Page:03.BCOT.KD.HistoricalBooks.B.vol.3.LaterProphets.djvu/1333

 unjust, he cannot in itself cling. He is so much the less able to do this, as he is compelled the more earnestly to long for vindication, the more confidently he is accused. When he now wishes that the testimony which he has laid down concerning his innocence, and which is contemporaries do not credit, might be graven in the rock with an iron pen, and filled in with lead, the memorial in words of stone is but a dead witness; and he cannot even for the future rely on men, since he is so contemptuously misunderstood and deceived by them in the present. This impels his longing after vindication forward from a lifeless thing to a living person, and turns his longing from man below to God above. He has One who will acknowledge his misjudged cause, and set it right, - a Goël, who will not first come into being in a later generation, but liveth - who has not to come into being, but is. There can be no doubt that by the words chy n'l he means the same person of whom in Job 16:19 he says: “Behold, even now in heaven is my Witness, and One who acknowledges me is in the heights.” The חי here corresponds to the גם עתה in that passage; and from this - that the heights of heaven is the place where this witness dwells - is to be explained the manner in which Job (Job 19:25) expresses his confident belief in the realization of that which he (Job 16:20) at first only importunately implores: as the Last One, whose word shall avail in the ages of eternity, when the strife of human voices shall have long been silent, He shall stand forth as finally decisive witness over the dust, in which Job passed away as one who in the eye of man was regarded as an object of divine punishment. And after his skin, in such a manner destroyed, and free from his flesh, which is even now already so fallen in that the bones may be seen through it (Job 19:20), he will behold Eloah; and he who, according to human judgment, has died the death of the unrighteous, shall behold Eloah on his side, his eyes shall see and not a