And when Bela was dead, Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah reigned in his stead.” {26a} Now we find in the book of Numbers, that Balaam the son of Beor was killed in battle, fighting on the side of Midian in the last year of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness, {26b} and supposing Job’s trial to have taken place (as some ancient writers assert) some few years after the Exodus, as he lived one hundred and forty years after those events, he may very well have succeeded to the chief place among the Idumæan or Uzzite people upon the death of Balaam. The importance of this to our present purpose lies in the fact, that he is thus a witness to the antiquity and the use of sacrifice and burnt-offering, quite independently of the institutions and commands of the Mosaic law. If Job were of man’s estate, and had sons and daughters of like estate also, (as the narrative unquestionably implies,) even before his sufferings, he must have been born not far in time from the birth of Moses, probably some little while before him; and what he “did continually” in his own country, and apart from Moses, is a witness to the practice and acceptableness of sacrifice, anterior to the enactments of the law from Sinai; and a witness, not merely, let us observe, to the use of sacrifice, but to sacrifice by burnt-offering, when the victim was killed and consumed upon the altar of God. Now this leads us back to consider what is the probable origin of sacrifice, and sacrifice of this kind, altogether; for it is thus evident, that it was adopted into, and not originated by, the peculiar institutions of the Jewish nation and law. Now, of course we see at once where we must turn for the first account of sacrifice. The primal exercise of this mode of approach to God, is that recorded in the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, which shews at once the need which the Fall had brought upon man of drawing nigh to God, not without a propitiation; and at the same time exhibits, in sad prominence, the first-fruits of that corruption of nature entailed by it, which provoked the eldest-born of the world, in malignant envy of heart, to slay his next born brother. Let us turn, then, to a brief consideration of those events, as illustrative of the origin and nature of sacrifice.