Professor Christine Hayes: When Nebuchadnezzar
of Babylon burned the temple and destroyed Jerusalem,
the initial reaction was one of overwhelming grief and sadness,
and that's represented primarily in the Book of
Lamentations. It's a very short book of
dirges that laments the loss of Jerusalem as the death of a
beloved person. And it's traditionally
attributed to Jeremiah.
The Bible itself doesn't make this claim;
it's an old tradition.
It may have arisen, however, because of all of the
prophets, Jeremiah is the one who reveals the most to us about
his personal suffering and grief,
and because he was present as an eyewitness at the
destruction. There's no real logical
development of ideas in Lamentations primarily because
it's structured by an artificial device.
There are five chapters and four of the chapters are
acrostic poems. This means that each verse,
or sometimes a series of verses, begins with a letter of
the alphabet in sequence.
So in chapter 3 you have three verses per letter of the
alphabet. But this kind of acrostic
poetic formation gives the poem a kind of formal unity,
at the same time that it has no logical unity or logical flow.
And it's been pointed out that that form is particularly
appropriate for an expression of grief that is too profound or
too all encompassing to be logical.
The Lamentations over Jerusalem resemble very much David's
lamentations over Saul.
The mourner spends time contrasting the former splendor
of the beloved to his or her present state.
And we have lots of Ancient Near Eastern prototypes for this
kind of lamentation--lamentations over
destroyed cities which are understood as the result of the
deity's decision to abandon the city.
In Lamentations we're given a very detailed picture of the
great suffering that accompanied the final collapse.
Lamentations 1:1: "Alas!
Lonely sits the city Once great with people!
She that was great among nations Is become like a widow;
The princess among states Is become a thrall."
Chapter 4: Alas!
The gold is dulled, Debased the finest gold,
The sacred gems are spilled a At every street corner.
The precious children of Zion; Once valued as gold--
Alas, they are accounted as earthen pots,
Work of a potter's hands!
Even jackals offer the breast And suckle their young;
But my poor people has turned cruel,
Like ostriches of the desert.
The tongue of the suckling cleaves
To its palate for thirst.
Little children beg for bread; None give them a morsel.
Those who feasted on dainties Lie famished in the streets;
Those who were reared in purple Have embraced refuse heaps.
The guilt of my poor people Exceeded the iniquity of Sodom,
Which was overthrown in a moment,
Without a hand striking it.
Her elect were purer then snow, Whiter then milk;
Their limbs were ruddier then coral,
Their bodies were like sapphire.
Again, the description of the physical beauty of the beloved,
Now their faces are blacker then soot,
They are not recognized in the streets;
Their skin has shriveled on their bones,
It has become dry as wood.
Better off were the slain of the sword
Than those slain by famine, Who pined away,
[as though] wounded,
For lack of the fruits of the field.
With their own hands, tenderhearted women
Have cooked their children; Such became their fare,
In the disaster of my poor people.
The poet here, though, does adopt the standard
Deuteronomistic interpretation of events which infers sin from
suffering, and therefore,
harps on the sin and the uncleanness of Jerusalem that
brought on this calamity.
Their guilt exceeded the iniquity of Sodom in the passage
we just read, and this is a strategy that of
course justifies God.
The poet singles out the corrupt priests,
the corrupt prophets for blame.
He attacks the popular ideology of the inviolability of Zion.
Israel's many sins are what caused Yahweh to pour out his
wrath and destroy Jerusalem utterly.
The descriptions of Yahweh's wrath, anger,
his consuming rage, these are some of the most
powerful and most violent poetry in the Hebrew Bible.
They tend to divert attention, in fact, from the people's
guilt and focus attention on their suffering.
Children crying for bread, children starving to death,
women raped, men abused.
In chapter 3, the poet switches into the
first person so Jerusalem is speaking like one who is pursued
and abused, beaten by an angry and violent
master. Chapter 3:
I am the man who has known affliction
Under the rod of His wrath; Me he drove on and on
In unrelieved darkness; On none but me He brings down
His hand Again and again, without cease.
He has worn away my flesh and skin;
He has shattered my bones.
All around me He has built Misery and hardship;
He has made me dwell in darkness,
Like those long dead.
He has walled me in and I cannot break out;
He has weighed me down with chains.
And when I cry and plead, He shuts out my prayer;
He has walled in my ways with hewn blocks,
He has made my paths a maze.
He is a lurking bear to me, A lion in hiding;
He has forced me off my way and mangled me,
He has left me numb. A remarkably violent passage.
And in another remarkable passage, the poet describes God
as refusing to hear the prayers of Israel.
He no longer can forgive.
He simply has to punish.
This is in chapter 3 as well, verses 42 to 45.
We have transgressed and rebelled,
And You have not forgiven.
You have clothed Yourself in anger and pursued us,
You have slain without pity.
You have screened Yourself off with a cloud
That no prayer may pass through.
You have made us filth and refuse
In the midst of the peoples.
So God is simply refusing to even hear Israel's prayer.
This is an emphasis not so much on Israel's guilt,
but on Israel's tremendous suffering, God's
hardheartedness. The poem ends with a plea of
reconciliation in 5:19-22.
But You, O Lord, are enthroned forever,
Your throne endures through the ages.
