Job 2:13

13. Seven days and seven nights The Orientals not only bemoaned the event of death for a period of seven days, (Genesis 50:10, Sir 22:12 ,) but other calamities those of a national. (Ezekiel 3:15,) and, as in this case, those of a more private, character. The “Bedawi Romance of Antar” thus describes the lamentation of the tribes of Abs and Adnam over their great discomfiture, and the many kings and chiefs that had been slain in battle: “They threw down their tents and pavilions, and thus they continued seven days and seven nights.” The obsequies of a Jewish king were celebrated with peculiar honours: “among others,” says Maimonides, “a company of students in the law were appointed to sit at his sepulchre, and to mourn seven days together.”

(Cited by LEWIS, Antiq., 3:88.) Dillmann, Hirtzel, and others, deny that custom prescribed a seven days’ silence. This they attribute to deep compassion and awe for Job’s sorrow. The counter view of Ewald and Rosenmuller, that such mourning was in conformity with the custom of the times, may be illustrated by a similar usage that to the present time prevails among the Hindus: “Those who go to sympathize with the afflicted are often silent for hour’s together. As there were seven clays for mourning in the Scriptures, so here, and the seventh is always the greatest, the chief mourner, during the whole of these days, will never speak, except when it is absolutely necessary. When a visitor comes in, he simply looks and bows down his head.” ROBERTS, Orient. Illus. The Rabbins tell us that among the Jews the mourner always sat chief; and the comforters, who were the neighbours, were not to speak a word till he broke silence first. LEWIS, Ibid.

EXCURSUS No. I.

SATAN.

This word Satan Septuagint, diabolos, “devil” is a word purely Semitic, (Arabic, Shatanah,) signifying “adversary,” and is from the same form, שׂשׂן , Satan, “to attack,” “lie in wait,” “hate.” It is used in Job and in Zechariah with the article, “the Satan,” either for emphasis, “ the adversary “pre-eminently, (for the word appears elsewhere a few times as a designation of human beings,) or, more properly, as a proper name of a being at that time well known.

He first appears in Scripture under the guise of the serpent, (a name he afterwards bears,) as the agent in encompassing man’s fall. On the reasonable supposition that Adam, in his subsequent reflections if not in the hour of his temptation, must have peered through this bestial disguise and apprehended the superbestial agency involved in the act of intelligent speech, we may presume that the being of this profoundly mysterious adversary must have as deeply impressed the descendants of Adam as any other of the antediluvian facts whose traditions still linger among men. The Arabs, for instance, still “call a serpent Satan, especially if he be conspicuous in the crest, the head, and repulsive looks.” Schultens.

There are very few, if any, of the essential characteristics of the Satan of this book that are not to be found in the diabolic actor in the garden. So that the serious objection urged by some against the antiquity of the Book of Job because of its “full-fledged Satan,” as they are pleased to call this most malicious enemy of our race, really finds its refutation in the records of the Fall. And it may be as easy to account for the fact that during the many centuries included in the Book of Genesis no further mention is made of Satan, as for the silence respecting the actual instrument in beguiling Eve. A detailed comparison of the two Satans of Genesis and Job would show them to be not only one in being but in the amount of disclosure of character made, and that the supposed progress of doctrine in regard to Satan is without a valid basis.

A general knowledge of this evil spirit is implied in the Azazel of Leviticus, chapter xvi, translated scapegoat, who is represented as the antithesis to God, which necessitates a spiritual personality “a personification of abstract impurity as opposed to the absolute purity of Jehovah.” Roskoff. The very desert to which the goat “to Azazel” was to be sent, was in the popular belief the home of evil spirits. (Isaiah 13:21; Isaiah 34:14.) This view of Azazel as Satan is confirmed by the etymology of the word Azazel, the might or “power of God,” (Furst and Gesenius,) perhaps the name of the evil spirit before his fall, (compare Gabriel,) or “defiance to God,” another etymology suggested by Gesenius. ( Thesaurus, 1012.) Origen declared Azazel to be the devil. (See Hengstenberg’s “Egypt and the Books of Moses,” 159-174.)

In 1 Chronicles 21:1. Satan (without the article) “stands up against Israel,” and that he may involve a whole nation in the wrath of God, persuades its royal head into the pride and presumption of numbering the people. The Satan is here disclosed as operating within the domain of the mind, and moving mind directly by solicitations from within. This is the most important disclosure of the Old Testament with regard to Satanic agency.

The same idea of adversary appears in Zechariah 3:1, where Satan stands as accuser (Revelation 12:10, κατηγωρ ) at the right hand of the high priest the proper place of an accuser and antagonizes (literally, Satanizes) him in his official capacity of bearing the sins of the people before the Lord.

