They
had passed the stage of worshiping sticks and stones and idols, and
had reached to a knowledge of the one true God; they were
agriculturists; they raised flocks of sheep and camels; they built
houses; they had tamed the horse; they had progressed so far in
astronomical knowledge as to have mapped out the heavens into
constellations; they wrote books, consequently they possessed an
alphabet; they engraved inscriptions upon the rocks.
But it may be said truly that the book of Job, although it may be
really a description of the Drift catastrophe, was not necessarily
written at the time of, or even immediately after, that event. So
gigantic and terrible a thing must have been the overwhelming
consideration and memory of mankind for thousands of years after it
occurred. We will see that its impress still exists on the
{p. 343}
imagination of the race. Hence we may assign to the book of Job an
extraordinary antiquity, and nevertheless it may have been written
long ages after the events to which it refers occurred; and the
writer may have clothed those events with the associations and
conditions of the age of its composition.
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