Why have you forgotten us utterly,
Forsaken us for all time?
Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself,
And let us come back; Renew our days as of old!
For truly, You have rejected us, Bitterly raged against us.
Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself,
And let us come back; Renew our days as of old!
Lamentations represents one response to the fall of
Jerusalem. It's an overwhelming sense of
loss, grief, misery, a sense of shock too at God's
treatment. And also a longing to return,
a longing for renewal and reconciliation.
The 200 years following the destruction would prove to be a
time, a very critical time, of transition.
And Israelite literature in this period reflects the
Israelites' struggle with the philosophical and religious
challenge of the destruction.
How could the disastrous events be explained?
We've already seen the response of the Deuteronomistic School.
Israel was collectively punished for idolatry.
We've seen that history simply reflects justice on a national
and international level in this view.
We've also seen the response of Ezekiel.
He promoted the idea of a continued relationship with God
in exile and was awaiting a fantastic restoration,
a redesign of human nature.
We've seen the response of Second Isaiah which emphasizes
the universal significance of Israel's suffering,
a universal mission for Israel.
For both Ezekiel and the author of Second Isaiah,
Israel's suffering is serving a purpose in the divine plan.
It's necessary. Israel needs purification and
redemption and that will prepare her for a new role in world
history. But there are other responses
as well and they're found in the material that's collected in the
third section of the Hebrew Bible.
That's the section referred to really as Ketuvim,
which in Hebrew simply means writings, written things.
It's sort of a miscellany, a catch-all phrase.
And the final portion of the course is going to be devoted
now to that third section.
So Torah, Neviim or prophets, and Ketuvim,
or writings. Next time I'm going to discuss
the problem of dating many of the works that are in this third
section, the Writings.
For now it'll suffice to say that while some of the books in
this third section of the Bible may have pre-dated the exile,
they became canonical, they became authoritative for
the community in the post-exilic period and therefore served as a
prism through which to view and come to grips with Israel's
history. So we're going to turn today,
first of all, to an examination of the three
books that represent the Wisdom tradition,
what's referred to as the Wisdom literature,
or Wisdom tradition in ancient Israel.
The Wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible are Proverbs,
Job, and Ecclesiastes.
Israelite Wisdom literature belongs to a much wider and
broad Wisdom legacy or tradition in the Ancient Near East.
There's very little in biblical Wisdom literature apart from its
monotheism that lacks a parallel in the Wisdom literature of
Egypt or Mesopotamia.
So Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature is literature that's
characterized by a praise of human intelligence,
applied to understanding the ways of the world,
the ways of society.
It tends to contain traditional advice--advice that's been found
to be tried and true.
It tends to be very individually oriented,
but at the same time, quite universal and humanistic
in its orientation as well.
In keeping with this style, Israelite Wisdom literature
doesn't really speak to the particular historical condition
of Israel. It speaks to the general human
condition. It makes no claim to having
been divinely revealed--no special claim to having been
conveyed by a prophet or by Moses.
It's simply observational wisdom;
advice and counsel that can be weighed or confirmed or disputed
by experience. Again, if you were simply to
open up the Book of Proverbs and read something in there,
unless it had the word Yahweh, you wouldn't know that it
didn't come from some Egyptian Wisdom literature,
or Mesopotamian Wisdom literature.
There are various types of Wisdom material.
Scholars have classified the Wisdom material into three main
categories. The Hebrew word for
wisdom--which is the word hokhmah--literally means
skill and probably refers to the skill of living well or living
properly. The three types of Wisdom
literature that we find are what we could call (1) clan or family
wisdom. These materials tend to be
common sense aphorisms and observations,
the kinds of things that are common to all cultures.
They're scattered around the Hebrew Bible,
but most of them are contained in the Book of Proverbs.
So, for example, Proverbs 15:17,
"Better a meal of vegetables where there is love / Then a
fattened ox where there is hate."
It's the kind of thing you can imagine your grandmother saying.
Chapter 20:14: "'Bad, bad,' says the buyer,
/ But having moved off, he congratulates himself."
Or 26:14: "The door turns on its hinge, / And the lazy man on
his bed," and neither of them really gets anywhere.
25:25: "Like cold water to a parched throat / Is good news
from a distant land."
Many of the Proverbs we classify as clan or family
wisdom are parental.
They tend to sound as if they're being said to a son,
not so much a daughter, but to a son.
The second category of Wisdom literature is what we call court
wisdom, and we have a lot of this from Egypt.
A great deal of court wisdom came from Egypt to serve the
needs of the court.
It tends to be bureaucratic advice, administrative advice,
career advice, instruction on manners or tact,
how to be diplomatic, how to live well and
prosper--practical wisdom.
So, for example, Proverbs 24:27,
"Put your external affairs in order, / Get ready what you have
in the field, / Then build yourself a home."
Or 21:23: "He who guards his mouth and tongue / Guards
himself from trouble," tact; 11:14, "For want of strategy an
army falls, / But victory comes with much planning," or 12:1,
"He who loves discipline loves knowledge;
/ He who spurns reproof is a brutish man."
Then the third category of Wisdom literature is what we
might call more free-wheeling existential reflection or
probing--a reflective probing into the critical problems of
human existence, and I'm going to talk about
that in much more detail as we get to the Book of Job.
