George Costard (1710–1782) on the Book of Job

Abstract This chapter focuses on Wadham College fellow and tutor George Costard’s critical essay titled Some Observations Tending to Illustrate the Book of Job, which was published in 1747. In that essay, Costard argues that the Book of Job should not be read as the handiwork of Moses or an ancient, inspired Jew but rather an anonymous author writing during the Babylonian captivity. While his thesis was inspired by William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1738–42), his methods can be traced back to influences from his student days, and particularly that of the Laudian Professor of Arabic Thomas Hunt, who argued for the importance of Arabic and other oriental sources to biblical criticism. Turning to Costard’s engagement with the slightly later lectures on sacred poetry by another acclaimed Oxford figure, Robert Lowth, the chapter suggests that Costard came to regard Job not as a parable, an epic, or a socio-political allegory but rather as a five-act, proto-classical tragedy. To show why, it explores the relationship between historicist and poetic approaches to the sacred past, concluding that, for Costard, the only way to read Job literally was to read it literarily.