[My first exposure to Scripture was through a reading list for a college literature course. The one and only ‘biblical’ selection was the “OT” book of Job and rightly so. Aside from theme, poetic dialogue, plot and the age-old question about “why must man suffer,” some of the most breathtaking passages come straight from the mouth of the Creator-God. This MUST READ: A Literary Guide to the Bible reflects the approach not of a religious student of Scripture but of literary scholars (possibly some unbelievers) who happen to recognize the literary value of some of the most beautiful literature ever penned in works of antiquity. Reformatted and highlighted for post.—Admin1@S6K]
JOB
Moshe Greenberg
The prophet Ezekiel mentions Job alongside Noah and Daniel as a paragon of righteousness (Ezek. 14:12-20); from this we know that Job was a byword among the sixth-century B.C.E. Judahite exiles whom the prophet addressed. But from Ezekiel and from the late passing reference to Job’s patience (or perseverance) in James 5:10-11 one would never guess the complexity of the character set forth in the book that bears his name.
Indeed the book’s representation of Job seems to some modern scholars so disharmonious as to warrant the hypothesis that two characters have been fused in it:
- “Job the patient,” the hero of the prose frame of the book; and
- “Job the impatient,” the central figure of the poetic dialogue.
In the prose story, Job the patient withstands all the calamities inflicted on him to test the sincerity of his piety and is finally rewarded by redoubled prosperity. The moral is: piety for its own sake is true virtue and in the end is requited. It is this old story—often called a folktale—that is supposed to have been known to Ezekiel’s audience. Later, the hypothesis continues, a far more profound thinker (perhaps a survivor of the Babylonian Exile and its crisis of faith) used the temporary misfortune of the hero as the setting for his poem, in which the conventional wisdom of the tale is radically challenged.
This theory is based on expectations of simplicity, consistency, and linearity that are confuted by the whole tenor of the book. Reversal and subversion prevail throughout—in sudden shifts of mood and role and in a rhetoric of sarcasm and irony. The dialogue contains much response and reaction but no predictable or consistent course of argument. When to these disconcerting features are added the exotic language (loaded with Aramaisms and Arabisms) and the uncertain state of the text in many places—from apparent corruption of words to unintelligible sequences of verses—the confidence of some critics in their ability to reconstitute the original text by rewriting and rearrangement seem exaggerated.
This essay discusses the book as we have it. The chief literary (as distinct from theological or literary-historical) problem of Job is its coherence:
- do the prose and the poetry or the speeches of Job and his Friends hang together?
- How are they related?
We must gain an awareness of the complexities of interplay among the elements of the book. The truncation of the third round of speeches and the integrality to the book of Elihu’s speeches have been treated by most critics as problems to be solved by a theory of textual dislocation or adulteration. I shall try to describe how these elements in their present shape work upon the reader. This is not to assert the infallibility of the text in hand, but rather to confess our inability to justify on grounds other then individual predilection the alternatives proposed to it. It also reflects a conviction that the literary complexity of the book is consistent with and appropriate to the nature of the issues with which it deals.
The background of the dialogue is established in chapters 1 and 2 in five movements.
- The first movement introduces the magnate Job,one of the “dwellers in the east” (1:3)—that is, east of the Land of Israel—in uncertainly located country of Uz (connected with Aram to the north in Gen.10:23, but with Edom to the south in La,. 4:21). He is a “blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil” (1:1). His wealth and family are described in numbers typifying abundance—seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand small cattle and three thousand camels, and so forth. The happiness of the family is epitomized in the constant round of banquets held by the children; Job’s scrupulousness is shown by his sacrifices on their behalf, lest in a careless moment they “bless” (euphemism for “blaspheme”) God in their hearts (1:5).
- In the second movement, the action that shatters this idyll starts. “One day,” at a periodic assembly of the divine court (1:6), God singles out Job for the praise to the Adversary (the antecedent of the later Satan and anachronistically so called in the King James Version; in Hebrew Scriptures an angel whose task is to roam the earth and expose human wrongdoing). This commendation virtually invites the Adversary to suggest that since God has built a protective hedge around Job, his piety may not be disinterested (“for nothing,” 1:9): only deprive him of his possessions and see whether he won’t “bless” God to his face! God accepts the challenge and empowers the Adversary to carry out the rest.
- The third movement takes place “one day” as a round of the children’s banquets begins and they are gathered in the house of the eldest son (1:13). A terrible chain of calamities befalls Job: one messenger after another arrives to report the destruction of every component of Job’s fortune, culminating in the death of his children. Job goes into mourning, but with a blessing of God on his lips (the Adversary is thwarted, but his expectation is literally realized!). The movement concludes, “In all this Job did not sin or impute anything unsavory to God” (1:22).
- The scene of the fourth movement is heaven again. “One day,” at the periodic assembly of the divine court (2:1), God repeats his praise of Job to the Adversary, adding, “and he still holds on to his integrity, so you incited me to destroy him for nothing” (2:3). The Adversary proposes the ultimate test: afflict Job’s own body and see whether he won’t “bless” God. God agrees, with the proviso that Job’s life be preserved, and the Adversary hurries off to inflict a loathsome skin disease on Job, driving him to constant scratching with a sherd as he sits in the dust (the Greek translation reads, “on the dungheap far from the city”). His wife protests: “Do you still hold on to your integrity? ‘Bless’ God, and die” (2:9). Job remonstrates with her: “Should we then accept the good from God and not accept the bad?” (2:10).The question is rhetorical, but in every rhetorical question lurks the possible affirmation of what is ostensibly denied. Moreover, by bluntly calling what he has received from God “bad,” Job has moved from his nonjudgmental blessing of God after the first stage of his ruin. The movement concludes with a variant of the preceding conclusion: “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” Is “with his lips” a mere equivalent of “did not impute anything unsavory to God,” or did the Talmudic sage correctly perceive in it a reservation: with his lips he sinned not, but in his heart he did! Is the impatient Job of the poem already foreshadowed in the closing stage of the narrative?
- The last movement brings the three Friends of Job (also of Abrahamitic, extra-Israelite stock) into the picture. Coming from afar to comfort Job, they assume his condition—they sit on the ground with him, having torn their clothes and thrown dust on their heads. They keep him company in silence for seven days until he starts to speak.
