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Recasting a Classic: A Reconsideration of Meaning in the Book of Job
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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The goal of this article is to show how all parts of the Book of Job function coherently, co-operatively and brilliantly. Though commentators continue to assert that the frame of the work (1-2, 42:7-17) is easily separable from the body of the work (3-42:6), that contention is simply not true. The prose prologue and epilogue pose the book’s central and crucial issues, which are then partially, and slightly unrealistically, dealt with in the work’s central, poetic dialogue section. The ‘game’ of understanding the work would be much easier to play if the frame—front and back—were not there. But it is there; and it is indispensable. The prologue raises the theological stakes of the dialogue.
Five key issues are posed by the prologue, setting the agenda for the entire book. First, who is God? What sort of deity is God, according to information we receive in the prologue? Why is God employing an adversary (a satan) and what can an adversary do that assists God? What is God’s motive in calling attention to Job? How can the wager between God and the adversary, apparently entered into so casually, be benign? What is God’s presumption regarding the outcome of the wager made with the adversary?
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- Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Polzin, Robert, ‘The Framework of the Book of Job,’ Interpretation 28 (1974): 182–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Seitz, Christopher R., ‘Job: Full‐Structure, Movement, and Interpretation,’ Interpretation 43 (1989): 9.Google Scholar
3 Not all scholars agree that the oft‐repeated insistence of Job's goodness is to be taken at face value.
4 Hedge vocabulary and related imagery is present in a number of ways in the work (1:110, 3:23, 10:11, 27:18, 36:29, 38:8, 40), suggesting its importance as a complex and multivalent symbol of both help and hindrance.
5 Luis Alonso‐Schökel, SJ, “Toward A Dramatic Reading of the Book of Job,” trans. Polzin, R.. Semeia 7 (1977): 46–8Google Scholar suggests that Elihu is a member of the audience unable, eventually, to restrain himself further, God becomes a judge of audience as well as of characters. He concludes that when so considered, the work becomes intelligible and comprehensible; it recovers its expression and appeal.
6 I think for all practical purposes the family of Job is to be accounted as possessions, possibly excepting his wife, who is not a possession but not a character either. She is a motif.
7 Wilcox, J.T.. The Bitterness of Job. A Philosophical Reading (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1990)Google Scholar explores the issue in chapter 5, concluding that God is the agent of unfairness, beyond a doubt.
8 The point is stated succinctly by MacKenzie, R.A.F. S.J. and Murphy, Roland E., Carm, O.., ‘Job.’The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Eds. Brown, E. S.S., Fitzmyer, J.A. S.J., and Murphy, R.E., Carm, O.. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice‐Hall, 1990): 467Google Scholar: the friends spoil their point by exaggerating, by being unwilling to leave any margin of uncertainly, by resisting the admission of any limits to their own insight.
9 Habel, N.C., The Book of Job. Commentary (London: SCM, 1985)Google Scholar writes at length (517‐74) on God's speeches, both maintaining (530, 33) and demonstrating (530‐32) the close relationship of vocabulary, theme and topic between Job's points and the divine responses.
10 Alonso‐Schökel comments that though Job does not know God is present and attentive, nor can he accept God to be absent (49).
11 Alonso‐Schökel 50.
12 Alter, Robert, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985) 88Google Scholar.
13 Long, Thomas G., ‘Job: Second Thoughts in the Land if Uz,’ Theology Today 45 (1988): 17–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Hauerwas, Stanley, Naming the Silences. God, Medicine, and the Problem of Suffering (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990)Google Scholar.
15 Alonso‐Schökel 50–1.
16 See Habel as above.
17 Pace Long, 6, and many other commentators.
18 Long notes that God's speech is not simply rational but is vivid enough to be seen by Job (15–16).
19 Brenner, ‘Answer,’ 132.
20 Seitz 15.
21 Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job (San Francisco: North Point, 1987). The translation is made on p. 88, with the accompanying note on p. 129: The crucial word, nhm, occurs nine other limes in Job, always meaning ‘comfort,’ though it can in other contexts bear the notion of ‘repentance’ as well Mitchell reminds readers that a similar combination of compassion and dust occurs in Ps. 103: 13–14, where God is said to have compassion on man, who is but dust.
22 A private communication to the writer by Dani Newhouse.
23 Long 19.
24 MacKenzie and Murphy 467.
25 Commentators seem too quick to assume that inevitably Cod is rewarding Job for piety. E.g., Polzin 185.
28 Hauerwas 82.
29 Hauerwas xiii, 34, 44.
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