The Book of Job: How Low Can You Go?
Monday, May 31, 2010 at 4:55PM | by Otter 
William Blake's Job. Click the image to go to Blake's illustrated Book of Job.From the Mailbag:
I'm wondering if you could help me understand some things about the Book of Job. It was brought up recently [on another forum] to illustrate God's chastisement or removal of blessing.
Job is another story that is troublesome for me. It portrays God as a sort of capricious asshole who allows Satan to torture his righteous servant. And then when Job has the audacity to question God, he's given a lecture about God's sovereignty. What's up with that?
I was talking to my husband about it this morning, and he said that he believed that Job was written during the exile or shortly after, and that it is an allegory with Job representing Israel. I'm thinking that maybe it was written to give the Jews, who had lost everything, comfort and hope that what they had lost would be restored to them as they were with Job.
What do you think?
I think that Job is another excellent case where reading theologically causes a great deal of problems.
What I mean is, if you approach the text with the modernist assumption that there is one specific question ("What is the meaning of suffering?") and one right answer, and that Job indicates what that answer is satisfactorily, prosaically, and with no remainder, you'll be disappointed.
Similarly, if you take it as a theology of blessing, you're going to wind up in some pretty weird territory. Is it the case, in your experience, that righteous people who suffer end up with all their stuff back? No, nor mine. Sometimes it works out that way. More power to them. But more often than not we can identify reasons for why some people get their stuff back and other people don't: hard work, persistence, good friends, whatever.
If you're not disappointed therefore with the book, you'll be picking and choosing which portions of the text matter to you, isolating them from the rest according to your preferences, and allowing them to dictate the meaning of the book.
Your husband's idea that Job symbolizes or personifies Israel or Judah is a tempting one. At least that's getting close to climbing into the head of an Israelite / Jewish author rather than demanding that he crawl into ours. Then too, some of the really interesting themes of the Hebrew Bible are there in Job, particularly the ideas of sacrifice and its relationship to suffering.
But on the whole, I'm not seeing the textual support for seeing Job as conspicuously Jewish that I'd like to see. Suffering was not peculiar to Israel / Judah, and if the author(s) and redactors had wanted to make that case, it would have been cake to find the imagery that screamed "Babylon." Not seeing it. Doesn't mean I can't be persuaded, but I'm not seeing it.
And to the degree that I'm right about that (which may not be a high degree), Job is more symbolic of humankind than he is of Israel / Judah.
I do think though that several important things need to be said about Job.
Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740-1812). Further evidence that there was suffering as early as the 18th century.
One is that it's a layered work. I think that there are at least two and probably more hands at work in it. The poet of the long middle section is probably the oldest of the bunch, and I think it's worth seeing what he's up to.
I think he's treating suffering as an occasion for reflection and for lamentation. Like many a good person interested in reflection, he fixes on the dialogue as a good method for looking at the kaleidoscope of emotions and thoughts triggered by suffering. Thoughts on suffering come thick and fast when you're in the midst of it, and so do the voices in Job: It's because you're not holy enough, or because of some sin, or it's totally random, or it's just inscrutable.
There is not, in this intial stratum of composition, a "solution."
Unless the speech of God is of the same stratum, it's just reflection.
If it is part of the same stratum, the poet adds to the reflection the voice of God calling out of a whirlwind (Job 38:1-41:34), saying in effect, "You not only cannot know but you have no standing to ask."
Note that in this poetry section of the book (which I take here to be relatively early) the word "God" is very plentiful. Note also that the word "Yahweh" is fairly scarce.
What I think of as the piety-stratum of the text is in the enveloping prologue and epilogue, and note as you read them that the name "Yahweh" is constantly reiterated.
I think that two problems at least with the text as the poet left it to us were (1) that Job is without a doubt interrogating a deity, something that was religiously and socially unstable; and (2) that God is implicated, by couching his refusal to explain in a boast about his ability to do so, as being inscrutably but ultimately responsible for the sufferings of humanity.
The prologue (Job 1:1-2:13) "solves" (for some, including perhaps the redactors and their audience) the problem by making Ha Satan, the Adversary, directly responsible for the suffering.
This is of course at least for us a very unsuitable theological answer. Ultimately Yahweh gives Satan the authority to do as he likes. And if you come from a Christian perspective in which God has ultimate and total power over the universe, there's no way out of this dilemma: ultimately such a god must be responsible for suffering.
