Preview of Michael Austin's "Re-Reading Job"

Re-reading Job
Austin_Job.indb 1 5/22/2014 12:10:53 PM

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Re-reading Job
Understanding the Ancient
Worlds Greatest Poem
Michael Austin
Greg Kofford Books
Salt Lake City, 2014
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Copyright 2014 Michael Austin
Cover design copyright 2014 Greg Koford Books, Inc.
Cover design by Loyd Ericson
Passages from the Jewish Publication Society Hebrew Bible are reprinted from
the Tanakh: Te Holy Scriptures by permission of the University of Nebraska
Press. Copyright 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia.
Portions of this book appeared in the article What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?:
A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry. In Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Tought 46, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 122142. Reprinted by permission.
Published in the USA.
All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher, Greg Koford Books. Te
views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not neces-
sarily represent the position of Greg Koford Books.
Greg Koford Books
P.O. Box 1362
Draper, UT 84020
www.gregkoford.com
facebook.com/gkbooks

Also available in ebook.
2018 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1
__________________________________________________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Austin, Michael, 1966- author.
Rereading Job : understanding the ancient worlds greatest poem / Michael
Austin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58958-667-3 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-58958-668-0 (hardcover)
1. Bible. Job--Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints--Doctrines. 3. Mormon Church--Doctrines. I. Title.
BS1415.52.A97 2014
223.106--dc23
2014017136
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For Karen, my best reader
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Contents
Preface, ix
1. Six Tings I Used to Know about Job, 1
2. Job as History / Job as Literature, 15
3. Te Frame Tale (12; 42:716), XX
4. Te Wisdom dialogue (3-27), XX
5. Odds before the End (28-37), XX
6. God (Sort of ) Answers Job (3842:16), XXX
7. Te Emancipator of Your God:
Jobs Critique of Religious Orthodoxy, XXX
8. Anticipating Christianity:
Why Jobs Redeemer Does Not Liveand How He Does, XXX
9. Job after Auschwitz:
Refashioning Teodicy in the 20th Century, XXX
10. Job and the Wisdom Tradition, 215
Bibliography, 225
Index, 245
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Preface
Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to me to
retain one work only, I should save Job. Victor Hugo
Tere is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal
merit. Tomas Carlyle
Te greatest poem of ancient or modern times. Alfred Lord Tennyson
Victor Hugo, Tomas Carlyle, and Lord Tennyson were three of the
greatest writers of the nineteenth centuryand they were not easily im-
pressed. Tey did not praise lightly, and, when they did praise, they rarely
praised the same things. One thing that all three did share, though, was a
deep distrust of traditional religion and traditional religious textsexcept
for the Book of Job. If we line up their statements about Job, they look less
like the opinions of three of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century
and more like the gushing reviews on the back of a recent bestseller. Te
Book of Job has afected people this way for nearly 2,500 years.
Te greatest philosophical and literary minds of our world have long
felt a powerful need to come to terms with Job: Aquinas, Maimonides,
Hegel, Kant, and Kierkegaard all ofered their own interpretations of Job,
and John Calvin preached more sermons on Job than on any other book
in the Bible. William Blakes most famous works of art are his etchings
for the Book of Job. Johann Wolfgang von Goethes masterpiece Faust is
a Romantic retelling of the Job story. So too are Voltaires Candide and
Kafkas Te Trial. Kafkas entire oeuvre, in fact, can be described as the
attempt of a modern man to understand what it might have felt like to
be Job.
And yet for all of this, nobody has ever quite fgured out what Job
means. Te book famously resists any kind of narrative closure or fnal
interpretation. Te best scholars in the world still ask the very same ques-
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Re-reading Job x
tions about Job that the Jewish philosopher Maimonides asked 800 years
ago: Does God make us sufer? Is the universe ultimately just? Is righ-
teousness just a form of self-interest? Can we conceive of ultimate good-
ness as something separate from ultimate power? Can human beings ever
see the world from Gods perspective?
Tese, it turns out, are some of the hardest questions that human be-
ings have ever tried to answer. And even when the Book of Job fails to an-
swer them (which it usually does), it has done humanity the great service
of providing us with a framework for talking with each other about them.
And the framework that Job created has led to art, literature, psychology,
philosophy, and theology that have advanced human understanding in
profound ways.
So why does the world need one more book about Job? Its not
like there arent plenty of them already. In the twenty years that I have
spent trying to understand it, I have read adaptations of and books
about Job from a dizzying variety of viewpoints. I know the Catholic
Job (G.K. Chestertons Introduction to Job and Muriel Sparks Te
Comforters), the Protestant Job (Robert Frosts A Masque of Reason
and Archibald MacLeishs J.B.), and the post-Holocaust Jewish Job
(Elie Wiesels Te Trial of God and Zvi Kolitzs Yosl Rakover Talks to
God). I have also learned much from Job the Politician (William
Safres Te First Dissident), Job the Education Reformer (H. G. Wells
Te Undying Fire), and Job the Dimension-Hopping Fundamentalist
Fire Walker (Robert A. Heinleins Job: A Comedy of Justice). And I know
more scholarly Jobs than I can ft on a reasonably sized bookshelf.
