Much of the thought here is similar to the "Wisdom of Solomon" (ii. 22-4, iii. 1-9), where however the ideas are conflicting. It is said, "God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity: nevertheless, through the devil's envy came death into the world, and they that hold of his side do find it." But then Jahvism puts in with the declaration that the seeming destruction of the righteous is God's chastisement and probation of them. The Epistle to the Hebrews does not regard the sufferings and death of Jesus as God's work at all, but all from the devil. Though God spoke by him there is no suggestion that he sent Jesus, or that his coming was not voluntary. With this reservation, and a large one it is, that Jesus was not delivered up to Satan by God, but left to confront his torments in an effort to subdue him, "bring him to nought," the central idea of the Epistle is a doctrinal transfiguration of Job, who being delivered up to Satan, triumphs over the tempter and tormentor, and through all preserves his sinlessness and loyalty to God. The result being that those who had denied Job's merits, his sinlessness, had to secure Job's intercession in order to escape the penalty of having ascribed his sufferings to God (Job xlii. 8). [33] This relationship of ideas is all the more interesting because apparently unconscious in the writer of the Epistle, and thus revealing the extent to which Oriental religion had remoulded Judaism among the educated Jews of his time. Monotheism is strictly inconsistent with the supremacy of "merits" which is the very soul of Oriental religion. The sacred books of India contain records of saints or Rishis who by extraordinary austerities, sacrifices, and virtues so piled up their "merits" that the gods were frightened, as they were at the tower of Babel; and sometimes the gods tempted these powerful saints to commit some sin that would reduce their "merits." The Solomonic "Proverbs" are pervaded by the Oriental doctrine of "merits": a man is proved by test of his merits, as gold passing through the furnace (xxvii. 21); the perfect inherit good (xxviii. 10); and perhaps that sublime pedlar of transcendent gems imported along with the gold of Ophir some version of the Puranic legend of Harischandra, "the Hindu Job." All the Jahvist adulterations of the biblical version do not conceal the fact that when Jahveh, by delivering the meritorious man up to Satan, delivered himself also into the hands of Satan, he (Jahveh) was compelled to surrender before the merits on which the man had planted himself. Jahveh reclaimed his sovereignty, but agreed that Job, who had said "God hath wronged me," had spoken of him "the thing that is right" (xlii. 8). In the same way the storm-god Indra (the Hindu Jahveh) accompanied by all the gods, headed by Dharma (Justice), appears to Harischandra after his trials, and tells him that he, his wife and son, had, by their merits, "conquered heaven" (Markandeya Purana).