The contrast between the simple folktale and the artful poem must not be overdrawn. In fact the artistry in the narrative is considerable. The representation of time in the first to the fourth movements progresses from duration to instant. In movement one, the regularity of happy, uneventful lives is expressed by verbs in the durational mode: “would go and would make a banquet,” “would send word,” “always used to do.” The decision is heaven to test Job and its earthly realization in calamities (the second and third movements) occur each on separate days. Moreover, temporal disjunction is accompanied by disjunction of agent: although the Adversary is empowered to ruin Job, he is not mentioned in the subsequent story of disasters. But in the climactic fourth movement, the pace is stepped up and the events are concentrated. Events in heaven and their effect on earth occur on one and the same day; God licenses the Adversary to afflict Job’s body, and the Adversary sets to work immediately and in person, as though eager to win his wager. The parallelism of the second stage of Job’s trial to the first is expressed with the intensification and focusing that are characteristic of the second verset of poetic parallelism.
Dialogue and elements of poetic diction permeate the prose tale, further diminishing the contrast between the frame and the poem. Only the last movement of the story is speechless—owing to the courteous silence of the Friends. The first movement ends with Job’s internal dialogue of concern lest his children blaspheme in secret. The second movement and the corresponding first half of the fourth movement consist almost entirely of dialogue between God and the Adversary, with the latter employing markedly elevated speech: parallelism (“roaming the land and walking about in it,” 1:7; “the work of his hands you blessed, and his cattle abound in the land,” 1:10); proverbs (“Skin for skin; all a man has he will give for his life,” 2:4), emphatic repetition (“a hedge about him and about his household and about all he has,” 1:10). The chain of calamities in the third movement is conveyed entirely through reports of messengers all of which exhibit the same pattern. The details of the accounts of disaster are artfully disposed: human and natural destroyers alternate, and the loss of Job’s children is delayed to the end. Job’s acquiescence in God’s decree, with its parallelism, its compression, and its balanced lines, is poetry proper:
Naked came I forth from the belly of my mother
and naked shall I return thither:
The Lord gave, and the Lord took away;
blessed be the name of the Lord. (1:21)
The terrestrial scene of the fourth movement is dominated by the sharp exchange between Job and his wife in which are ironic touch is visible. Job’s wife unwittingly advocates the Adversary’s cause to Job (“’Bless’ God, and die”) while expressing her exasperation with her husband in the very terms used by God to praise him (“still hold on to your integrity”). Such reuse by one character of the language of another is a constant feature of the poem; its occurrence here in the narrative is another bond between the two parts of the book.
The preliminary narrative establishes Job’s virtuous character and so provides us with inside information known to heaven and Job alone. Our judgment on what Job and his Friends will say about his character must be determined by this information. We also know—what neither Job nor his Friends do—that Job’s sufferings are designed to test him. These circumstances are fertile ground for irony; their impact on our reception of the arguments put forward in the poetic dialogue is an open and intriguing issue. If we now follow the debate step by step, we will get a clearer sense of the artful interplay between statements and positions, of the elements of progression in the arguments, and of the overarching ironies of the book as a whole.
After Brooding over his face for seven days, Job breaks his silence with a bitter diatribe against his life and its symbol, light (chap. 3.) He wishes that the day of his birth would be reclaimed by primeval darkness and imagines the peace he would have enjoyed in Sheol had he been stillborn. Why does God give life to the wretched, whom he has “hedged about” (that is, obstructed—a reversal of the meaning of the very phrase used by the Adversary to describe Job’s security)? He recollects his lifelong fear of calamity (one thinks of his anxious sacrificing on behalf of his children) which did not avail to prevent it.
This outburst takes the Friends by surprise. They had come to commiserate and encourage, not to participate in a rebellion against God’s judgment.
- Their first spokesman, Eliphaz, opens softly (chaps.4-5), reminding Job of his custom of cheering victims of misfortune, and gently chiding him for breaking down under his own calamities. He preaches the doctrine of distributive justice: no innocent man was ever wiped out, while the wicked reap their deserts. He reports a revelation made to him “in thought-filled visions of the night” (4:13); man is by nature too base to be innocent before God—even the angels are not trusted by him! Shortlived as he is (“cut down from morning to evening,” 4:20), man cannot acquire the wisdom to comprehend his fate. Will Job seek vindication from some (other) divine being? Only fools let vexation kill them; “taking root” for a moment, they suddenly lose everything they own through their blindness to the truth that “man is to misery born as the sparks fly upward” (5:7). In Job’s place, Eliphaz would turn to God, who works wonders and benefactions and who constantly reverses the fortunes of men. It is a lucky man whom God disciplines, for if the man—here Job—accepts it and repents, he has good hope of being healed and of living prosperous and happy to a ripe old age. All this has been proved by experience.
In the first exchange, each party starts from advanced positions. Job vents his death wish with untempered passion, becoming the spokesman of all the wretched of the earth. Eliphaz’s carefully modulated reply sets the pattern for all subsequent speeches of the Friends: a prologue, demurring to Job, followed by a multithematic advocacy of the conventional view of God’s attributive justice.
Most of the themes of the Friends’ argument are included in Eliphaz’s speech:
- man’s worthlessness before God;
- man’s ephemeralitya call to turn to God in penitence;
- and (consequent) ignorance;
- praise of God;
- the disciplinary purpose of misfortune;
- the happiness of the penitent;
- the claim to possess wisdom greater than Job’s.
The rhetoric of debate pervades the speech of Eliphaz and all that follow.
Themes are introduced by—
- expressions of interrogation (“Is/Does not…”),
- demonstration (“look, behold”),
- exhortation (“Remember! Consider! Know!”),
- and exception (“but, however”).
Among the rhetorical questions peppering ELiphaz’s speech, one exhibits the unconscious ironically typical of many in the Friends’ speeches:
“Call now, will anyone answer you; / to which of the divine beings will you turn?” (5:1).
Eliphaz is scoffing, but in the event Job will not only call upon a heavenly witness, arbitrator and vindicator; he will ultimately be answered by the greatest and holiest of them all.
A constant difference between the general and particular observations of Job and the Friends is already evident in this first exchange. Both parties pass back and forth from the particular case of Job to the general condition of mankind. But in Job’s speeches his particular misfortune governs his vision of the general; his unmerited suffering opens his eyes to the injustice rampant in society at large.
In the Friends’ speeches, on the other hand, the general doctrine of distributive justice governs their judgment on Job’s case: he must be wicked in order to fit into their scheme of things. Job’s empirically based generalities reflect reality; the Friends’ perception of the particular is as fictive as the general doctrine from which it springs.
