CHAPTER
EIGHT: THE LAND OF UZ
We find many literary genres in the
biblical texts: legend, poem, letters, legal documents, short story, song,
prayer - but nowhere do we find real philosophical argument. The texts
with the most philosophical themes are the so-called Wisdom Literature
texts that include Job and Ecclesiastes. A number of presuppositions,
beliefs, claims and judgments rest just below the surface of the stories
however, and these are never explicitly stated but are assumed as common
ground. Through the stories we see a structure of implicit claims about
the world and our experience of it: Yahweh exists; birth and death are a part of a
mysterious external plan; time and chance exist but appear to be subject
to Yahweh's control; life's meaning comes from outside, from an external
source or authority; human fulfillment comes from being a part of a
collective of people who comply with the commands of a supreme suzerain,
who, in return for fealty promises land and protection. The single theme
that ties together all of the Old Testament stories is the theme of the covenant between Yahweh and his chosen people. Once we
see this theme as the focal point of the stories we can begin to see order
and meaning to the structural sprawl. The Mount Sinai experience is the
dramatic climax to the covenant announcements in Genesis. At that moment
in the story the external force announces and records the suzerainty
treaty, an act that constitutes the people of Israel. The Ten Commandments
become the first constitution. "Have no other gods before me and I,
the god who took you out of slavery in Egypt, promise you land and
life."
Yahweh's promise to
Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob is fulfilled through the prophet-mediator, Moses, in the desert
after the daring escape from Egypt.
`How do you know that Yahweh appeared to Moses?' `Because it
says so in Exodus. `How do you know that Yahweh spoke to the
patriarchs?' `Because it says so in Genesis.' Saying so does not
necessarily make it so, unless of course one has already accepted that the
stories are true because they were "written" by an infallible
being. `How do you know that God exists?' `Because the Bible tells me so,'
is an exchange that is fatally flawed in its logic. As we have seen, the
writers of the stories in the Bible are not arguing a position, but are
proclaiming the truth of their narrative, claiming it has
a special place in the area of human knowledge, a place that secures it
from attack from skeptics and those who claim a different revealed truth.
But how can one believe without evidence? How can one exercise a rational approach
to all other areas of knowledge and then suddenly throw reason away in the
arena of religion? Easily, it seems. By requiring less of religious claims
than we do of any other knowledge claims we are able to insulate our deeply
felt beliefs from any rational analysis - some people really want
these claims to be true and then confuse the passion of the belief with
the truth value of the claim. But, passionately believing that you have
turned off the coffee pot before you left for work is not a sufficient
condition for it being turned off, no more than a passionate belief that
you have won the big lottery is either necessary or sufficient for your
having done so.
Contemporary philosophical discussions of
truth insist that truth is a property of
statements. We say, for example, that the statement: `It is raining' is
true just when it is raining. That is, a sentence is true when the
statement made by the sentence corresponds to a state of affairs in the
non-linguistic world. `I have a headache' is true if and only if I do in
fact have a headache. If I utter the sentence but do not have a headache
then the statement expressed by the sentence is false. There are of course
other possibilities based upon the usage of the sentence. I could have an
arrangement with you that the sentence `I have a headache' will be used by
us to mean something else, say, a code for a message like `the enemy has
landed on our shores.' Or, the sentence could be a line in a play, uttered
by an actor in a particular scene. In that kind of example we do not talk
about the sentence being true or false. In general in literary texts we
suspend these epistemic concerns as soon as we hear or read a signal like
`once upon a time', or `long time ago', or `in the beginning' which
indicate we are in a fictional world where truth value functions in a
quite different way than in much of everyday discourse. Literature
provides us with possible worlds to reflect upon and to respond to, gives
us a point of view to consider, and breathes "life" into
characters just as surely as the creator-god of Genesis does.
Biblical writers are best read as poets
not as philosophers. And as poets they do not have this correspondence
theory of truth in mind. Those who claim that the Bible
is "True", if by that claim they mean that every statement in
the Bible is literally true, fail to respond to the fictional signals
provided by the writers. What are these signals? More than just the introductory
mode indicators are at work in these texts; for example, the narrator(s)
often steps out of the story to say something directly to the audience:
"There came a famine in the land - not the earlier famine in Abraham's time -
and Isaac went to Abimelech the Philistine king at Gerar." (Gen.
