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 containing the sacred name Jehovah. The increased study of Arabic in the 17th century led several theologians of eminence to the same conclusion. Spanheim, for instance, thought that Job and his friends wrote down the history and the colloquies in Arabic, after the happy turn in the fortunes of the sufferer, and that some inspired Israelitish writer, in the age of Solomon, gave this work a Hebrew dress. Albert Schultens, in the preface to his Liber Jobi (1737), is at the pains to discuss this theory, which he rejects on two main grounds, (1) the disparagement to our magnificent Book of Job involved in calling it a translation, and (2) that in those primitive and, according to him, pre-Mosaic times, the Hebrew and Arabic languages cannot have been so different (!) as Spanheim from his point of view imagines. Elsewhere he expresses his own opinion shortly thus, 'Linguam quâ liber Jobi conscriptus est, genuinum illius temporis Arabismum esse.' He actually imagines that Job and his friends extemporised the Colloquies we have before us, referring to the amazing faculty of improvisation still possessed by the Arabs—a view scarcely worthier than that of Spanheim, for, as Martineau remarks in another connection, Who ever improvised a great poem or a great sermon? Both these great scholars have fallen into the error of confounding the poet with his hero and the use of poetic and didactic fiction with deliberate fraud. One cannot be severe upon this error, for it has survived among ourselves in Prof. S. Lee's great work (1837), where our Book of Job is actually traced back through Jethro to Job himself. The only form however in which a critic of our day could discuss the question mentioned above would be this, Is it in some degree probable that the author of Job was a Hebrew who had passed some time with the Arabic- and Aramaic-speaking peoples bordering on the land of Israel?

On grounds independent of Eichhorn and Dean Plumptre, the former of whom combines his theory with that of a pre-Mosaic, and the latter with that of a Solomonic date of Job,