The Book of Job

The Book of Job
By Marco Treves

A Philosophical Dialogue
The Book of Job may be described as a philosophical dialogue in verse or a dramatic poem dealing with the problems of Divine Justice (theodicy) and man's attitude towards misfortune.
Many famous dialogues on philosophical subjects have been written since 405 B. C. One need only to mention the names of Plato, Xenophon, Bembo, Baldassar Castiglione, Tasso, Galileo, Leopardi, etc.1 In view of these illustrious examples some writers of literary manuals re­gard the dialogue as the most suitable and natural form for discussing philosophical problems. This opinion, however, is open to question. Other literary forms appear to be more natural and suitable. Indeed, it may be doubted whether any philosophical dialogues would have been composed at all, were it not for the magnificent example of Plato who was admired and imitated by many generations of philosophers. Today, as the classical tradition is dying out, philosophers seldom write dia­logues.
Plato had several good reasons for choosing this form: in the first place he was a disciple of Socrates, whose peculiar method of discussion was maieutic, i. e. based on questions and answers. Secondly, he desired to pass off his own doctrines as though they were his teacher's, perhaps in order to lend them greater authority, or to disclaim responsibility for certain strange conclusions, or out of modesty. Thirdly, Plato was not only a philosopher, but also something of a poet, a story teller, and a humorist. The dialogue form provided an opportunity for giving vivacity and wit to abstruse matters, and drawing facetious caricatures of the sophists and rival philosophers. Fourthly, the Athenians of those days were great admirers of drama, and Plato wished to vie with the great writers of tragedies and comedies, as he says himself.2 Fifthly, Plato was an admirer of Sophron's humorous dialogues.
As there were no “maieutic” philosophers before Socrates and there were no comedies or tragedies — except in Greece and Sicily — before the Alexandrian age, one may conclude that Plato was the inventor of the philosophical dialogue, and that the literary form of the Book of Job indirectly derives from Plato.
The dialogue has a long tradition in Greece, whereas in Hebrew literature it is an isolated phenomenon. Of course, if the Book of Job derives from the Platonic dialogue we must date it after 331 B. C. Before Alexander's conquest the Jews had no opportunities of reading Greek literature.
The Book of Job, however, is not a direct imitation of any of Plato's works. We must look elsewhere for its sources.

The Structure of the Book of job
The Book of Job, apart from some interpolations, which will be dealt with later, consists of a prologue in prose, a series of speeches in verse by Job, his friends and God, and an epilogue in prose. Some mod­ern scholars suppose that the prologue and epilogue are by a different and earlier author. They suppose that a) a prose writer composed a short story about Job; b) at a later date a poet versified the dialogue part; c) either the poet himself or a third person — an editor — gutted the prose story, discarded the central portion, and sandwiched the verse dialogues between the two stumps.
This theory is not probable. In the first place a poet borrowing his plot from a prose tale would have versified the whole story. Why on earth should he have refrained from versifying the prologue and the epilogue? It is also highly questionable that a poet would have inserted his dialogue into a prose story made by someone else. I should certainly be amazed if I were told that either Shakespeare himself or a modern editor had published an edition of the central portion of the great dra­matist's Othello, devotailed between two fragments of G. B. Giraldi's prose tale serving as prologue and epilogue. If the portions of Job are by a different author, they certainly were written later than the poetic ones. One can mention many works of poetry and prose commingled in which the poetry is earlier than the prose, although I recollect very few in which the prose is earlier than the poetry.
F. Torraca's Manuale della letteratura italiana (Firenze, 1918, vol. I, part II, 124—212) contains the Divine Comedy partly in verse, partly in prose. The verses are by Dante, the prose passages are by Professor Torraca, who summarizes some of Dante's Cantos for reasons of space or of suitability.
Turning to older books, we find that the Saga of the Volsungs and Snorri Sturluson's prose Edda are written in prose, but contain quota­tions of earlier poems. In the Saga some of the speeches — i.e. the passages in direct oration — are in verse. The poetic Edda is largely in verse but some prose passages have been inserted by the compiler. In some cases (“Grimnismal”, “Lokasenna”) the prologues and the epi­logues are in prose, while the speeches are in verse,3 just as in the Book of Job. We find prose and poetry in the Deipnosophistae by Athenaeus. This author writes in prose but quotes fragments both of prose and of poetry. In all the other literary works composed of prose and verse that come to my mind — Dante's Vita Nuova, Boccacio's Ameto, Sannazaro's Arcadia, the Buddhist Birthstories (Jataka tales), the Lalita Vistara, the Saddharma-pundarika (the Lotus of the True Love), the Panchatantra, etc., the verse is either older than or contemporary with the prose. Even in the Hebrew Genesis some snatches of verses occur.4 Scholars agree that they are older than the prose texts in which they are embedded.