26.1); "He named that place Beth-El, but the earlier name of the city
was Luz." (Gen. 28.19); "(An omer is one tenth of an
ephah.)" (Exodus 16.36); "In days gone by in Israel, when a
man wished to consult God, he would say, `Let us go to the seer.' For
what is nowadays called a prophet used to be called a seer." (1 Sam.
9.9) Breaking the frame in this way
shows us the frame, and from time to time we are reminded of the fact that
we are reading a story, reminded of intention and voice and other literary components
at work in the narrative.
The stories in the Bible assume a
certain official line and present the character of God through
actions, images, and dramatic situations. From the beginning of story
telling we have been seeking a way of expressing the inexpressible, of
linguistically presenting the extra-linguistic. How do you talk about God?
Through the Word. The New Testament belief in "the Word"
or "Logos which becomes flesh" comes directly from
the Greek notion of Logos and provides the basic concept in terms of which
the doctrine of the Incarnation was to be understood. The concept of Logos came directly
from the Stoics, for whom it originally meant an immanent World Soul. It
was later fused with the Platonic idea of nous and so was conceived as
acting in accordance with archetypal patterns. The basic problem was: how
is it possible to have knowledge of a strictly transcendent being. A
suggested solution came in terms of an intermediary, in this case logos,
which was posited to solve the question of knowledge. Throughout the early
Christian centuries what we find is not philosophy of religion but
theological writings employing various philosophical concepts. Revealing the character and plan of God to
limited and finite human beings is a difficult problem solved by establishing
a canon based on an authority of the highest order. Hence, for a very long
time it was believed that Moses was the author of the first five books. Books like Ecclesiastes and The Song of
Songs were included in the canon on the authority of Solomon. No serious
biblical scholar any longer believes that Moses and Solomon wrote these books.
Philo, the gifted Jewish philosopher of
the first century, was largely responsible for the idea of logos or
"the Word" entering into Christian thought. Many theologians,
then as now, resented the intrusion of philosophy into the domain of faith
(the most outstanding was Tertullian who said, "I believe because
it is absurd.") Early Christianity also flirted with mysticism, which
was another Greek contribution. The so-called Neoplatonists reverted to
a profound sense of the Oneness or Unity of Universe in a way, which
put particulars and plurality in jeopardy, as they had been to some extent
in the philosophy of Plato. In order to account for particulars the
difficult notion of emanation was developed. God is the ultimate unity and
He/She transcends all forms of thought, but finite beings exist as a
falling away from the original perfection.[1]
The problem here is that it is very hard to make sense of the notion of
emanation without calling in question the all-embracing nature of the one
ultimate reality. The insistence on the latter did influence mystic
thought and the influence produces Oriental mysticism with its attempt to
draw away altogether from our present existence, with its limitations and
evil, and to pass beyond into a union with the ineffable Being. One way of
turning the ineffable into the "effable" is through story.
In strong contrast to the Eastern belief
that evil is illusory and particulars are mere shadows stands the
Hebrew-Christian doctrine of creation. The Old
Testament, as we have
seen, is full of stories that express the elusive and transcendent nature
of their god. The Hebrews believed that a true discernment of God's
transcendence required the recognition of our own distinctness as beings
independent of God. This in turn sharpened the question of how such
limited and finite beings could in anyway come to know God. The Hebrew
answer was in terms of God's disclosure of Himself in history and
experience, and this was deepened and extended in specifically Christian
claims about the works and words of the man-god, Jesus Christ.
One of the central problems within the
Judeo-Christian theological story centers on epistemology: how can we
finite and limited creatures have knowledge of this infinite and all-powerful
transcendent being? The question is not merely philosophical or to be
dismissed as an academic puzzle. The search for authority is a real human
search and includes passion and desire, fear and need. When we humans seek
the divine we are looking for an experience not an argument. And yet it is
our experience that makes the search so difficult. How do we - how can we
- understand a god-sponsored world in which little children suffer and
die? Evil may be a worm in man's heart but it also eats away at
comfortable belief. Evil has always
been a problem for theologians because its existence brings into doubt
either the nature of God or the existence of God. Bluntly put, the problem is: If God is
all-powerful, all knowing, and all good, then why does evil exist in the
world? If God cannot eliminate evil then God is not all-powerful. If God
can but does not then God is not all-good.