But I have yet to meet a Mormon Job. Job is one of the books of the Bible
that generally eludes Latter-day Saint readers. It does not ft well into the
standard narratives that most Mormons bring with them to their study of
the Old Testament. Latter-day Saints are not used to reading scriptures
that are also poetry, nor do we usually like to focus on the parts of the
scriptures that, like Job, challenge orthodox beliefs and present God as
less than one hundred percent perfect. What does ft nicely into LDS
interpretive traditions, though, is the short prose tale that makes up the
frst two chapters and the last half of the last chapter of the Book of Job.
And with very few exceptions, this is what gets taught. Tis is a shame,
as the rest of the Book of Job has some very important things to say to
Latter-day Saints.
And Latter-day Saints have plenty to say about the Book of Job.
Mormon theology and LDS scripture have the potential to open av-
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Preface xi
enues for interpreting Job that previous religious traditions have ignored.
Unique Mormon beliefs about things like free agency, personal revelation,
the nature of God, and the role of the pre-existent Satan speak to elements
of Job that have been invisible to generations of interpreters. If Latter-day
Saints understood Job better, I believe that we would fnd it resonating
with our own beliefs in remarkable ways. Tis is why I believe that the
world has room for another book about Job.
I come to Job as a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints and as a scholar of English literature specializing in the
poetry and prose of the seventeenth century. In the past, I have written
about such fgures as Milton, Dryden, Cowley, Bunyan, and Defoe, pay-
ing close attention to the ways that they incorporated the narratives of the
Old Testament into their work. I am not a scholar of Hebrew. Like most
of my co-religionists, I know Job only through translation. What I place
on the altar is the perspective of a trained literary critic, who happens to
be a Mormon, on one of the Bibles most difcult books, which happens
to be a poem.
On a few occasions in this book I will make arguments that rely on
the Hebrew source text. I only do so when convinced that I am citing the
near-unanimous opinions of the many excellent scholars who have spent
much of their lives working with the Hebrew texts. I owe an especially
strong debt to Marvin Popes Anchor Bible edition of Job (1965), Carol
A. Newsoms scholarly masterpiece Te Book of Job: A Contest of Moral
Imaginations (2003), Robert Alters recent translation and commentary
in Te Wisdom Books (2010), Rabbi Harold Kushners compulsively read-
able Te Book of Job: When Bad Tings Happened to a Good Person (2012),
and Mark Larrimores endlessly fascinating Te Book of Job: A Biography
(2013). Te rich portraits of Job that these scholars have drawn have been
a genuine pleasure to read and grapple with.
Perhaps the hardest thing that I had to do in writing this book was
to choose a translation of Job to cite. Te only thing that I knew for sure
when I began was that I would not use the King James Version. I do not
say this lightly. For the frst thirty years of my life, the King James Bible
was the only Bible I knew. I read it frst as a practicing Latter-day Saint us-
ing the only English Bible approved by the Church, and later as a scholar
of the seventeenth-century, whose literature was more infuenced by this
version of the Bible than by any other text, ancient or modern.
I still believe that the King James Bible is a wonderful work of lit-
erature in its own right and that it is good for many things, but under-
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Re-reading Job xii
standing Job is not one of them. Unlike every other commonly available
English-language Bible, the KJV does not make any distinction between
prose and poetry. It prints every line of the Bible as prose, and it elevates
the diction of every sentence to the level of poetry. For all of its consider-
able charm, this translation strategy creates big problems for a book like
Job, which switches back and forth between pedestrian prose and elevated
poetry in ways that readers are supposed to notice.
As I auditioned translations, I looked for four things: 1) scholarly
reliability, 2) wide availability, 3) respect for the structural and semantic
parallelism of the original Hebrew verse, and 4) competent English po-
etry. Some translations do much better in some of these categories than
others, but the one that, in my opinion, scores highest overall is the Jewish
Publication Societys Tanakh, or simply the JPS (sometimes called NJPS
to distinguish it from a 1917 translation by the same organization). Tis
original translation of the Hebrew Masoretic Text involved forty Jewish
scholars and rabbis over more than twenty years, culminating in its fnal
publication in 1985. All of my citations from Job will come from this
version as will nearly all other citations from the other books of the Old
Testament. When referencing the New Testament, I will use the familiar
King James translation. And in one place I use the Anchor Bible translation
of a verse from Proverbs because I really like the way it sounds. A foolish
consistency, after all, is the hobgoblin of little minds.
As my title suggests, this is a book about how to re-read Job. My
interpretations of the text assume that readers will have some familiarity
with the story and will know the basics of the plot. But Job is probably
the easiest book in the entire Bible to read badly. Because of its unique
constructionbeginning with a simple prose tale and continuing with an
excruciatingly complicated series of poetic speechesreaders can piece
together a fairly coherent narrative from the introduction and the conclu-
sion without really understanding the very important middle. I will not
try to deconstruct, reconstruct, historicize, problematize, or psychoana-
lyze Job in any way. I have set for myself the much more modest task of
reading a difcult poem and trying to fgure out what it means. Tis is the
only service that literary critics really have to ofer.
