allusion to the earthly human, whether it be to each individ- ) There is the same touching thought of remembrance, Job xiv, 16. It has the deeper pathos from its reference to the far future, when not only the earthly "places that now know us shall know us no more," but even nature shall seem to have forgotten us: "Thou wilt have regard to the work of thy hands." When we lie buried deep in dust, there is an eye that never loses sight of us. From the beginning unto the consummation of the process, from the first breathing of the organized humanity until its glorious reconstruction, God has ever "regard to this work of his hands." Nothing can be more affecting than the broken, sighing, soliloquizing language in which Job utters his hope that He who formed his human body, He who permits Satan to destroy it, will yet "appoint him a set time," will yet "remember him." The words are ejaculatory; they run like a broken, murmuring stream; sentences and verses having a logical connection are parted by the utterance of anticipatory emotions; but amid it all it is not difficult for one who places himself in the subjective position of the mourner to gather up the fragmentary thought. Few are the points in the picture, yet how mournfully vivid when rightly grouped together. How long, as well as how minute, this memory of *The other interpretation of this peculiar language, which makes "the lowest. parts of the earth "equivalent to "this lower world," is far from satisfactory. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XV.-5 God! Time, though of immense length in the conception, seems of no account. It is a vision of ages. Nature has gone on with her mighty change, "the flood has failed from the sea," "the mountain crumbling falls, the rock is removed from its place, the waters wear the stones, they wash away the things that grow out of the soil of the earth." One might almost fancy it the language of our modern geology. But during all this time" man lieth still and riseth not." "Until the heavens grow old," (see Psalm cii, 27,) and nature is in that last decay which precedes her renovation, the slumbering body "waketh not, nor is roused from its long sleep." But it is not lost to the divine memory. "Thou wilt have regard to the work of thy hands." We know that others interpret this passage differently; but we can take no other view. The whole context shows that the language is prompted by the hope of some future reviviscence* after a long imprisonment in Sheol, whether we understand by that word the grave as the abode of the body, or some gloomy, shadowy spirit-land, in conception so near to death and utter dissolution that the soul longs to be delivered from it. "O that thou wouldst lay me up in Sheol! O that thou wouldst appoint unto me a bound, and then remember me!" The sudden upspringing hope gives birth to the prayer, and then follows the ejaculation, which is but the emotion of wonder at the conception it has called forth: "If a man die shall he live?" It is not a denial, not even a doubt, but a solemn, musing, soliloquizing query, as of a soul believing yet struck with the greatness and strangeness of the belief. “If a man die shall he live?" The emphasis is on the contrast, and this appears from the abruptness and strongly disjunctive accentuation of the Hebrew sentence.† Must a man die to live? It is not so much the modern idea of the resurrection, as the old Arabian belief of a renovation, a cyclical renewing of the world and man, such as seems to have been in the mind of the Psalmist, cii, 27, where by is evidently denoted the "change" of renewal after decay, just as this same word is used of the regermination of the plant, Job xiv, 7, (if it be cut down, 79, it shall bud again,) and Psalm xc, 6. This ancient Oriental doctrine of cyclical renovation is most fully and learnedly discussed by Pareau in his book De Notitiis Immortalitatis ac Vitae-futurae ab antiquissimo Jobi Scriptore adhibitis. It is a treatise of rare occurrence and of rare merit. -exclam ה is more properly the היחיה The particle in .אם ימות גבר היחיה + atory than the interrogative, although it may include both. There is unquestionably an expression of surprise or wonder: "Ah! if a man die, shall he live!" Is death, indeed, the way to life? Then "all the days of my appointed bound will I wait until my change,† (my п,) my reviviscence, come. Thou wilt call and I will answer thee, thou wilt long for the work of thy hands." Blessed be God for the anthropopathies of the Bible! There is not in all Scripture a more tender word than the one here employed to express the continuance of the divine interest in the mouldering human remains: on, "Thou wilt have a longing desire." It denotes that intensity of affection which makes the face grow pale with care and watching. The places where it occurs are few but most significant. It is used in Niphal (Gen. xxxi, 30) for the feeling of homesickness, Jacob's fainting "desire We have it in all .נכסף נכספתח לבית אביך ",for his father's house its inimitable tenderness, Psalm lxxxiv, 3, where it expresses the same feeling made holy by being directed to a higher and holier home, or to its appointed symbol here on earth: -D) mnbb Da Mbo, "Longs, yea, faints my soul for the courts of the Lord; my flesh and my heart cry out for the God of my life." Such is the word that is here employed in this remarkable soliloquy of Job to denote the intensity of the divine remembrance of man, God's longing desire to bring back his banished, and to deliver the pious dead, who, though lying * would be literally militia mea, "my warfare," my term of military service. Take the figure, however, as we may, it is evidently explanatory of , or appointed bound," in the verse before. + Compare Paul's ¿λλayŋoóμɛ0a, 1 Cor. xv, 51, 52. 