ide is derived from Aramaic words only,
which words are not unsuitable to a writer who either lived, _or had
lived_ out of Palestine, and scholars agree now that they may belong
either to a very late or a very early time, and are used by people
familiar with the cognate languages of the East.

A word about your very natural feeling on the subject of Satan. I
suppose that Inspiration does not interfere with the character of mind
belonging to the inspired person. The writer thinks Orientally, within
the range of thought common to the age, and patriarchal knowledge, so
that he could neither think nor write as S. Paul or S. John, even
though inspired. We criticize his writing (when we do criticize it)
from the standpoint of the nineteenth century, _i.e._ from the
accumulated knowledge, successive revelations, and refined
civilization of several thousand years.

Its extreme simplicity of description may appear to us trivial. But is
not the fact indubitable that God tries us as He did Job, though by
different methods? And is not our Lord's expression, "whom Satan hath
bound, lo! these eighteen years," and S. Paul's, "to deliver such an
one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh," analogous to the
account in Job? One has only to try to transfer oneself to the
patriarchal age, when there was no Bible, no Lord Jesus come in the
flesh, but when at intervals divine revelations were given by personal
manifestations and then withdrawn, and to take out of oneself all one
has known about God from a child, to view the account as an Oriental
would look at it, not as a Western Christian. The "experiment" (so to
speak) involves one of the grandest questions in the world--Is
religion only a refined selfishness, or is there such a thing as real
faith and love of God, apart from any temporal reward? The devil
asserts the negative and so (observe) do Job's so-called friends; but
Job proves the affirmative, and hence amidst certain unadvised
expressions he (in the main) speaks of God the thing that is right.

I do not know that there is in the early chapters anything that can be
called "petty," more than in the speech of the devils to our Lord,
and His suffering them to go into the swine.

We must, however, beware that we do not, when we say "petty," merely
mean at bottom what is altogether different from our ordinary notions,
formed by daily and general experience of life, as we ourselves find
it.

All this long yarn, and not a word