I have arranged the chapters of this book to refect, more or less, the
chronology of my own experience with the Book of Job. Te frst two
chapters talk generally about the nature of Job and the challenge of read-
ing scripture that is also poetry. Te next four chapters provide in-depth
readings of the four major divisions of the poem. Chapter Tree treats
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Preface xiii
the prose narrative that begins and ends the Book of Job; Chapter Four
explores the dialogue between Job and his Comforters; Chapter Five deals
with the Hymn to Wisdom, Jobs fnal speech, and the speeches of Elihu;
and Chapter Six tries to make sense of Gods cryptic answer to Job from
the whirlwind. Te last three chapters and the Epilogue of Re-reading Job
address four of the most common lenses that people in the past have used
to read and interpret Job: as a critique of Deuteronomistic orthodoxy,
as an anticipation of Christianity, as a theodicy, and as an example of
Wisdom literature.
A number of people read early drafts and portions of the book and
ofered me valuable feedback along the way. I am especially grateful to
David Bokovoy and Julie Smith, who previewed Re-reading Job for Greg
Koford books and to Kofords own Loyd Ericson, who took a chance
on this project when it was only the barest outline of an idea. David Yee
read the entire manuscript and checked each biblical quotation against
the original, giving me the beneft of his careful eye and deep experience
with the Tanakh. Jim Fleetwood read multiple drafts and provided valu-
able feedback during the writing, as did my father, Roger Austin, who frst
taught me to be curious about the stories of the Bible. And most of all,
my wife and life partner Karen Austin read every word of the manuscript
carefully, copyedited it brilliantly, and provided intellectual and emotional
support during the entire project. Tis book would not exist without her.
My fnal thanks go out to the many great minds who have struggled
with Job over the past 2500 years. In each chapter, I will combine my own
observations with those of these much greater writers and thinkers who
have interpreted or reimagined Job through the centuries. Te enormous
body of novels, plays, poems, sermons, and philosophical treatises based
on Job all illuminate diferent aspects of the text worth paying attention
to. Ultimately, of course, I must bear full responsibility for the way that
I have chosen to present one of the greatest works of literature ever writ-
tenand this includes owning up to any errors that I make along the
way. Albert Camus once remarked that, after a certain age every man is
responsible for his face. Alas, the same holds true for ones ideas, ones
opinions, and ones interpretations of Job.
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Chapter One
Six Things I Used to Know
about Job
Anyone interested in both the Bible and literature will eventually fnd
himself revolving around the Book of Job like a satellite.
Northrup Frye, Words with Power
Learning the Lessons
I frst read Job in 1980 or 1981. I was in ninth grade, and our rural
Oklahoma ward wasnt big enough for early-morning seminary. Tere
were only four or fve of us scattered across just as many small towns and
school districts, so we had a home-study course that met every week on
Sunday. But once in a while, we would all get together for a Friday-night
read-a-thon at the teachers house. We would bring pillows and pajamas,
the teacher would have pizza, and we would read the scriptures from seven
at night until everybody fell asleep. On one such night we all read Job and
a few other books from the Old Testament. But mainly I slept.
I didnt do much better the second time through, though I have clear-
er memories of what I did not understand. It was in 1986, and I was an
LDS missionary in Stockton, California. I had made a goal that year to
read the entire Old Testament during my personal study time. Like any
good reader, I started at Genesis and just plowed my way through to the
end. I remember coming to the Book of Job in the text, understanding the
frst few chapters quite clearly, and then passing my glazed eyes over the
complicated words and sentences that followed, assuming that they must
be saying something consistent with the chapters that had seemed so clear.
Te third time I read Job was in 1988. I was a sophomore at BYU and
had just changed my major to English. My Old Testament class that semes-
ter assigned only a small portion of the Book of Job: the frst two chapters,
the last half of the last chapter, and a few reputedly Christological verses
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Re-reading Job 2
in between. But I (being a new English major and all) dutifully read the
whole book, along with the analysis in the Institute Manual that we used
as our text. Tat year, I learned more about Job than I had ever known. I
learned, in fact, six concrete things that would constitute the whole of my
knowledge about the Book of Job for the next ten years. Here are the six
things that I learned about Job:
1. Job was a historical fgure and the Book of Job should be read
historically.
2. Te Book of Job is a single, internally consistent narrative with a
beginning, a middle, and an end.
3. Job was a patient fellow.
4. Te Book of Job fts logically with the narrative arc of the Old
Testament and with the other Standard Works.
5. In the midst of his great sufering, Job occasionally, and for no
apparent reason, prophesied of Christ with famous words like I
know that my Redeemer lives.
6. Te Book of Job ultimately shows that, if we just wait long enough,
God will reward our good behavior with material prosperity.
I knew, in other words, that part of Job that one can learn by reading the
frst two chapters, the last half of the last chapter, and a few reputedly
Christological verses in between.
I did not read Job again in graduate school, even though I ended up
writing a dissertation on the ways that seventeenth-century poets (Milton,
Dryden, Cowley, etc.) understood the Old Testament in their poetry. But
I did read hundreds of books and articles on the literary motifs of the
Hebrew Bible. I published articles on Genesis, Samuel, Ruth, and the
Psalms in respectable journals with rigorous standards for peer review.