Echoes of Job’s speech may be heard in that of ELiphaz. Job’s “roarings” (3:24) reflect his anguish; Eliphaz speaks of the “lion’s roar” (4:10). Birth and misery figure prominently in Job’s speech; Eliphaz combines them in his epigrammatic “man is born to misery.” Countering Job’s wish for a direct passage from birth to grave, Eliphaz holds out hope of a penitent Job reaching the grave happy and in ripe old age. Such echoes and allusions pervade the dialogue, arguing against a commonly held opinion that the poem of Job consists of a series of disconnected monologues.
Job begins his reply to Eliphaz (chaps. 6-7) with a reference to ka’as,“vexation” (which Eliphaz warned kills fools, 5:2); overwhelming vexation has caused Job to speak so intemperately (6:2-3). He is the victim of God’s terrors; to hold out hope to him is mockery, for his only wish is to be speedily dispatched (“crushed” he says in 6:9, using Eliphaz’s language in 5:4). He is not made of stone so as to be able to tolerate his suffering any longer (6:12; in 5:17-18 Eliphaz called it God’s benign discipline). He is disappointed that his Friends have deserted him. As when thirsty travelers seek out a wadi and find it has run dry in summer heat, so now when Job looks to his Friends for support they fail him. All he asks of them is to pay attention to his case, show him his fault, and stop producing vapid arguments. Job turns Eliphaz’s theme of man’s ephemerality to his own use: man’s life is like a hireling’s term of service; his only relief is night and wages. But Job’s life is a hopeless agony; night brings him only the terrors of his dreams and night visions (a bitter echo of Eliphaz). Since human life is so brief, it is a wonder that God fills it with such suffering. Job parodies a verse in Psalms: “What is man, that you are mindful of him: / mortal man, that you take note of him?” (8:4; cf. 144:3: “Lord, what is man, that you should care about him, / mortal man, that you should think of him?”). This is skewed sardonically into:
What is man, that you make much of him,
that you fix your attention upon him—
inspect him every morning,
examine him every minute? (7:17-18)
If only the “watcher of men” would look away for a while and let Job live out his few remaining days in peace!
Establishing here the pattern for the following dialogues, Job’s answer is longer than his predecessor’s. He has been goaded by ELiphaz’s pious generalities and oblique rebuke into itemizing his experience of God’s enmity and its universal implications. In this way all the replies of the Friends arouse Job to ever-new perceptions of his condition and of the divine governance of the world.
Job’s complaint scandalizes Bildad, the next interlocutor (chap. 8). “Will the Almighty pervert justice?” he asks rhetorically (v. 3), and proceeds to ascribe the death of Job’s children to their sins. Thus Bildad lays bare the implications of the speeches of both his predecessors. Job ought to supplicate God contritely rather than assert a claim against him. Since we are so shorlived, it behooves us to consult the ancient sages; they teach that as it is nature’s law that plants wither without water, so the course of the godless leads to perdition (the moral law). God will not repudiate the blameless or support the wicked; hence if Job repents, a joyous future, better than his past, is in store for him.
In his reply (chaps. 9-10), Job exploits the forensic metaphor in the rhetorical questions of Eliphaz and Bildad (“Can mortals be acquitted by God?” 4:17; “Will the Almighty pervert justice?” 8:3). It expresses the covenantal-legal postulate of ancient piety with its doctrine of distributive justice, shared by all the characters in the dialogue. God refuses to follow the rules, Job asserts: “Man cannot win a suit against God!” (9:2).
God indeed works wonders (echoing Eliphaz)—mainly in displays of his destructive power in nature (a parody of Eliphaz’s doxology). Such aggression he directs against any who seek redress from him for calamity inflicted on them undeservedly. In language suffused with legal terms, Job denounces God’s disregard of his right: he terrorizes Job into confusion; even if Job could plead, his own words would be twisted against him. Contrary to Bildad’s assertion, God indiscriminately destroys the innocent and the guilty, for “he wounds me much for nothing” (9:17; ironically, Job was unwittingly stumbled on the true reason for his suffering). If God would allow him, Job would demand of him a bill of indictment. He would charge him with unworthy conduct: he spurns his creature while smiling on the wicked; he searches for Job’s sin, though he knows Job is not guilty. He carefully fashioned Job and sustained him through the years—only to hunt him down with a wondrous display of power (themes of Psalm 139 are sarcastically reused here.)
It is now Zophar’s turn (chap. 11). After denouncing Job’s mockery and self-righteousness, he speaks as one privy to God’s counsels: if God would answer Job, he’d show him his ignorance; the fact is that God has treated Job better than he deserves. God’s purpose is unfathomable:
higher than heaven,
deeper than Sheol,
longer than the earth,
broader than the sea. (vv. 8-9)
Job should pray to God and remove his iniquity; then he will enjoy the hope, the light, the peace and the sound sleep of the righteous.
Each of the three Friends having had his say, Job now delivers his longest answer yet (chaps. 12-14). Goaded by Bildad, he mockingly acknowledges their monopoly of wisdom, but claims he is no less wise. A shower of irony and sarcasm follows. Borrowing terms from Bildad’s invocation of the ancient sages and Zophar’s celebration of God’s boundless wisdom, Job grotesquely invokes the dumb creatures of sky, sea, and earth to teach the commonplace, “With him [God] are wisdom and power; his are counsel and insight” (12:13), followed by another parodic doxology depicting divine power exercised with sheerly destructive results in the social realm. In this context the stock praise of God that he “uncovers deep things out of darkness, brings deep gloom to light” (12:22; cf. Dan. 2:22) suggests that he tears the lid off submerged forces of death and chaos, allowing them to surface and overcome order. As for the Friends, they are quacksalvers, liars, obsequiously partial to God; they ascribe false principles to him and ought to be in dread of his ever subjecting them to scrutiny. Job, despite his ruined state, will stand up to God, convinced God must recognize integrity.
Let him slay me; I have no [or in him I will] hope;
yet I will argue my cause my cause before him.
Through this I will gain victory:
that no godless man can come into his presence. (13:15-16)
This burst of confidence collapses into the mournful realization of his vulnerability to God’s terrors. Again he asks to be allowed to converse with God, to be informed of his sin (13:20-23; cf. 6:24, 10:2). Again he complains of God’s enmity, wonders at his petty keeping of accounts and his persecution of “a driven leaf” (13:25). Again he implores God to let him live out his term of service in peace, for, unlike a tree, which after being felled can still renew itself from its roots, man once cut down sleeps eternally in Sheol.