Now as I mentioned before, all of these types of Wisdom
literature tend to be very universalistic,
humanistic, ahistorical.
There's nothing particularly Israelite about them.
There's no mention of the exodus, there's no mention of
Sinai or Moses or covenant or any of the early narratives of
the nation. And they are paralleled in
great abundance in the writings of other Ancient Near Eastern
cultures. Sometimes there's an attempt to
connect wisdom specifically with belief in Yahweh.
But biblical Wisdom like Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom
generally grounds morality on non-specific notions of prudence
and God-fearing in a sort of non-specific way,
rather then on the historical covenant with Yahweh.
So let's look at the Book of Proverbs in a little more
detail. Proverbs is the classic book of
Wisdom. It contains some material of
great antiquity. Even though the book probably
reached its final form only in post-exilic times,
surely a great deal of it is much older.
There are many affinities between Proverbs and Egyptian
and Canaanite Wisdom literature, so that suggests that Israel
assimilated Wisdom material from the wider environment.
The chief aim of Proverbs seems to be the inculcation of wisdom
as the means to social tranquility and a happy life.
Young people should learn to master their impulses.
They should lead productive and sensible lives.
Many of the maxims are intended to educate sons,
there's no mention of daughters here,
and a good deal of the first nine chapters is formally
pedagogical, clearly pedagogical,
and can be compared quite productively with some Egyptian
writings that we have from the third millennium--the Egyptian
teaching of Amenemopet, or the Babylonian Counsels of
Wisdom; tremendous parallels among
these works. But these first nine chapters
warn against the seductions of foreign women and they urge
young men to pursue wisdom.
And wisdom here is figured--almost hypostasized,
an attribute or a characteristic that's almost put
into a concrete human form, wisdom is figured as a virtuous
woman who promises insight and counsel.
This woman was created before all other created things.
And wisdom again, figured as a woman,
assisted Yahweh in the creation--in the ordering,
I should say, the ordering of the universe.
Wisdom was with God at that time.
Proverbs values hard work and diligence, and warns against
excessive sleep and sex, and wine.
Proverbs recommends honesty in your business affairs and
kindness, and loyalty, impartiality,
sobriety, and humility, restraint, and sincerity.
Wealth is very nice, but it's not to be desired at
the cost of calmness and peace.
The Wisdom sayings that appear in Proverbs are usually these
short two-line sentences in which the second line runs
parallel in some way to the first.
Some scholars have classified the different kinds of
parallelism you find in the book of Proverbs and I've written the
three main forms up here.
An example of synonymous parallelism, where the second
line is essentially synonymous with the first--that's found in
Proverbs 22:1. It's a classic feature of
biblical poetry in general.
We'll see it in the Psalms.
For an example, "A good name is to be chosen
rather then great riches / And favor,"
parallel to a good name, "is better then silver and
gold," parallel to great riches .
So the two lines are somewhat synonymous.
In antithetic parallelism the two lines form a balanced pair
of opposites, so in Proverbs 10:1,
"A wise son makes a glad father / But a foolish son is a sorrow
to his mother". When the second line seems to
complete the thought of the first, it's called ascending
parallelism. We find that in Proverbs 11:22,
"Like a gold ring in the snout of a pig / Is a beautiful woman
bereft of sense."
Another feature of Proverbs is that wisdom itself is
established as a religious concept.
It seems to have some religious value.
Proverbs tries to link wisdom with reverence for God and
obedience to God.
In Proverbs 1:7, "The fear of the Lord" or
reverence, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Fools despise wisdom and discipline," or chapter 3:5-8,
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, / And do not rely on
your own understanding."
Wisdom guards one from evil, the wise person accepts the
sufferings with which God is disciplining him.
So in Proverbs 3:12, "For Yahweh reproves," or
disciplines, "him whom he loves / As a father,
the son in whom he delights".
Keep that in mind as we turn to Job, because I think the most
important thing about the Book of Proverbs is its almost smug
certainty that the righteous and the wicked of the world receive
what they deserve in this life.
There's a complacency here, an optimism.
God's just providence and a moral world order,
are presuppositions that it just doesn't seem to question.
The wise person's deeds are good and will bring him
happiness and success.
The foolish person's deeds are evil and they are going to lead
to failure and ruin.
The key idea is that a truly wise person knows that the world
is essentially coherent.
It's ethically ordered.
There are clear laws of reward and punishment that exist in the
world. Proverbs 26:27;
"He who digs a pit will fall into it / and a stone will come
back upon him who starts it rolling".
Or 13:6: "Righteousness protects him whose way is
blameless; Wickedness subverts the sinner."
If the righteous suffer then they are being chastised or
chastened by God just as a son is disciplined by his father.
He shouldn't reject this reproof, he should welcome it.
This insistence, on the basic justice of the
world, and the power of wisdom or fear of the Lord to guarantee
success and security was one strand of ancient Israelite
thought. It reaches crystallization in
the Book of Proverbs.
It was available as a response to or an explanation of the
catastrophes that had befallen the nation.
We've seen it at work in the Deuteronomistic school,
unwilling to relinquish the idea of a moral God in control
of history and preferring to infer the nation's sinfulness
from its suffering and calamity.
Better to blame the sufferer Israel and so keep God and the
system of divine retributive justice intact.
