Job 32

EXCURSUS No. VI.

ELIHU.

A new interlocutor now enters upon the scene. He is a young man of high descent, ( רם , ram, high,) probably of the lineage of Abraham, and has thus far stood modestly in the background among the silent auditory. He is unmentioned in the prologue, and altogether unheralded, except by “the kindled wrath” of which the sacred writer four times speaks in Job 32:2-5. That wrath has been kindled by the miserable fiasco “the friends” have made, and by displeasure at the self-righteousness with which, as Elihu conceives, Job has plumed himself. He speaks only because he can no longer hold his emotions in check, and because he believes that he is inspired to announce principles of the divine government which Job and his friends have both ignored. “He represents, as it were, the better I of Job, for he knows how to say effectively to Job all that it is necessary and wholesome for him to know concerning the causes of his sorrows.” Andrea.

As to the discourses of Elihu it is difficult to account for the wide diversity of opinion they have called forth. On the one side stand the Jewish rabbis, who regarded him as a prophet of the Gentile world; Chrysostom, who represented him “as a witness to true wisdom both as respects his speeches and his silence;” Hengstenberg, who entitles him “God’s spokesman,” and his discourses “the throbbing heart” of the whole poem; and Bishop Wordsworth, who calls Elihu “the St. Stephen of the patriarchal Church.” See note on Job 35:15. On the other hand, the Venerable Bede identifies Elihu with the false prophet Balaam; Hahn calls him “a most conceited and arrogant young man;” Delitsch (in Hertzog) charges that his speeches are filled with “manufactured pathos; “while Herder and Eichhorn see in him but an empty babbler.

Similarly depreciating views have led some of the leading German exegetes to regard the Elihu section as an interpolation. Ewald goes so far as to detach and place it at the end of the work; notwithstanding he inconsistently admits that “the thoughts in this speech are in themselves exceedingly pure and true, conceived with greater depth, and presented with more force, than in the rest of the book;” which he proceeds to account for by the advanced stage of the debate when Elihu appeared. On the contrary, Schlottmann ( Einl., p. 55) and Stickel (228-232) have displayed consummate skill in tracing out the intimate relations this section sustains to the rest of the work; in gathering together the incomplete thoughts of the preceding speakers, which find their end and solution only in Elihu; and in showing that this whole section dovetails with the rest of the book according to the workmanship of a god rather than that of a man. See note, Job 34:9. it proves to be like the nervous system, which not only finds a place in the body, but is so interwoven with it as to be inseparable. The plane from which Elihu speaks is more elevated than that of Job and his co-disputants; his view of the moral government of God is more consistent and comprehensive; and the key to the mystery of suffering which he holds fits more of the dark and intricate wards of evil. This advanced knowledge “these doctrines more skilfully combined” leads Renan to say that they “appear to be more modern than those of the other interlocutors;” while he oddly enough adds, “but it would be difficult to say whether ages were necessary to produce this transformation,” (p. 57;) an admission which quite offsets the disparaging views concerning Elihu which he had previously expressed.

The office Elihu fills in the poem, structurally considered, is that of preparing the way for the coming of Jehovah. He is a quasi John the Baptist a divinely commissioned bearer of truth whose voice dies not away until the coming of Him who is greater than he. God reasons at large with man, through man: an Elihu is a necessity in the divine plan at least so far as its features have been disclosed to us. Dr. Walter Hedges (1750) went so far as to suppose that Elihu was a type of Christ in his human nature. When God himself shall appear and speak, he will speak like a God. In response to the repeated demands of Job that God should judge his cause, God will finally appear as judge, and if he speak, speak in the character of judge. Job’s appeals virtually criminate the Judge. The pious heart is startled by the boldness and vain-glory of his final summons of God. (Job 31:35-37.) Job’s whole being, to use one of his own figures, (Job 7:12,) is like the sea or its monsters, which unceasingly chafe beneath the divine will. In order that the character and function of the Judge may stand above even a conceivable impeachment, it is necessary that an advocate should intervene between the disputants, filling the part of an Elihu. Ere the God speak in adjudication, the reason of Job must be convinced; “the Titan must first be made puny in his own eyes,” and reduced to silence by probing his self-righteousness to the quick, and showing him that the true seat and source of his woes lies, not in God but in himself, and that the purification and exaltation of man’s being is the ulterior and loving end of the divine chastisement. The addresses of Elihu remove the stain of aspersion cast upon the divine nature, and open the way for a wise and righteous adjustment of the case at issue. The lacuna which would follow upon the excision of an Elihu from the scheme of the poem would be most palpable, and irreparable by other than a divine hand.

“To deny the genuineness of the speeches of Elihu,” says Hengstenberg, “is equivalent to plucking out the eyes of the book.” With the excision of Elihu, the poem would, indeed, prove a torso mutilated at the heart rather than at the extremities.

The Unravelment: Chaps. 32-42.

THE FOUR SPEECHES OF ELIHU THE FIRST PART OF THE POSITIVE SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM. Chapters 32-37.