Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks! Last week the series had a guest poster who tackled a close reading of one of Edith Wharton's best known works, The House of Mirth. This week we're going to crawl into the WayWayback machine to address one of history's most baffling short stories.
Why do people suffer? If there is a God, and he does have a 'plan', why do people who believe in him find themselves suffering the same indignities as people who don't?
I have no interest in the religious side of this question (I'm an atheist), but the it makes for fascinating art. If you think religious texts aren't appropriate fodder for literary analysis... well, then this ain't the essay for you!
Otherwise, join me below for a trip through ancient Edom.
"I read the Book of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it.
-- Virginia Woolf
The world's religions have no shortage of parables, poems, fables, histories, and biographies, so why should we bother with Job, a relatively minor piece (in dogmatic terms) of obscure cultural origin? The plot is relatively straightforward, if confusing and uneven; the poetry is good but you can certainly find better; and no one can seem to agree on what it was intended to mean.
Yet no book of Jewish scripture (for that matter, no book of the Bible) has inspired such a wide array of admirers and analysts, including psychoanalyst Carl Jung, playwright Neil Simon, philosopher Lev Shestov, pundit William Safire (generally ugh, although his reading is interesting)... enough people to merit a three volume study of Job's impact that includes Hobbes, Spinoza, Pascal, Voltaire, Goethe, Blake, Kierkegaard, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Camus. Notice this list includes a span from conservative Christians to atheists.
I have my own theories why, but first let's back up and discuss the history of this disjointed text, and how it came to achieve such a high place in Western thought.
On Edomites and Textology
Scholars aren't 100% sure where Job originates, but one thing is fairly certain: neither the story nor its central character is Jewish, which makes its inclusion in the Jewish scripture an interesting choice. The present form of the story describes Job as an Edomite, living in a kingdom located roughly on the border of southern Israel and Jordan.
According to tradition, "Edom" derives from Esau, the older brother of Jewish patriarch Jacob (much as Arabs are traditionally linked to the older brother of Jewish patriarch Isaac). The archaeological record is unfortunately scant.
As for the text itself, it's undergone significant meddling between its likely origins as an oral tradition and its modern form. For one thing, we're fairly certain that an enterprising scholar (or community of scholars) felt that the bare story of Job was too unclear theologically, so they added a new character and possibly rewrote some of the lines. How we know this will become clear when we discuss the plot.
Oddly enough, these "clarifications" backfired: Job is still a baffling piece of literature, and the contradictions and discomforts stem in part from the sections added as "clarifications". It's as if, attempting to simply a text for general readership, the scholars created a Frankenstein's monster of terrible depth.
On Boils and Potsherds
Job is the great work of Suffering, and its pages have been dogeared by a hundred generation of readers trying to understand why bad things happen. Here's the plot in a nutshell:
To prove a point, God allows one of his most upstanding people to be the target of some seriously brutal suffering. Job (the target) knows he's done nothing wrong and cries out to heaven for justification. Eventually God comes down in a whirlwind, tells Job to shut up, and rewards him for passing the test.
Got that? It's simple enough (if baffling) on the surface, but as with many texts of this depth the devil is in the details.
Literally: the plot is set in motion by none other than Satan, in his very first appearance as a literary entity. But the word "Satan" actually means "Accuser", and whoever he is, he's not a fallen angel or proprietor of the hottest property this side of the Sahara. As far as the story is concerned, Satan is God's prosecutor, testing the abilities of the human race to "fear God and shun evil." The trials of Job start off as a glorified bet:
Then the LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil."
"Does Job fear God for nothing?" Satan replied. "Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face."
The LORD said to Satan, "Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger." (1:8-12)
With those words, Job's formerly happy existence becomes a living hell. His property is stolen or destroyed, all his children are killed in freak accident of nature, and - after God wants to declare victory, but Satan ups the ante - his body becomes infected with oozing, itchy boils.
Now the story really begins: the plot shifts away from this prose prologue into an elegant poetic structure, as Job's three friends try to convince him about how to deal with his misfortunes.
Job curses his miserable existence, but his friends have other ideas. Eliphaz believes that God makes no mistakes, and good people are rewarded for good just as bad people are condemned. Job isn't amused, and you can practically hear his anger seething out between clenched teeth:
I will not keep silent;
I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit,
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.
...
If I have sinned, what have I done to you,
O watcher of men?
Why have you made me your target?
Have I become a burden to you? (7:11, 20)
Friend #2, Bildad, replies with more of the same, arguing that God's actions are just by nature. He couches his argument in some pretty, imagery-laden verse, but beneath the poetic platitudes he's implying that Job has to repent, because obviously he's done something wrong to merit all this catastrophe. Job's bitterness pours out in response:
It is all the same; that is why I say,
'He destroys both the blameless and the wicked.'
When a scourge brings sudden death,
he mocks the despair of the innocent.
When a land falls into the hands of the wicked,
he blindfolds its judges.
If it is not he, then who is it? (9:22-24)
Friend #3, Zophar, has none of the tact of the other interlocutors, and blasts Job for his arrogance in assuming he'd done nothing wrong. Now the text settles into its pattern, as the friends continue, in order, to berate Job for his wrongheadedness while Job proclaims his innocence and the unfairness of his suffering.
First Eliphaz, then Bildad, then Zophar,
then Eliphaz, then Bildad, then Zophar,
then Elipahz, then Bildad, then Elihu.. wha?
Who the hell is Elihu?