But must containment in Sheol be final? Might it not be a temporary shelter from God’s wrath? “If a man dies, can he revive?” (14:14)—hope wells up in the question, and the fantasy of reversal continues: When wrath subsides, God would call and Job would answer, God would long for his creature. But this anticipation of a doctrine whose time was not yet ripe, this flight of a mind liberated by a collapse of its concept of order, is a momentary flash. Job falls back into despondency.
When the first round of dialogue began, Job rejected life; by its conclusion, he is clinging to it and longing for renewed intimacy with God. Lamentation, anger, despair, and hope succeed each other in waves, but a clear gathering of energy is visible in his speeches. The Friends, hurt by Job’s challenge to their concept of the moral order, have turned from comforters to scolds, each harsher than his predecessor.
- Eliphaz only implies that Job is a sinner;
- Bildad openly proposes that his children have died for their sins;
- Zophar assures Job that his suffering is less than he deserves.
- Yet each ends with a promise of a bright future if Job will only acknowledge his guilt and implore God’s forgiveness.
- Though they provide no direct comfort to Job, by blackening his character they rouse him out of the torpor of despair and kindle in him the desire to assert himself.
Eliphaz opens the second round (chaps. 15-21), deploring Job’s mockery of his Friends’ counsel. His pernicious arguments undermine piety. Is Job Wisdom personified (“Were you born before the mountains?” at 15:7 evokes Prov. 8:25 in reference to Dame Wisdom); does he have a monopoly of it (cf. 12:2-3)?
Job’s ridicule of sapiential tradition rankles with Bildad and Zophar as well (“Why are we thought of as brutes?” 18:3; “reproof that insults me,” 20:3). One would think Job had listened in on God’s council when in fact it was to Eliphaz that insight into man’s true condition was vouchsafed in a night vision (15:14-16 repeats with slight variation the oracle on man’s baseness in Eliphaz’s first speech, 4:17-21). Eliphaz proceeds to depict the life and exemplary fate of the wicked as taught by the sages. This theme, briefly touched upon previously, is elaborated at length throughout the second round of the Friends’ speeches. Since they cannot persuade Job to withdraw his arraignment of God, his very perseverance in his claims appears to them to convict him of sin. Hence they endeavor, in this round, to frighten him into recanting by describing in detail the punishment of the wicked. That these descriptions, ostensibly generic, contain items identical with Job’s misfortunes, is of course not accidental. The poet exhibits virtuosity in playing variations on this single theme. He has Eliphaz focus on the tormented person of the wicked man (chap. 15); here the most blatant allusions to Job’s condition occur. Bildad concentrates on the destruction of his “tent” and progeny:
Light has darkened in his tent;
his lamp fails him …
Generations to come will be appalled at his fate [and say],
“These were the dwellings of the wicked;
here was the place of him who knew not God.” (18:21)
Zophar (chap. 20) develops an alimentary figure: the ill-got gain of the wicked are sweets he tries to swallow but must vomit, or they will turn to poison in him and kill him.
Job answers the monitory descriptions of the fate of the wicked with pathetic descriptions of his misery (chap. 16). In response to Eliphaz he figures God as an enemy rushing at him like a hero, setting him up as his target—inverting Eliphaz’s picture of the wicked playing the hero and running defiantly at God (15:25-26). He has been afflicted despite his innocence, and this very thought moves him to plead that the wrong done to him not be forgotten (“Earth, do not cover my blood,” 16:18). In a transport of faith he avers he has a witness in heaven who will arbitrate between him and God, then descends again into despair.
Responding to Bildad’s depiction of the wicked man’s loss of home and kin, Job relates (chap. 19) how God has stripped him of honor; how friends, wife, and servants have abandoned him till only his flesh and bones remain attached to him. He implores the compassion of his Friends, wishes for a permanent record of his arguments, and consoles himself with the assurance that although he is forsaken in the present, his redeemer-kinsman (go’el) lives and will in the end appear to vindicate him.
In his reply to Zophar (chap. 21), concluding the second round of dialogue, Job bids his Friends be silent and listen to something truly appalling (Job spurns as specious the horror over the pretended destruction of the wicked described by Bildad, 18:20), namely the real situation of the wicked. Contrary to the Friends’ doctrine, the wicked live long and prosper, surrounded by frolicking children; they die without pangs. They flaunt their indifference toward God with impunity. How often is their light extinguished (contrary to Bildad’s claim)? Their children will pay for their sins?—why doesn’t God pay them back!
The Friends have reproached Job with insolence toward God: “Can God be instructed in knowledge—/he who judges from the heights?” (21:22; the verse seems to cite the Friends, but it is a pseudo-citation since in fact they never said this; in the heat of debate Job ascribes to the Friends what can at most have been implied in their speeches). Job answers: What sort of judge distributes well-being and misfortune according to no standard? The Friends have admonished: “Where is the tent in which the wicked dwelled?” (see the end of Bildad’s speech, 18:21); Job retorts: every traveler (that is, worldly-wise person, not necessarily old) knows that even in death the wicked are honored.
In the second round the Friends dwelt one-sidedly on the punishment of the wicked, intending Job to see in the wicked a mirror of himself. What they succeed in doing is to move him to particularize his own suffering and—equally one-sidedly—the success of the wicked, thus at once proving he is not one of them and confirming again God’s perversity. In this round, too, Job experiences sporadic moments of hopefulness and intimations of vindication. Significant of things to come in round three is the frequency (especially in Job’s last speech) with which Job cites the Friends or anticipates their responses to him. In the first speech of this round he says that were he in their place he would mouth the same sort of platitudes (16:4); in his last speech he begins to show he can do it.
Eliphaz returns to the arena yet a third time (chap. 22). Is your righteousness of any interest to God? he asks Job (v. 3); the implication seems to be that Job’s clamor for a hearing is arrant presumption (Eliphaz cannot know that God indeed has a stake in Job’s righteousness). In fact, he continues, you are very wicked—behaving in a cruel and callous manner toward the weak and defenseless. Eliphaz has been driven to this extreme by his tenacious adherence to the doctrine of distributive justice, the threat to which may be gauged by his incredible accusation. In the sequel, Eliphaz misconstrues Job’s pseudo-citation (21:22) to mean that God cannot see through the cloud-cover to judge mankind; but, he affirms, the wicked are punished. Job must return to God, give up his trust in gold (another fabricated charge), and pray to God; reformed, he will be God’s favorite, capable of interceding with him on behalf of the guilty. Once again Eliphaz suggests he knows God’s counsels; he cannot know that in the end his prediction will come true when Job prays to avert God’s wrath from Eliphaz and his companions!