But it's precisely this formulaic and conventional piety
that is challenged by two other remarkable Wisdom books in the
Bible: the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes.
In Job we find the idea that suffering is not always
punitive. It is not always a sign of
wickedness. It's not always explicable.
And this is the first of several subversions of
fundamental biblical principles that we encounter in the Book of
Job. The Book of Job--we really
don't know its date.
It's probably no earlier then the sixth century BCE,
but scholars disagree and there are portions of it that seem to
reflect a very old and very ancient tradition.
It's one of the hardest books of the Bible for moderns to
read, and I think that's because its conclusions--to the degree
that we can agree on what the conclusions might be--its
conclusions seem to fly in the face of some basic religious
convictions. You have to allow yourself,
I think, to be surprised, to open your mind,
to allow yourself to take Job's charges against God seriously.
After all, the narrator makes it clear that God does take them
seriously. God nowhere denies Job's
charges and, in fact, at one point the narrator has
God say that Job has spoken truly.
So no matter how uncomfortable Job may make you feel,
you need to understand his claims and not condemn him.
Job is going to attack the optimistic conventional piety
that is typified in the Book of Proverbs.
He's going to challenge the assumption that there is a moral
world order. The issues that are raised in
this book are twofold: first, why God permits blatant
injustice and undeserved suffering and evil to exist in
the world, and second of all,
whether people will be virtuous when they are afflicted and
suffering. In other words,
are people righteous only because God will reward them for
it, or are they righteous because
of the intrinsic and inherent value of righteousness?
Those are the two issues.
Now literarily, the book contains two primary
elements. First, we have a prose story
and that provides a framework for the book,
that's chapters 1 and 2 and then it returns in chapter 42 at
the end of the book.
Into this prose framework a large poetic section of dialogue
and speeches has been inserted.
So there are two main literary components.
Now the prose framework concerning a scrupulously
righteous man named Job, afflicted by horrendous
calamity, was probably a standard Ancient
Near Eastern folktale of great antiquity.
The story isn't set in Israel; it's not about an Israelite.
It's set in Edom.
Job is an eastern magnate who dwells in the country of Uz,
not an Israelite.
But the Israelite author has used this older Ancient Near
Eastern legend about a man named Job for his own purposes.
The name Job, which in Hebrew is pronounced,
iyyov, is bivalent in meaning.
It can mean "enemy" in Hebrew, by changing vowels around;
but it's the root for enemy, oyev, or,
if we take it in Aramaic, it can mean "one who repents,"
"a repentant one."
And as we're going to see, the name will be appropriate in
both senses as the story progresses.
There's a handout on the side of the room.
I'm not sure everyone took one when they came in.
I'm wondering if it could be distributed please.
I'm sorry. It's going to help you chart
what goes on in Job.
But this handout contains an outline of the book's structure
on one side--so it's mapped out on one side.
On the other side, it has some important verses
and terms. But we'll see from the outline
of the structure, chapters 1 and 2 have this
prose prologue about the pious and prosperous Job and his
devastation, which is the result of a
challenge which is put to God.
At the end of that prologue, at the end of chapter 2,
he has three friends who come to sit with him in silence for
seven days. The silence doesn't last very
long because we move then into the large poetic section and
that extends from chapter 3 all the way to chapter 42,
verse 7. So you'll see that structure on
the handout. There are many ways to map the
structure of the Book of Job.
Your handout charts, I think, one of the more common
and clearer representations.
Looking now specifically at the poetic section:
First, you have a dialogue between Job and his three
friends that goes from chapter 3 to chapter 31,
verse40. And it can be divided into
three cycles of speeches.
Job opens each cycle--so the first speech in each cycle is by
Job--and then his friends speak in a regular pattern.
First, Eliphaz with Job responding and then Bildad with
Job responding and then Zophar; and you have this pattern of
six speeches. It occurs three times but in
fact the third time the reply by Zophar is omitted and that
deviation ensures that Job has the first and the last word.
He has a summation speech in chapters 29 to 31.
At first, the friends seek to comfort Job and to explain his
suffering but they become increasingly harsh,
ultimately bearing a callous contempt for Job's condition.
Now this section closes with the long speech by Job,
as I said: 29 to 31.
He's lamenting the loss of his past, pleasant life.
He protests his innocence, he calls on God to answer.
But then Elihu, this previously unannounced
fourth friend appears.
He gives four speeches from chapters32 to 37.
He admonishes Job; he defends God's justice,
and then this is followed by a poetic discourse between God who
poses a series of rhetorical questions and Job who appears
contrite. And that section also falls
into four parts rather like Elihu's speech.
You have two long speeches by Yahweh, two short ones by Job.
Finally, there's a concluding prose epilogue that vindicates
Job. God criticizes Job's friends,
and then in a rather unexpected happy ending,
we have Job restored to his fortunes and finally
experiencing a peaceful death.
So let's look at the contents in greater deal now that we've
reviewed the structure.
The story opens by introducing us to Job.
He's said to be a blameless and upright man.
He fears God and he shuns evil, that is chapter 1,
verse 1. So the moral virtue and
innocence of Job is established in the opening line as a
narrative fact, a non-negotiable narrative
fact. And yet this Job is to become
the victim of a challenge issued by "the satan" in the
heavenly counsel.
