (Engl. 5); 73.16–17). Under the double impact of Assyrian imperial advance and of internal social disintegration in the eighth and seventh centuries, this optimistic Weltanschauung was rudely shattered. The prophetic movement, hitherto nonconformist and not highly regarded by those who mattered, came into its own, sounding ever more loudly sour and pessimistic notes that had rarely been heard in Israel before (Amos 5.18f; Mic. 6.1–2; Isa. 5.18f; Zeph. 2.15; Jer. 6.16f; 8.8f etc.). It deeply affected the historians who were responsible for the Deuteronomistic writings,2 but of more direct concern to us, it had a pervasive influence on the Wisdom tradition as well.3 This can be traced in an increasing emphasis upon the need for humble submission to God's will in the face of life's enigmas.
page 259 note 2 Nicholson, E. W., Deuteronomy and Tradition (Blackwell, 1967), pp. 65f.Google Scholar
page 259 note 3 McKane, W., Prophets and Wise Men (S.C.M., 1965)Google Scholar, especially chs. vi and vii.
page 259 note 4 The A, B, C categories of W. McKane in his commentary on Proverbs (S.C.M., 1970) provide a useful key to the analysis of these chapters. The C category is the one where the new emphasis is most apparent.
page 260 note 1 E.g. Driver and Gray (1921) and Dhorme (1926, Eng. transl. 1967) in the fifth cent. B.C., Fohrer (1963) between the fifth and third cents.
page 260 note 2 With e.g. M. Pope (Anchor Bible, 1965). This commentary is to be commended for the light it brings to bear from Ugaritic and otlier Northwest Semitic sources on the language and imagery of Job; see also Blommerde, A. C. M., Northwest Semitic Grammar and Job (Rome, 1969)Google Scholar (a less judicious guide than Pope) and more generally, Engnell, I., ‘The figurative language of the Old Testament’ in Critical Essays on the Old Testament (S.P.C.K., 1970), pp. 242Google Scholarf. The discovery of the Ras Shamra mythological tablets and their application to the study of Hebrew cultic practice and poetry is one of the factors that has led in the last generation or so to the bulk of the Psalms being dated in the period of the first rather than the second Temple. Perhaps under the same impulse Job will be the next biblical book to be given back to old Israel, as scholarship perceives that like the Psalms it must belong to a time when the Hebrew–Canaanite poetic tradition was still a living one.
page 262 note 1 I am particularly indebted for this understanding of the scope and purpose of the book of Job to Pedersen's, J. profound psychological treatment in his Israel: Its Life and Culture, I–II (O.U.P., 1926), pp. 363f.Google Scholar It seems to me to get nearer the heart of the matter than the recent more theological and thematic study of von Rad, G. in his Wisdom in Israel (S.C.M., 1972), pp. 206fGoogle Scholar, which tends to empty the poem of movement and human interest.
page 262 note 2 Most of the commentaries on Job, even the great ones, are disappointing in their treatment of these chapters; see the remarks of von Rad, in his Old Testament Theology, I (Oliver and Boyd, 1962), p. 410Google Scholar, about the mistake of looking too closely for a ‘schema’ or rigid system in the theology of the friends. See also the perceptive study of Fullarton, K., ‘Double Entendre in the first speech of Eliphaz’, JBL, 48 (1929), pp. 320f.Google Scholar
page 264 note 1 The occasions on which archaeologists in the biblical lands have recovered tombs like Tutankhamun's with their contents unrifled are rare, and witness to the widespread and successful activities of grave robbers in antiquity, as do the rather plaintive inscriptions on many grave stones, for example, these words from the Siloam Tomb (Silwan) inscription in Old Hebrew, ‘There is no silver or gold here, only his bones and the bones of his maidservant with him. Cursed be the man who opens this!’ For the text see Gibson, J. C. L., Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions I (Clarendon, 1971), p. 24.Google Scholar
page 264 note 2 Literally, ‘Shall we lift a word to you?’
page 265 note 1 English cannot adequately reproduce the five different Hebrew words for types of lion used in this verse.
page 266 note 1 Pointing rīḇ instead of rōḇ (cp. 33.19).