One answer is to claim that evil is
appearance only and not reality, but this hardly matches up with our
experience. Another is to posit a dualism of good and evil locked in
perpetual battle and equally matched in power. But this makes god a
half-owner of the universe with limited powers. Some argue that evil is
the responsibility and result of human free will - that because we
are free to choose, and we are limited in knowledge, we sometimes choose
wrong. Others, of course, argue that there is no god, and that cause and
effect are all we need to explain natural catastrophes and human actions.
The biblical stories that treat these questions are in the collection
called Wisdom Literature. Can we know the nature of Yahweh? How would an
existing divine force reveal itself? The continuing popularity of the book
of Job shows that these problems are important. Job questions God's
nature, his connection to morality and justice, and the relationship
between the creator and his creation. A reading
of the book of Job shows the way the Hebrew writers presented these
philosophical problems in literary form. It will also suggest answers
to the fundamental epistemological and moral questions. The Book of Job
also serves as a transition between the Old and New Testaments. Many
Christian writers have seen in Job the foreshadowing of Christ, and have
argued that the answer to Job's questions is to be found in the man-god,
Jesus.
To begin let us look briefly at a paper
by Paul Weiss.[2]
In this paper Weiss distinguishes ten different kinds of evil: sin, bad
intention, wickedness, guilt, vice, physical suffering, psychological
suffering, natural evil, and metaphysical evil. The first two are most
characteristically human for they are privately inflicted. The ten are defined
as follows:
1. Sin - he sins who is disloyal to a
primary value accepted on faith.
Blasphemy is one form of sin and
treason another. He sins who
denies his people just as surely as
does he who violates the fiats of
his/her god. Job shows us that it is
not necessary that a man sin. Job
is righteous. Job is not a sinner.
Since he suffers, suffering and the
multiple evils of the world ought not
to be attributed to man's
failure to avoid sin.
2.
Bad intent - ethical evil, like setting oneself to break an ethical
command. Like sin this is privately
achieved. It is concerned with
the good as open to reason. The man of
bad intent fails internally
to live up to what reason commands. (Steals, kills , lies). Evil
intent and suffering do not
necessarily go together.
3. Wickedness - the evil of carrying
out evil intentions. Job is right
in insisting that he was not wicked.
He who is wicked does not
necessarily incur the wrath of God.
Nor does he necessarily suffer.
4. Guilt - We ought to love, help,
cherish everyone, but since we are
finite and have finite interest, funds
and energy we can not. Each
thus fails to fulfill an obligation to
realize the good completely. We
are hence necessarily guilty. We fail
to do all that ought to be done.
Eliphaz charges Job with the neglect
of hosts of the needy, but we
are all guilty in that respect.
5. Vice - The habit of doing what
injures others; vice is produced by
men and not by God, and need not
entail suffering.
6. Social.
7. Physical.
8. Psychological.
Job suffers in all (6,7,8) these ways:
torn in his body, by his mind,
and from his fellows, Job has no rest.
9. Natural evil - an evil embodied in
the wild, destructive forces of
nature, as manifest in earthquakes,
tidal waves, hurricanes, etc.
These do not arise because there is
something bad in man/woman.
To suppose that nature is geared to
the goodness and badness of
men and women is to suppose either a
mysterious harmony
between ethics and physics, or that
spirits really move mountains.
God is responsible for "natural
evil" says the Book of Job.
10. Metaphysical evil - As Weiss puts
it: "What could not be
avoided by the things in any universe
whatsoever is the tenth kind
of evil, metaphysical evil, the evil
of being one among many, of
possessing only a fragment of reality,
of lacking the reality and thus
the power and good possessed by all
the others. Any universe
whatsoever, created or uncreated, is
one in which each part is less
than perfect precisely because it is
other than the rest, and is
deprived therefore of the reality the
rest contain."
