Job

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JOB

JOB . The biblical Book of Job is included among the Writings (Ketubim ) in the Hebrew Bible and among the Poetic books in the Old Testament. Along with Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Sirach, it is part of the wisdom literature of ancient Israel. The character Job, however, is not an Israelite but a figure belonging to a broader ancient Near Eastern tradition. His name (Hebrew 'iyyōb ) is not a typical Hebrew name but is related to Amorite names attested throughout the second millennium bce. Similarly, Ezekiel 14:14 mentions Job, along with Noah (the Israelite version of the Mesopotamian flood hero Utanapishtim) and the Canaanite king Dan'el, as figures legendary for their righteousness. The setting of the book of Job in the land of Uz and the homelands of Job's three friends (especially that of Eliphaz the Temanite) suggest that the Israelites may have acquired the story from Edomite sources. Although evidently familiar with a variety of ancient Near Eastern literary and folk traditions, the author of the biblical book has adapted these materials to his own specific religious and cultural beliefs. Few clues exist as to the date of composition. Though Job's world is described in terms that evoke a patriarchal setting, evidence from historical linguistics suggests that the book was composed in the early postexilic period.

Contents and Structure

The structure of the book has long puzzled scholars. It begins (1:1–2:13) and concludes (42:7–17) with a simple prose story that recounts how Job, a man of exemplary piety and extraordinary wealth, is tested through the loss of his family, property, and health. Refusing to curse God even in the depth of his suffering, Job's possessions are returned twofold, a new family is given to him, and he lives another one hundred and forty years. Between the prose beginning and ending, however, there are some thirty-nine chapters of erudite and highly sophisticated poetry. Chapters 3–27 contain a dialogue between Job and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, concerning the significance of his suffering, the nature of God, and God's governance of the world. Though technically not cursing God, Job accuses God of heinous injustice, sadistic violence, and gross mismanagement of the world. A poem on the inaccessibility of wisdom follows the dialogue in chapter 28. Job resumes speaking in chapters 29–31, giving a defense of his life, swearing an oath of innocence, and challenging God to reply to him. Instead, the next several chapters (chapters 32–37) introduce a new character, Elihu, who attempts a further rebuttal of Job. At the conclusion of Elihu's speech, God appears "out of the tempest" to address Job (38:1–42:6). God does not speak directly to Job's complaints, however, but challenges his knowledge of creation and his inability to provide for the wild creatures of the earth as God does. Although Job retracts his accusations against God (40:1–5), God resumes with a second speech, describing the terrible magnificence of the legendary creatures Behemoth and Leviathan. In his final reply (42:1–6), Job acknowledges that he has spoken "without understanding," and having seen God "with my eyes," he recants. The prose conclusion then follows.

Although many ancient Near Eastern literary compositions incorporate a poetic text within a prose framework, the tensions between the prose and poetic parts of Job are striking. Where the prose story describes a character whose patient endurance is unwavering, the Job of the poetic section is an angry rebel whose accusations against God are only quelled by an encounter with the sublimity of the divine. Even those differences might be accommodated as features of a psychological portrait of acute suffering, but the transition from the poetry to the prose conclusion is jarring. Whereas in the poetic speech to Job God accuses him of "obscuring counsel" and speaking "without knowledge" (38:2), in the prose conclusion God rebukes the three friends because "you have not spoken the truth about me, as has my servant Job" (42:7).

With the rise of historical criticism in biblical studies, scholars argued that the prose narrative must be an ancient folk tale that the poet who wrote Job used to frame his new poetic composition, by removing the "original" dialogue between Job and his friends but otherwise not significantly changing the story. The Elihu speeches, which differ stylistically from the rest of the poetry and interrupt the dramatic structure, were regarded as a later addition. Some scholars argued that the wisdom poem, Job's final speech, and one or both of the divine speeches came from different hands. In reaction to historical-critical excesses, however, many recent commentators have attempted to understand the book as a more unified composition, though most still regard the figure and words of Elihu as a secondary addition. However the book was composed, the tensions between the prose tale and the poetic material remain fundamental for understanding the meaning of the book. The major components of the book are composed as different literary genres and address different aspects of the religious dilemma posed by the traditional figure of Job.