It is natural for a prose writer to quote poetry. It is also natural for the editor of a poem to add an introduction or a commentary in prose. It is not natural for a poet to quote pieces of prose or to insert his own poetic compositions into an already existing prose work by another writer.
In spite of the examples quoted above, one may doubt whether the prose and the verse sections of the Book of Job are by different hands. The reason is the following: in the whole range of ancient literature known to me, the work most similar to the Book of Job, both in struc­ture and subject, is Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. The similar­ities are the following:
1)Both works are a mixture of verse and prose, in spite of the fact that they have unity of subjects.
2)Both works are largely dialogues, which, however, are meant to be read, not performed on the stage. They both belong to a genre inter­mediate between the drama and philosophy.
3)In both works human and non-human (supernatural or allegorical) characters are introduced: Job, his friends, Satan and God; Boethius, the Muses, Philosophy.
4)Both works deal with the problems of Divine Justice and resignation in adversity.
5)Both are apparently intended to comfort the unfortunate, and con­clude that we must trust God, though His acts may seem inexplicable to us.
6)Neither has recourse to arguments drawn from faith in life after death, or from awareness of sins committed, or from a belief that the hero is suffering for a just cause or for the good of others.

These similarities are so numerous that they cannot be fortuitous. Yet it is quite unlikely that Boethius should have imitated the Book of Job. A Christian author of the sixth century A. D. would never have introduced such pagan characters of the Muses, Philosophy and Fortune into an imitation of the Bible.
We are forced to conclude that the authors of Job and the Conso­lation were inspired by a common model. If such is the case, the combi­nation of prose and verse may have already occurred in this model.
Modern scholars believe that Boethius borrowed the idea of the literary form of his book from Menippus, a Cynic philosopher of Gadara in Palestine. The writings of Menippus are lost. We know, however, that they induced dialogues in a mixture of prose and poetry (Lucian, Bis accus. 33), that they dealt with ethical and philosophical problems and that some of the interlocutors were gods or mythical heroes. They must have been very popular among the ancients, for they were imitated by Ennius, Varro, Lucilius, Horace, Seneca, Petronius, Lucian, and Marcianus Capella. So in all likelihood, we have found at last the literary model of the book of Job and the missing link between Plato and Job and between Plato and Boethius.
If anyone should object that an irreverent Cynic like Menippus is unlikely to have provided the model for a pious and serious work such as the Book of Job, one might reply that the De consolatione is pious and serious too, and yet all the critics derive it from Menippus. Nothing prevents us from supposing that the Book of Job is rather a refutation than an adaptation of Menippus’ philosophy. All modern literatures abound in religious works which imitate in structure pagan or profane ones inspired by different ideologies. I do not claim that the author of Job adopted any of Menippus’ doctrines. I merely claim that he bor­rowed from him the idea of composing a philosophical dialogue in verse on the problem of the conduct of the sage in adversity.
Boethius ignores the possibility of finding consolation in any Chris­tian eschatological belief. He draws all his arguments from pagan philos­ophy. He introduces the character of Fortune, which for a believing Jew or Christian is almost impious. All this is rather strange, considering that he was a devout Christian and the author of several theological treatises. It can only be explained on the assumption that he followed rather closely a pagan model.
It might be supposed that Boethius and the author of Job imitated not Menippus but some other Greek writer of the same period: for in­stance we know that Crates of Thebes wrote tragedies imbued with the spirit of philosophy and the poem of Job is a kind of philosophical tragedy. However, there is no evidence that Crates mixed verse with prose, and since the scholars who have studied the sources of Lucian, Boethius and Latin satire writers attribute the invention of this literary form to Menippus, we shall abide by the consensus of the scholars.
There is another ancient dialogue which has a certain similarity to the poem of Job and the De consolatione. This is Lucian's fisherman. The points of resemblance are the following:
1)Like both Job and the De consolatione, it is philosophical and dra­matic.
