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Post by gsmithb on Dec 3, 2014 4:21:48 GMT
One possibility for the time period of Job is between Jacob and Moses during the stay in Egypt. He was the greatest of all in the east, meaning he would have been greater than the patriarchs. He would have had to live after the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Several references of prominent happenings are mentioned in Job, but not about the Exodus. Also, his oxen and donkeys were attacked by the Sabeans and it is thought that this tribe was not formed until after the Israelites went into Egypt. |
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Lee
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Post by Lee on Dec 25, 2014 18:38:31 GMT
The oldest book in the Bible is undoubtedly Genesis. Not speaking now however of the time when the book was written, but with reference to the events of which it treats. The book of Job does not come into competition with it on the score of age; it is rather a book that may be said to have its genealogical roots in Genesis—for in Elihu the Buzite we have manifestly a descendent of Buz, the son of Nahor, Abraham’s brother (Gen. 22:21); while in Eliphaz the Temanite we have evidently a descendant of Esau, in the line of Eliphaz and Teman (Gen. 36.) Then in Bildad the Shuite we may possibly have a descendant of Shuah, the son of Abraham, by Keturah (Gen. 25:2); while in Uz, after whom the land was called, we have again either a grandson of Shem (Gen. 10:23), or a son of Nahor (Gen. 22:21), or a grandson of Seir (Gen. 36:28). The period to which the book of Job relates is governed by these genealogical considerations, in the light of which it cannot go further back than the third generation of Esau’s descendants, of which Eliphaz was the first, Teman the second, and of course in “Temanite” (such as Job’s Eliphaz was) we have necessarily the third or some still remoter generation before us. Esau and Jacob being twins, but Esau marrying a whole generation before Jacob, the third generation of Esau would be contemporary with the second generation of Jacob; this therefore takes us down to the initial period of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt as the earliest time in which the scene in Job could have happened. But as Job’s three friends were evidently aged men, we may reckon that Esau’s fourth generation were already middle-aged men. The conclusion is that Job’s recorded experiences happened some time during the 225 years of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt; 154 years of which measure the interval between the end of Genesis and the death of Joseph, and the exodus of the fourth generation under Moses. Job therefore (we think) finds its proper chronological place between Genesis and Exodus. But its insertion here would have interfered with the connection of events, which requires Exodus to follow Genesis; and so just possibly for that reason the book has been assigned the more general place it now occupies. Job was on the ground for 140 years after his trouble, and if we reckon him to have been forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty years of age when his trouble came upon him, he must have made a great hole into some 200 or “225” years of Bible history. The Talmud (if that is worth mentioning) makes Job contemporary with Reuel the Midianite (Ex. 2:18), and with the 130th year of the sojourn in Egypt. The fact that the book of Job corresponds in so many particulars to the characteristic primitiveness of Genesis only suggests that it is a book of premosaic events, partly contemporary with Genesis, or supplementary to it, as Ruth to Judges or Esther to Ezra and Nehemiah.
1889 Christadelphian, 26(electronic ed.), 103–104.
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