1 For an analysis of the Testament of Job within the context of early Jewish interpretation, see Gabrielle Oberhὃnsli-Widmer, Hiob in jὁdischer Antike und Moderne. Die Wirkungsgeschichte Hiobs in der jὁdischen Literatur (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2003) 59-93.

2 B. Taanit 30a. For a discussion, see Oberhὃnsli-Widmer, Hiob in jὁdischer Antike und Moderne, 102-119. See Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History (trans. Raymond Scheindlin; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993) 151.

3 See Oliver Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 55.

4 Nonetheless, for an intimation of a theodicy similar to that of Job, see Deut 8:2-6. For other challenges to the dominant, reward and punishment theodicy see Hab 1:2—4, 13, Jer 12:1—4, and several psalms (sections of Pss 10, 11, 12, 13, 77) call God to account for apparent injustice. See David C. Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 27-33. In addition to texts that enshrine a “tradition of complaint,” Kraemer essays all of the varieties of theodicy found in the Hebrew Scriptures.

5 Bruce Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 175.

6 Kraemer, Responses to Suffering, 184—210.

7 Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (trans. Israel Abrahams; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) 514. After assessing the many varieties of rabbinic theodicy Urbach makes a summary assertion: “Irrespective of the answer given to the question ‘the righteous man who fares ill and the wicked man who fares well’… the actual existence of reward and punishment is not in doubt.”

8 Kraemer, Responses to Suffering, 69. The Tosefta (Bava Mezi'a 3:25) criticizes Job's friends not for the content of their speech but for their insensitivity toward the suffering Job. Their insensitive speech is tantamount to oppression. By extension, Job's speech is excusable but not justifiable.

9 The story of Hananiah ben Teradion's martyrdom, with its extreme justification of God's judgment, is found in Sifre: A Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy (trans. Reuven Hammer; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986) 311 (Piska 307). Note also the theodicy claim attributed to Moses at the end of the piska.

10 Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999) 71.

11 For Levinas, according to Richard Bernstein, “Theodicy, in both its theological and secular forms, is the temptation to find some sort of justification, some way to reconcile ourselves to useless, unbearable suffering and evil. But intellectual honesty demands that we recognize that theodicy—in this broad sense—is over.” Levinas cited in Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) 169 [emphasis added].

12 Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 149.

13 Alternatively, where metaphysics continues to attempt a science of the whole it does so in ways profoundly incompatible with traditional Jewish theodicy. The historicist metaphysics of Hegel, the nontheistic metaphysics of Heidegger or the process metaphysics of Whitehead leave no room for the expression of traditional Jewish assertions about God's power, knowledge and justice.

14 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 26. See also, Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 266-84 for the demise and transformation of metaphysical concepts of the whole such as the “great chain of Being.”

15 Susan Neiman, Evil In Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) 17.

16 Ibid.

17 Translated texts are drawn from the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Baba Bathra. Baba Bathra (trans. Isidore Epstein; London: Soncino Press, 1935) 77-81. The diversity and development of rabbinic approaches to suffering are brilliantly analyzed by Kraemer, Responses to Suffering. That Kraemer's own sympathies lie with the heterodox “Bavli rebels,” as he calls the texts that challenge God's justice, is clear (viii, 200).

18 The view that the book has a fictive character is also found in Bereshit Rabba 57:4.

19 Oberhὃnsel-Widmer, Hiob, 52-55.

20 “There was a certain pious man among the heathen named Job, but he [thought that he had] come into this world only to receive [here] his reward, and when the Holy One, blessed be He, brought chastisements upon him, he began to curse and blaspheme, so the Holy One, blessed be He, doubled his reward in this world so as to expel him from the world to come.” Baba Bathra 15b, quoted from Isidore Epstein, trans. Baba Bathra, 75.

21 Baba Bathra 16a, in ibid., 79.

22 Ibid., 80.

23 Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 50. A systematic overview of Saadia's theodicy, drawn however from his Book of Beliefs and Opinions and not from his commentary on Job, may be found in Eliezer Schweid, (Bat Yam: Tag, 1994) 151-81.

24 Saadia's relationship to kalam in general and to the Mutazila in particular, however, is by no means straightforward. For an analysis see Sarah Stroumsa, “Saadya and Jewish kalam,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

25 Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (trans. Samuel Rosenblatt; Yale Judaica Series 1; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948) 214. For the sources for “sufferings of love,” see Deut 8:5 and Prov 3:12. A critical rabbinic discussion of the concept is found at B. Berachot 5a—b.

26 Saadia is the first to identify the speeches of each character in Job with a determinate philosophical position. See The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job by Saadiah ben Joseph Al-Fayyumi (trans. Lenn E. Goodman; Yale Judaica Series 25; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 55.

27 Goodman, The Book of Theodicy, 410. Compare this translation with the New Jewish Publication Society Version: “After the LORD had spoken these words to Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job.” Moshe Greenberg et al., eds., The Book of Job: A New Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980) 62.

