I think the devil missed his mark--that the messengers were scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels, &c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated at the last by the restoration of his own dear children.

They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are found.

Like Abraham returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the resurrection in a figure.
"If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were real, therefore similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply, that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the other, bodily.

In the latter case, positive personal pain was the gist of the matter--in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction as the children's deaths amount to.

God's mercy may well have allowed the evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double was the joy of Job over these ten dear children! "Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth,--I must, in answer, think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us as the verity of it would have been to Job.