`Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead!'

or think of this soliloquy:

`Upon the King! let us our lives, our souls,

Our debts, our careful wives, our children and

Our sins, lay on the king! We must bear all'.

`'Tis not the balm, the sceptre or the ball,

The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,

The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,

The farced title running `fore the king,

The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp

That beats upon the high shore of this world,

No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,

Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave'.

Would truth be better served if the actual complaint of sleeplessness as expressed by the king had been

preserved, and Shakespeare's noble verse left unwrit? It may be that none of the speakers in the book of Job ever

rose to the heights of language that the poem now contains, but what of that? God has taken this great experience

and, by the inspiration of His Spirit, has enshrined it for ever in a casket of jewels. Who the actual penman may

have been we do not know, although there are strong reasons for believing it to have been Moses himself who put it

into its present form. Job himself lived long enough to have written the book, and like Ecclesiastes and Jonah, may

have manifested his true repentance by so writing.

What seems to fit the case without straining any point unduly, is that some time after the experiences through

which Job and his friends passed, Moses was inspired by God to preserve the story in the present poetical form. The

original document falling into the hands of Moses while in Midian was completed by him, Moses himself writing

the first two chapters, and the conclusion. He was then made to understand the sacred nature of the book thus

providentially brought to his notice, and taking it back with him upon his return to Egypt, this book of Job would

have been of the utmost importance in preparing the way for the great revelation which was to come through his

pen. Added to this, the problems raised by the book, would illuminate the problems of Israel as a nation, and enable

those who had eyes to see, to perceive the purpose of God behind the sufferings of the people. This aspect, together

with the age-long problem that the book presents, we must now consider.

The poetic portion of the book of Job, which commences with the words of Job as recorded in chapter 3,

constituted, so far as we can judge, the complete book, until the opening chapters and the concluding portion,

written in prose, were added by another hand at some later period. Instead of this feature being accidental, it is in

fact essential to the right understanding of the whole work. The whole Bible, like the book of Job, is waiting for the

divine Penman to write the needed introduction and sequel, but this is reserved until that day, when we shall know

even as we are known. With the book of Job before us, however, we have less excuse if we do not `trust where we

cannot trace'. For a man of Job's integrity and uprightness to curse the day upon which he was born, some

experience out of the ordinary is demanded. We learn from the first and second chapters how calamity after

calamity fell upon him until after the most awful suffering, aggravated by an entire absence of any apparent cause

for their infliction, Job breaks the silence with the words: