It seems probable, therefore, that the ancient story of Job was committed to writing by some priest during the Babylonian exile. Since Job and his friends live out on the borders of the Arabian desert to the east or southeast of Palestine, it seems clear that the tradition came to the Hebrews originally from some foreign source; but in the prose form in which we find it in Job, it has been thoroughly naturalized, for Job is a faithful servant of Jehovah and the law. Ignoring for the moment the poetical sections (iii. 1 to xlii. 6), we find that the prose story has a direct, practical message for the broken-hearted exiles, crushed beneath an overpowering calamity. Jehovah is testing his servant people, as he tests Job in the story, to prove whether or not they _fear God for nought_ (i, 9). If they bear the test without complaint, as did Job, all their former possessions will be restored to them in double measure (xlii. 7-17). [Sidenote: _The problem of the poetical sections of Job_] This prose story has apparently been utilized and given a very different interpretation by a later poet-sage in whose ears rang Jeremiah's words of anguish, found in chapter xx. 14-18 of his prophecy (_cf_. Job iii.), and to whose ears came also the cry of the pious voiced in Malachi ii. 17: _Every one who does evil is good in the sight of Jehovah, and he delighteth in_ _them. Where is the God of justice_? The old solutions of the problem of evil were being openly discarded. _They who feared Jehovah_ were saying (iii, 13, 14), _It is vain to serve God; and what profit is it to have kept his charge or to have walked in funeral garb before Jehovah of hosts? Even now we must congratulate the arrogant; yea, they who work wickedness are entrenched; yea, they tempt God and escape!_ With a boldness and thoroughness that must have seemed to his contemporaries dangerous and heretical, the great poet-sage presents the problem in all its intensity. [Sidenote: _The role of Job and his friends in presenting the problem_]