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 he only seems to deny that the ideas of the three representative sages can be applied at once, as they apply them, to the case of one like Job.

[Böttcher, however, regards Job as the work of one principal and several subordinate writers. It was occasioned, he thinks, by a conversation on the sufferings of innocent men, at that time so frequent (i.e. in the reign of Manasseh). See his Achrenlese, p. 68.]

II. The completion or publication of the colloquies revealed (or seemed to reveal) sundry imperfections in the original mode of treating the subject. Some other 'wise men,' therefore (or possibly, except in the case of III., the author himself), inserted passages in the poem with the view of qualifying or supplementing its statements. These were merely laid in, without being welded with the rest of the book. The first in order of these additions is chap. xxviii., which cannot be brought into a logical connection with the chapters among which it is placed, in spite of the causal particle 'for' prefixed to it ('For there is a vein'). It is possible, indeed, that it has been extracted from some other work. The hypothesis of insertion (or, if used without implying illicit tampering with the text, 'interpolation') is confirmed by the occurrence of 'Adonai' in ver. 28, which is contrary to the custom of the author of Job, and by its highly rhetorical character. If the passage was written with a view to the Book of Job, we must suppose the author to have been dissatisfied with the original argument, and to have sought a solution for the problem in the inscrutableness of the divine wisdom. Zophar, it is true, had originally alluded to this attribute, but with a more confined object. According to him, God, being all-wise, can detect sins invisible to mortal eyes (xi. 6):—it is needless to draw out the wide difference between this slender inference and the large theory which appears to be suggested in chap. xxviii.

III. One of the less progressive 'wise men' was scandalised at the irreverent statements of Job and dissatisfied with the three friends' mode of dealing with them (xxxii. 2, 3). Hence the speeches of Elihu, the most generally recognised