Job replies in a soliloquy (chaps. 23-24) indirectly relating to Eliphaz. He would like to find God, not in order to repent, but to argue his case before him, for he is sure he would be cleared; but he finds him nowhere. He would emerge as pure gold from a test, and God knows it, yet the deity capriciously harasses him. A list of crimes committed by the wicked now appears, intertwined with a description of the downtrodden, and ending with the cutting reproach “Yet God does not regard it unseemly!” (24:12). After describing a trio of “rebels against the light”—murderer, thief, and adulterer, who shun the light of day—the speech becomes unintelligible till its last defiant line: “Surely no one can give me the lie / or set my words at naught” (24:25).
Bildad’s third speech (chap. 25) is a mere six verses, a doxology consisting chiefly of a repetition (for the second time; see 15:14-16) of Eliphaz’s threadbare oracle (cf. 4:17-21). The following speech of Job contains a doxology that might well continue this one (26:5-14); indeed many critics have taken it for the misplaced end of Bildad’ speech. But an alternative interpretation is commendable for its piquancy: Bildad’s speech is short and sounds like what Job says in reply precisely because Job cuts him off and finishes the speech for him. Such mimicry accords with the tenor of the beginning of Job’s speech, in which he derides Bildad’s rhetorical impotence and suggests that even his banalities are not his own (“Whose breath issued from you?” 26:4). Job demonstrates with great flourish that he can better anything Bildad does. When the Friends are reduced to repeating one another and Job can say their pieces for them, we know that the dialogue has ended.
And indeed Zophar has nothing to say in this third round. To be sure, critics have identified his “lost speech” in the next speech of Job: 27:13 is a variant of the conclusion of Zophar’s last speech (20:29)—picking up as it were where he ended—and the subsequent description of the doom of the wicked continues Zophar’s specific theme of dispossession. That these two passages are connected can hardly be in doubt, but is the latter an alien intrusion into Job’s speech? Its context permits another explanation.
After waiting in vain for Zophar to speak, Job (chap. 27) resumes his address (aptly not called a reply) with an oath invoking (paradoxically) “God who has deprived me of justice” (v. 2). He affirms his blamelessness against his Friends’ vilification. He will hold on to this integrity (an echo of 2:3, 9) as long as he lives, for God destroys the impious who contend with him. He offers to teach his Friends “what is with God” (27:11)—perhaps a reference to wisdom (cf. “It is not with me,” 28:14, and “[What do] you understand that is not with us?” 15:9), in respect of which the Friends held themselves superior to Job (15:9-10). For now, they must stop talking the nonsense that their own experience contradicts (27:12). As an example of such nonsense Job then offers what Zophar might have said had he spoken, in a second display of expert mimicry.
Still formally part of Job’s speech is the sublime poem on wisdom that follows (chap. 28)—the wisdom by which the world is governed, by which the meaning of events is unlocked. Man knows how to ferret precious ores out of the earth; he conquers the most daunting natural obstacles in order to obtain treasure. But he does not have a map to the sources of wisdom. The primeval waters, Tehom and the sea, do not contain it; farsighted birds of the sky do not know its place; Death (the realm next to divinity) had heard only a rumor of it. God alone, whose control of the elements of weather exemplifies his wide-ranging power, comprehends it. For man he has appointed, as its functional equivalent, the obligation to fear God and shun evil—wherewith he adjusts himself to the divine order.
The topic of this poem and its serene resignation seem out of place at this juncture. Critics generally excise the poem from its context, though some ascribe it nonetheless to the author of the dialogue. It is a self-contained piece having only tangential connections with its environment; but these may account for its location. The mention of silver in the first line links the poem to the preceding description of the wicked man’s loss of his silver (27:16-17). More substantial is the possible connection with Job’s undertaking to teach his Friends “what is with the Almighty” (27:11), preparatory to which they should stop talking nonsense. If, as was suggested above, this is a reference to wisdom, which is with God alone, then the Friends’ parade of assurance that they know the reason for Job’s suffering is sheer presumption. As the medieval exegete Nachmanides put it, “He instructed them to say, ‘I don’t know.’” A close paraphrase might be: abandon your futile doctrine; it is a reproach to you and will not gain you God’s favor. This is Job’s last word to his Friends.
Job’s speech in chapters 27 and 28 is framed by phrases that echo his initial characterization in the prose tale. At the beginning, the expressions “I will maintain my integrity / I will hold on to my righteousness” (27:5-6) recall God’s praise: “he still holds on to his integrity” (2:3). At the end, the human equivalent of wisdom is “to fear the Lord and shun evil” (28:28), the very traits of which, according to the story, Job was a paragon. Between these appears Job’s arraignment of God and his friends, and the denial that wisdom is accessible to man. Taken together, these evince the sheer heroism of a naked man, forsaken by his God and his friends and bereft of a clue to understand his suffering, still maintaining faith in the value of his virtue and in the absolute duty of man to be virtuous. The universe has turned its back on him, yet Job persists in the affirmation of his own worth and the transcendent worth of unrewarded good. Perhaps this is the sense of the difficult passage in 17:8-9:
The upright are paralleled at this [Job’s fate];
The innocent man is aroused against the impious [Job’s Friends];
The righteous man holds to his way [despite it all];
He whose hands are pure grows stronger.
If such is the gist of this complex speech, it marks a stage in Job’s reconciliation with God, undercutting the climax in chapter 42. But did the ancient poet share our predilection for the single climax? He has depicted Job attaining to peaks of confidence several times, only to relapse into despondency. The same may hold true for Job’s making his peace with his fate and with God.
Job’s final speech, a long soliloquy (chaps. 29-31), reverts even more explicitly to his former state as “the greatest of all the dwellers in the east.” He recollects pathetically his past glory, the awe in which he was held, his regal patronage of the needy and helpless (a pointed refutation of Eliphaz’s gratitious accusations); how he looked forward to living out his days in happiness, surrounded by his family and honored by society “like a king among his troop, as one who comforts mourners” (29:25). Instead he now drinks bitter drafts of insult from a rabble “whose fathers I would have disdained to put among my sheepdogs” (30:1). Once again he describes his suffering—God’s cruel enmity toward him—ending his lament with a line contrasting with the conclusion of the previous picture: “My lyre is given to mourning, / my pipe to accompany weepers” (30:31).