The Prose Tale

Although often referred to as a folk tale, the prose narrative is more accurately described as a didactic wisdom tale. In such stories, which include the stories about Joseph, Tobit, and Daniel, the protagonist embodies moral qualities valued by the culture. Within the story the moral coherency of the world is threatened when an antagonist menaces the hero. The suffering hero perseveres in his virtue, however, and is rewarded at the end, thus restoring the consistency of the moral order and recommending the virtue that the hero exemplifies. In Job the featured virtue is a disinterested piety that does not depend on reward. What is often overlooked is that this lack of concern for reward is not the typical way in which piety is described in the Bible. In Deuteronomy, in Proverbs, in Psalms, and elsewhere, devotion to God and blessings from God are seen as concomitant. God blesses the upright, whose gratitude expresses itself in further devotion to God. The Joban prose tale, far from being a simple folk story, is a narrative exploration and resolution of a potential problem within this religious framework. Does God's blessing corrupt piety? Or can one hold onto both concepts if one can imagine a form of piety that is truly disinterested? By depicting Job's piety as unchanged in good fortune and in bad, the writer can avoid potential contradiction. The restoration of Job at the end of the book serves to reunite the two values.

The character in the story who articulates the problem is the Adversary (ha-śātān ), who argues that Job is pious only because he has been blessed and will curse God if all he has is taken away. This figure is not yet Satan, the dualistic opponent of God that he becomes in later Jewish and Christian thought. Rather, he is a member of the heavenly court charged with inspecting the earth and reporting instances of disloyalty or corruption. The same figure occurs in Zechariah 3, where he accuses the high priest of corruption. In these texts the term satan is a common noun, not a proper name. Nevertheless, in both cases the Adversary's accusations are rejected by God, and in Job he acts as something of an agent provocateur. Thus one can see how the character later develops into a figure of evil and an adversary of God himself.

The Wisdom Dialogue

The prose tale makes use of a suffering hero to examine the concept of piety. In wisdom circles in the ancient Near East, however, the enigma of suffering itself had long been a topic of reflection, and it is this aspect of Job's situation that the poetic parts of the book explore. Several poetic texts from Mesopotamia and Ugarit have been compared with Job, notably the Sumerian composition A Man and His God and the Babylonian text I Will Praise the God of Wisdom. These poems, however, are appeals and thanksgivings for relief from suffering, and as such are more comparable to biblical psalms of lament and thanksgiving than to the story of Job. The one text that bears a striking resemblance to the dialogue between Job and his friends is the so-called Babylonian Theodicy, composed around 1000 bce. Here, as in the Book of Job, a sufferer repeatedly complains to his friend concerning the inexplicable evil that has befallen him, questioning the justice of the gods and the coherency of the moral world. His friend replies each time by offering the orthodox theodicies. Although direct literary dependency is unlikely, it is evident that the Job poet composed the dialogue portion of the book according to a well-known genre.

In the dialogue, although Job gives eloquent voice to his personal sufferings, the primary issue that concerns him is the nature of God. Since he cannot perceive his sufferings as in any way justifiable, he is forced to conclude that God is not only unjust but also sadistic and obsessed with seeking out and punishing vulnerable humans (e.g., 9:16–31; 14:18–22; 16:9–16). Job extends his critique to indict God's misgovernance of the world (e.g., 12:14–25 and 24:1–12). The most remarkable innovation in Job's religious thinking is his use of a forensic, or courtroom, model to explore his relationship with God. Although Israelite tradition sometimes described God's punishment of individuals or persons in terms of a legal judgment (e.g., Ps. 143:2; Isa. 3:13–14; Mic. 6:1–2), Job creatively reverses the force of the metaphor and attempts to imagine how a trial with God would allow him not only to hear God's charges against him but also to bring charges of his own (e.g., 13:18–27; 16:18–21; 23:2–7).