page 266 note 2 Hapaxlegomenon, consistently rendered ‘madness’ by the medieval Jewish commentators; it seems invidious to attempt to improve on this tradition by emending.
page 266 note 3 I.e. men's bodies.
page 266 note 4 Reading mōšîα' for mēśîm with support from the Septuagint. In certain formal hands of the Dead Sea Scrolls the letters ‘Ayin and Mēm are not dissimilar, though in later scripts they have quite different shapes; see particularly tables 5 and 7 in Cross, F. M., ‘The development of the Jewish scripts’ in Wright, G. E. (ed.), The Bible and the Ancient Near East (Routledge, 1961), pp. 138–139Google Scholar. The scribal error that substituted Mēm for ‘Ayin may go back to that period. By rearranging the letters (but unfortunately by also omitting a γōḅ) we get the attractive reading mibbolim šēm, ‘nameless’ (cp. 30.8); the m at the end of the first word would be the enclitic m, amply attested after all sorts of grammatical forms in Ugaritic and hitherto unrecognised in quite a few biblical passages (e.g. Ps. 29.6 wayyarqî'ḍdam, ‘he makes (Lebanon) skip (like a calf)’, where a plural suffix would destroy the parallelism). If I prefer ‘saviour’ it is because it seems to me to accord rather more exactly with the context (cp. 5.1 here with Ps. 18.42 (Engl. 41) = 2 Sam. 22.42).
page 266 note 5 Verse 21a is transposed to the middle of 5.5 (so to a slightly different position N.E.B.), a move which regularises the strophic structure in both contexts. The presence of very similar verbal forms from the base DK' in 4.19 (‘men crush them’) and 5.4 (‘they are trampled’) may have led a sleepy scribe to get his verses mixed up.
page 267 note 1 The usual (Judaean) form is 'ayil, but in the non-Judaean dialect of Hebrew in which the book of Job is written the diphthong is reduced. It is to this dialect that the so-called ‘Aramaisms’ that used to be thought a mark of the post-Exitic authorship of the book should be traced.
page 268 note 1 Literally ‘sons of flame’ (cp. Song 8.6, ‘its flames are flames of fire’). I am most reluctant to dispense with this highly original and telling image on the grounds either that the uncommon verb here translated ‘fly’ is used of eagles in 39.27 or that the Greek versions all regard benê rešep as a poetic substitute for ‘birds’ (so here N.E.B.). Pope renders ‘the sons of Resheph’, Resheph being the Syrian god of fire and pestilence; he is mentioned occasionally in the Ugaritic texts and the Aramaic inscriptions and frequently in the Phoenician inscriptions (cp. also Hab. 3.5). Such an ancient mythological allusion may be reflected in the Jewish tradition, which though aware of the rendering ‘sparks’, sometimes saw a reference to demons (Targum) or angels (Rashi). But neither birds nor divine beings ‘soar upwards’ involuntarily or inevitably, and if we retain the Massoretic pointing in the verb ‘is born’ in the previous line (as I do), these are the senses that are required.
page 269 note 1 yôlīḏ for yûlad.
page 270 note 1 Pointing moḥοraḇ, a striking metaphor, words from this base being normally applied to cities and countries; it would be its very unusualness that led the Massoretes to change the pointing to give ‘from a sword’. The Hebrew behind the Septuagint similarly misunderstands the sense, though it had eased the problems of the Massoretic text by omitting the following phrase (literally ‘from their mouth’). Note the verb ‘has saved’, in vivid and no doubt intentional contrast with ‘saviour’ in 4.20.
page 270 note 2 Nor, for that matter, is it in the Old Testament as a whole; see von Rad, Old Testament Theology, op. cit., p. 402.
page 271 note 1 This is another instance of the subtle play on words in which the writer indulges; the same verb is used of Satan ‘going to and fro’ in the earth in 1.7. Some translate as a noun, ‘from the lash of the tongue’, giving an example of the proposition b used in Hebrew with the meaning ‘from’, a common usage in Ugaritic.
page 271 note 2 Pointing šēḏ (cp. Deut. 32.17) for šōḏ, which occurs in the next line (‘havoc’); such a change produces an effective alliteration instead of a weak repetition.
page 271 note 3 Pointing šοma' οnūhā.