And somehow I managed to do all of this without ever learning the most
basic and obvious fact about the Book of Job: itor at least most of itis
a poem.
But even overspecialized new Ph.D.s cant go on knowing nothing
forever. When I landed my frst teaching job at a state university in West
Virginia, half of my teaching load was in a general-education world lit-
erature class that every student in the college had to take. All sections of
the class used the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Everybody had
to teach Job. I was not worried; I was an expert, after all, and I knew six
things about Job. But when I read the headnote in the Norton anthology,
I realized very quickly that Id been had. My previous assumptions about
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Six Things I Used to Know about Job 3
the Book of Job were not merely wrong; they were spectacularly wrong. I
had no business trying to teach anybody about the greatest literary work
of the Bible. And that day in the fall of 1997, I began the painful process
of unlearning everything I knew about the Book of Job.
Unlearning the Lessons
Te Book of Job challenges its readers more than most books of the
Bible do, but the challenges are not insurmountable. Job is certainly no
more difcult than most of William Faulkners novels, and it is nowhere
near as hard as Ulysses or Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. By the third time
that I read Job, I had already learned how to read and understand consid-
erably more difcult works of literature. But I knew that those books were
going to be hard. When I read Ulysses in college, for example, I had no
illusions about breezing through it in a few days. I read it at a desk with
Stuart Gilberts commentary always on the left and Don Gifords inde-
pendent annotations always on the right. I got a lot out of it only because
I put a lot into it, which is generally how most of us non-geniuses have to
read difcult things.
But I never thought that I needed help understanding Job. In the frst
place, I always read it as part of a larger textthe Christian Biblewhich
provided much of my narrative framework for understanding it. I was
thirty years old before it ever occurred to me to read Job as a book in its
own right and not as a small chapter in a much larger drama involving
chosen people, golden calves, sin, destruction, apples, nakedness, and the
coming of a Messiah to atone for our sins. Tis context severely constrains
the ways that we can read Job and all but eliminates the possibility of
reading it as a critique of other Hebrew texts in the same overall narrative.
But the hardest thing about the Book of Job, at least in my experience,
is that it does not start out being hard. Both the beginning and the end
of Job read like a childrens story, and these are the parts where every-
thing seems to happen. Te thirty-nine hard chapters come in the middle,
which just looks like a lot of introspection and navel gazing. Our training
as readers tells us that, as long as we understand the beginning and the end
of a story, we can fake it through the middle just assuming that it more or
less follows a trajectory that we can derive from the end points. In most
cases, this strategy will work just fnebut not in Job. Te Book of Jobs
unique construction makes it impossible to understand the middle of the
story by simply extrapolating from the beginning and the end.
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Re-reading Job 4
At the heart of the difculty lies the fact that the Book of Job contains
two fundamentally incompatible stories about a man named Job. Te frst
Job story, which predates the biblical book by as much as 500 years, was
a common Near Eastern folk tale about a guy who loses everything yet
never complains to his god. Te second Job story is a Hebrew poem that
challenges many of the assumptions of the folk tale by having its suppos-
edly complacent hero abandon all pretense of patience and complain, in
excruciating detail, about his god.
Here is how I usually explain the two Jobs to my students: imag-
ine a written version of the Cinderella story that begins and ends with a
simple paraphrase of the Disney movie but contains, in between, a 10,000
word poem called Cinderellas Lamenta brilliantly written feminist
manifesto challenging most of the sexist assumptions in the original story.
Imagine that the poem is written primarily from Cinderellas perspective
but includes speeches by the stepmother and stepsisters as well.
Te Cinderella of the poem (let us imagine) is as radical as the Disney
version is safe. She questions some of her cultures deepest values and
beliefs that women should marry men, that rich-and-handsome princ-
es are automatically desirable, that a man can love a woman even if he
cant remember what she looks like. Te other characters in the poem
are, of course, horrifed by her unorthodox views, and they do every-
thing they can to contradict her. Every time she speaks, they rebut every-
thing she says. But Cinderella is a clever debater, and she holds her own.
Tey go on arguing and arguing until the Fairy Godmother shows up
and angrily puts an end to the debate. I spent a lot of time and efort
catching you a prince, she tells Cinderella, and you had better marry
him fast if you dont want to end up a pumpkin yourself. Cinderella
knows when she has been beaten, and she submitsnot to a better argu-
ment, but to superior physical force. She marries the prince, and they
live happily ever afterexcept, of course, they dont, and we know they
dont because we have been made privy to Cinderellas deepest thoughts.
Tis is roughly how the Book of Job would have looked to its frst genera-
tion of readers. As modern readers, of course, we can never experience Job
this way because we have never encountered one of the stories without the
other. Te only text that we have stitches the two Jobs together. But we
can see the seams. And to understand the Book of Job in any but the most
superfcial sense, we must acknowledge those seams and understand that
somebody put them together for a reason. Once we understand the reason,
we can make some pretty good guesses about the meaning of the poem.