We're 32 chapters in, and a previously unmentioned character has decided to butt into the conversation - with a prose prologue to introduce him in a slipshod, unconvincing way ("He was there all along, really! He just didn't like talking over the other people!") The newbie, whose name means "My God is He" - how's that for subtle? - starts ripping into everyone, Job and friends alike, for not understanding the nature of divine justice. Job doesn't have to repent for anything - he simply has to recognize that understanding divine justice is so far out of his cognitive abilities that he shouldn't presume to know better.
As if on cue, God enters stage left, in a whirwind (heck of an entrance!) Rather than argue with Job about the rightness or wrongness of his punishment, God puts their relationship into some perspective:
Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand...
Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb? (38:4, 8)
And then God invents snark:
Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years! (38:21)
And with that, trembling at the mighty boom from the whirlwind, Job accepts his fate. God says, "I win!" and gives Job everything back, including a new set of children and blemish-free skin. Finita la commedia
Exegesis
I'm troubled, I'm puzzled, I have more questions than answers—and that, I suppose, is why the Book of Job has been required reading for almost 3,000 years.
-- David Plotz, Slate
There are so many directions we can go with this text - if it's been rich enough to inspire thousands upon thousands of pages of discussion through the centuries, I certainly can't but scratch the surface in a blog post. Some areas of particular interest:
Sin and Punishment: One of the radical things about Job is that it disconnects the notion of earthly misfortune from sin. Depending on how you approach it, this is either extremely discomforting (the world around us follows no understandable logic, and we're all randomly-squashed ants!) or extremely comforting (a natural catastrophe that takes the lives of thousands of people is not anyone's fault, so fuckwads like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson can shove it). Besides, why should the Almighty care about earthly peccadilloes that barely register? On the flip side of the coin, you didn't get that promotion because you prayed, and you didn't find your keys because you're "a good person". As Elihu explains,
If you sin, how does that affect him?
If your sins are many, what does that do to him?
If you are righteous, what do you give to him,
or what does he receive from your hand? (35:6-7)
Language: more so than any Biblical text outside of Genesis, Job concerns itself with the role and function of language. Apart from the framing device, the book is almost entirely dialogue, foregrounding conversation and speech above an action-less plot. When God finally appears, it's in the form of a disembodied voice.
But it recognizes itself as a literary text, too. In a nice moment of ancient Meta, Job hopes that future generations will recognize him for the blameless soul that he is:
Oh, that my words were recorded,
that they were written on a scroll,
that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead,
or engraved in rock forever! (19:23-24)
This eventually leads to one of the text's most interesting paradoxes: if the moral of the story is that divine justice is beyond our understanding, surely it must be beyond our language, too. This is doubly true since language, even in the Bible, is considered a corruption - or an inferior form of human understanding. How does the book deal with this?
The Sublime: The limitations of language are in part a reason for God's non-response response. If divine justice were explainable, he'd explain it; but it isn't, so he doesn't. Instead, God relies on imagery - giant oceanic Behemoths, creation of the cosmos, booming whirlwinds - to carry a sense of what Job is dealing with.
Basically, Job has a meltdown. Faced with the enormity of creation thrust in front of him, his neurons overload and he reaches a better understanding of the enormity of the Ineffable. Kant called this type of meltdown "the Sublime" and recognized that it could lead to the annihilation of a sense of self in the face of the Absolute.
The Sublime, of another sort: Why does this text inspire so many contradictory responses? Part of the reason is that the theology (or more accurately, the theodicy) is so unsatisfying, and it has to be: as we just noted, if it were explainable, it could be explained. And yet it all starts with a bet - in fact, the text explains to us exactly why Job is suffering, then berates Job for trying to understand the nature of his suffering! Satan shows us his cards, Elihu tells us we can't see the cards. What gives?
Punishment that is not punishment, justice that is not justice, an explanation that is not an explanation. Job loops back on itself with visions of a universe outside our understanding while seeking to make it understandable, and the more you contemplate its mysteries, the more you find yourself sinking into incomprehension. In the end, faced with such an agonizing push-and-pull of ideas, your brain suffers a meltdown.
A-ha.
It's just my reading, but I think this is the source of Job's greatness: its inscrutable nature forces the reader to reenact Job's own meltdown when faced with the divine. Since the text can't deliver a whirlwind to each of our homes, it creates a cognitive whirlwind by beating us up with an incomprehensible theodicy, and we're left cowering in the corner. But as with Job, this also precipitates our breakthrough in understanding the Ineffable on a higher level.
And even if you find that you don't get quite the same uneasy feeling reading the book, you can still enjoy one major aspect: at its center stands the best-written, most vivid character in all Jewish scripture. Job appeals to readers because he is so recognizably human, and his suffering and his indignation still feel potent some thousands of years later.
My eyes have seen all this,
my ears have heard and understood it.
What you know, I also know;
I am not inferior to you. (13:1-2)
Links:
- New International version of Job, which is the version I used for this essay
- Fully illustrated Job by William Blake (a must-see!)
- Excellent essay by Slate's David Plotz in Blogging the Bible (and a much better close reading than I've written here)
- Essay on Job by G. K. Chesterton (early 20th century author of popular novels like The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare)
- Putting God on Trial, a comprehensive website on Job by the author Robert Sutherland
Other Literature Diaries:
Text of Job from the New International translation, linked above. All images courtesy Wikimedia Commons, with images hyperlinked to their original sources. Cross-posted as always on Progressive Historians and DocuDharma.
Thank you for reading!