06.17. The Poetical Books
Chapter 16 The Poetical Books In the category of the Holy Writings, touched upon in the previous chapter, there are certain books particularly identified as the “Poetical Books” of which Job and the Psalms are samples, both of which will be treated of in this chapter. That Job is a historical character would seem to be settled by such Scriptural allusions to him as Ezekiel 14:14, and James 5:11. Added to this the contents of the book itself is a proof of its historicity. Not only is there an absence of any intimation of its unhistorical character, but the details of persons and places in which it abounds testify to the opposite. Such things are not found in an allegory. Dr. Taylor Lewis, the distinguished Hebraist and commentator, says, that since there is nothing in the book itself to lead to the thought that it is unhistorical, it would amount to the perpetration of a fraud, if such were after all, the case. “In this respect,” he goes on to say, “it differs from all the fables, riddles, parables and allegories of the Scripture, which no subsequent inspired writer was ever led to regard as actual history.”
It is the apparent strangeness, the very unusual character of the recorded experiences of Job that leads certain critics to doubt its reality, but on comparison with the records of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph and others of his contemporaries, it is not so strange.
I agree with those who place the period of Job as early as the patriarchs, and one thing that suggests it is the long life of Job, about 140 years, comparing more nearly with the ages to which men then lived than at any subsequent period. But there are allusions in the text of the book also which help to fix its period. For example, the worship of God described in the first and last chapters, is seen to be that of sacrifice without any officiating priest or any sacred place, just as we find it in the time of the patriarchs, but not in the time of Moses. The allusions to the worship of idolatry also, viz., that of the heavenly bodies (Job 31:26-28), point to the earliest form of idolatry known. But there are certain omissions in the book which are equally strong evidence to its antiquity; for example, it never mentions the books of the Old Testament, or the history of Israel. This is almost incredible on the supposition that such a literature and such a people were in existence. Nor is there any mention of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, though those nations were in the neighborhood of Job’s locality, and would have furnished a strong weapon in the hands of his “friends” to emphasize certain arguments they were insisting upon. Indeed, I find that many expositors place Job as a contemporary of Abraham, and suppose the chronological order of the book to be somewhere between Genesis 11:1-32 and Genesis 12:1-20. The question of the authorship of the book is perhaps indeterminable, some ascribing it to Job himself, some to Elihu, and some, the largest number perhaps, to Moses. Of course, the author may have lived much later than the hero, and gathered his material from tradition and earlier writings, compiling the whole in its present literary form under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as in the case of other books to which reference has been made. Its place in the Old Testament Canon is authenticated by our Lord and his apostles. It was part of the Bible as they knew it, and as they used it. The book of Psalms was in the Jewish Canon the first and most important of the “Holy Writings,” and often gave its name to the whole (Luke 24:44). The Hebrew title (tehilim) means “praises,” but our English word “psalms,” is from the Greek, psalto, which means to strike a stringed instrument. According to tradition the psalms were gathered together by Ezra though some few additions may have been made afterward.
Among the authors David is the chief, 73 being ascribed to him by their titles, after him coming Asaph, the sons of Korah, Solomon, Heman, Ethan, and Moses, to the last three being ascribed one psalm each. Many psalms are anonymous, and among those one has been ascribed to Jeremiah (Psalms 137:1-9), one to Haggai (Psalms 146:1-10), and one to Zechariah (Psalms 147:1-20), though without any very strong authority in any case. A modern Higher Critic, one of the most advanced and radical among them, Professor Cheyne, boldly avers that David did not write any of the psalms, and that they were all post-exilic. He asserts this on the supposition that the Israelites were not sufficiently advanced in spiritual culture in David’s day to appreciate such expressions, and that David himself was not a man of such character and qualifications as to have written them. Scholars generally do not accept the view of Cheyne, and the readers of the foregoing chapters will hardly need specific answers to his affirmations. There was no period in Israel’s history so well adapted for the expressions of some of the Davidic psalms as David’s period, and the many-sided nature of the man, to say nothing of his heavenly inspiration, was an abundant equipment for the task. We may safely put over against these words of the English professor the estimates of such men of learning and piety as Athanasius, Basil, Luther, Milton, Hooker, Bishop Hall, Cardinal Newman, Dean Perowne, Charles H. Spurgeon and Alexander MacLaren, who find no difficulty in accepting a Davidic authorship. More of this, however, will be touched upon in the next chapter, and we may close this with a simple reference to the fact, known to every reader of the New Testament, that the latter abundantly authenticates the book of Psalms as a whole “not only by direct citation, but the frequent employment of its phraseology in scattered sentences and phrases.”