;
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 rises,
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 verses from the
eleventh to the twenty-third are in direct contradiction
to all which he has maintained before, are, 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 the early editions are, in many instances,
wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons.
It might have arisen from inadvertence; it might have
arisen from the foolishness of some Jewish transcriber,
who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book into harmony
with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy.
This view has the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity;
another, however, has been suggested by Eichorn, who
originally followed Kennicott, but discovered, as he
supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which w