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It is with this in mind that I ofer the following revisions to the six things
that I used to know about Job:
1. Job is a highly stylized work of imaginative literature that may or
may not have been based on the experiences of a real person but
cannot be considered objective history.
Everything about the Book of Job announces that it is a work of
literature. It begins with the Hebrew equivalent of once upon a time
and deliberately steers us away from any historical place or period It
features immortal characters (God and Satan) acting in ways that are
inconsistent with their actions anywhere else in the Bible. It contains
several diferent kinds of writing, but much of it is written in what
competent scholars consider the most formally excellent Hebrew po-
etry found anywhere.
Tis does not mean that there was never a man named something
like Job who had a lot of stuf, lost it all, and then got it back again.
Tere certainly could have beenjust as there could have been a man
named Odysseus who got lost on the way home from a war. But it
would be just as incorrect to read Job as the actual history of a wealthy
man of the East as it would be to read the Odyssey as a frst-person ac-
count of a journey. When we try to turn an obvious work of literature
into a historical record, we end up asking the wrong kinds of ques-
tions, and, in turn, learning the wrong kinds of lessons.
One of my primary arguments here is that written texts want
to be read in certain ways. Tis is of course an oversimplifcation.
Clearly, inanimate objects such as poems and history books dont re-
ally have desires. But authors have intentions, and, invariably they
leave clues in their texts about how they expect those texts to be read.
We are pretty good at reading these clues in books from our own
culture. If a work begins with once upon a time, we know that it
will probably be either a fairy tale or a satire of a fairy tale. If it has
seventeen syllables and talks about cherry blossoms, then we can be
pretty sure that it is a haiku.
With a book like Job, however, we no longer have access to all of
the cultural assumptions that were shared by its author and its original
readers. And this means that we can easily miss the clues and genre
markers that tell us how we should read it. Furthermore, most people
today encounter Job as part of a larger work that we have been trained
to read in very specifc ways. When we encounter the Book of Job in
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Re-reading Job 6
the Bible, we very naturally want to read it the same way we read the
Book of Exodus or the Book of Judges.
We should remember, however, that the Bible is not as much of a
book as it is a libraryand what we call the Old Testament contains
the most signifcant writings of an entire ancient culture. Like any
good library, the Old Testament contains history books and instruc-
tion manuals. It contains overtly religious works that declare the mind
of God directly through prophecy, and it also contains magnifcent
works of literature that teach spiritual truths imaginatively, through
poetry and narrative. We owe it to the writers of all of these books to
learn the diferences between them and to read each book the way that
it asks to be read.
2. Te Book of Job contains two basic parts: a simplistic prose frame
and a complicated long poem, with the latter designed to com-
ment ironically on the former.
Te Job frame, which consists of Chapters 12 and 42:716, tells
the tale of a righteous man who sufers extreme misfortunes, endures
them all with patience and faith, and gets rewarded handsomely in
the end for being such a good sport. Tis story, it turns out, is much
older than our Book of Jobperhaps as much as 500 or more years
older. Scholars have found traces of this story throughout the Ancient
Near East, among Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites, and many more.
1
Te Job poet positions the poem as a challenge to the simplistic
ideology of the folk tale. Te Job of the poem complains loudly, to
anyone who will listen, that God has treated him unfairly. Te more
his friends try to defend God, the more they feel that they have to
blame Job for his own sufering, and the angrier he gets. Using the
Ancient Near Eastern literary form known as a Wisdom dialogue,
the poet explores, and rejects, his cultures most common explanations
for human sufering.
Te relationship between the poem and the frame is almost en-
tirely ironic. Te poem works precisely because it requires us to dis-
count the Job of the frame in favor of the more fully realized Job of
the poem. But we are not used to dealing with this level of irony in
the Bible, nor do we expect to fnd admirable characters questioning
Gods morality. Te Job poem is hard to read, and it says things that
1. Mark Larrimore, Te Book of Job: A Biography, 16, 4049; Samuel Terrien,
Job: Te Poet of Existence, 2829.
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make us uncomfortable. Te Job frame, on the other hand, is simple,
easy to understand, and it says the kinds of things that we think the
Bible is supposed to say.
Modern readers, therefore, tend to read Job like this: we read and
understand the frst two chapters without any problem, and then, when
we hit the hard stuf in chapter 3, we start skimming. Since we assume
that we have a handle on the story, we miss the enormity of the transi-
tion from the frame to the poem and simply assume that it works like
most of the narratives we know, with the middle fowing logically from
the beginning. We skip over the most difcult passages because we are
fairly sure that we know what they say, and, when we get to the end, we
see that everything worked out like we thought it would.
As the twentieth-century theologian Samuel Terrien describes, we
come to the poem vaguely acquainted with the story of a man of faith.
Terefore, we usually ignore the poem of his doubt. Remembering
the plot of the folk tale in prose, we too often neglect the dialogue in
verse. Yet, the poetic discourses are the raison detre of the book, and
the popular narrative that surrounds them is only the occasion of the
poem.
2
And in this way, one of the most profound parts of the Bible
has remained hidden in plain sight for more than 2,000 years.