Notice that in the prologue, we get a chorus of assurances that "Job did not sin with his lips." It's difficult to know for certain what the writer intends to imply with that. But I think, given a theory of strata of composition, that it means, "Job did not interrogate Yahweh," which is however precisely what Job is about to do in the poetic reflections that follow.
Part of the same piety-stratum may be the epilogue (Job 41:3-42:17). In it, Job is vindicated, though I think it's worth noting that God has just finished chewing Job a new one "out of the whirlwind." In other words, Job has (in the poetic section) offended God by speaking words without knowledge, which is essentially the sin laid before Eliphaz & Company (in the prose section).
So I think that the redaction of the prose parts may be an attempt at preserving the piety of Job as well as the justice of Yahweh.
He might have been responsible for taking things away, but he cannot be charged with injustice, that is, with withholding material blessing (and make no mistake, these are material blessings) from the righteous.
So I suppose I would put it this way.
Blake, who never balks at the hard things, goes right for God, speaking from the whirlwind.
Somebody in Judah was as unhappy with the (lack of) conclusions of the poet of Job as any modern person could be, and felt obliged to provide a (rather unhelpful) portrait of Yahweh intended to explain what the poem itself does not explain.
Of course it still does not explain it, but at least now Yahweh buys off Job's plea, which God had not done in the poem.
But this points us to the heart of the book of Job: not God's answer, but Job's plea.
The answer to that plea is, "Don't ask: you haven't the standing."
Fair enough: that's our position before nature, or God, or the cosmos or however you want to put it. We suffer, we die, we lose what we had, unfairly much of the time.
But in the plea of Job, we hear an echo of what our condition is. "It would be better if the day on which I was conceived had never been."
It is sometimes said that the lesson of Job is in his patience: "Though he slay me," says the pious King James Version, "yet I will trust him" (Job 13:15).
But of course that's not exactly what the text says. It says, "[Though] he will slay me; I have no hope," and goes on to add, "Yet I will argue my ways to his face." The whole of chapter 13, and indeed most of the book, are about Job's desire to stand before God and ask for a justice that God, speaking out of the whirlwind, denies to him.
And someone has added a recompense, seeking to say at the same time, "But there is still good, and we will focus on it, and not speak evil of our god whom we take to be the source of many good gifts."
This is philosophical failure. But it is artistic in its failure, and like many an artistic failure, can leave you stunned with truths.
In this way, to simply read Job is to read confusion.
But to read the hearts of the two (?) writers of Job is to read a great deal of light. When two chunks of flint collide at speed, a spark sometimes emerges. But it's not the flint giving the light.
Reader Comments (2)
I just got home after a long and disappointing afternoon; I'm exhausted, and I've read through this several times now. I may not make any sense, but I have a few questions.
Why is this important? Is it because "Yaweh" is Israel's own god, while "God" could be any deity?
This is not good news for me. Is this what you meant by this:
How else can it be read besides theologically?
Okay, I think I get it now. If I understand corrrectly, the writers of Job are saying that:
Suffering is a part of life, and there is often no explanation for it. And...
Am I on the right track?
Elizabeth, it sounds like you understand me very well.
By not reading theologically, I mean you have to read Job for what it says about the writer's and the reader's minds and hearts. I mean not looking for a statement that could have been reduced to a simple prosaic statement about God: had such a statement been possible or desirable, it would be preferrable to forty chapters of dense poetry that speaks with too many voices.
And no, it's not especially good news, except in the sense that knowing you are not alone is very good.
As for the names "God" and "Yahweh," we have a bad habit of thinking monotheistically that sometimes blinds us to currents in the text. For instance sometimes the Hebrew word /El/ could mean a generic "god," or it could mean a specific "God" (including Yawheh), or it could refer to the chief father-god in the Canaanite pantheon, El, whose symbol was the bull and whose worship remained strong in the countryside of Israel and Judah.
Only context and a good intelligence can help you decide which is meant.
Some passages (I'm thinking especially of one or two in Kings) lose all meaning because we don't attend with any subtlety to the different ranges of /El/.
But when some writer or redactor (usually in or near Jerusalem where Yahweh's temple defined orthodox worship) wished to exclude the possibility he meant any other god, he would emphasize a text's mention of Yahweh.