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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307799869 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2011 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 716,166 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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1
THE STORY OF JOB
“THERE LIVED IN the land of Uz a man of blameless and upright life named Job, who feared God and set his face against wrongdoing.”
At the beginning of the book, Job is living the good life, in both senses of that phrase: The powerful chieftain is not only painstakingly pious, but also blessed with ten party-throwing children and he has three thousand camels in his stable. We are told he is “the greatest man in all the East”.
Among the angels presenting themselves to God at his heavenly court is the Satan, or the accusing angel. (In many translations, the definite article precedes the word Satan in the Old Testament, suggesting a title like Special Prosecutor, or Inspector General, rather than a person’s name. He’s not the same as the Devil in later biblical references; the linguistic roots of Satan include “roaming” and “accusing”.)
God asks the Satan where he has been. That’s a curious way to begin a biblical book; God is shown to be, or shown pretending to be, not omniscient. Unless God is making idle conversation, which he does nowhere else in this book or in the rest of the Bible, God is admitting ignorance, or feigning it—he does not seem to know one of his angels’ recent whereabouts.
The Satan dutifully gives an account of his absence from the celestial court: “Ranging over the earth from end to end.” God asks, “Have you considered my servant Job? You will find no one like him on earth, a man of blameless and upright life, who fears God and sets his face against wrongdoing.”4
By selecting for consideration a man so morally pure and worshipful as to be unlike any other on earth, God seems to be taunting the member of his court whose assignment it is to be skeptical of man’s goodness.
Provoked, the Satan sneers, “Has not Job good reason to be God-fearing?” (The King James Version is more memorable: “Does Job fear God for nought?”)5 The Satan implies that God’s favorite human has good material reason for his piety—that it has brought him great wealth and respect. Having stated the issue of motive boldly, the Satan proposes a test: “stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and then he will curse you to your face.” (In Edwin Good’s recent translation, the Satan says, literally, “If he doesn’t curse you to your face—” leaving unsaid but implicit the rest of an oath, which would be “may I be cursed”. Such an “oath of clearance” by the swearer would force God’s hand, a technique Job later uses to provoke God into doing his duty.)
God, who perhaps stimulated this trial to satisfy his own doubts about the reason for the best man’s obedience, takes up the challenge. He makes what amounts to a bet with the accuser: Take everything away from Job and let’s see if you’re right.
An innocent man is thereby consigned to suffering, and it strikes the modern reader as wrong—the good end of discovery is put before the cruel means of torture. But poet-Job assumes it is not unreasonable for God to wonder if man worships him only for what he can get. It is not an idle bet, not even the “celestial wager” that it has been termed to be for centuries. Neither the folktale nor poet-Job’s version suggests that God and the Satan were making book on Man’s motives just to pass the time of a long day. For this test of Job’s motive to be fair and instructive, Job had to be kept ignorant of the fact that he was being tested.
With God’s permission, the Satan then proceeds to cause disasters to rain down on Job. All of Job’s ten children are killed; his vast herds of sheep, asses, and camels are stolen or slaughtered; his home is destroyed by a great wind; but “Throughout all this Job did not sin; he did not charge God with unreason.”
Then the Satan gets God’s permission to go after Job’s person, stopping short only of taking the man’s life. He afflicts the hapless Job with loathsome sores from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
Although Job’s wife is not shown to be suffering, she too has lost ten children and her comfortable way of life; and she must now care for an outcast and afflicted husband. The strain on her can be inferred from her agonized advice to Job: “Curse God and die!” But her husband, the human ulcer, scratches his body with a broken piece of pottery and resolutely asks, “If we accept good from God, shall we not accept evil?” The chapter concludes in many translations with “In spite of all this Job did not sin with his lips.”
Talmudic scholars as well as modern exegetes have taken the last three words to mean that the apparently patient Job might have begun to formulate sinful thoughts about God’s justice, in his heart. You have to watch out for those concluding modifiers in Job; when the Satan predicted that Job would curse God “to your face”, that might have implied that people were already cursing God behind his back. Is this reading too much into the text? The subtle text of Job invites such minute examination.
Here we have literary irony in its most striking form: The reader knows something that vitally affects the central character in the story, but the character himself has no way of knowing it. The author has told the audience why Job has been egregiously afflicted, but the hero himself is in ignorance; he does not know that he is the one chosen for the great test.
The reader wants to tell the man from Uz: “Hey, it’s all right, your suffering only seems unjust, but you are part of a grand design. You are not suffering for no reason, or for some sin you don’t know about; instead, you are the subject of the greatest wager ever made on the reason for Man’s devotion. It’s up to you to show the Satan that Man does not worship God only for power or fame or a big family or the modern equivalent of three thousand camels. Stick with it, Job—by maintaining your faith in God’s wisdom, you justify God’s faith in the purity of mankind’s motives for worshiping him.”
This, of course, is the straightforward message that many have found in the book: Take comfort in times of inexplicably unjust pain or senseless stress by seeing it as part of a greater pattern, known to God but not vouchsafed to mortals. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away; our blessings may not be permanent, and it is not for us to ask why. But there is much more to this story and its message.
Job rejects as wickedly foolish his wife’s embittered advice to curse God; the Satan appears to be losing his bet. Three eminent Eastern chieftains who are friends of Job, and who have evidently heard from afar of his misfortune, come to console him. As envoys from the world’s elite, they sit beside him for a week in silence; the right word for their sympathetic presence is commiserate, to share his misery actively. So ends the seemingly simple prose prologue to the book.
Studied closely, this opening tale reveals the poet-Job’s view of what Carl Jung, one of the founders of psychiatry, called God’s self-doubt, or at least God’s apparent need to test the motives of his worshipers. The story is presented in the childlike style of a folktale.
Then poet-Job moves from plain prose to potent poetry. With the switch in style, the nature of the book changes abruptly. It is as if poet-Job drew on the popular legend to hook us with an easy-to-follow two-dimensional opening pageant, and then suddenly wiped the cardboard storybook characters away, to confront us with human beings of different mettle facing a wrenching reality. The prosaic, legendary Job’s piety is dissolved by the pain being experienced by the poetic, human Job.
“Damn the day that I was born!”9 this outraged Job cries out, as much to himself as to the three colleagues who have come to comfort him. (“Perish the day” in the NEB and even “Curse the day” are to me timid translations.) “Why was I not still-born, why did I not die when I came out of the womb?”10 Longing for the darkness of death, Job dares to derogate God’s gift of light and to question God’s mercy: “Why should the sufferer be born to see the light? Why is life given to men who find it so bitter?”
This surely goes beyond lamentation to outright blasphemy. For centuries, scribes and translators have softened God’s refusal to end unbearable pain with the relief of death by using the passive voice. The device is familiar to modern bureaucrats: “I made a mistake” is fudged to the passive “mistakes were made”, which evades direct responsibility. In Job’s case, the passive “Why is life given” softens the direct accusation that is the plain meaning of this line: “Why does God keep the sufferer alive?”
In cursing the day of his creation, Job is implicitly cursing his creator—the one who brought the order and the light of day to the chaos of night. Damning God’s day damns God. To drive that shocking point home, Job also mocks God’s first words in Genesis, “Let there be light,” when he says of his own birthday, “May that day turn to darkness.”
This unexpected blast gives heart to those readers taking a piece of the Satan’s bet: As the accuser predicted, when Job was stripped of his wealth and health, he implicitly cursed God to his face.