In the last section of the soliloquy (chap. 31), Job forcefully affirms his blamelessness in a form derived from the terminal curse-sanctions of covenants. The biblical models are Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28: if Israel obeys the stipulations of the Covenant, it will prosper; if not, it will suffer disaster upon disaster.
Attention is directed to this traditional pattern by allusion to a “covenant” Job made with his eyes not to gaze on a maiden (31:1). In the immediate sequel he spells out the classic covenantal doctrine by which he has guided his steps: “Surely disaster is appointed for the iniquitous: / trouble for the wrongdoer” (31:3). (In the retrospective light of this conception, all of Job’s speeches assume the character of a “covenant lawsuit” in reverse: man accusing God, instead of God accusing man [Israel] as in the books of the Prophets.)
In the thin guise of self-curses Job recites a catalogue of his virtues—the code of a nobleman who does not allow his status to weaken his solidarity with the unfortunate. The virtues come in bundles and are interrupted by an only occasional self-curse (“If I did not practice such and such a virtue, may this or that calamity overtake me”), indicating that the pattern (in which normally the curses are prominent) is more form than substance—a vehicle serving the double purpose of marking a conclusion (the function of covenant curses) and of manifesting the unbroken spirit of Job. The latter is underlined by Job’s wish that his Litigant produce a bill of indictment: he would display it as an ornament, so sure is he that it would prove him righteous!
Having played out their parts, the Friends fell silent; now Job falls silent, and the scene assumes the form it had before the dialogue began. But there is a tension in the air: will the Litigant respond?
Resolution of the tension is delayed by the sudden appearance of a new character: angry at the Friends for the inability to answer Job otherwise than by declaring him a sinner, and at Job for justifying himself against God, brash young Elihu and Buzite takes possession of the stage (chaps. 32-37). He excuses his intervention by citing the impotence of his elders and delivers himself of three highly wrought speeches, full of obscure language and not always to the point. Though insisting he will not repeat what has been said (32:14), he does go over familiar ground; new are the grandiloquence and the occasional argument in favor of positions already taken.
Thus to Job’s charge that God does not answer, Elihu replies (off the point) that God speaks to man through dreams and illness designated to humble man’s pride and turn him from his bad course (Eliphaz said as much in 5:17-18, but without elaborating the suffering and later confession and thanksgiving of the penitent). He counters Job’s complaint of God’s injustice by affirming, tautologically, that the sole ruler of the earth cannot do wrong, since it is of the essence of rulership to be just. From the transcendence of God Eliphaz had argued that man’s works cannot interest him (22:2-3); Job had reasoned from the same fact of transcendence that even if he sinned, it could scarcely matter to God (7:20); Elihu advances the thought that the good and evil that men do cannot affect God, but only other men. Hence—if we understand 35:9 rightly—human misery has its cause in human evil; yet God is not indifferent, and in the end he punishes the guilty. Elihu’s last speech opens with an interpretation of the suffering of the virtuous as disciplinary, and concludes with a rhapsodic paean to God’s greatness as evidenced in the phenomena of rain, thunder, and lightning.
Elihu has indeed championed God’s cause without condemning Job (except in 34:8: Job makes common cause with the wicked); his ornate eloquence has contributed color but little substance to the debate. Critics consider his speeches redundant and hence from another hand or at least outside the original plan of the book. But if repetition is an indication of unoriginality, considerable tracts of the dialogue of Job and his Friends would have to be declared secondary. The pattern of alternating dialogue is absent in Elihu’s section, but it has already lapsed in the last spell of Job’s oratory.
Elihu’s style is different from that of his predecessors, but might not that difference be intentional, to distinguish impetuous youthfulness from one deliberate age? Our author may simply have sought another character through which to display rhetorical invention. Indeed, can a better reason be given for the extension of the dialogue for three rounds than the delight of the poet in the exercise of his gift?
This very motive animates the ancient Egyptian composition called “The Eloquent Peasant,” whose thematic similarity to Job has been observed: a peasant who has been robbed pleads his cause before the governor; the king, who is told of the peasant’s eloquence, deliberately delays judgment of the case so as to enjoy more and more of it. By this device the author gains scope for exercising his skill in playing variations on a few themes. (A modern editor’s evaluation of the piece recalls evaluations of Elihu’s speeches: “The peasant’s speeches are, to modern state, unduly repetitive, with high-flown language and constant harping on a few metaphors.”) Be that as it may, the unconventional representation of youth outdoing age bespeaks the author of the rest of the poem, whose hallmark is subversion of tradition. Elihu has marginally surpassed the Friends in affirming that God does speak to man, that not all suffering is punitive, and that contemplation of nature’s elements opens the mind to God’s greatness—a line of apology for God that does not entail blackening Job’s character. We are on the way to God’s answer from the storm.
The chief problem raised by God’s answer to Job (chaps. 38-41) is to relate the panorama it paints of God’s amazing creativity to the issues the interlocutors have been wrestling with.
In opening his speech (chaps. 38-39), God exchanges roles with Job: till now, Job has demanded answers from God; now God sets unanswerable questions to Job about the foundations of universe.
- Does Job know anything about the fashioning and operation of the cosmic elements—earth, sea, the underworld, and darkness?
- Has he knowledge of, can he control, the celestial phenomena of snow, hail, thunder, and lightning, or the constellations?
- From these spectacles of nature God turns to wilderness animals and their provisioning: the lions, who lie in ambush for their prey; the raven, whose young cry to God for food; the mountain goats, whose birth only God attends; the wild ass, who roams far from civilization; the wild ox, who mocks man’s attempt to subjugate him; the silly ostrich; the war horse, with his uncanny lust for battle; the soaring falcon and eagle, who sight their prey from afar. None owe man anything; the ways of none are comprehended by him.
How different this survey of creation is from that of Genesis 1 or the hymn to nature of Psalm 104. Here man is incidental—mainly an impotent foil to God.
- In Genesis 1 (and its echo, Ps. 8) teleology pervades a process of creation whose goal and crown is man. All is directed to his benefit; the earth and its creatures are his to rule.
- In Psalm 104 nature exhibits a providential harmony of which man is an integral part.
- But the God of Job celebrates each act and product of his creation for itself, an independent value attesting his power and grace.
- Job, representing mankind, stands outside the picture, displaced from its center to a remote periphery.