2)As in the poem of Job, the protagonist is a man who is accused unjustly and whose innocence is finally vindicated.
3)As in the De consolatione, one of the characters is a personification of philosophy.
4)As in the De consolatione, the protagonist is the author himself.

In spite of the great differences in tone and details, I suggest that these three dialogues may be imitations of the same work of Menippus. Of course, I use the word “imitation” in the broadest sense, so as not to preclude a good deal of originality and the influence of other sources.
The Latin scholar Varro wrote “pseudotragedies” which, like the Book of Job, were dramas intended to be read, not recited on the stage. He is supposed to have borrowed this genre from the Greek Cynics. He also wrote satires in a mixture of prose and verse, in which he imitated Menippus. Thus, from whichever direction we approach our problem, we are always brought back to Menippus.5
In conclusion, it is almost certain that the Book of Job — with the exception of the interpolations — is the work of a single author. If there were two authors, it is probable that the poet be earlier than the prosa­ist. It is absolutely impossible that the prosaist should be earlier than the poet.
It is very probable that the Book of Job imitates the dialogues of Menippus. It is less probable that it imitates some other Greek author of the Hellenistic age, who, like Menippus, combines some features of the Platonic dialogue with some features of the Greek drama. It seems improbable that Job's model should be pre-Hellenistic or non-Greek.

The Date of job
Termini post quos:
1)The language is comparatively late and contains many Aramaisms, which point to the post-exilic period.
2)The personage of Satan, unknown to the pre-Exilic Hebrews, is considered to be an adaptation of the Evil Spirit of the Iranian reli­gion. Satan tempts Job as Angria-Mainyu tempted Zarathustra.
3)The Book of Job is a philosophical dialogue, a literary form which was invented by Plato ca. 405 B. C. and could hardly have been known to the Jews before 331 B. C. Since the philosophical dialogue is a derivation of Socrates’ maieutics, of Sophron’s mimes and of Attic drama, it could not have come into existence independently among a people who had no drama, no mimes, no knowledge of Socrates.
4)The Book of Job is probably an imitation of some dialogue by Men­ippus of Gadara (died ca. 250 B. C.).
5)The mention of a runner (Job 9,25), which probably refers to foot races, also points to the Hellenistic period. The ancient Hebrews did not go in for athletics.
6)The word “wisdom” occurs in the post-exilic sense of Torah in Job 11,6.
7)The Book of Job contains a few reminiscences of the Greek trage­dies, which could hardly have been known to the Jews before 322 B.C.
8)The Book of Job contains many reminiscences of the Song of Songs (certainly after 260 B. C., and probably after 246).
9)The Book of Job contains many echoes of Prov 10—29 (3rd century B.C.).
10) There is an allusion to the Greek studies on the dimension of the earth (Job 9,9). Eudoxus (408-355 B.C.) was apparently the first scientist who tried to calculate the dimensions of the earth. But our poet was probably thinking of the studies of Eratosthenes of Cyrene — librarian at Alexandria from 240 to 194 B. C. — set forth in his book On the Mensuration of the Earth. The inhabitable world of Job 37,12 and the earth hanging in space (Job 26,7) are also Greek conceptions which our poet found in Eratosthenes.
11)The reference to the sword of Damocles (Job 15, 20—22) probably derives from Timaeus of Taormina, a Sicilian historian who flour­ished about 265 B. C. (cfr. Kirkpatrick, Psalms, 46).
12)The description of so many animals in Job 38—41 shows that the poet was much interested in zoology, a science that had been founded by Aristotle, who was head of the Lyceum from 335 to 322 B. C., but the interest in wild animals may have been fostered by the hunting exploits of Ptolemy Epiphanes in 189—188 B. C.
Termini ante quos:
1)Ecclesiastes (168 B. C.) contains a few reminiscences of the Book of Job.
2)Jesus ben Sirach (162—141 B.C.) mentions Job in a manner that shows he was acquainted with our book and also imitates several passages.
3)Job contains no mention of the immortality of the soul or the resur­rection of the flesh, beliefs which might have provided a more consol­ing solution to the problems of divine justice. These doctrines were adopted by the Pharisees apparently about the time of John Hyrcanus (end of second century B. C.). However, the resurrection was already known in the days of Daniel 12 (ca. 164 B. C.).
4)The development of the idea of Wisdom seems to show that Job is earlier than Prov 1—9 (ca. 165) and Ecclesiasticus.
