This we may call the third point. Job puts forward a note of
interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of
proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is
a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. Lastly, the poet
has achieved in this speech, with that unconscious artistic accuracy
found in so many of the simpler epics, another and much more delicate
thing. Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah
in His deliberate declaration, he has contrived to let fall here
and there in the metaphors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and
splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a
sad one--semi-accidental suggestions, like light seen for an instant
through the cracks of a closed door. It would be difficult to praise
too highly, in a purely poetical sense, the instinctive exactitude and
ease with which these more optimistic insinuations are let fall in
other connections, as if the Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that
He was letting them out. For instance, there is that famous passage
where Jehovah with devastating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when
the foundations of the world were laid, and then (as if merely fixing
a date) mentions the time when the sons of God shouted for joy. One
cannot help feeling, even upon this meagre information, that they must
have had something to shout about. Or again, when God is speaking of
snow and hail in the mere catalogue of the physical cosmos, He speaks
of them as a treasury that He has laid up against the day of battle--a
hint of some huge Armageddon in which evil shall be at last overthrown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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