to the reader is not, after all, revealed to Job or to his friends, and for this plain reason:  the burden of the drama is not that we do, but that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of the government of the world, that it is not for man to seek it, or for God to reveal it.  We, the readers, are, in this one instance, admitted behind the scenes—­for once, in this single case because it was necessary to meet the received theory by a positive fact, which contradicted it.  But the explanation of one case need not be the explanation of another; our business is to do what we know to be right, and ask no questions.  The veil which in the Egyptian legend lay before the face of Isis, is not to be raised; and we are not to seek to penetrate secrets which are not ours. ____

+ The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job’s last words and God’s appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be genuine.  The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to the progress of the argument; proceeding evidently on the false hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job’s suffering.  And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally suggest are now made certainties, by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different hand.  The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which allowed him to take so great a liberty.  He, too, possessed with the old Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction to it; and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God’s honour could still be vindicated in the old way.  “His wrath was kindled” against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself “full of matter,” and “ready to burst like new bottles,” he could not contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the Theodice, such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he lived. ____

While, however, God does not condescend to justify His ways to man, He gives judgment on the past controversy.  The self-constituted pleaders for Him, the acceptors of His person, were all wrong; and Job, the passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job, he had spoken the truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a transient theory as an everlasting truth.

“And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, my wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.  Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and offer for yourselves a burnt-offering.  And my servant Job shall pray for you, and him will I accept.  Lest I deal with you after your folly, for that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.”