5)The non-nationalistic outlook, the absence of any reference to Israel, to the Torah or to the Prophets, the choice of an Edomite for a hero makes it likely that the book was composed before the Maccabean wars, which aroused nationalistic feelings and hatred of the Edomites.
6)In declaring his innocence (Job 21), Job does not mention idolatry among the sins he has avoided.
7)Among the misfortunes which destroyed Job's cattle and his family, war is not mentioned.
8) I have the impression that several Greek phrases occurring in the Psalms were borrowed not directly from the Greek authors but through the Book of Job, whose author was certainly acquainted with Greek literature.
We may conclude that the Book of Job, with the exception of the chapters which contain Elihu's speeches (32- 37), was probably com­posed between 188 and 170 B.C., but there is no certainty. The Elihu chapters are an interpolation inserted a few years later.
The scene of the dialogue is doubtless laid in the land of Edom. The place where the poet wrote was probably Egypt. The plants men­tioned in 8,11 are the papyrus and the Nilegrass according to some interpreters. The ships of reeds (Job 9,26) are the boats made of papyrus, mentioned by Pliny xiii 3 and Lucan, Pharsalia iv 36. The Leviathan may be the Lothan of the Ugaritic texts, a seven-headed serpent like the Hy­dra of Greek mythology. Probably, like the Hydra, it was a poetic ideali­sation of the octopus. But the poet of Job, who had never seen a Leviathan, in describing one borrows some details from the Egyptian croco­dile which he had seen, and in describing Behemoth he borrows details from the Egyptian hippopotamus. In any case, by placing the Jordan in the land of Uz and the Behemoth in the Jordan he shows that his geogra­phy and his fauna are equally poetic.
It should be emphasised that the Book of Job is a deeply religious work. It is not a prophecy, a sermon, a treatise of theology, a liturgical hymn. It is rather religious in the sense that the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost are religious, and even more since it has greater unity and contains no digressions. The messages that it is meant to convey are the following: firstly, as Solon told Croesus and many other Greek poets stated afterwards, before you pronounce a man happy or unhappy you most wait and see the end of his life. Fortune and misfortune, no matter how glaring and outrageous, may be only temporary. He who is on the top today may be at the bottom tomorrow and vice versa.
Secondly, there is a divine justice. In the end, it is the just who are rewarded and the wicked who are punished (Job 34; 36,6; etc.): do not fret yourself when evildoers are powerful, for their calamity will come suddenly. Neither despair when the upright are afflicted, for just as sud­denly the Lord will deliver them.
Thirdly, God's ways are inscrutable: just as man cannot understand the physical economy of the universe, so he cannot grasp its moral econ­omy. Salvation or destruction may arrive by the most unexpected means.
Thus the Book of Job makes an organic whole and its conclusion is faith. It is of course a work of fiction and not a philosophical treatise. You cannot expect to find in it the rigorous syllogisms which you may find in St. Thomas' Summa or in Spinoza's Ethica. The arguments used by Job and his comforters do not necessarily reflect the poet's views.
They are intended to represent dramatically the situation and not to convince the reader. Some of these arguments are refuted by facts related in the last chapter. It is God's intervention and the final restoration of Job's prosperity that confound and reduce to silence both Job's lamenta­tions and his friends' consolations.

Critical Remarks
The poet who brings God to speak on the stage is obviously not an atheist nor an Epicurean. He cannot be identified with any particular school of Jewish thought because he wrote before the various schools — Sadducees, Pharisees, etc. — began to develop. The way he absorbs Greek thought in orthodox Judaism is remarkable. We have already pointed out the numerous borrowings from Greek poets and scientists that testify to the author’s extensive learning. The story of Job is an illustration of the Greek maxim that before declaring a man happy or unhappy, one must see the end of his life.
The God of the Old Testament is at the same time the universal creator, the ruler of the world and the national God of the Hebrews. In the Book of Job only the first aspect is brought out. The absence of any national feeling in the book is remarkable. The hero and his friends were ancient Edomites, and therefore technically pagans, yet this is nowhere suggested. There is no reference to the Temple, to Jerusalem nor to any distinctly Jewish rite. Several explanations may be given for these facts. The author was living in Alexandria, where the Jews were well treated and happy, together with citizens of other races, under a non-Jewish king. He was equally at home with Hebrew and Greek literature and found inspiration in both. He intended to give to his message a universal scope. The Maccabean struggles, which revived Jewish nationalism, had not yet begun.