Consider this list as a map for reading
Job. But notice also that it is not an objective map. It too contains a
certain story about ethics; and is not completely clear and separate from
its official line. `Sin' is a
religious not a moral term. It is a sin to wear a head covering in some
contexts, a sin not to wear a head covering in other
contexts. To be disloyal may be a moral failing, but surely it depends
upon what one is disloyal to. Disloyalty to an authority urging immoral
acts is certainly not a moral failing. You have to make a moral judgment
about which god is worthy of respect and worship. `Bad intent'
and `wickedness' are moral terms and it is just here that Job is innocent
- he has neither bad intent nor wickedness - the story makes that clear.
`Guilt' may be a moral term; that is, one may feel guilty if one has done
something wrong, but to feel guilt in a general sense is a pathological,
not a logical phenomenon. "But you should not feel guilt for that"
is a perfectly reasonable and healthy cor- rective to the guilt ridden
innocent. Weiss's fourth category seems to include the notion that ought
implies can - one can not be held morally responsible for things beyond
one's control. `Metaphysical guilt' as
described by Weiss is hard to understand. What sense does it make to hold
a person responsible for not being all of reality?[3]
Can one rationally blame one's dog for not being a camel? A human being?
This concept would have evil built into the very fabric of the universe, a
notion as puzzling as its counterpart of having good built into the fabric
of the universe. Religious doctrine may assert such a position, but it
is not clear precisely what would count as evidence for such a position. As Job discovers in the story, good and
evil are the province of men and women, and have nothing to do with God.
The universe is not good or evil - it is. For Weiss Job is guilty because
he is a man and all men are guilty. But the Book of Job tells us that Job
is innocent, and yet he suffers. What does this story tell us about the
nature of the god it depicts as a major character?
Notice first that it is a piece of
literature, a story of a particular kind. It is a play. It has a framing
device. It has long boring speeches and little action. It is repetitive.
The key images have to do with knowledge, wisdom and under- standing.
These are to be gained in a court room setting with God as judge
and accuser, Job as wrongly accused defendant who aches for his day in court
to prove his innocence. Job is a radical protestor, struggling against a
system that strikes him as unfair and unjust. He is not patient, and he is
not Jewish, though many think of him as the paradigm of Jewish patience.
The existence of God is assumed; it is his nature that is in question.
Suffering does not imply wrongdoing; the bad do sometimes prosper. There
is no necessary connection between morality and the size of one's
portfolio. The Book of Job is like some massive chunk of marble that has
within it a beautiful sculpture that has not yet been completed: rich,
extensive, suggestive, but incomplete. It has been praised as a great
work:
Not only its value as a work of art,
displayed by the power of its
language, by the depth of its feeling,
by the grandeur of its
structure, but also the subject with
which it deals, the daring titanic
struggle with the immemorial, yet ever
new, questioning of man-
kind concerning the meaning of
suffering, places this composition
as regards its general significance
beside Dante's Divina
Commedia and Goethe's Faust.[4]
The book consists of two distinct parts.
The bulk of the work, and by far the more important, is the long poetic
section which is framed by the brief prose narrative which relates the
legend of the righteous man's travails, beginning in heavenly council, and
the happy ending when the suffering man has everything restored to better
than ever status. Biblical scholars[5] tell us that the framing device,
written in an archaic style, bears all
of the marks of an ancient and popular folk tale, while the dramatic
interchange in poetic form is from a much later, probably post-exilic
time. In any case, it is easy to see the difference between the two, even
in translation, for the simplicity of the frame is even more obvious when
set off against the complex and philosophical poetic debate between Job
and his "comforters". An editor has molded the two parts
together to form one literary whole, and
as readers we must judge how successful the whole has been completed and
how the two parts function to- gether.
