The Book of Job has been referred to almost every age from Moses to post-exilic times. There is certainly an endeavour to reproduce the conditions of the patriarchal age, in the avoidance of the name Jehovah (Exod. vi. 3), and in the money standard adopted (Job. xlii. 11); but there is no desire to deceive the reader, for this archaic atmosphere is adopted merely as the appropriate setting of the dialogue, and is not maintained: the name Jehovah slips from the author's pen, he takes no pains to conceal his knowledge of the Law and his interest in the questions of his own times. The question of age is not to be complicated by the question of authorship; there was a person named Job, known to Ezekiel (xiv. 14), but there is nowhere any assumption that Job himself wrote the book; and the mechanical and symbolical character of the disasters which befall Job, and the nature of the compensation, show that we have here only dramatic settings for the speeches and not actual history. It is likely that there was a well-known tradition of a man named Job who had suffered overwhelming troubles and eventually had been restored to his former prosperity, and this is made the basis for a discussion of the problem of suffering. It has been suggested that in the Prologue and Epilogue we have fragments of that old tradition, since these passages are in prose while the body of the book is in semi-poetic rhythm; but the prose form is best explained as that always adopted by the Hebrews for narrative, for we find ideas in these parts that betray as late a date as anything in the body of the work. Considered on internal evidence, everything seems to point to the age which produced the rest of the Wisdom Literature; and more precisely, a date shortly before or shortly after Proverbs, seems indicated. The material for deciding more particularly is such that different conclusions may be drawn from it. For instance, the personification of wisdom in Proverbs seems to be in advance of the idea of wisdom in Job; and if we could think of the development of an idea always coinciding with chronological progression, then Job would need to be placed earlier than Proverbs; but this is complicated by the fact that the main body of the book of the Proverbs may have been in circulation before the earlier chapters were added. Yet there are apparent quotations from the Proverbs in the Book of Job (xv. 7 f. = Prov. viii. 22-25), and the reference to the lamp of the wicked being put out (Prov. xiii. 9; xxiv. 20) seems clearly to have Proverbs in mind (Job. xxi. 17). Dependence might, of course, be taken to lie the other way, but on the whole, it would appear that the problems dealt with in Job have not yet emerged for the writers of the Proverbs, and indeed Job seems rather an indictment of the superficial idea, which we find everywhere assumed in the earlier work that prosperity and goodness are inseparable. The most satisfactory order seems therefore