thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden? Which were cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflowed with the flood. Which said unto God, Depart from us: and what can the Almighty do for them? Yet, he filled their houses with good things: but the counsel of the wicked be far from me! The righteous see it, and are glad: and the innocent laugh them to scorn'. The light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of his fire shall not shine. The steps of his strength shall be straitened, and his own counsel shall cast him down. For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walketh upon a snare. The snare is laid for him in the ground, and a trap for him in the way. Terrors shall make him afraid on every side, and shall drive him to his feet'.

So again, we find the inspired writer alluding, in one continued strain, to the first division of the earth among the children of Noah before the ambition of the Cuthim disturbed that arrangement, to the violent irruptions of the Shepherds, to their resisting the divine behests as communicated by Moses, and to the ultimate subversion of their usurped authority even in the very plenitude of its strength.

I will shew thee; hear me: and that, which I have seen, I will declare; which wise men have told from their fathers, and have not hid it unto whom alone the earth was given, and no stranger passed

1 Job xxii. 15-19.

2 Job xviii. 5-11.

among them. The wicked man travelleth with pain all his days: and the number of years is hidden from the oppressor. A dreadful sound is in his ears: in prosperity the destroyer shall come upon him. He wandereth abroad for bread, saying, Where is it? He knoweth, that the day of darkness is ready at his hand. Trouble and anguish shall make him afraid: they shall prevail against him, as a king ready to the battle. For he stretcheth out his hand against God, and strengtheneth himself against the Almighty. He runneth upon him, even upon his neck, upon the thick bosses of his buckler: because he covereth his face with his fatness, and maketh collops of fat on his flanks. He shall not be rich, neither shall his substance continue; neither shall he prolong the perfection thereof upon the earth. It shall be accomplished before his time: and his branch shall not be green'.

As the author thus alludes to the great outlines of the pastoral history, so he not unfrequently fills them up by a reference to subordinate particulars. In the following passage, he hints at the first expulsion of the Shepherds from Egypt, when they were driven into the south of Palestine and became notorious for their robberies; an allusion introduced with the greater propriety, because, while outcasts in that country, they had plundered Job of his camels.

1 Job xv. 17-32.

Now they, that are younger than I, have me in derision; whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock'. Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me, in whom old age was perished? For want and famine they were solitary, fleeing into the wilderness in former times desolate and waste: who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven out from among men; they cried after them as after a thief: to dwell in the clifts of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed: under the nettles they were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea children of base men: they were viler than the earth'.

In another passage he alludes to the plague of darkness; one of those visitations, with which the obstinate Shepherds were afflicted in consequence of their refusing to liberate Israel.

He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprize. He taketh the wise in their own craftiness: and the counsel of the froward is carried headlong. They meet with darkness in the day-time, and grope in the noon-day as in the night. But he saveth the poor

By the fathers of these men, we are of course to understand their ancestors, who were reduced to a very low condition by their being violently driven out of Egypt. Their expulsion took place about 94 years before the trials of Job.

2 Job xxx. 1—8 They were the descendants of the apos. tate Cuthim, styled fools in scriptural phraseology, because they were apostates from the sincere worship of God.

from the sword, from their mouth, and from the hand of the mighty. So the poor hath hope, and iniquity stoppeth her mouth'.

Lastly, we find him alluding, in evident mutual connection, to the unjust government of the Shepherds and to the sudden death of the firstborn which took place at midnight.

Shall even he, that hateth right, govern? And wilt thou condemn him, that is most just? Is it fit to say to a king, Thou art wicked: and to princes, Ye are ungodly? How much less to him, that accepteth not the persons of princes, nor regardeth the rich more than the poor: for they are all the work of his hands. In a moment shall they die, and the people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away: and the mighty shall be taken away without hand. For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings'.

(2.) As Moses had been honoured by most awful communications with God both in mount Horeb and on the summit of mount Sinai, it is natural to expect, on the supposition of his being the author of the book of Job, that he would very pointedly allude to them: for communications of that nature must ever, with the utmost vividness, have been present to his recollection.

Accordingly, the Supreme Being is introduced

* Job xxxiv. 17–21. Compare Exod. xii. 29, 30.

into the poem after a manner which strongly implies that the writer himself had similarly conversed with him. As God spoke to Moses out of the midst of a burning bush on mount Horeb, and as he called to him out of the midst of thunders and lightnings and fire and a thick cloud on mount Sinai; so he is twice said to have answered Job out of the whirlwind'.

(3.) It was on mount Sinai, that a written Law was for the first time delivered from God to man and the person, through whom this Law was communicated, was Moses. To this peculiar circumstance then we may well expect him to allude in any composition of which he was the author; while, on the other hand, it is clear, that the Idumèan Job could not refer to an event, which had certainly not occurred at the epoch of his trials, and which (according to the numerical reading of the Hebrew) did not occur until after his death.

Receive, I pray thee, the Law from his mouth; and lay up his words in thine heart'.

The original word, here employed to denote the Law, is Torah; which, as it is well known, was the word specially used by the Jews to designate the Law of Moses: and the Law, here spoken of, was not a national statute of mere human authority, nor yet such a moral law as

1 Exod. iii. 1—5. xix. 6—20. Job xxxviii. 1. xl. 6. 2 Job xxii. 22.