The Book of Job is a poem and not a sermon or philosophical treatise. It offers a dramatic representation of divine justice and not an exhaustive discussion of it. The denouement is effected by resorting to the typical Euripidean device known as Deus ex machina. This device is condemned by Aristotle (Poetics xv 1454b) on the ground that the denouement of the story must result from the story itself and not from the intervention of a god. A defender of our poet can reply: first, God's intervention in human affairs is precisely the thesis of the poem. Se­condly, an expedient that may be offensive on the stage — due to the necessity of dressing an actor as a god, of introducing him by machinery, etc. — is acceptable in a poem intended to be read:
«Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
Quam quae sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus, et quae
Ipse sibi tradit spectator.» (Horace, Ars poetica, 180—182)

Thirdly, the author of Job probably had studied the treatise of Neoptolemus of Paros, whose rule is thus paraphrased by Horace:
«Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus inciderit. » (Ars poetica, 191)
He follows all the other precepts of Aristotle and Neoptolemus in that: a) there is unity of action; b) it is poetry that is more philosophical than historical; c) the characters follow a traditional pattern; d) compassion and fear are roused; e) the characters are friends; f) the poet sympathizes with their emotions; g) incidents of murder are narrated and not en­acted; h) the poem is both educational and entertaining.
The poet was a classicist of the strictest kind, a peruser of the exemplaria Graeca, and a faithful disciple of Aristotle and Neoptolemus.

The Interpolations
The Book of Job is perhaps — comparatively speaking — one of the better preserved books of the Old Testament. However, owing to its carefully planned symmetrical structure, the interpolations and lacunae are all the more evident.
It seems probable that originally the speeches were arranged in three rounds, each consisting of six speeches, but some confusion has crept in. The interpolations are listed by N. Schmid, S. R. Driver and G. B. Gray. The more important ones are the Eulogy of Wisdom (chap. 28) and the speeches of Elihu (chaps. 32—37).
The Eulogy of Wisdom should be dated after the Book of Job, but before Proverbs 1—9 and Ecclesiasticus6. Elihu’s speeches differ from the rest of the book in style and language. Of course, they are later than the rest of the book. I would date it before 164 B. C. and Elihu's speeches in 163 — 152, but probably 163.
There is apparently no difference in style and vocabulary between the poetic and the prosaic parts of the Book of Job. This is strange, because many writers use different styles for prose and poetry. Anyway, this confirms my theory that the author of the prologue and the epilogue is the same as the man who wrote the speeches.
There existed during the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages another story of Job, different from the one in the Bible. The three comforters were not mentioned in it, and the characters were Job, his wife and Satan. This other story, which may be called a “folk-tale”, is preserved in several versions, particularly in Moslem countries. There are references to it from the 4th century A. D. on. We have no means of dating it and ascertaining whether it was later or earlier than the Biblical poem. We can only say that it was post-exilic, since it mentions Satan. If Satan appeared in it as the leader of a Persian army, as in the Testa­ment of Job, the folk-tale must have originated after the downfall of the Achaemenids. This folk-tale should not be confused with the prologue and epilogue of the Biblical poem. In the prologue and epilogue the three comforters are mentioned and the language is Hellenistic. The words “wisdom” and “folly” are used in the hellenistic acceptations.
Ez 14,18 — 20 mentions Job. He must have known some anecdote about him, but he could have known neither the Biblical poem nor the folk-tale, because neither was yet in existence.
We may sum up our conclusions as follows:
1)Job was the hero of some ancient history or legend or myth, which was known to Ezekiel, who mentions Job together with Noah and Daniel as a righteous man. This history or legend or myth is lost and we know nothing about it.
2)The Book of Job is a literary work, belonging to a genre which mixes poetry and philosophy and has its closest parallel in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. This genre was probably invented by Menippus.
3)The Book of Job was written about 200 B. C. by a great Jewish poet, whose name is unfortunately unknown and who was well acquired with both Hebrew and Greek literature.
4)We do not know whether this poet used at all the tale known to Ezekiel or whether he invented the plot out of whole cloth.
5)The Book of Job is a unit of which the prologue and epilogue in prose are integral parts. However, the chapter on wisdom and Elihu’s speeches are interpolations. The chapter on Wisdom might well be another poem by the same author. Elihu’s speeches are by another poet and a few decades later. The Book of Job probably has some lacunae which are noticeable because of its symmetrical structure.
