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And this strange tale has relations to all the other legends.

Here we have the great demon, darting fire, blazing, smoking, the destructive one; the rebel against the good God. He is overthrown by the bright-shining one, Dimiriat, the same as the Dev-Mrityu of the Hindoos; he and his forces are cut to pieces, and scattered over the land, and he, after being chased for months through space, is captured and chained. Associated with all this is a people of the Bronze Age-a highly civilized people; a people living on an island in the Western Sea, who perished by a calamity which came on them suddenly; "a summoner of death" came and brought disasters; and then followed a long period of terrible heat and drought, in which not they alone, but all nations and cities, were starved by the drying up of the earth. The demon had devoured the cows-the clouds; like Cacus, he had dragged them backward into his den, and no Hercules, no Indra, had arisen to hurl the electric bolt that was to kill the heat, restore the clouds, and bring upon the parched earth the grateful rain. And so this Bronze-Age race spread out their useless treasures to the sun, and, despite their miseries, they praise the God of gods, the Cause of causes, the merciful, the compassionate, and lie down to die.

And in the evil-one, captured and chained and sealed by Solomon, we seem to have the same thing prefigured in Revelation, xx, 2:

"2. And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.

"3. And he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should no more seduce the nations.”

CHAPTER XII.

THE BOOK OF JOB.

WE are told in the Bible (Job, i, 16)—

"While he [Job] was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

And in verse 18 we are told

"While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house :

"19. And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

We have here the record of a great convulsion. Fire fell from heaven; the fire of God. It was not lightning, for it killed the seven thousand sheep, (see chap. i, 3,) belonging to Job, and all his shepherds; and not only killed. but consumed them-burned them up. A fire falling from heaven great enough to kill seven thousand sheep must have been an extensive conflagration, extending over a large area of country. And it seems to have been accompanied by a great wind-a cyclone-which killed all Job's sons and daughters.

Has the book of Job anything to do with that great event which we have been discussing? Did it originate out of it? Let us see.

In the first place it is, I believe, conceded by the fore

most scholars that the book of Job is not a Hebrew work; it was not written by Moses; it far antedates even the time of Abraham.

That very high orthodox authority, George Smith, F. S. A., in his work shows that

"Everything relating to this patriarch has been violently controverted. His country; the age in which he lived; the author of the book that bears his name; have. all been fruitful themes of discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!"*

Job lived to be two hundred years old, or, according to the Septuagint, four hundred. This great age relegates him to the era of the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants, among whom such extreme ages were said to have been common.

C. S. Bryant says:

"Job is in the purest Hebrew. The author uses only the word Elohim for the name of God. The compiler or reviser of the work, Moses, or whoever he was, employed at the heads of chapters and in the introductory and concluding portions the name of Jehovah; but all the verses where Jehovah occurs, in Job, are later interpolations in a very old poem, written at a time when the Semitic race had no other name for God but Elohim; before Moses obtained the elements of the new name from Egypt."†

Hale says:

"The cardinal constellations of spring and autumn, in Job's time, were Chima and Chesil, or Taurus and Scorpio, of which the principal stars are Aldebaran, the Bull's Eye, and Antare, the Scorpion's Heart. Knowing, therefore, the longitudes of these stars at present, the interval

"The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 351.

MS. letter to the author, from C. S. Bryant, St. Paul, Minnesota.

of time from thence to the assumed date of Job's trial will give the difference of these longitudes, and ascertain their positions then with respect to the vernal and equinoctial points of intersection of the equinoctial and ecliptic; according to the usual rate of the precession of the equinoxes, one degree in seventy-one years and a half."*

A careful calculation, based on these principles, has proved that this period was 2338 B. C. According to the Septuagint, in the opinion of George Smith, Job lived, or the book of Job was written, from 2650 B. c. to 2250 B. C. Or the events described may have occurred 25,740 years before that date.

It appears, therefore, that the book of Job was written, even according to the calculations of the orthodox, long before the time of Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, and hence could not have been the work of Moses or any other Hebrew. Mr. Smith thinks that it was produced soon after the Flood, by an Arabian. He finds in it many proofs of great antiquity. He sees in it (xxxi, 26, 28) proof that in Job's time idolatry was an offense under the laws, and punishable as such; and he is satisfied that all the parties to the great dialogue were free from the taint of idolatry. Mr. Smith says:

"The Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Canaanites, Midianites, Ethiopians of Abyssinia, Syrians, and other contemporary nations, had sunk into gross idolatry long before the time of Moses."

The Arabians were an important branch of the great Atlantean stock; they derived their descent from the people of Add.

"And to this day the Arabians declare that the father of Job was the founder of the great Arabian people."†

*Hale's "Chronology," vol. ii, p. 55.

+ Smith's "Sacred Annals," vol. i, p. 360.

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Again, the same author says:

"Job acted as high-priest in his own family; and, minute as are the descriptions of the different classes and usages of society in this book, we have not the slightest allusion to the existence of any priests or specially appointed ministers of religion, a fact which shows the extreme antiquity of the period, as priests were, in all probability, first appointed about the time of Abraham, and became general soon after."*

He might have added that priests were known among the Egyptians and Babylonians and Phoenicians from the very beginning of their history.

Dr. Magee says:

"If, in short, there be on the whole, that genuine air of the antique which those distinguished scholars, Schultens, Lowth, and Michaelis, affirm in every respect to pervade the work, we can scarcely hesitate to pronounce, with Lowth and Sherlock, that the book of Job is the oldest in the world now extant." †

Moreover, it is evident that this ancient hero, although he probably lived before Babylon and Assyria, before Troy was known, before Greece had a name, nevertheless dwelt in the midst of a high civilization.

"The various arts, the most recondite sciences, the most remarkable productions of earth, in respect of animals, vegetables, and minerals, the classified arrangement of the stars of heaven, are all noticed."

Not only did Job's people possess an alphabet, but books were written, characters were engraved; and some have even gone so far as to claim that the art of printing was known, because Job says, "Would that my words were printed in a book!”

*Smith's "Sacred Annals," p. 364.

Magee "On the Atonement," vol. ii, p. 84.

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