`The floods have lifted up, O Jehovah

The floods have lifted up their voice;

The floods lift up their waves' (Psa. 93:3).

`The bricks are fallen down

But we will build with hewn stone;

The sycamores are cast down,

But we will replace them with cedars' (Isa. 9:10).

Synthetic Parallelism. In this form noun answers noun, verb answers verb, negative answers negative:

`O that the day might have perished in which I was born,

and the night which said "A male child is conceived"

Let the day be darkness;

let not God inquire after it from on high' (Job 3:3,4).

Many parts of Scripture resolve themselves into `poetry' when tested by these rules. For example, the beatitudes

of the sermon on the mount, the great psalm of love, 1 Corinthians 13 and many passages in the Prophets. The

poetry of the book of Job is exceedingly simple, only once or twice does the rhythm vary from the uniform couplet

and take the triple form. The parallels are of the simplest, where the second member corresponds with the first, and

could therefore be the spontaneous utterances of a people addicted to this form of speech, as the Arabs are credited

with being from earliest times, or, would lend itself to be recast into simple poetry without departing from literal

truth. There are indications in the book of Job that favour the idea that it was originally written in a form of Arabic,

and it is therefore quite possible that the writer of the Song of Deuteronomy 32, and of Psalms 90 and 91, was

inspired to write the book of Job in its present Hebrew form, ready for it to take its place in the sacred canon. There

is a providential ruling in all this, that should not pass without grateful comment:

`Only they, who have wrestled with the problem, can appreciate the extreme difficulty a translator has, who

attempts to translate a poem, its metre, its rhythm and its rhyme, into another tongue. In most cases beauty is

sacrificed, or meaning, or both. The most characteristic features of other poetry are just those which it is most

difficult to reproduce. But it has often been remarked that Hebrew poetry invites rather than repels translation.

Though written in the tongue of an insignificant tribe, the Bible is at home in all lands. So readily does it adapt

itself to new circumstances, that we seem to hear the Spirit speaking to us, "every man in the tongue wherein we

were born"` (A.S. Aglen).

This parallelism is everywhere manifest to the reader of Job, except in the prose introduction and conclusion.

The poem is constructed in a tripartite form, which we here display:

(1) The Book as a whole: (a) The Prologue; (b) The Poem; (c) The Epilogue.

(2) The Poem itself: (a) The controversy of the three friends with Job; (b) The mediation of Elihu; (c) The

self-revelation of the Almighty.

(3) The Controversy of the friends: Here the tripartite form is continued, in that there are three series in the

controversy, each in the same order (Job 27:11 to 28:28 is considered by many as Zophar's address. (See

The Companion Bible).

Making every allowance for the fact that oriental discourse is much more flowery than modern speech, it does

not seem reasonable to think that Job, distressed beyond measure by awful affliction and cursing the day of his birth,

should nevertheless speak in blank verse and be answered in the like manner by each of his friends. Art however is

sometimes truer in its effect than nature. From what we know of king Henry V, he would have been quite unable to

have addressed his soldiers before Agincourt in the measured verse that we find in Shakespeare, yet there will be

few that would prefer the actual language of the king, to the verse that we have as his memorial.