tted them, and so he had; the
old argument then as now.--'Is not thy wickedness great?' says Eliphaz.
'Thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the
naked of their clothing; thou hast not given water to the weary, and
thou hast withholden bread from the hungry;' and so on through a series
of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when words like these
could make Job angry. Bildad follows them up with an attempt to frighten
him by a picture of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but
Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of
loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and
calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high,
tranquil self-possession. 'God forbid that I should justify you,' he
says; 'till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My
righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not
reproach me so long as I live.'

So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence,
having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.
A difficulty now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.
As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh
is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to the
twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has
maintained before--is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from
the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow
the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes that he is here
receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had
betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are
satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think
Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to
be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem. Another
solution of the difficulty is very simple, although it is to be admitted
that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have
each spoken a third time; the symmetry of the general form requires that
now Zophar should speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made
by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses in question
belong to him. Any one who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily
how such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in
Shakespeare, the speeches in th