Page "Book of Job" Paragraph 43

Modern scholarship dates the work between the 6th and 4th century BC.

While " there is an intentional editorial unity with a cohesive purpose and message in the canonical form of the book ," Job contains many separate elements, some of which may have had an independent existence prior to being incorporated into the present text.

Scholars agree that the introductory and concluding sections of the book, the framing devices, were composed to set the central poem into a prose " folk-book ", as the compilers of the Jewish Encyclopedia expressed it.

The central poem is from another source.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Targum of Job 11Q10.

Another example of text from the last chapter or epilogue of Job can be found in the book The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, showing examples of how fragments of The Book of Job found among the scrolls differ from the text as now known.