JOKES IN THE BIBLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 4

JOKES IN THE BIBLE

Sir-It is a matter of regret when such topics as the above are discussed in your excellent publication as little good ever comes of them. However, I feel called upon to,correct the rash statements of "Oliver" lest any reader feel that the last word has been uttered. The theory, put forward in 1895, that "Job" is "cribbed " from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Socratic Dialogues, or the so-called " Babylonian Job," Tabi-utul-Beli, King of Nippur, has never been accepted for weighty reasons. It is denied by such first-line scholars as Ranston, Driver, Gray, Jeremias, and others (vide Ranston Wisdom Books, P. 105ff). Moreover, since last century no Hebrew scholar of weight has held that Job is other than a poetical drama written in the Greek or Persian era but set in the Patriarchal. We do not discount or belittle the didactic message of Mallory because Morte d’Artur is staged in an earlier period. Further, having some knowledge of Hebrew, and having had occasion to translate Jonah from that language, it being another didactic poem teaching the universality of the Jewish deity, I am satisfied that only out of complete ignorance of that. tongue could " Oliver" deem the book to be a satire, or to have been written by other than a master of the best classical Hebrew. As well suggest that Shakespeare was penned by an English-speaking Burmese. As for Job’s technical terms being in Greek, well, Braun-Driver-Briggs Standard Lexicon of Hebrew has yet to learn that fact, as also Liddell and Scott’s Greek. May one respectfully remind " Oliver" that a "little knowledge is a dangerous thing," especially when culled from shilling reprints of last century scholarship? Perhaps the pseudonym was adopted to notify that the facts were being given a twistvide Siemund Freud.

GILBERT J.

JOHNSTON

B.A. (Gore).