- He who would form a proper judgment of God cannot confine himself to his relations with man, who is, after all, only one of an astonishing panoply of creatures created and sustained in ways unfathomable to the human mind.
Instead of confessing his ignorance and, by implication, his presumptuousness, in judging God, Job replies (40:3-5) that he is too insignificant to reply; that he can say no more. This response, as Saadya Gaon observed in the tenth century, is ambiguous: “When one interlocutor says to his partner, ‘I can’t answer you,’ it may mean that he acquiesces in the other’s position, equivalent to ‘I can’t gainsay the truth’; or it may mean he feels overborne by his partner, equivalent to ‘How can I answer you when you have the upper hand?’” In order to elicit an unequivocal response, God speaks again.
In language identical with that of the first speech, God declares he will put questions to Job: “Would you impugn my justice, / condemn me, that you may be right?” (40:8). Job has dwelt on the prosperity of the wicked, attributing it to divine indifference or cruelty. God invites Job to try his hand at righting wrongs, if he has the hand to do it: “Have you an arm like God’s? / Can you thunder with a voice like him?” (40:9). If he can do better, God will sing his praises.
Once again, Job’s ignorance and impotence are invoked to disqualify him from arraigning God: only one who comprehends the vastness and complexity of God’s work can pass judgment on his performance. To drive home Job’s powerlessness, two monstrous animals are described that mock the Genesis notion of man’s rule of terrestrial and sea creatures.
- Behemoth, a land animal, is briefly described: his muscles are powerful, his bones like metal bars.
- Leviathan, a denizen of the waters, is a living fortress, whose parts evoke shields and military formations; flames and smoke issue from him; no weapon avails against him; his tracks are supernally luminous; he lords it over the arrogant.
The effect of this parade of wonders is to excite amazement at the grandeur and exotic character of divine creativity. By disregarding man, the author rejects the anthropocentrism of all the rest of Scripture. God’s governance cannot be judged by its manifestations in human society alone. Had the moral disarray evident in society been tolerated by a mere human ruler, other humans of like nature and motives would have been entitled to judge him as vicious. But no man can comprehend God, whose works defy teleological and rational categories; hence to condemn his supervision of human events because it does not conform to human conceptions of reason and justice is improper.
Man’s capacity to respond with amazement to God’s mysterious creativity, and to admire even those manifestations of it that are of no use or benefit to him, enables him to affirm God’s work despite its deficiencies in the moral realm. Such deficiencies, like so much else in the amazing cosmos, stand outside human judgment. Chapter 28 has already anticipated the conclusion at which Job must arrive in the face of God’s wonders: for mankind wisdom consists of fearing God and shunning evil; more than that he cannot know.
Job now submits unequivocally (42:2-6). He confesses his ignorance and his presumptuousness in speaking of matters beyond his knowledge. Now that he has not merely “heard of” God—that is, known of him by tradition—but also “seen” him—that is, gained direct cognition of his nature—he rejects what he formerly maintained and “is consoled for [being mere] dust and ashes” (v. 6). Lowly creature that he is, he has yet been granted understanding of the inscrutability of God; this has liberated him from the false expectations raised by the old covenant concept, so misleading to him and his interlocutors.
The Adversary has lost his wager. Throughout his trial Job has neither rejected God (he has clung to him even in despair) nor ever expressed regret for having lived righteously (cf. Ps. 73:13-14). He thus gave the lie to the Adversary’s insinuation that his uprightness was contingent on reward. Yet this last word of the poet does not pull all things together.
God’s answer does not relate to the issues raised in the dialogue; it seeks rather to submerge them under higher considerations. Although the poet rejects the covenant relation between God and man with its sanctions of distributive justice, he offers no alternative. In effect, he puts the relation entirely on a footing of faith—in the language of the Adversary, “fearing God for nothing” (1:9).
The narrative epilogue (42:7-17) relates Job’s rehabilitation. God reproaches Eliphaz, the chief and representative of the Friends, for not having spoken rightly about him as Job did. God thus seconds Job’s protest in 13:7-10:
Will you speak unjustly on God’s behalf?
Will you speak deceitfully for him? …
He will surely reprove you
if in your heart you are partial toward him.
God forbids a conception of himself as a moral accountant, according to which the Friends interpreted Job’s suffering as punishment and Job ascribed injustice to God. Since the prayer of the injured on behalf of those who injured him is the most effective intercession (cf. Abraham’s intercession for Abimelech, Gen. 20:7, 17), God orders the Friends to seek Job’s intervention with him on their behalf (ironically, Eliphaz promised Job this power, 22:30). With this act of mutual reconciliation, Job is restored to his material and social position: his possessions are doubled (cf. Bildad’s promise, 8:7), and he has children equal to the number of those reported dead by the messenger. Unlike 1:2, 42:13 does not state that the children “were born to him”; Nachmanides infers from this difference that the original children were restored, having been only spirited away by the Adversary—a laudably humane, if unpersuasive, piece of exegesis. The story pays unusual regard to Job’s daughters, noting their incomparable beauty, their exotic names—which may be rendered “Day-bright” (so ancient tradition understood Yemima), “Cassia” (a perfume-herb), and “Horn of Eye-Cosmetic”—and their equalization with their brothers as heirs, an egalitarian touch worthy of our unconventional author. Job dies at a ripe old age surrounded by four generation of his family (cf. 5:26, 29:18).
Critics have deemed this conclusion, yielding as it does to the instinct of natural justice, anticlimactic and a vulgar capitulation to convention; the common reader, on the other hand, has found this righting of a terribly disturbed balance wholly appropriate.
In its reversal, the conclusion is of a piece with the rest of the book, so consistently subverting expectations and traditional values. Thus the story is set in motion by the Adversary’s undermining the value of covenant-keeping piety, casting doubt on its disinterestedness. This instigates the immoral exercise of dealing the deserts of the wicked to pious Job in order to try his mettle—a perverse measure that cannot be avoided if doubts about his motives are to be allayed.
Job, true to his character, blesses God even in adversity; however, soon thereafter he awakens to the moral disarray in the world and comes near blasphemy by accusing God of indiscriminate cruelty. Job despairs, yet continues to look to God for vindication. The Friends came to console, but exhaust themselves in vexatious arguments with Job; seeking his repentance, they incite him to ever bolder protest. They propose to teach him traditional wisdom; he ends by teaching them the inaccessibility of true wisdom. Job calls on God to present his bill of indictment, believing and not believing he will respond, and eager to present his defense. God does actually respond, but not to Job’s questions; and Job has no answer at all. God rebukes Job for presumptuousness, but he also rebukes the Friends for misrepresenting him. Finally, when Job has resigned himself to being dust and ashes in the face of the cosmic grandeur revealed to him, God reverses his misfortune and smiles on him to the end of his life.