3. Te much-lauded patience of Job ends with chapter 2, after
which Job complains almost constantly about God.
Te phrase the patience of Job has become idiomatic among
people who have never opened a Bible. Religious materials often col-
laborate to reinforce this reading by ignoring virtually all of the poem
and focusing on the lessons of the frame. Tis ensures that the Book
of Job says the sorts of thing that Bible stories are supposed to say.
It tells us to worship God in good times and badand it warns us
against forsaking God and sinning with our lips. It gives us a great
example of a man who loses everything and remains steadfastand
who is rewarded in the end for his patience and his faith. And it allows
us to comfort (but really to criticize) those who are complaining about
something in their own lives with the allegedly cheery thought that, at
least, they arent as bad of as Job.
Who would want to muck up this perfectly wonderful little
object lesson with a 10,000-word poem complaining bitterly about
Gods injustice? But that is what follows the second chapter. At the
2. Samuel Terrien, Job: Te Poet of Existence, 23.
Uncorrected Proof
Re-reading Job 8
very beginning of chapter 3, Job himself immediately gives lie to the
Patient Job narrative by cursingroughly in orderthe day he was
born, the night he was conceived, his mothers womb, the knees that
received him, and the breasts that gave him suck. And then he starts
questioning the justice of God so fercely that his friends feel com-
pelled to break their silence and defend the Almighty.
4. Te Job poem powerfully critiques much of the Old Testaments
internal logic.
Te Old Testament histories were designed to explain how the
Jews went from the glories of David and Solomon to their humili-
ating captivity in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587
b.c. Tis was the most important question that the post-exilic Jewish
communitywhich compiled and constructed the documents that
we now call the Old Testamentcould ask.
3
And their answer was
remarkable: God did not abandon us, they reasoned, we abandoned
God. Despite Mosess clear warnings in Deuteronomy, we rejected
Him and chased after false gods. Te fact that we have been punished
demonstrates the severity of our sins.
Te Book of Job is a dissenting opinion from this party line.
Rather than trying to defend the Jews, or argue that they have not
sinned against God, the Job poet directly attacks the major premise
of his cultures most powerful syllogism. Te fact of punishment, he
argues, is not an evidence of sin. Tis is the point that Job makes
over and over again to his interlocutorsand it is the point that they
stubbornly refuse to consider. But really, they cant consider it without
undermining one of the core beliefs through which they make sense
of the world. Rather than go through the difcult work of revising
their worldview, Jobs Comforters abandon their compassion for their
sufering friend and become his tormentorsand this, too, is part of
the poets critique.
Te Job poet dared to critique, and dismantle, the most powerful
religious orthodoxy of his culture by confronting it with a set of facts
that it could not accommodate. And he demonstrated in excruciating
detail how those who hold to rigid orthodoxies will end up renounc-
ing both overwhelming evidence and basic human decency before
abandoning their beliefs.
3. For an introduction to the composition of the Old Testament, see David
Bokovoys Authoring the Old Testament series.
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5. When Job speaks of a Redeemer, he is not prophesying of Christ.
He is invoking his right to an avenger.
In every Church lesson that I have ever had about the Book of
Job we have read the twenty-ffth verse of chapter 19: For I know
that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon
the earth (KJV). What clearer evidence could we have of Jobs faith,
not just in God, but in Jesus Christ, who would not be born for at
least another 500 years? Samuel Medleys 1775 poem I Know that
My Redeemer Lives has been set to music many times and is, in
one of its versions, one of the most cherished songs in the LDS hym-
nal. Other denominations use a hymn of the same name written by
Charles Wesley or the version from George Frideric Handels famous
oratorio, Messiah.
Unfortunately, there is no way to read the original text as a proph-
ecy of Christ. Te Hebrew root word that Job uses here (and which
Christian translators have long translated as Redeemer) is gaal,
which means something more like avenger or reputation fxer.
Tis was someone who had the charge to preserve the reputation of a
deceased family member. Te role of a gaal varied widely depending
on the circumstances. It could require someone to avenge a death
with bloodshed or to provide evidence exonerating somebody who
died under a cloud of suspicion. But it could also include marrying
a deceased mans wife and siring children in his nameas Boaz did
with Ruth, acting in his role as gaal,.
It is possible, of course, to see in the Hebrew gaal a fguration of
the role of Jesus Christ. It is not possible, however, to actually agree
with Job in thinking that a gaal, or redeemer, will some day confront
God and prove his innocence. Tis would require us to accept the
proposition that Jobs sufering is connected to his behaviorthat
God is actually punishing him for supposedly doing something wrong.
And this is precisely the proposition that the whole poem is trying to
convince us to reject. Te fact that Job believes that his Redeemer
lives shows us that, at this point in the poem, he has no more ability
than his friends to comprehend a God who does not operate on a
straightforward principle of rewards and punishments.
6. Te fnale of Job, in which he is richly rewarded for his faithful-
ness, is part of the frame, not the poem, which means that it is part
of what the author is trying to undercut.
