It is clear that here we have got a book of patriarchal time. All the circumstances point to that time and no other. And, further, it is as well to state even now, before we go on, that the book appears to have been written in the time of Moses, and probably by Moses. But some people are a little perplexed by the fact that it comes after the book of Esther in the Bible. That has nothing whatever to do with the date of it. The historical books are given from Genesis to Esther — that is the end; then we begin the poetic books — Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. Therefore, we must necessarily go back here, because poetry was certainly not written after history, but concurrently with it. We can easily understand that the book of Job carries us back to the very same time that the first book of the history goes back to. Everything concurs to show that.
For instance, Job offered burnt offerings; it was lest his sons should have sinned. But it was not a sin offering, which would have been the natural thing if it had been after the law; it was before the law, and the offerings that were habitually offered by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, under all circumstances, were burnt offerings. So here we find a very simple mark in the very first chapter. And, again, we find that there is a very peculiar idolatry at this time. The book of Job was written after the flood of Noah; there was no idolatry before the flood. Of course, some theologians think there must have been idolatry, but that is no reason at all — it is merely their imagination. The fact is, the earliest idolatry was the worshipping of the sun, moon and stars, and in the course of this book we shall see that this is the only idolatry that Job refers to. It was what was common at that time, and they were getting afterward into much more degraded forms of it.
There Was Idolatry in Job’s Time
Therefore, it would seem that the writer of the book was a good while after Job, but that Job lived in a time when there was idolatry. Yet this thing is what alone he notices; it is in his defense of himself —that he was not guilty — which is one of the thoughts that governed the minds of his three friends. I suppose they were the orthodox people of that day, but like the orthodox people of many a day, it was a poor, human, contracted notion of God. Orthodoxy is merely the popular opinion of religion, as a general rule, and although there are elements of truth, and orthodoxy is certainly much better than heterodoxy, still it is not faith. It is not spiritual judgment, which is a deep acquaintance with God’s mind.
Only we must remember there was very little written at the time that this book was written, perhaps no more than the book of Genesis. I judge thus because there is no reference to the law. If it had been written after the law was given on Sinai, we might expect to find some allusion to that, but there is none.
Job’s Length of Life
There is another thing that contributes also to help us to the date, and that is the age of Job. He was 140 at least. There are some people who seem to think that he lived 140 years after all his troubles, but there is no ground for that. It is merely the manner of speech in the last chapter, and I presume it really means that this was his entire age, the period of his life — not the time after these disasters purposely fell upon him — for reasons that I am going to explain in a moment. Now, if that age be the age of Job, it shows we need not imagine more than what God’s Word declares, and he would therefore be rather a younger man when he died than Jacob. Jacob lived fewer years than Isaac or Abraham. So that would appear to point to the time of the patriarchal age, and all the circumstances fall in with that.
But there is another thing very remarkable and separate in the book. It is entirely outside Israel. There was certainly the nucleus of Israel then; Abraham, Isaac and probably Jacob had been living, and it is clear that this pious Gentile, Job, had profited a good deal from the knowledge of what God had revealed in His dealings, not only with those patriarchs, but the traditions of those who had lived before. I say “traditions,” because Scripture was not yet written. If there was any book of Scripture written at this time, it could only, in my opinion, have been, possibly, the book of Genesis. That was but very little. However, the book of Genesis is one of the most instructive books in all the Bible, and it is remarkable for being a kind of seed plot. All the seeds that later germinated into the various lines of truth throughout Scripture—there you have them all in their beginning.
W. Kelly