I say "the satan" deliberately.
The satan.
The satan is certainly not the devil.
There's no such notion in the Hebrew Bible.
The phrase, "the satan," occurs four times in the Hebrew Bible,
here and in Numbers 22 and in Zechariah3.
"The satan" is simply a member of the divine
counsel--one of God's minions whose function it is to
investigate affairs on earth and to act as a kind of prosecuting
attorney. He has to bring evildoers to
justice. And it's only in later Jewish,
and especially Christian thought, that the term loses the
definite article--from "the satan" which means "the
prosecutor" essentially, the prosecuting attorney--and
becomes a proper name, Satan, for an enemy or opponent
of God. This later concept of Satan
develops as a means of explaining evil without
attributing it to God, but that isn't the function of
the satan here.
He works for God and when Yahweh boasts of his pious
servant Job, the prosecuting angel wonders,
as his portfolio requires him to do, whether Job's piety is
sincere. Perhaps he's motivated by
self-interest. Since he's been blessed with
such good fortune and prosperity he's naturally enough pious and
righteous, but would his piety survive
affliction and suffering?
Deprived of his wealth wouldn't he curse God to his face?
You have to notice as you're reading the euphemistic use of
"bless God" instead of "curse God."
The ancient writers did not want to write down "curse God"
so they wrote "bless God," but we need to understand
that's a euphemistic way of avoiding writing "curse God."
So wouldn't he curse God to his face?
God is quite confident that Job's piety is not superficial,
it's not driven by the desire for reward,
and so he permits the satan to put Job to the
test. Job's children are killed,
his cattle are destroyed, his property is destroyed,
but Job's response in chapter 1:21 is, "Naked I came from my
mother's womb and naked I shall return;
God gives and God takes away, may the name of the Lord be
blessed. The narrator then adds in verse
22, "In all this--," and if you flip over I've got some of these
key verses on the back of your handout to help you keep track,
"In all this Job did not sin or impute anything unsavory to
God." And God again praises Job to
the satan, saying, "And still he holds on
to his integrity, so you incited me to destroy
him for nothing."
That's chapter 2:3.
So the satan proposes increasing the suffering,
and God agrees on the condition that Job's life be preserved.
So the satan strikes Job's body with these terrible
painful sores, trying to crush his spirit and
Job's wife rages, "Do you still hold on to your
integrity? Bless God," curse God "and
die," chapter 2:9.
But still Job will not sin, he will not curse God,
he insists on remaining virtuous and he responds,
"Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not
receive evil?" So at first glance it would
appear that Job accepts his bitter fate.
But note: after the first round of suffering,
the narrator observed that "in all this Job did not sin with
his lips or impute anything unsavory to God,"
but now he merely observes, "in all this Job did not sin
with his lips." Not with his lips perhaps,
but in his heart did he impute unsavory things to God?
If we were to move directly to the conclusion of the folktale
in chapter 42, if we jump from this point just
to the conclusion, in 42:7 is where the conclusion
begins, we would find that Job is
rewarded fully for his patience and steadfast loyalty and his
household and his belongings are restored to him twice over.
The folktale standing alone could be read as the story of an
innocent man tested, who accepts his fate.
He retains his faith, and he's rewarded.
Standing alone, the tale appears to reflect the
values and the conventional piety of the Wisdom literature
and of the Deuteronomistic school.
But the folktale doesn't stand alone.
The anonymous author of Job uses this earlier legend
concerning the righteous man Job as a frame for his own purposes,
and the hint at the end of the prologue that Job perhaps is
beginning to impute unsavory things to God points forward to
this extensive poetic dialogue that's following.
Here are Job's unsavory accusations against God.
Here we have a most impatient and furious Job who will charge
God with gross mismanagement of the world and eventually deny
the existence of a moral order altogether.
So reading the Book of Job is a fascinating exercise because the
two types of material in the book,
the prose frame and the poetic dialogue in the middle,
they appear to be in tension.
And yet interwoven, as they are now,
they work together and the one shapes our reading of the other.
Our reception of the accusations of Job's friends in
the poetic dialogue--our reception of those words is
determined by the prose framework's assertion that Job
is innocent. That's a non-negotiable
narrative fact and because of the fact of Job's righteousness,
we know Job's friends are lying when they say Job must be
suffering for some hidden sin.
And we know that Job's self-defense,
that he hasn't deserved the suffering is correct.
We're going to rehearse some of the arguments that are advanced
in the central core, the poetic core of the book,
and here I think a helpful guide through the
arguments--there are lots of commentaries on the Book of Job,
but one commentary that I think is helpful in just sort of
working through some of the arguments of the interlocutors
is the analysis of Edwin Good.
Although Job doesn't exactly curse God in his first speech,
he does curse the day of his birth.
And in a passage that alludes repeatedly to creation,
Job essentially curses all that God has accomplished as creator
of the cosmos. He wishes he were dead,
and at this point he doesn't even ask why this has happened
to him, he only asks why he should be alive when he prefers
death. Eliphaz's reply is long and
elaborate. He seems to offer comfort.
He seems to offer comfort, until he injects a new
element in the discussion and that's the element of justice.
