SteveMiller wrote:Based on the lifespan of Job, 200+ years, (LXX says 240), he should have lived before Abraham. By the end of the 40 years wandering in the wilderness, life span was 70-80, at which it has stayed until recently.
I looked at the Aleppo version, and it doesn’t give an age at all.
But people have lived much longer than 70–80, even fairly recently. There was a man who died in China in the 1930s who was apparently well over 200 (the inspiration for the novel Shangri La), and one in England in the 1800s died at about 150, in the Bible Aaron was 123 and Moses himself 120 when they died. 2 Chronicles 24:15 Yehoyadaa the priest was 130 at his death. (They’re not counted by modern historians because they weren’t issued duly notarized birth certificates upon their births.) God could very well have extended Job’s life even fairly late in history.
SteveMiller wrote:His wealth is measured, not by money, but in the amount of livestock that he owned, which was the measure of patriarchal times.
That’s a cultural thing, even fairly late in history. In the Old West, in the 1880s, U.S. cattlemen measured their wealth in the number of livestock, not money. There are places even today where wealth is measured in cattle, not money, so this argument is weak at best.
SteveMiller wrote:The style from reading English translations seems to me to be similar to Solomon's writing. I could not comment on the Hebrew style, except that it has an awful lot of hapaxes compared to other books, which would seem to place the writing very early. It may be that Job lived pre-Abraham, but the book was written later.
I haven’t made a detailed investigation, but some of the late prophets also had many hapaxes as a percentage of words used. On the whole, I find Job easier to read than some other passages. In fact, one of the signs of the later prophets is that they use many hapaxes or rarely used terms.
Karl W. Randolph.