Look at the frame: we are told
immediately that Job is "a man of blameless and upright life"
who fears God and has his face set against wrongdoing. He is given as
perhaps a bit too much of a good man; that is, he seems to approach the
good life like an accountant, offering sacrifices for possible wrongs on
the part of his children because he thinks "that they might somehow
have sinned against God." William Blake in his illustrated edition
of Job has the family at the beginning of the story reading the book to be
sure that they are following all of the commands of God, but appearing to
have a fairly bleak and stiff time of it. The musical instruments are not
being used, there is no joy in this family life before the experience of
the whirlwind. Blake's story is visually projected, and he gives us three
characters: God, Satan, and Job,
all of whom look alike. In Blake's vision God and Satan are forces
in us, psychological parts of us. Suddenly in the prologue we hear of the
members of the court of heaven who gather in the presence of the Lord, and
this sudden shift from earth to heaven is presented with no transition and
with no hesi- tation. In this heavenly court Satan challenges God to a
contest to test Job. God will allow Satan to torment Job in order to see
if he is steadfast. Satan takes his task seriously and destroys Job's
flocks, his servants, and his children. Job's children are killed by a
whirlwind sweeping across the desert, which knocks their house down and
crushes them. We will see a whirlwind again before this tale is over.
"Throughout all this Job did not
sin; he did not charge God with unreason." Satan tries further tortures,
with God's approval, and attacks Job's body and mind. His three friends
arrive and "for seven days and seven nights they sat beside him on
the ground, and none of them said a word to him." So far a cracking
good fairy tale: powerful forces are at work above who will interfere with
events in the human world either to pass the time or to test a man to see
what kind of torture he can take before breaking. These are the forces of
some child-like, cruel and sadistic place, imaged in monsters
and presented as powerful but without moral sense. A god who will break
his own commandments against killing is not worthy of worship. What do we
learn from the frame outside the frame? After seven days of silence Job
breaks silence and curses the day of his birth, for "there is no
peace of mind nor quiet for me; I chafe in torment and have no
rest."
Job at this point seems to believe that
there is a correlation between being good and being rewarded with the
goods of the world. Follow the
rules, be careful, take a few extra steps of precaution by sacrificing
even if you do not need to and all will be well. His attitude seems to be
one of an overly strict, rule-bound worrier, completely uptight about righteousness
but forgetting about the joy of life itself. Yes, Job is righteous, and no, he has not sinned against the
laws in the book of righteousness, but he has forgotten to enjoy life in
all its bountiful glory. He is not really straight with life. He snaps at his
wife, worries about his children's obedience to the book of rules.
It is one of the ironies of literature that the phrase "patience of
Job" is now part of our linguistic heritage. Job is, in fact, not at
all patient, but wants his problem dealt with now, right now - wants to
face God and argue his case, not
sit patiently awaiting resolution. This rebellious demand for a chance
to plead his case can be seen in the
complex of images that revolve around the key motifs of justice,
balance, and scales of justice. Until he is able to do so the world and
everything in it is flat and without taste. Notice the images in
the following passages from the King James translation:
But Job answered and said,
2. Oh that my grief were throughly
weighed, and my calamity laid in the
balance
together!
3. For now it would be heavier than
the sand of
the sea: therefore my words are
swallowed up.
4. For the arrows of the Almighty
are within
me, the poison whereof drinketh up
my spirit:
the terrors of God do set themselves
in array
against me.
5. Doth the wild ass bray when he
hath grass?
or loweth the ox over his fodder?
6. Can that which is unsavoury be
eaten with-
out salt? or is there any taste in
the white of
an egg? (Job 6.2-6)
Even though Job is filled with grief and
racked with pain he continues to cry out for justice. His is a just cause
and he wants to be heard in the court of the Almighty, where he believes
Justice resides.
11. Therefore I will not refrain my
mouth;I
will speak in the anguish of my
spirit; I will
complain in the bitterness of my
soul. (7.11)
Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath
heard and understood it.
2. What ye know, the same do I know
also: I
am not inferior to you.
3. Surely I would speak to the
Almighty, and I
desire to reason with God.
4. But ye are forgers of lies, ye
are all physi-
cians of no value. (13.1-4)
Job is not a coward; he faces his torment
with a desperate strength fed with moral outrage. One can almost see his
inner conflict at work in the play; the drama in this work is indeed in
the mind of the protaganist.
15. Though he slay me, yet will I
trust in him:
but I will maintain mine own ways
before him.
16. He also shall be my salvation:
for an hypo-
crite shall not come before him.
17. Hear diligently my speech, and
my declara-
tion with your ears.
18. Behold now, I have ordered my
cause; I
know that I shall be justified.
(13.15-18)
Awash in tears, afraid of the threat of
death, but constant in his assertion of innocence, Job cries out to earth
and to heaven to allow him his day in court.
