The epic of the inner life, being the book of Job...

Front matter

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Preface

r I ^HE kind reception accorded to an article -*■ on " The Interpretation of the Book of Job/' published in the " Andover Review " for November, 1888, has encouraged the author to hope that a revision and completion of the study therein outlined may not be unacceptable to the reading public. In the carrying out of this work, thanks are due first of all to the editors and publishers of that Review, not only for their ready permission to make such use of that article as may seem necessary, but also for the hearty Godspeed that they have given to the undertaking. And now that the study has assumed the proportions of a book, some questions naturally arising about its form and the general treatment here adopted require, perhaps, the answer of a preface.

Those readers to whom the question-begging name Epic, displayed on the title-page, is a stumbling-block that must needs be removed

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before they can with complacency read further, are referred to pages 20-26 for a definition of the modified sense in which I have ventured to use the term.

The Book of Job, full as it is of religious edification, is also a poem, a work of literary art, to be read and judged as we would read and judge any poem, with the same favoring presuppositions, the same candor of criticism. It has long been my conviction that if we should make for it no demand but the literary demand, seeking in the broad diffused light of every day simply that unity of idea and treatment which we have a right to expect in every work of art, the book would prove itself not less sacred, rather more ; while also it would gain greatly by stepping out of its age-constructed frame of abstruse erudition into common people's homes and hearts. Whether by the present Translation, Notes, and Introductory Study I have in any degree succeeded in verifying this conviction must be left to my readers to judge.

The question naturally arises, Why make a new translation ? why not use the noble

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Revised Version ? Well, this is the answer that a prolonged study of the book has made increasingly evident : The Revised Version, being the work of a company of scholars, represents the average of their views ; it is the somewhat colorless, or perhaps we may say low-relief, product of many minds, all of whom must sink to some extent their individual preferences in order to accommodate themselves to a common and composite result. The work as it lies before us is the verdict of a majority vote. But the original was presumably the work of one mind ; such at least it must be presupposed until critical study compels another judgment. To. get accurately at that one mind's idea, as a whole and in all its parts, it seemed to me necessary to pass the work anew through the crucible of a single mind, whose business it should be first to find what the book supremely stands for, and then, without having to trim and modify in obedience to divergent views, to estimate candidly and correctly every shading of expression, every degree of intensity, every transition, every connection, in the light of that dominant idea. Of viii PREFACE

course this necessitates retranslation. Translation is interpretation ; it cannot be otherwise ; it must take more or less the color of the mind that draws the idea out of the original. True as this is of all translation, it is especially the case in translation from the Hebrew, in which language the provisions for finer shadings of thought are so meagre, one particle, for instance, having often to do duty for a variety of relations. The Hebrew language presents its thought in great unsquared blocks, sublime and simple ; and these the translator has to square and polish, so that they will joint together and make out of many one structure. The only way to do this effectually is to live with the author's mind, in selfeffacing submission and obedience, until the power is obtained to follow all his sequences, anticipate his turnings and objections, gradually embody all his thoughts into a complex unity wherein every part shall be luminous with the spirit of the whole. This I have endeavored to do, not without a good deal of painstaking labor. And the present translation, whatever other merits or defects it may

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have, will, I think, be found at least homogeneous, the work of one mind interpreting one idea.

A new translation, from the " natural " point of view, is also justified, as seems to me, by the fact that there is a strong tendency in a company translation, made in the interests of Church and Christianity, to make every clause at all hazards a source of spiritual and homiletical edification. The custom of founding sermons on passages of Scripture, which latter for this purpose are torn from their connections, may be legitimate for religious instruction, but its operation is sadly unfavorable to the reading or translation of a book of Scripture as a homogeneous whole. My hope is, that the present attempt to translate the Book of Job, with the sermonizing instinct for the time being effaced, may prove not unfruitful in suggestion.

Having made the translation with care, I have then proceeded to treat it as if it were an English poem. That is to say, the notes are not devoted, in any great degree, to telling the reader just how this and that passage got it-

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self done into English, or how many meanings Dillmann and Delitzsch and Ewald and Zockler found admissible, or how much suggestiveness there is in a certain Hebrew root or idiom. Perhaps in so denying myself I have missed a good chance to display learning ; but for this I do not "care, being more concerned with the question what the ordinary reader wants explained. The notes are accordingly designed mainly to trace the sequences and interdependencies of the thought, and to solve briefly the difficulties inherent in the work of a remote age and land. In the numerous cross-references, too, from one part of the book to the other, the reader may see how predominant the endeavor has been to make the book interpret itself. The author of a book, after all, is his own best expositor.

As a further help to the reader, I have discarded the old division of the poem into chapters and verses, which often makes misleading interruptions to the connection, and have adopted a division into sections, according to the natural articulation of the thought, retaining, however, for facility in comparison, the old

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notation at the bottom of the page. To this division into sections with their subdivisions, a parallel, suggestive alike for its mechanical helpfulness and for its delicate fitness to the nature of the thought so articulated, may be seen in the notation of Tennyson's " Maud," which is a "monodrama M worked out by a connected series of lyrics ; another, less closely indicated, in the " In Memoriam," which also portrays a progressive spiritual history by the lyrical method, its individual sections purporting to be " short swallow-flights of song." The value of these suggestions for the Book of Job is obvious. Its method, too, is strongly lyrical ; and by choosing the same manner of division and subdivision as has given fitting physiognomy to the above-named poems, I set off the speakers' changing yet progressive moods in such wise that the eye as well as the mind of the reader can better discriminate them.

So much for what seems necessary to explain. If the other features of my book are not self -justifying, no preface can justify them.

Amherst, Massachusetts.

February, 1891.