The most considerable of these are the speeches of Elihu (cc. 32-36). It has already been noted that Elihu's name is not in the prologue, he comes in with a bit of a prologue of his own (xxxii. 1-5); and when the three friends are rebuked in the epilogue, he, who surely deserved the same condemnation, is ignored. All his speeches, provocative enough, draw no reply from Job. When, at the end of Elihu's discourse, God answers out of the whirlwind (xxxviii. 1 ff.), "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge," it is to Job he addresses himself, not Elihu; and the appearance of God is naturally taken as the response to Job's challenge in xxxi. 35, "O that I had one to hear me," etc., just before Elihu breaks in. All these signs indicate that Elihu is an intruder. This inference is borne out by the arguments so pretentiously announced. They are in the main variations on the themes in the preceding speeches of the friends, with a certain evident predilection for the idea that suffering is a warning. It would seem that another poet thought, as he makes Elihu boast, that he could improve on the arguments of the friends. The unbiassed reader, without depreciating the poetical merit of the speeches, will be likely to differ with him. The eulogy of the divine wisdom (Job 28) is a very fine poem, in the vein of Prov. 8, of which it is probably not independent, but it is, to say the least, inappropriate in the mouth of Job at this point in the debate. The description of ancient mining is particularly noteworthy. In the speeches of God, the long descriptions of the hippopotamus and the crocodile (xl. 15-xli. 34) are not without reason suspected of being purple patches, and in putting them in some damage has been done to the margins. It has been questioned whether the prose prologue and epilogue really belong with the poem; but it would not be intelligible without them. In Ezek. xiv. 14, 20 the name of Job occurs with Noah and Daniel as exemplary righteous men, who, if they were alive, could nevertheless not save the wicked city of Jerusalem from its doom; but whether the story Ezekiel knew about Job had any resemblance to the prologue of our book, no one can tell. It may very well be that there was a prose book of Job (in which, possibly, the friends played the opposite rôle from that given them in the poem), and that the poet took from it the incidents and setting that he needed; but about that also nothing can be known.