28 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (trans. Shlomo Pines; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) 491. The discussion of Job is found in Guide III: 22—23. Maimonides asserts that the friends agree with each other only superficially, that is, on the exoteric level. A closer reading indicates that the text “hide[s] the notion that is peculiar to the opinion of each individual, so that at first it occurs to the multitude that all the interlocutors are agreed upon the selfsame opinion; however, this is not so (495).” Each friend articulates a classical view with regard to providence, i.e., to divine justice in the governance of the world. Job's opinion is in keeping with Aristotle. Eliphaz's opinion is in keeping with “the opinion of our Law.” Bildad's corresponds with the Mutazila and Zophar's with the Asharites (494). Since Maimonides rejects Eliphaz's opinion, his own stance is esoteric.

29 Kenneth Seeskin, Searching for a Distant God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 151.

30 Guide III:22, 487. On the distinction in Maimonides between the righteous and the wise, i.e., between moral and intellectual virtue, see Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 174.

31 Guide III:23, 492.

32 Ibid., 493.

33 For an example of his exoteric teaching on theodicy, see Guide III:17. “It is thus one of the fundamental principles of the Law of Moses our master that it is not at all possible that He, may He be exalted, should be unjust … all the calamities which befall men and the good things that come to men, be it a single individual or a group, are all of them determined according to the deserts of the men concerned through equal judgment in which there is no injustice at all.” Quoted in Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 79.

34 Guide, III:23, 496.

35 Ibid., 497

36 But of course, we don't keep silent and Maimonides doesn't either. Although no language can describe God, Maimonides understands the Torah's attributive language to be descriptive of God's actions rather than of his being. That is, language can describe how we experience, on a phenomenal level, the manifestations of divine activity.

37 Norbert M. Samuelson, Revelation and the God of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 130—31.

38 “ἄber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee” in Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklὃrung: Aufsὃtze zur Geschichte und Philosophie (Gῷttingen: Kleine Vandenhoeck-Reihe, 1994). A translation of the essay appears as an appendix in Michel Despland, Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1973).

39 Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003) 162.

40 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (trans. J. H. Bernard; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2005). The second half of the Critique is entitled “Critique of the Teleological Judgment.”

41 For a crisp description of these two types of judgment, see William James Booth, Interpreting the World: Kant's Philosophy of History and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986) 36. “In determinant judgment, the act of judging consists in the application of a known principle to a set of particular circumstances or facts. Judgment is here required to supply no concepts of its own; it is rather a relation, or function, by which one kind of data is brought to bear on another. But in those cases where no principle is supplied, the faculty of judgment must supply its own, and, according to Kant, the only standard it can employ in selecting this principle is the requirements of judging itself.” For the primary text, see Kant, Critique of Judgment, 11—13.

42 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 175.

43 “Theism can just as little establish dogmatically the possibility of natural purposes as a key to Teleology; although it certainly is superior to all other grounds of explanation in that, through the Understanding which it ascribes to the original Being, it rescues in the best way the purposiveness of nature from Idealism, and introduces a causality acting with design for its production.” in Kant, Critique of Judgment, 180.

44 Despland, Kant on History and Religion, 286.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 290.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid. Kant's denial that we can know anything of the divine wisdom rules out the entire theodicy of Leibniz, which rests on an analogy between divine and human wisdom and thus on our ability to know the former. Our concepts of perfect and best guide us in thinking about God. A perfect (i.e., divine) wisdom must choose the best of all possible worlds. Our world, as a creation of divine wisdom, must therefore be the best. See G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (trans. E. M. Huggard; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952) 128. For a concise analysis of Leibniz's theodicy, see Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 7-18.

49 “ἄber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee” in Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklὃrung: Aufsὃtze zur Geschichte und Philosophie, 86; Despland, Kant on History and Religion, 291.

50 Ibid., 292

51 Ibid., 293.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Kant is more concerned for sincerity than for authenticity. This distinction has not yet become fully articulated. Authenticity is a more contemporary ideal that has displaced the still quite morally oriented ideal of sincerity. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).

55 An excellent survey and analysis of Job in modern Jewish belles lettres and in so-called Holocaust theology may be found in Gabrielle Oberhὃnsli-Widmer, Hiob in jὁdischer Antike und Moderne, part II (Hiob in jὁdischer Moderne). Oberhὃnsli-Widmer's analysis, especially of such modern classics as Isaac Leib Peretz's “Bontsche Schweig,” corroborates the thesis advanced in this essay.

56 For an overview and analysis of Cohen's views, see Leaman, Evil and Suffering, 157-64.

57 Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (trans. Simon Kaplan; American Academy of Religion Text and Translation Series 11; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1995) 226.

58 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 227.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid., 228.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 For Fackenheim's rejection of Cohen on these grounds, see Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 273. I agree with Kenneth Seeskin that Cohen's views deserve a contemporary defense. See the introductory essay of Kenneth Seeskin, “How to Read Religion of Reason,” in Cohen, Religion of Reason, 40.

64 Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960) 186.

65 Buber, The Prophetic Faith, 187.

66 Ibid., 191

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., 192

69 Ibid., 194 [emphasis added].

70 Ibid., 195

71 Ibid. See also Buber's approach to reconciling oneself to one's fate in Martin Buber, I and Thou (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) 100-2.

72 Horace M. Kallen, The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1959) 76—77.

73 Ibid., 77.

74 Cited in Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., The Dimensions of Job (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 84.

75 Moshe Greenberg et al., eds., The Book of Job: A New Translation, xx.

76 Ibid., xxiii.

77 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).