Job 21:1

JOB’S SIXTH REPLY.

1. But Job answered The friends have to the last adhered to their main proposition, that the wicked are punished in this life. Job now meets it for the first time face to face; devoting the entire speech to its consideration. He more discreetly than before makes an appeal to facts, and shows that in their entire life the wicked are eminently prosperous, and that even in the article of death their lot is easier than that of the righteous. The friends have made appeal again and again to the wisdom of the ancients; he, on the other hand, summons travelers, men of wide knowledge, who testify (Job 21:28-33) that the punishment of the wicked is in the next life a truth “the friends,” in their dogmatism, have ignored; that in this life the wicked are above law and responsibility to man; and that their memory; instead of perishing, as the friends maintained, lived on in magnificent tombs and the abiding power of an evil life. In thus urging the general prosperity of the wicked, Job has pushed his plea to the extreme of dogmatism, and in argument committed an error similar to that of his opponents, thus leaving a gap in his defence which gives rise to a renewal of the controversy. It is to be remarked that the first of Job’s discourses since his triumph of faith in the nineteenth chapter, (25-27,) like the others yet to follow, is marked by calm and dispassionate argument; by a greater freedom from personalities; by a more confident view of the darkest phases of evil; and by a faith which the darkness around him has no more power to disturb than the shadow of the night has to unsettle the fastnesses of the mountain, all which is in itself an earnest of the victory soon to follow.