6) The purpose of our Book is not to prove that the righteous man can be unhappy, for no one would write a book to prove such an obvi­ous fact. Moreover a religious person would never try to dispel the illu­sion that righteousness always leads to happiness, if some naive person were to entertain it! Our book was written to explain why the righteous man is sometimes unhappy and to reconcile this obvious fact with the belief in divine justice. The answer our book gives, is that the acts of God are inscrutable and that the righteous is happy in the end.

Notes:
1.On the history of the dialogue see R Hirzel, Der Dialog, 1895.
2.See Plato Symposium, 233, 239; Republic, V 4/3 d; Laws, 65/9 bc.
3.Cf. H. A. Bellows, The Poetic Edda, 1926, 84f.
4.H.E. Ryle, The Book of Genesis, 1914, XXXIV.
5.The dates of Menippus’ life are not known with certainty. He was a disciple of Crates of Thebes, who flourished about 328 — 325 B.C. and died at a great age. Diogenes Laertius, who usually arranges the biographies of the philosophers of each school in chronological order, places the biography of Menippus between that of Metrocles (4th to early 3rd century) and that of Menedemus the Cynic (3rd century B. C.). Menippus wrote on the offspring of Epicurus, presumably after Epicurus’ death (270 B.C.). He also wrote on Arcesilaus (316-241 B.C.), presumably when Arcesilaus was old enough and important enough to be the subject of a dissertation, and probably after he had become the head of the Academy (ca. 266 B.C.). Hermippus of Smyrna, who wrote about 192 B. C., told of Menippus’ suicide. Menippus is one of the speakers in Lucian’s dialogue entitled Icaromenippus. He relates a fantastic flight to heaven, during which he catches sight of the Colossus of Rhodes (erected 302-290, fallen in 224 B.C.) and the lighthouse Pharos (completed in 280 B.C.), sees Ptolemy in his sister's arms (ca. 272-271 B.C.), Lysimachus’ son conspiring against his father (284 B.C.), Seleucus’ son Antiochus flirting with his stepmother Stratonice (292 B.C.), Alexander of Thessaly slain by his wife (358 B.C.), Attalus’ son preparing poison for his father (Attalus II was poisoned by a nephew in 138 B.C.), Arsaces (perhaps Arsaces I, king of the Parthians 250 — 248 B. C.) killing a woman, and various other incidents, which are of uncertain date and perhaps not all historically accurate.
One has the impression that Lucian had the intention of mentioning events that occurred at the time of Menippus, but through carelessness made mistakes and created some confusion. We may assume that the stories of Alexander and Attalus are based upon such confusion between namesakes. The other incidents do not necessarily imply anachronisms. In the same dialogue Menippus is represented as acquainted with the doctrines of Crysippus (ca. 280 — 206 B. C.). In the tenth Dialogue of the Dead Menippus arrives in Hades at the same time as the athlete Damasias (a winner in 320 B. C.), and other unidentified personages. From all this evidence one may conjecture that Menippus was born in the latter half of the fourth century and probably lived till about the middle of the third.
6.The doctrine that Wisdom is the fear of the Lord is typically Jewish and quite at variance with the views of the Greeks. Nonetheless the comparison between the quest for Wisdom and the quest for precious minerals may have been suggested by some Stoic essay. Compare Philo's treatise Quod omnis probus liber sit, 65 — 68: «For the sake of money we ransack every corner and open up rough and rocky veins of the earth, and much of the low land and no small part of the high land is mined in quest of gold and silver, copper and iron, and the other like substances. The empty-headed way of thinking, deifying vanity, dives to the depth of the sea, searching whether some fair treasure to delight the senses lies hidden there. And when it has found different kinds of many coloured precious stones, some adhering to rocks, other ones, the more highly prized, to shells, it gives every honour to the beguiling spectacle. But for wisdom or temperance or courage or justice no journey is taken by land, even though it gives easy traveling, no seas are navigated, though the skippers sail them every summer season. Yet what need is there of journeying on the land or voyaging on the sea to seek and search for virtue, whose roots have been set by their Maker ever so near us, as the wise legislator of the Jews also says, ‘in his mouth, in thy heart and in thy hand’, thereby indicating by a figure words, thoughts and actions? »