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Re-reading Job 10
Te traditional Job story ends with God restoring Jobs health and
doubling his property. If we take this as the ultimate meaning of the
Book of Job, we will end up reinstating all of the assumptions about
rewards and punishments that the poet worked so hard to get us to
reject. It is crucial, therefore, that we understand that this fnal scene is
part of the frame tale, not the poem, and that one of the most impor-
tant functions of the poem is to question the ideology of the frame.
Keep in mind that most of the original readers would have known
the Job story and would be expecting the big reward at the end. If the
poet has done his job, however, the ending should fall fat. We should
realize that the version of God that we see in the frame is nothing like
the version that we see in the poem, and that the idea of rewarding
somebody who has sufered patiently (or even impatiently) fies in the
face of the poems more nuanced and spiritually mature understanding
of God. We should, in other words, read the fnal verses of Job ironically.
Let me be very clear hear about what I am not saying. I do not
suggest that some hapless editor joined the frame and the poem to-
gether because he didnt understand how diferent they were. Nor do
I think (as some have argued) that a pious redactor, centuries after the
poem was written, slapped on the last few verses to blunt the original
critique. Rather, I accept what has become the predominant (but by
no means unanimous) view of scholars: the author of the Book of Job
knew exactly what he was doing when he juxtaposed the frame and
the poem and he clearly intended us to read the frame, including the
fnal scene, ironically.
Te book that I have outlined above is not the Book of Job that most
Latter-day Saints encounter in their Gospel Doctrine, Seminary, and
Institute classes. We are not alone here. Most religious commentary pres-
ents Job as an exemplar of patience and faithfulness and has for thousands
of years. We dont really need to think very hard about why. Complaining
Job isnt much of a role model. Nobody wants to cut out fannel board
pictures of a man shaking his fst at God or put students in small groups
to talk about the last time they tried to obliterate the day of their concep-
tion. As long as the designers of religious curricula use the scriptures to
reinforce desired behaviors, they are always going to gravitate toward the
patient fellow in the Job folk taleand to the man of faith who knew that
his Redeemer lived.
Read properly, Te Book of Job is not the sort of thing that one would
want to use to reinforce religious orthodoxies. It is an extremely subversive
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work of literature. It challenges assumptions about God, morality, and jus-
tice that have been central to human religious thought for millennia and
remain so today. And it is especially hard on orthodox religious beliefs. It
has long been in the interest of institutional religions to try to contain the
more radical implications of the Job poem by focusing, whenever possible,
on the jaunty, pious tale that introduces it.
Asking the Right Questions
In this book, I treat Job as a work of imaginative literature, which, I
believe, is an essential starting point for responsible interpretation. To wrest
meaningful answers from any complex work, we must start with meaning-
ful questions. If we insist on reading Job as a historical narrative, with
the frst two chapters carrying the bulk of the history, we will have a very
difcult time coming up with any good questions at all. We will be too
busy trying to solve the serious theological problems that these frst two
chapters, if read historically, raise. Seen as the actual interactions between
God and a historical person, Job alternates between the horrifc and the
absurd. In the frst two chapters, God invites his archenemy up to heaven
for a chat and then ofers up Job as an example of a truly righteous man.
To score a few debating points, God allows Satan to kill this mans children
and infict him with grievous sufering just to see if it will make him crack.
Te end of the Job poem is even more problematic than the beginning.
When Job fnishes kvetching, God appears in the form of a whirlwind to
tell Job how powerful he is and how puny Job and his friends are. Te God
of Job does not act like the vindictive God of the Old Testament or the
merciful God of the New Testament. Rather, He acts like a neurotic play-
ground bully shaking Job down for his lunch money. For this portrayal to
make any sense at all as a historical record, we must frame the narrative in a
way that prevents it from making sense as anything else. And this, in turn,
requires us to ask, and to try to answer, a lot of difcult questions that dont
actually matter very much to the points that the author wants to make.
Does God really make friendly bets with Satan? Why would a just God
kill a mans children in order to score debating points? Was Job tested
beyond what a human being can endure? When does the action in
Job occur? Why did God bother to appear to Job in the frst place if
He wasnt going to answer his questions? And just where is the Land of
Uz? Tese are the sorts of questions that we have to ask if we consid-
er Job a historical text. Tey are precisely the wrong questions to ask if
Uncorrected Proof
Re-reading Job 12
we are trying to derive any kind of meaning from a work of literature.
When we shift our assumptions just a little bit and allow the Book of Job
to be what it claims to be, we fnd ourselves able to ask much better ques-
tions of the textthe questions that can give us the kinds of answers that
can change our lives. In Job, such questions might include the following:
Why did the best Jewish poet of the post-exile generation choose
the (probably) Persian fable of Job as the basis for his greatest work?
What does the obviously Hebrew poet want to accomplish by pre-
senting Job as an Everyman character rather than as a Jew? What
does this suggest about the way that the Abrahamic Covenant was
understood by at least some people during the Babylonian captivity?
What diferent perspectives do Jobs Comforters represent? Who
in the poets culture held the views attributed to Eliphaz, Bildad,
and Zophar?
Why do Jobs friends hold so frmly to their belief in Jobs guilt?