In these four chief places of the Old Testament where Satan is disclosed we have, therefore, a oneness and consistency of character answering to the generic meaning of the word Satan. The position of adversary to such a being as God, makes possible all that the Bible reveals of his nature. He stands at the head of fallen beings, who, in the New Testament, are called demons, δαιμονια the one great, powerful, and infinitely malicious personality, who, for some reasons not fully revealed, seeks the injury and ruin of our race an object of overwhelming terror unless restrained by the grace and power of God. In the New Testament he bears the names Satan, Beelzebub, Belial; and the titles “devil,” ( διαβολος ;) “slanderer,” (one who sets at variance;) the “wicked one;” “prince of this world;” the “destroyer;” “prince of the demons,” ( των δαιμονιων , Mark 3:22;) “prince of the power of the air;” “lord of the dwelling;” “worthlessness,” or “wickedness;” and is the author of evil, John 8:44, the enemy of mankind, Matthew 13:39, and the tempter of the faithful, 1 Thessalonians 3:5. Satan is a created spirit, subordinate in every sphere to God, and destined to be subjugated by Christ, and has but little in common with the dualistic conception of an evil spirit coeternal and coequal with the good. The disclosures concerning our great foe are confined to the word of God. Traces, indeed, there are, in the most ancient mythologies, that plainly reach back to the garden of Eden, of a spirit pre-eminently evil, but they are so overgrown with puerile conceptions of suryas: devs, fervers, etc., that the scriptural idea of Satan is almost lost. The evil spirit most nearly resembling the Satan of the Old Testament is Set, or Typhon, of the Egyptian mythology. Under the ascription of an “adversary,” he is invoked on a papyrus as “the god who is in the void, the almighty destroyer and waster.” DOLLINGER, Gentile and Jew, 1:453. The features of resemblance on the part of Set, or the Vritra of the Vedas, Tiamat of the Babylonians, Angra Mainyus (Ahriman) of the Avesta, or Loki of the Scandinavians, are too few to need notice. See pp. 277, 278.

EXCURSUS No. II.

SATAN AMONG THE SONS OF GOD.

The confessedly strange scene of Satan in the midst of “the sons of God” has called forth various theories:

1 . That it is to be regarded as a mere vision, after the manner of the vision of Micaiah. (1 Kings 22:19.)

2 . That the scene has not even the basis of a vision, but God employs the figure of an earthly court in accommodation to our ideas of things. According to Mercerus, while “engaged in their ministry the angels cease not to stand before the Lord. They are said, after a human way, to return to him when they praise him,” etc. Quaint Job Caryl, the most copious of the many writers on this book, takes this view: “This I say, God doth here after the manner of men; for, otherwise, we are not to conceive that God doth make certain days of session with his creatures, wherein he doth call the good and bad angels together about the affairs of the world. We must not have such gross conceits of God; for he needs receive no information from them, neither doth he give them or Satan any formal commission; neither is Satan admitted into the presence of God, to come so near God at any time; neither is God moved at all by the slanders of Satan, or by his accusations, to deliver up his children and servants into his hands for a moment; but only the Scripture speaks thus to teach us how God carries himself in the affairs of the world, even as if he sat upon his throne, and called every creature before him, and gave each directions what and when and where to work, how far and which way to move in every action.” Kitto ( Daily Bib. Illust. in loc.) endorses this view.

3 . That the Satan, here, is a good spirit, to whom has been assigned the work of trying and proving men. This was the opinion of Dathe, Eichhorn, Schultens, and Herder. The last mentioned regarded him as a kind of censor morum, or an attorney or solicitor general, ( Staats-Anwalt Gottes.) This view, which savours more of trifling than of serious discourse, is destined to a like fate with that of Dathe, of which Gesenius says it is now universally exploded.

4 . That his presence is tolerated as a culprit, or as a transgressor as yet unexposed except to God himself. Thus St. Augustine, ( Serm. in loc.): “Satan was in the midst of the good angels, even as a criminal stands in the midst of bailiffs awaiting judgment.” Delitzsch suggests, “that Satan here appears among the good spirits, resembling Judas Iscariot among the disciples until his treachery was revealed.” This thought Birks ( Difficulties of Belief, p. 99) expands: “If Judas remained long undetected among the twelve apostles, it is conceivable that the crime of the arch deceiver may have remained concealed for a time except from the eye of the Omniscient alone. We may conceive that the adversary was still permitted to appear among the sons of God, and to seek, in the courts of heaven itself, to veil his dark malice under the show of a zeal for the divine justice, and his fraudulent temptations under the specious show of genuine benevolence towards angels and men.” A plausible theory! but one requiring that the temptation of Job should have taken place prior to the fall of man; for at that time the character of Satan must have been fully revealed.

Another theory is that of Dachsel: “Satan appears among the children of God before the Lord, on the one part, because all his hostile doing stands under God’s holy will and his permission,… on the other part, because Satan and his angels have a right to accuse believers before the Lord as long as an unforgiven sin remains in the Church of God. Revelation 12:10.” (See also Delitzsch, under Job 2:9, who maintains the same view.)

The gist of this whole difficulty lies in the problem of the place where the scene transpired. The intimation that Satan could have insinuated himself into the heaven of the sainted dead is a pure assumption, at once contrary to the entire analogy of the Scriptures and offensive to our thoughts. The subject has been embarrassed by the too limited view taken of the dominion of God. The innumerable company ( μυριαδες ) of angels, (Hebrews 12:22,) may be assigned to divers worlds, and subjected to different economies of the divine government. Under some one of these, the visible appearing of Satan may be no more abnormal than is his invisible presence in kindred assemblages in this world. Indeed, our present economy, no less than that which opened in Eden, discloses not only the juxta-residence of good and evil spirits, but their casual association. Analogy justifies us in accepting a similar economy for at least one other world, and this would meet the demands the scene before us makes upon our faith. The scene, however, which is remarkable for its downright naturalness, has been overlaid with “cabinets” and “councils” and the paraphernalia of Eastern courts, to the prejudice of sound criticism.