Job hasn't mentioned the issue of justice up to this point,
but Eliphaz says, "Think now, what innocent man
ever perished? / Where have the upright been
destroyed? / As I have seen,
those who plow evil / And sow mischief reap them," chapter
4:7-8. So Eliphaz is handing Job the
standard line of biblical Wisdom literature as exemplified by
something like the book of Proverbs,
belief in a system of divine retributive justice--that
retribution is just.
By definition there can be no undeserved suffering.
The implication is that Job has deserved this suffering--a
thought that apparently hadn't occurred to Job--and the
question of undeserved suffering is now going to dominate the
rest of the discussion.
Job's second speech is very disorderly.
It's full of wildly contradictory images that may
reflect the shock and the pain and the rage that now overwhelm
him. He seems to be haunted by
Eliphaz's connection of his suffering with some sin and so
he turns to address God directly.
He admits he's not perfect but surely, he objects,
he doesn't deserve such affliction.
In chapter 8 we have Bildad's speech and it's tactless and
unkind. He says, "Will God pervert the
right? / Will the Almighty pervert
justice? / If your sons sinned against
Him, / He dispatched them for their transgressions," 8:3-4.
In other words, God is perfectly just and
ultimately all get what they deserve.
Indeed, your children, Job, must have died because
they sinned, so just search for God and ask for mercy.
The friends' speeches lead Job to the conclusion that God must
be indifferent to moral status.
God doesn't follow the rules that he demands of human beings.
This is chapter 9:22, "He finishes off both perfect
and wicked." When Job complains,
"He wounds me much for nothing," chapter 9:17,
he's echoing God's own words to the satan in the
prologue. Remember when God says to the
satan you have "incited me to destroy him for nothing,"
and we suspect by this verbal coincidence that Job is right.
Legal terms dominate, as Job calls for the charges
against him to be published, and then he hurls
countercharges in a suit against God.
Charges of unworthy conduct, of spurning his creatures while
smiling on the wicked, on scrutinizing Job even though
he knows Job to be innocent, and this too is a subversion of
a common prophetic literary genre that we've seen:
the riv or the covenant lawsuit in which God through his
prophets charges Israel with flagrant violation of the terms
of the covenant and warns of inevitable punishment.
Here, in Job, it's a man who arraigns God and
yet, Job asserts, since God is God and not a
human adversary, there's really no fair way for
the lawsuit between them to be tried or arbitrated.
"Man cannot win a suit against God," chapter 9:2.
Job is powerless in the face of this injustice.
These ideas all find expression in Job 10:1-7:
I am disgusted with life; I will give rein to my
complaint, Speak in the bitterness of my
soul. I say to God,
"Do not condemn men; Let me know what You charge me
with. Does it benefit You to defraud,
To despise the toil of Your hands,
While smiling on the counsel of the wicked?
Do You have the eyes of flesh?
Is Your vision that of mere men?
Are Your days the days of a mortal?
Are Your years the years of a man,
That You seek my inequity And search out my sin?
You know that I am not guilty, And that there is none to
deliver from Your hand… Job repeats his wish to die,
this time less because of his suffering and more because his
worldview has collapsed.
He sees that divine power is utterly divorced from justice
and that's a second fundamental biblical assumption subverted.
But Job's words only seem to egg his interlocutors on.
Eliphaz had implied that Job was a sinner.
Bildad had baldly asserted that his sons had died for their sins
and now Zophar's going to claim that actually Job is suffering
less then he deserves.
And Job isn't persuaded.
He isn't persuaded that he has sinned or more precisely,
that he has sinned in proportion to the punishment he
is now suffering.
God is simply unjust.
The Job of this poetic dialogue portion of the book is hardly
patient or pious.
He is angry, he is violent,
he argues, he complains and vehemently insists upon his
innocence. In the fourth speech by
Job--now this is the speech that opens the second cycle of
speeches--Job appeals to creation.
God's controlling power is arbitrary and unprincipled.
He interferes with the natural order, he interferes with the
human order, and this is itself a subversion of the Genesis
portrait of creation as a process whose goal and crown is
humankind. Again, Job demands a trial.
He demands a trial in the widely quoted and mistranslated
verse--this is Job 13:15: "He may well slay me.
I may have no hope-- but I must argue my case before Him."
In other words, Job knows that he can't win but
he still wants his day in court.
He wants to make his accusation of God's mismanagement.
He wants to voice his protest even though he knows it will
gain him nothing.
In a pun on his name, Iyyov,
Job asks God, "Why do You hide Your face,
/ And treat me like an enemy?"
,treat me like an oyev, 13:28.
In his second speech Job fully expects to be murdered,
not executed, but murdered by God and hopes
only that the evidence of his murder will not be concealed he
says in 16:18, "Earth, do not cover my blood" .
Job's third speech reiterates this desire, the desire that the
wrong against him not be forgotten.
"Would that my words were written, would that they were
engraved in an inscription, with an iron stylus and lead,
forever in rock they were incised," 19:23-24.
Job's three speeches in the second cycle become increasingly
emotional and for their part the speeches of his friends in this
cycle become increasingly cruel.
Their insistence that suffering is always a sure sign of sin
seems to justify hostility towards and contempt for Job.
He's now depicted as universally mocked and
humiliated and despised and abused.