Why are they willing to condemn the man that they came to com-
fort? What do they consider more important than friendship? Do
we ever act like they do?
How does the poet want us to answer the question, Why do peo-
ple sufer? How does he NOT want us to answer this question?
Why does the poet represent God at the end of Job as an asker of
questions rather than as a giver of answers? Does the God that the
poet presents at the end of the poem deserve our respect, or just
our fear? Is there a diference?
Does the fnal prose segment of Job undercut the poem? Or does
the poems rebuttal undercut its ideology so efectively that it be-
comes ironic? Is it possible to believe in a God of rewards and
punishments after reading Job?
Tese are the kinds of questions that matter when we are reading Job
because they are the kinds of questions that can lead us to meaningful
refections about important human concerns. Every minute that we spend
trying to fgure out whether the Leviathan mentioned in chapter 42 is
an ancient sea monster or just a plain old crocodile takes us further away
from the books most profound truths. If we can give ourselves permission
to understand Job as something other than reliable, documentary history,
then we can get down to the really important business of understanding
how it is true as a poem.
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Te Ancient Worlds Greatest Poem?
Unlearning is a painful process because it requires humility, recogni-
tion of past errors, and the persistent suspicion that, having been wrong
once, one could easily be wrong again. I once knew six things about Job
with great confdence. Now I suspect six very diferent things about Job
that, I realize, could easily turn out to be wrong. But when I read Job ac-
cording to the things I suspect, rather than the things I used to know, I
can see why people like Victor Hugo and Tomas Carlyle called the Book
of Job one of the greatest literary works ever written.
I am not quite prepared to follow Hugo or Carlyle in labeling Job the
best work of literature ever written. But I am quite comfortable calling
itas I have called it in the subtitle of this bookthe ancient worlds
greatest poem. Tis is no small praise, as it vaults it ahead of some very
important works, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, Virgils
Aeneid, and Ovids Metamorphosesnot to mention some of the greatest
classics of the Eastern world, like the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and
the Tao te Ching. I have deep respect for these works, as I do for the trag-
edies of Aeschylus and Euripides, the satires of Horace and Juvenal, and
the other great poetic works of the Hebrew Bible. But I have no hesitation
praising Job above them all.
It is not the profundity of his sufering that makes Job unique. Pound
for pound, nobody did sufering better than the Greeks, and they were very
good at using profound sufering to showcase the depths of human emo-
tion. For all of Jobs trials, he at least never stabs his eyes out after killing his
father and marrying his mother, nor does God chain him to a rock and send
an eagle every day to devour his perpetually regenerating liver. Oedipus and
Prometheus could teach Job a thing or two about human misery.
But only Job struggles to make moral sense of his sufering. When
Greek heroes sufer, they shake their fst at the gods and demand respect,
but only Job shakes his fst at God and demands justice. When Roman
heroes fnd their friends recalcitrant, they require rectitude and obedi-
ence, but only Job has the audacity to require compassion. And, unlike
any other literary hero of the ancient world, Job has the courage to stare
straight into the face of a seemingly arbitrary cosmos and demand that the
universe make sense.
In many respects, the big question usually attributed to the Book of
Jobwhy do bad things happen to good people?is one of the least
interesting things about it. Te poet asks much more interesting questions
Uncorrected Proof
Re-reading Job 14
than thisquestions like how can we keep from being miserable in a
universe that we can neither predict nor control? why do the ideological
structures that we create to help us understand the world end up prevent-
ing us from acting efectively in it? and what is our moral responsibility
to other people whom we believe to be wrong, but who desperately need
our support and afection?
Tese are not easy questions, but they are questions that human be-
ings still ask. Tey are not unique to any religious or cultural perspectives.
Modern existentialists and secular humanists ask these questions just as
frequently, and just as profoundly, as Ancient Jews or Medieval Christians.
Te Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, I think, gets it exactly right when she
writes that like almost no other primordial poem the West has inherited,
the Book of Job is conceived under the aspect of the universalif the
universal is understood to be a questioning so organic to our nature that
no creed or philosophy can elude it.
4
And yet a huge number of religious people still see Job as an afrming
story about a guy who endures a lot of trials without complainingand is
rewarded in the end for his great faithfulness. Millions of people know Job
only as the story of the frame. Tis confusion has been around for a long
time, of course, and it may very well have helped the Book of Job make it
into the Bible to begin with. But the same things that have made the Job
frame so famous have also kept people from trying to understand the rest
of it. As a result, readers have been reading Job badlyand missing the
main points of its remarkable creatorfor a very, very long time.
Tis is why unlearning things about Job is so important. When we ap-
proach a difcult book that we know nothing about, we usually take some
steps to learn about it before we begin and understand it better while we
read. But when we read a book that we think we already understand, we im-
mediately ft everything we read into the understanding that we already pos-
sess. Tis works pretty well until we encounter a book whose author wants
us to question everything that we think we already know and to go even
further and question our assumptions about what it means to know things.
In the following chapters, I hope that I will be able to convince you
that Job is precisely such a book.
4. Cynthia Ozick, Te Impious Impatience of Job, 15.
Uncorrected Proof
Available
June 2014
Uncorrected Proof

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