2 Sam. xiv, 14: "For we must needs die, and we are like water spilled upon the ground which cannot be gathered up again; yet God doth not take away the soul. (see margin,) but he deviseth devices that his banished (72, driven forth) be not expelled from him." If we take the ordinary interpretation, it is difficult to see any force of argument in this as applied by the woman of Tekoah to the case of the banished Absalom. We have, therefore, often thought that it contains one of those intimations of a common Jewish belief in a post-mortem state which meet us here and there in that reserved book the Old Testament. They are all the more forcible from their coming upon us thus incidentally, as it were, or by surprise. In this passage the expression, we must surely die," (Heb. 2,) is regarded In this he favors by Jarchi as a confession of the primeval sentence, Gen. ii, 17. the idea of a post-mortem allusion, and thus regarded, the application is most striking. Let the banishment here be referred to the banishment of the grave with the hope of recall or deliverance, and there is a clear and cogent argument from the greater to the less. The common interpretations, of which the reader may see a long list in Poole's Synopsis, have come from the prejudged view that such a thought could not possibly have had a place in the mind of a Jew of that age, especially one of the common or lower class. But what evidence is there to support in Hades, according to the primal sentence, are still "bound up in the bundle of life." In the holy breathings of the devotional Scriptures there is precious evidence, not frequent, indeed, but unmistakably clear when it comes, that this thought had power for the souls of the pious, the thought that God remembers the dead. The holy dead, at least, still "live unto him." "They abide in the secret of his tabernacle;" they rest under the shadow of the Almighty; they are safe in the divine memory, although they have had to suffer the ancient penalty, and to go for a season into that banishment which it demands of all. There is an awful reserve in the Old Testament about this whole doctrine of a future life; but this only renders more precious the gleams that now and then come to us from over the dark river of death. Most scanty indeed are they, yet still such a prejudice? There are clear hints which enable us to affirm that the evidence is the other way. There was not, indeed, a distinct doctrine of a bodily resurrection; but there was still a "being for the dead." The superstition of the Oboth, and the story of the woman of Endor, is sufficient proof of the common notion thus far. But more than this, it was believed that the dead, the pious dead at least, still "lived unto God," that is, existed in some such relation to him as in that other remarkable expression above quoted from Abigail's words to David, 1 Samuel xxv, 29: "But the soul of my lord shall be bound up in the bundle of life, 77, with the Lord thy God." This passage the Jewish commentators refer without hesitation to a post-mortem state. Rabbi Tanchum explains it at length as denoting the state of the pious dead, blessed indeed, yet still not made perfect and still unabsolved; while the "casting out of the sling," in the same passage, describes the turbulent unrest of the wicked, "who are violently driven forth, while the righteous hath hope in his death." Prov. xiv, 32. The word here for driven forth, 7 or , is the same as that employed 2 Samuel xiv, 14. being rather rare, and, therefore, the more peculiar and emphatic in both cases. The hope of the righteous, on the other hand, would be the hope of recall or deliverance from banishment, or, in other words, that "God would not leave his soul in Hades," or give it up to the dominion of Hades. He lies down in submission to the primal sentence, but hopes for absolution from it when the Redeemer descends into Hades. Rabbi Tanchum concludes his long comment by noting that the declarations are placed in the mouths of women, the best preservers of the traditional or popular belief; and hence infers the superiority of the Jews to the more learned and philosophical of other countries. The life of man "bound up in the bundle of life with the Lord his God;" the glorious idea of mutual relation contained in the common Hebrew oath, "As the Lord liveth and as thy soul liveth;" truths like these, which elsewhere only present themselves to the highest minds, if they are felt and known at all, are here the property of the common mind, manifestum vel mulieribus. Hence he argues, too, how well the Jews were entitled to the praise of that declaration, Deut. iv, 6, "Surely a wise and understanding people is this great nation."-Maimonides Porta Mosis, 92. having more to awake the soul to thought than all the particularity to be found in the Greek accounts of Hades, Tartarus, and Elysium. There is, as we have said, little or nothing that can be called definite or positive about another world, or any such clear view as Christianity has brought to light; but there are a few ideas with which we cannot fail to be struck, as forming constituent elements of a sentiment that was ever growing into a more and more settled faith. They differ from the distinctively Christian ideas, not so much by being in opposition, as. by giving that more somber aspect of the great doctrine which it was to wear until the coming of the Prince of Life. These sadder, less hopeful, but by no means hopeless, features may be thus stated: Death is a sentence, never losing its penal aspect; it has the appearance of banishment, violent for the wicked, but hopeful for the pious; hence the post-mortem state immediately succeeding is not a desirable one; it is mourned over by the good, as is done by Hezekiah and in some of the Psalms; it is imprisonment, though with the ideas of wardship and security; it is unknown and gloomy; it is a land of silence; the degree of life and consciousness is uncertain; sense, and the memory of the present life seem sometimes to be regarded as greatly in abeyance, if not wholly suspended; it is an appointed time to be patiently endured; it is ever awaiting for a great deliverance and a great Deliverer; and, finally, the most precious thought connected with it is, that the soul still rests in the divine remembrance; or that, whatever be the nature of the separate life, or whatever the degree of its consciousness, it is still a "living unto God.", To this idea of a return from banishment, it has been thought there is a reference, Psalm xc, 3. The primal sentence is there certainly kept in view: "Thou turnest man to dissolution, and thou sayest, return ye children of men." There is evidently intended an impressive paronomasia in the double use of the verb . The second application of it may mean a turning from dust, as the first, doubtless, denotes a turning to it, as employed in the original sentence of condemnation. Hence the Episcopal Church Psalter, following the old Latin version, (revertimini,) renders it, "Come again ye sons of Adam," ye children of the earth. So Luther's expressive translation, Kommt wieder menschenkinder, "Come back again ye chil 4 |