The role of the friends in the wisdom dialogue is to defend traditional understandings of divine justice against the skeptical onslaught of the sufferer. Though the friends are often read as simply "blaming the victim," their arguments are much more nuanced. Like many people in the ancient world, they believe that one could offend the deity unintentionally or unknowingly. Thus the only rational response to inexplicable suffering—especially for a righteous person—is to acknowledge any possible wrongdoing and to appeal humbly to God for deliverance (e.g., 5:1–16; 8:5–7; 11:13–20). Theirs is a thoroughly practical approach to the enigma of suffering. Only when Job persists in his blasphemous speech do they conclude that he must indeed be wicked (22:2–11), though their advice to him remains the same (22:21–30).

Thus what separates Job and the friends is not so much a question of Job's guilt or innocence as a conflict between two models of the divine-human relationship. The friends accept that a great gulf of being separates God and humans. In the face of that mystery, supplication of God's good favor is the only possible stance. Job, however, assumes that God and humans share a common set of values concerning justice and equity that can be rationally applied to both human and divine acts. Both perspectives are grounded in Israelite religious thought, making the dialogue a profound engagement of alternative worldviews.

Job's Final Defense and the Divine Speeches

In his final speech (chapters 29–31) Job mounts a defense of his life and lays out the grounds on which he assumes he and God could address their differences. Job develops his view of the divine-human relationship as an extension of his self-understanding as a leader in his own community. The divine speeches, for which there is no parallel in the extant literature of the ancient Near East, are a fierce repudiation of an anthropocentric modeling of God and an implicit rejection of retributive justice as a part of the structure of the world. Although cast as a rhetorical repudiation of Job's pretensions ("Where were you.… Can you.… Do you know?"), their force is to challenge Job's construction of God as essentially a projection of an ancient Near Eastern patriarch on a cosmic scale. The divine speeches are difficult to interpret. Some commentators interpret them as a reaffirmation of the cosmos-creating deity who organizes the universe and restrains its chaotic elements. The difficulty with this understanding, however, is that the deity's final speech (chapters 40–41) appears rather to celebrate the place of the chaotic (exemplified in the legendary creatures Behemoth and Leviathan) alongside the accomplishments of the deity in establishing a stable order of creation (chapter 38). Indeed, the wild animals whom God nurtures (chapter 39) are precisely those that ancient Near Eastern thought considered to be emblems of the chaotic "other." Read in this way, the divine speeches are a radical challenge to traditional ancient Near Eastern theological assumptions.

Jewish and Christian Reception of Job

The Book of Job resists being read as a unified whole. Whether one deals with the tensions as evidence of successive editorial layers or as the construction of a subtle thinker who wished to juxtapose several different ways of engaging issues arising from human suffering, it remains a difficult book, the ambiguities of which have funded many different interpretations.

Early Jewish interpretation recast Job as an ethical testament in which a dying elder teaches his children the lessons of his life. The Testament of Job, probably composed in Alexandria in the first century bce, depicts Job as opposing Satan's idolatry, for which he is told in advance that he will be persecuted. Thus he becomes a figure of endurance (cf. James 5:11), and his daughters are represented as mystics to whom he gives the gift of understanding the language of the angels. Other early Jewish interpretations of Job are more critical of him, casting him as one of Pharaoh's counselors at the time of the oppression of the Israelites. This identification of Job with the Egyptians in Exodus becomes the rationale for his suffering. The rabbis cited in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Baba Batra 15–16) debate whether Moses wrote the Book of Job (a manuscript from Qumran copies Job in paleo-Hebrew script, otherwise used only for the books of the Pentateuch and the name of God) and whether or not Job blasphemes. B. Baba Batra 16b subtly interprets Job 2:10, "And for all this, Job did not sin with his lips," to suggest that Job sinned in his heart—an interpretation that prepares the reader for the sudden transition from the pious Job of the prose tale to the rebellious Job of the poetic dialogue.

