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Then there pass from Job's lips words into which Christian translators have breathed a distinctness, a hope and certainty, which doubtless far transcends the sublime, but dim, faith of the original. "I know," he cries, "that my Redeemer, my Rescuer, my Vindicator, liveth." Liveth, for He is none other than the living God — no more mute inscription, no human Goel, or avenger — on whom Job rests his faith. "And He, at the last," when all this bitter conflict is over, "will stand upon the earth," or rather, "on the dust," the dust of death into which I am sinking. "And" even "after my skin," this poor skin with all that it encases, "is destroyed" — even when "the first-born of death," and the "King of Terrors" himself, of whom you speak, have done their worst — "yet," even then, not "in," but rather "from" (in the sense most probably of "removed from," or "without") "my flesh," though my body moulder in the dust, "I shall see my God"— the God now hidden, the God to whom he had appealed before to hide him for awhile from the world of the dead, and then to call him forth. He will manifest himself at last to his forgotten friend, who will have survived for this the shock of the meat Destroyer; "whom I shall behold," he goes on, yea, I the prey of death, "shall see Him, shall see Him for myself." (Or see Him "on my side," the phrase is ambiguous.) "Yea, mine eyes shall behold Him, I, and not another. My reins," my very inmost heart, "consume," and melt "within me" at the vision...The sick heart faints with joy. Despair gives way to gladness. The poor tortured sufferer, who again and again has looked on the inevitable death which is waiting for him, as the limit of his days, as the final severer between himself and his God, rises to the region of a sublime, a rapturous hope. We dare not write into his words all the "sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection," which the Christian utters; still less that anticipation of a bodily rising from the grave, of a reclothing of his spirit in flesh, which the passage breathes in the great Latin translation, dear for ages to Western Christendom. We recognise even in the familiar words of our own older version, phrases and thoughts which outrun the patriarch's aspirations, the patriarch's faith. But for all that, when we have stripped the passage of all that is adventitious — all that even unconsciously imports into its framework the ideas and faith of another and later age — we still hear the cry of the saint of the old world, as he stands face to face with the King of Terrors; "Though my outward man decay and perish, yet God shall reveal Himself to me, to my true self." He plants, as it has been well said, the flag of triumph on his own grave. And his words, in one form or another, have lived longer than he looked for. They will outlive the scroll for which he sighed, the very rock on which just now he wished to see them engraved.

(Dean Bradley.)

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KJV: For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:

WEB: But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives. In the end, he will stand upon the earth.