One cannot help but see in this characterization of Job's
so-called friends, an incisive commentary on the
callous human propensity to blame the victim,
and to do so lest our tidy and comfortable picture of a moral
universe in which the righteous do not suffer,
should come apart at the seams as Job's has.
Job opens the third cycle of speeches urging his friends to
look, to really see his situation, because if they did
they would be appalled.
Job's situation looked at honestly requires the admission
that God has done this for no reason and that the friends'
understanding of the world is a lie.
Job asserts baldly: there is no distributive
justice, there's no coherent or orderly system of morality in
this life or any other.
There is no principle of afterlife, after all,
in the Hebrew Bible.
Chapter 21:7-26: Why do the wicked live on,
Prosper and grow wealthy?
Their children are with them always,
And they see their children's children.
Their homes are secure, without fear;
They do not feel the rod of God.
…their children skip about.
They sing to the music of timbrel and lute,
And revel to the tune of the pipe;
They spend their days in happiness,
And go down to Sheol in peace.
…How seldom does the lamp of the wicked fail,
Does the calamity they deserve befall them?
…[You say,] "God is reserving his
punishment for his sons"; Let it be paid back to Him that
He may feel it, ...One man dies in robust
health, All tranquil and untroubled;
His pails are full of milk; The marrow of his bones is
juicy. Another dies embittered,
Never having tasted happiness.
They both lie in the dust And are covered with
worms. But the friends can't look
honestly at Job; they can't allow that,
indeed, a righteous man suffers horribly.
By the end of the third cycle Job is ready and eager for his
trial, but he can't find God.
Job's final speech in the third cycle focuses on this theme of
divine absence. God is irresponsibly absent
from the world and the result is human wickedness.
So from the idea that God is morally neutral or indifferent,
Job has moved to the implicit charge that God is responsible
for wickedness. He rewards wickedness;
he causes wickedness by his absence, his failure to govern
properly. He is both corrupt and a
corrupter of others.
"If it is not so, he says, who will prove me a
liar and bring my words to nought."
Yet, even in the depths of his anguish, and even though he is
now convinced that God does not enforce a moral law in the
universe, Job clings to one value:
righteousness is a virtue in and of itself,
and even if it brings no reward Job will not give up his
righteousness. Face to face with the shocking
insight that good and evil are met with indifference by God,
that righteousness brings no reward and wickedness no
punishment, Job although bitter, refuses to succumb to a moral
nihilism. Chapter 27:2-6:
By God who has deprived me of justice!
By Shaddai who has embittered my life!
As long as there is life in me, And God's breath is in my
nostrils, My lips will speak no wrong,
Nor my tongue utter deceit.
Far be it for me to say that you are right;
Until I die I will maintain my integrity.
I persist in my righteousness and will not yield;
I shall be free of reproach as long as I live.
These last lines recall the words of God and the
satan in the prelude.
The satan had said that a man will not hold on to virtue
or to righteousness in the face of suffering.
He'll give everything away for his life.
So this narrative set-up guides or influences our interpretation
of Job's statement here.
Although he is losing his life, Job says he will not give
anything away but he holds onto, he maintains his integrity just
as God had scolded the satan in chapter 2:3
which reads, "Still he holds onto his
integrity. You have incited me to destroy
him for nothing."
So in his darkest, most bitter hour with all hope
of reward gone, Job clings to the one thing he
has--his own righteousness.
In fact, when all hope of just reward is gone then
righteousness becomes an intrinsic value.
Yehezkel Kaufman writes of this moment, "the poet raises Job to
the bleak summit of righteousness bereft of hope,
bereft of faith in divine justice".
Or in the words of another scholar, Moshe Greenberg,
we see here ..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.
We may add he believes God has turned his back on him--yet Job
persists in the affirmation of his own worth and the
transcendent worth of unrewarded good [Greenberg 1987,285].
So in a way then, for all their differences in
style and manner, the patient Job of the legend
and the raging Job of the poetic dialogue,
are basically the same man.
Each ultimately remains firm in his moral character,
clinging to righteousness because of its intrinsic value
and not because it will be rewarded.
Indeed, Job knows bitterly that it will not.
At the end of his outburst, Job sues God.
He issues Him a summons and he demands that God reveal to him
the reason for his suffering.
Job pronounces a series of curses to clear himself from the
accusations against him, specifying the sins he has not
committed and ending, as he began,
in chapter 3, with a curse on the day of his
birth. We expect to hear from God now
but instead we hear from an unannounced stranger,
Elihu. I'm going to have to give Elihu
short shrift. He's the only one of the four
interlocutors to refer to Job by name, address Job by name.
He repeats many of the trite assertions of Job's friends.
He does hint, however, that not all suffering
is punitive. He also hints that
contemplation of nature's elements can open the mind to a
new awareness of God and in these two respects,
Elihu's speech moves us towards God's answer from the storm.
So in the climatic moment, God answers Job in an
extraordinary theophany, or self-manifestation.
In chapter 38 God speaks out of the tempest or whirlwind,
"Who is this who darkens counsel,
speaking without knowledge," is he referring to Job,
to Elihu, the three friends, all of them?
God has heard enough, it's his turn to ask questions,
the answers to which are clearly implied;
these are rhetorical questions.
Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?"
You did, God. …Have you ever commanded the
day to break, Assigned the dawn its place,
…Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea,
Or walked in the recesses of the deep?
