Note 114 — Chapter XII · ON THE DISPUTED PASSAGES IN THE DIALOGUE-PORTION, ESPECIALLY THE SPEECHES OF ELIHU.

It is a pleasure to quote the forcible summing-up of Mr. Froude. ‘A difficulty,’ he remarks, ‘now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable. As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the 27th is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the 11th to the 23rd verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has maintained before—is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow the truth of Job’s last and highest position, supposes that he is here receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem’ (Short Studies, vol. i.) He then proceeds to mention with cautious approbation the theory of Kennicott (see note on Text at end of Chap. XV.)