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The Book of Job and the Cure of Souls1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
Though his example is warmly commended in the Epistle of James (5.11), Christian piety has never been altogether comfortable with the Job whose sterling patience in adversity is set forth in the book's first two chapters. The man who is there shown suffering bravely the loss of property and family and the onset of disease of a kind that in these distant days had the sentence of death written over it, yet steadfastly refuses to blame God for such disasters, is certainly admired. But his dauntless sentiments of 1.21, The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord, and of 2.10, What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? — the latter in response to his wife who, unable to put up with his agonies any longer, calls on him to curse God and be done with it all — are just too hard to take. A hymn made out of a similarly passive sounding Old Testament text like My times are in thy hand (Ps. 31.15) is one thing. But Job's insistence on implicating God directly in the tragedies that may befall a good man is quite another thing. I doubt, therefore, whether these texts from Job chapters 1 and 2 figure much in the pastoral care of the sick and the bereaved in the modern Church, though in sturdier ages it seems that they did.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1989
References
2 Similar unease about the disappearance of Job from the Roman Catholic Matins for the Dead is expressed in Rouillard, P., ‘The figure of Job in the Liturgy’ in Duquoc, C. and Floristan, C. (eds.), Job and the Silence of God (Concilium, November 1983).Google Scholar
3 As in the Book of Numbers where it has the meaning ‘to muster, number’ (the verb is pàqad).
4 This is one of the Tiqqûnê Sop'rim or ‘corrections of the scribes’, i.e. a place where it is admitted that the original text has been tampered with in the interests of a less offensive meaning. The original text, which is the one reflected in the Septuagint and is rendered by me ‘Why am I a mark for you to aim at?’, could have been translated ‘Why have I become a burden to you?’ The present Massoretic Text substitutes ‘to me’ for ‘to you’, thus the Authorized Version's ‘so that I am a burden to myself’.
5 This apothegm is often attributed to Voltaire, but in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Heine is regarded as the speaker, though a rather longer version is attributed to the Empress Catherine the Great. It is clearly one of those peripatetic aphorisms which in their history attract a variety of originators. The Psalms quotation earlier parodied by Job may in fact be a Hebrew example of such an aphorism; for Ps. 8.4 (Hebr. 5) appears again, in a slightly different form, in Ps. 144.3; compare also Isa. 2.2–4 with Mic. 4.1–3.
6 Or, ‘look at me’!; the Hebrew, rather oddly, has simply the particle ‘behold’ with no accompanying suffix.
7 Reading (verse 32) lû ‘if only’ (with some Greek and Syriac support) instead of lō’, ‘not’, i.e. ‘There is no (umpire)’.
8 Moffatt omits the first part of verse 3 and the whole of verse 4 which are quotations (from respectively 38.2 and 38.3 = 40.7) of Yahweh's own words built into Job's speech; they are awkward to fit in, but there is no versional evidence for regarding them as scribal additions.
9 In my commentary on Job in the Daily Study Bible series (Edinburgh, 1985)Google Scholar and in more detail in an article entitled ‘On evil in the Book of Job’ in Eslinger, L. (ed.), Biblical and Ugaritic Studies in Memory of Peter Craigie, to be published shortly by the University of Calgary PressGoogle Scholar. Professor Craigie, a distinguished graduate of New College was, until his tragic death in a car accident in 1985, Vice-Principal of Calgary University.
10 The animal in question is the aurochs or urus, a large long-horned bovine (zoologically bos primigenius) of the European and Middle Eastern forests, now extinct; but at least, unlike the unicorn, it once existed.
11 One place where they do is Ps. 44.22 (Hebr. 23), translated in the Authorized Version ‘For thy sake we are killed all the day long’ and cited in that sense (following the Septuagint) by Paul in Rom. 8.36; but, in tune with the bitter context, the verse ought to be translated ‘Because of you we are under daily threat of death’.
12 Westermann, C., The Structure of the Book of Job (Philadelphia, 1981), p. 6.Google Scholar
13 This view that the individual Laments began their life as laments of real people in need or distress seems to me a more satisfying one than that commonly current nowadays which sees in the ‘I’ a representative figure like the king. Instead of having the king, or some Temple minister, voice in metaphorical terms in the liturgy the people's feeling that God is not helping them as he ought, it envisages a rite at which Israelites suffering actual illness or exploitation could seek — and receive — redress in God's house. In holding to this view I have been influenced not only by Westermann's drawing of a parallel between the speeches of Yahweh in the Book of Job and the ‘oracle of salvation’ — a parallel that would fall if no such private rite existed —, but by the forceful arguments of D. H. Said, a Brazilian research student at New College, that the vocabulary of poverty and oppression in the Lamentation Psalms and in the Old Testament in general should be accepted at its face value and not spiritualized unless there is evidence in the text that it is being used metaphorically. See Westermann, op.cit., pp. 105ff., and Said's unpublished doctoral dissertation, Longing for Justice: A Study on the Cry and Hope of the Poor in the Old Testament (1987), esp. ch. 3. For a thoroughgoing attempt to make the king the dominant speaker in the Lamentation Psalms see Eaton, J. H., Kingship and the Psalms (London, 1976).Google Scholar
14 Though in much of what follows I am summarizing the final pages of my commentary, the more radical interpretation of 42.2–6 given here is new.
15 For my interpretation of this celebrated but extremely enigmatic passage see my commentary, pp. 149–160.
16 As [in the case of the first verb (m¯'as)] in 9.21 (‘I renounce my life’) and as [in the case of the second verb (niham)] in, e.g., 2 Sam. 13.39; Jer. 31.15; Ps. 77.2 (Hebr. 3).
17 The verse (13.8) means literally ‘Will you lift up his face (i.e. show partiality towards him)? Will you argue on God's behalf?’
18 The Greek is hupōpiazein, lit. ‘to hit under the eye’; the verb occurs again in 1 Cor. 9.27 where Lorimer renders, ‘Na: I nevel my ain bodie black and blae …’ Lorimer, sometime Professor of Greek at St Andrews, makes full use in his translation (The New Testament in Scots, Edinburgh, 1983) of the rich resources of the Scots language in terms of abuse and scurrility. A few scholarly Scottish ministers have tried their hand in the past at rendering portions of the Old Testament into Scots (e.g. P. Hately Waddell, The Psalms frae Hebrew intil Scottis, 1871, reissued 1987) but not, to my knowledge, the Book of Job. Is there anyone left in our manses with the necessary knowledge of Hebrew and fluency in Scots to rise to such a challenge?