The piquancy of these incessant turns of plot, mood, and character is heightened by the overarching ironies resulting from the union of the frame story and the dialogue. We see a handful of men striving vainly to penetrate the secret of God’s providence, guessing futilely at the meaning of what they see, while we know that behind this specific case of suffering is a celestial wager. The effect of keeping the background setting and the foreground dialogue simultaneously in mind is almost vertiginous. For example, the Friends appear so far right in insisting, and Job so far wrong in denying, that God discriminates in his visitations—for a reason none can know. All are wrong in asserting that whether Job (man) sins or not is of no account to God. Job’s sardonic charge that he is persecuted just because he is righteous is truer than any of the human characters can know.
At the same time, the surface meaning of the dialogue is not invalidated: appearances do support Job’s contention that God is indifferent to those who cling to him and smiles on the wicked; Friends’ depiction of society as a perfectly realized moral order is really nonsense. The beacon of the righteous is not hope of reward but the conviction that, for man, cosmic wisdom is summed up in the duty to fear God and shun evil, whether or not these virtues bear fruit. The misfortunes of the righteous ought not to imply a condemnation of God, in view of the grandeur and mystery of God’s creative work at large.
Vacillating between the “truth” of the story and the arguments of the dialogue, the reader may be inclined to harmonize the two:
- the suffering of the righteous is, or may be, a test of the disinterestedness of their virtue. This of course can never be known to the sufferers of their neighbors; the case of Job is a stern warning never to infer sin from suffering (the error of the Friends), or the enmity of God toward the sufferer (the error of Job).
- Although such a harmonization may offer some consolation to Job-like suffering, it is not spelled out in the book. With its ironies and surprises, its claims and arguments in unresolved tension, the Book of Job remains the classic expression in world literature of the irrepressible yearning for divine order, baffled but never stifled by the disarray of reality.
The Poetry of Job
The poetry of Job is a sustained manifestation of the sublime, in the classical sense of “exhibit[ing] great objects with a magnificent display of imagery and diction” and having “that force of composition … which strikes and overpowers the mind, which excites the passions, and which expresses ideas at once with perspicuity and elevation.”
It embraces an extraordinary range of objects of universal interest: emotions of serenity and terror, hope and despair; the contrasting characters of men; doubts about the affirmations of cosmic justice; the splendors and wonders of animate and inanimate nature. To be sure, these appear elsewhere in biblical literature, but only in the Book of Job are these themes expressed with much concentration, such invention and vivid imagery.
The poet makes use of the various genres of biblical lyric and sapiential poetry:
- the personal complaint of Psalms in Job’s self-descriptions;
- the moral character portraits of Proverbs (the lazybones, the drunkard) in the depictions of the righteous and the wicked;
- the psalmic hymns in the doxologies, which in Job are sometimes straightforward and sometimes parodic.
- However, Job’s brilliant descriptions of weather and animal phenomena and the evocation of man’s exploration and exploitation of earth’s resources have only rudimentary antecedents in earlier biblical poetry.
Innovative imagery pervades the book:
- the tree cut down that renews itself from its roots (14:7-9) as a metaphoric foil for man’s irrevocable death;
- humanity’s kinship with maggots (17:14) and jackals (30:29) as an image of alienation and isolation;
- the congealing of milk (10:10) as a figure for the formation of the embryo;
- the movement of a weaver’s shuttle (7:6), of a runner in fight, or of the swooping eagle (9:25-26) as similes for the speedy passage of a lifetime;
- God’s hostility figured as an attacking army (19:12);
- God’s absence represented in the image of a traveler’s unfound goal in every direction (23:8; a striking reversal of the expression of God’s ubiquity in Ps. 139:7-10).
The diction of the poems is distinguished by lexical richness, with many unique, unusual, and “foreign” expressions, lending color to the non-Israelite setting and characters. For example, ‘or, besides its normal Hebrew sense of “light,” seems to bear dialectical Aramaic senses of “evening” (24:14) and “west wind” (38:24); and there are many other terms that occur only in this book. There is much expressive repetition of sound (alliteration, assonance); the explosive p sound, for instance, dominates 16:9-14, a passage in which Job pictures himself as a battered and shattered object of God’s pitiless assaults. Verbal ambiguity is abundantly exploited: be’efes tiqwah in the weaving image of 7:6 can mean “without hope” or “till the thread runs out”; in 9:30-31, the opposites bor, “soap,” and shahat, “muck,” are homonyms of two synonyms meaning “pit,” thus conveying the suggestion “out of one pit into another.” Contrariwise, the same expression recurs in different contexts, effecting cohesion while at the same time producing variety: the pair “vision/dream” serves as the vehicle of oracular experience (33:15), nightmares (7:14), or a figure of ephemerality (20:8); the pair “dust (dirt) / clay” expresses the qualities of insubstantiality (4:19), lifeless malleability (10:9), worthlessness (13:12), and multitude (27:16).
What quality in poetry makes it the preferred vehicle for this author’s vision? Poetry was the form taken by sapiential observation and speculation throughout the ancient Near East. With its engagement of the emotions and the imagination, it was the usual mode of persuasive discourse. Through its comprehension, poetry allows stark, untempered expression that, while powerful in impact, awakens the kind of careful reflection that leads to the fuller apprehension of a subject. Moreover, the density of poetic language, compelling the reader to complement, to fill in gaps, fits it peculiarly for representing impassioned discourse, which by nature proceeds in associative leaps rather than by logical development. Spontaneous debate, too, is characterized by zigzag, repetitive, and spiral movement in which sequence is determined more by word and thought association than by linearity. Someone listening in to debate must supply the connections in a manner not very different from the complementing required for the comprehension of poetry. Such passionate argument is precisely reflected in the poetry of Job, as each interlocutor links theme to theme without troubling to arrange them according to logical sequentiality, and by that very liberty enriching the connotations and multiplying the facets of the argument.
The poetry of Job is continually astonishing—
- in its power and inventiveness.
- Its compression allows multiple possibilities of interpretation, corresponding to the open, unresolved tensions in the author’s vision of reality.
- It is a beautifully appropriate vehicle for a writer bent on compelling us to see things in new ways.