No, no human has.
And God continues with these rhetorical questions,
questions regarding the animals,
their various powers and attributes, but one wonders what
the purpose of all these questions is.
One senses that they are irrelevant.
Job has posed some very specific challenges to God.
Why am I suffering?
Is there a pattern to existence?
Is God's refusal to answer these challenges a way of saying
there is no answer?
Or is it God's way of saying that justice is beyond human
understanding? Or is this theophany of God in
nature and the focus on creation, an implicit assault on
the fundamental tenant of Israelite religion that God is
known and made manifest through his interactions with humans,
his rewards and punishments in historical time.
You'll recall that the monotheistic revolution is
generally understood to have effected a break from
mythological conceptions of the gods as indistinguishable from
various natural forces, limited by meta-divine powers
and forces of the cosmos.
The biblical God wasn't another Ancient Near Eastern or
Canaanite nature God ultimately, but a wholly transcendent
power--He was figured this way in many parts of the
Bible--known not through the involuntary and recurring cycles
of nature but through His freely willed and non-repeating actions
in historical time.
Such a view of God underwrites the whole system of divine
retributive justice.
Only an essentially good God who transcends and is
unconstrained by mechanistic natural forces can establish and
administer a system of retributive justice,
dealing out punishment and reward in response to the
actions of humans in time.
Is the author of Job suggesting that history and the events that
befall the just and the unjust are not the medium of
revelation? Is God a god of nature after
all, encountered in the repeating cycles of the natural
world and not in the unpredictable and incoherent
arena of human history and action?
If so, then this is a third fundamental biblical assumption
that has been radically subverted.
So we'll turn now to God's direct speech to Job in 40:8,40,
verse 8, excuse me.
"Would you impugn my justice?
/ Would you condemn Me that you be right?"
God, I think, is now getting at the heart of
the matter: your friends Job were wrong, they condemned you.
They attributed sin to you, so that they might be right.
But you, too, have been wrong condemning Me,
attributing wickedness to Me so that you might be right.
Job's friends erred because they assumed that there's a
system of retributive justice at work in the world and that
assumption led them to infer that all who suffer are sinful,
and that's a blatant falsehood.
But Job also errs; if he assumes that although
there isn't a system of retributive justice,
there really ought to be one.
It's that assumption that leads him to infer that suffering is a
sign of an indifferent or wicked God, and that is equally a
falsehood. Job needs to move beyond the
anthropocentrism that characterizes the rest of
Scripture and the Genesis 1 account of creation,
according to which humankind is the goal of the entire process
of creation. God's creation,
the Book of Job seems to suggest, defies such
teleological and rational categories.
In a nutshell, God refuses to be seen as a
moral accountant.
The idea of God as a moral accountant is responsible for
two major errors: the interpretation of suffering
as an indicator of sin, or the ascription of injustice
to God. In his final speech,
Job confesses to a new firsthand knowledge of God that
he lacked before, and as a result of this
knowledge Job repents, "Therefore, I recant and
relent, / Being but dust and ashes,"
42:6. Here we see the other meaning
of Job's name, "one who repents," suddenly
leap to the fore.
What is he repenting of?
Certainly not of sin; God has not upheld the
accusations against Job.
Indeed he states explicitly in a moment that the friends were
wrong to say he had sinned.
But he has indicated that guilt and innocence,
reward and punishment are not what the game is all about,
and while Job had long been disabused of the notion that the
wicked and the righteous actually get what they deserve,
he nevertheless had clung to the idea that ideally they
should. And it's that mistaken
idea--the idea that led him to ascribe wickedness to God--that
Job now recants. With this new understanding of
God, Job is liberated from what he would now see as a false
expectation raised by the Deuteronomistic notion of a
covenant relationship between God and humankind,
enforced by a system of divine justice.
At the end of the story Job is fully restored to his fortunes.
God asserts he did no evil and the conventional,
impeccably Deuteronomistic view of the three friends is clearly
denounced by God.
He says of them, "They have not spoken of Me
what is right as my servant Job has," 42:7.
For some, the happy ending seems anticlimactic,
a capitulation to the demand for a happy ending of just
desserts that runs counter to the whole thrust of the book,
and yet in a way I think the ending is superbly fitting.
It's the last in a series of reversals that subverts our
expectations. Suffering comes inexplicably,
so does restoration; blessed be the name of the Lord.
God doesn't attempt to justify or explain Job's suffering and
yet somehow by the end of the book, our grumbling,
embittered, raging Job is satisfied.
Perhaps he's realized that an automatic principle of reward
and punishment would make it impossible for humans to do the
good for purely disinterested motives.
It's precisely when righteousness is seen to be
absurd and meaningless that the choice to be righteous
paradoxically becomes meaningful.
God and Job, however we are to interpret
their speeches, are reconciled.
The suffering and injustice that characterize the world have
baffled humankind for millennia.
And the Book of Job provides no answer in the sense of an
explanation or a justification of suffering and injustice,
but what it does offer is a stern warning to avoid the
Scylla of blaspheming against the victims by assuming their
wickedness, and the Charybdis of
blaspheming against God by assuming his.
Nor is moral nihilism an option, as our hero,
yearning for, but ultimately renouncing
divine order and justice, clings to his integrity and
chooses virtue for nothing.