The early Christian church viewed Job as an "athlete of God" who perseveres through his suffering, and as an antitype of Christ, an interpretation most influentially presented in Pope Gregory's Moralia in Job. Ironically, since early postexilic Judaism did not have a conception of resurrection, certain passages in Job (especially 19:25–27) came to be cited during the patristic period as evidence for resurrection of the body. In the Middle Ages, Job became the patron saint of those who suffered from worms, leprosy, skin diseases, venereal disease, and melancholy. Calvin composed one hundred and fifty-nine sermons on Job, emphasizing the theme of divine providence.

The poetry of Job attracted considerable attention during the Romantic period, as Job became a prime example of the expression of the sublime in the writings of Robert Lowth (1710–1787; Bishop of London 1777–1787), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), and Edmund Burke (1729–1797). The most important Romantic interpretation of Job, however, is William Blake's series of illustrations, made around 1823, in which Job becomes an example of the cleansing of "the doors of perception," as he moves from misperception to true vision of God. In the early twentieth century, Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy ) claimed Job's encounter with God as a primary example of the experience of the holy. In the later twentieth century the figure of Job was invoked to exemplify psychological development (Carl Jung, Answer to Job ); psychological illness (Jack Kahn, Job's Illness ); absurdist existentialism (Robert Frost, "A Masque of Reason"; implicitly, Franz Kafka, The Trial ); post-religious humanism (Archibald MacLeish, "J.B."); and the radical evil of the Shoah (Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God ). In theological criticism Job has been critiqued as exemplifying the "evils of theodicy" (Terrence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy ), and from a liberationist perspective as an example of "how to speak about God" (Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent ). René Girard (Job, the Victim of His People ) interprets Job as a type of scapegoat. Feminist critique has rehabilitated the maligned figure of Job's wife (Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach ), and postmodernists have been drawn to the "self-consuming" structure of the internal contradictions of the Book of Job (Edward Good; David Clines; and Dermot Cox), or they have interpreted the book as modeling a dialogic play of voices in which no single character or perspective controls the meaning of the book. The richness and ambiguity of the book ensure that it will continue to be a provocative work that defies definitive interpretation.

Bibliography

Baskin, Judith R. Pharaoh's Counsellors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition. Chico, Calif., 1983. An important comparative study of Jewish and Christian interpretation. Besserman, Lawrence L. The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass., 1979. Clines, David J. A. Job 1–20. Waco, Tex., 1989. The best and most comprehensive commentary. Contains an extensive bibliography. Job 21–42 is to be published in 2005. Clines, David J. A. What Does Eve Do to Help? And Other Readerly Questions to the Old Testament. Sheffield, England, 1990. Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence: Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Rome, 1978. Fohrer, Georg. Das Buch Hiob. Gütersloh, Germany, 1963. Insightful exegetical commentary. Good, Edward M. In Turns of Tempest: A Reading of Job with a Translation. Stanford, Calif., 1990. A provocative postmodern reading of Job. Habel, Norman C. The Book of Job. Philadelphia, 1985. An insightful commentary that emphasizes the literary features of Job, especially the legal metaphor. Keel, Othmar. Jahwes Entgegnung an Ijob. Göttingen, Germany, 1978. An innovative use of ancient Near Eastern iconography to illuminate the imagery of the divine speeches. Newsom, Carol A. The Book of Job: A Contest of Imaginations. New York, 2003. A reading of Job in light of Bakhtinian dialogism. Newsom, Carol A., and Susan E. Schreiner. "Job, Book of." In Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, edited by John H. Hayes, pp. 587–599. Nashville, Tenn., 1999. History of interpretation, focusing on Christian sources. Extensive bibliography. Oberhänsli-Widmer, Gabrielle, Hiob in jüdischer Antike und Moderne: Die Wirkungsgeschichte Hiobs in der jüdischen Literatur. Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, 2003. The most comprehensive study of Job in Jewish tradition. Terrien, Samuel. The Iconography of Job Through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters. University Park, Pa., 1996. An exceptionally valuable collection of materials. Wright, Andrew S. Blake's Job: A Commentary. Oxford, 1972. Important analysis of the illustrations by William Blake. Zuckerman, Bruce. Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint. New York, 1991. Interpretation of the growth of the book of Job as a series of "misreadings," analogous to the documented misinterpretation of a Yiddish story.