16. My face is foul with weeping,
and on my
eyelids is the shadow of death;
17. Not for any injustice in mine
hands: also
my prayer is pure.
18. O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let
my cry have no place.
19. Also now, behold, my witness is
in heaven,
and my record is on high.
20. My friends scorn me: but mine
eye poureth
out tears unto God.
21. O that one might plead for a man
with God,
as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!
(16.16-21)
Lack of understanding, of comprehension,
is the real cause of Job's torment - he wants desperately to know what is
going on in his presumed moral universe. Where is the moral centre of the
universe to be found? How is it that the innocent suffer?
Then Job answered and said,
2. Even to day is my complaint
bitter: my
stroke is heavier than my groaning.
3. Oh that I knew where I might find
him! that
I might come even to his seat!
4. I would order my cause before
him, and fill
my mouth with arguments.
5. I would know the words which he
would
answer me, and understand what he
would say
unto me. (23.1-5)
6. Let me be weighed in an even
balance, that God
may know mine integrity. (31.6)
We cannot miss this recurring imagery
pattern, and it supports the idea that Job feels he is a righteous
sufferer who wants justice, who wants to argue his case before he who is
(apparently) judging him. He continues to believe that there must be a
moral connection between behaviour and benefits. Thus, his cry to be
heard, to present his argument: if God is the final arbiter and
is reasonable and comes to know the facts then he can not possibly continue
to torment Job. In his balance ledger understanding, good should bring
good and bad should bring bad. I can hear my German Lutheran step-father every time I read Job. I
hear him crying out to his Lutheran God from the wheat fields in Colorado
after a hail storm had just wiped out the entire crop: "Why are
you punishing me? What have I done wrong? Why not the Renzelmens across
the road? Why me?" There was, of course, never an answer. Otto, like
Job, demanded to know the relationship between suffering and action,
between deed and resulting reward or punishment. Job's friends, like my
Lutheran pastor on those childhood Sundays, offer him old arguments about
how there must be a correspondence between the way we live and the rewards
we get. They offer the old notion of rewards for the good and suffering
for the bad. See a man's condition and you can read off his spiritual
status. But Job (and Otto) knew he was not guilty and feels outraged to be
a citizen in a system of justice that seems to have gone crazy. We know
what Job does not: that God has agreed to let the devil use Job in a test
of loyalty. This ironic situation reveals a God who seems not interested
in justice in particular or in morality in general. In the prologue
God/Satan flagrantly violates at least three of the commandments he gave
out on Mount Sinai.
And what do we discover when God, as the
voice out of the whirlwind, speaks to Job in the dramatic conclusion of
the "justice-scales" theme? Job, who has suffered in mind and in
body, who has lost his children, his flocks, his health, has cried out to
be heard by his tormentor. And when the answer comes what does God have to
say about the nature of justice? What does he offer in explanation of the
relationship between crime and punishment? What insights does God offer
about the nature of good and evil? What does God say to Job about the
reasons for his suffering? Absolutely nothing. Job, who wanted to reason
with God, who wanted to argue his case in court, who wanted to understand
the relationship between acts and rewards, has no chance for ar- gument.
Expecting a wise judge to debate his case with, he gets a God of power,
sheer power. All of the long speeches of Job and his friends in
which arguments were presented and analyzed, in which causes and effects
are posited, are set against the voice from the whirlwind. And this voice
does not present argument, does not offer explanation, provides no thesis
on cause and effect; no, this voice does not speak as a rational first cause,
but instead says:
Then the Lord answered Job out of
the
whirlwind, and said,
2. Who is this that darkeneth
counsel by
words without knowledge?
3. Gird up now thy loins like a man;
for I will
demand of thee, and answer thou me.
4. Where wast thou when I laid the
founda-
tion of the earth? declare, if thou
hast under-
standing.
5. Who hath laid the measures
thereof, if
thou knowest? or who hath stretched
the line
upon it?
(38.1-5)
The voice out of the whirlwind releases a
whirlwind of rhetoric, a series of creation images of sheer brutal power, but has absolutely
nothing to say about the situation that Job is in. What we have waited for throughout the play finally
comes and it is totally unexpected. The human questions about morality and
suffering, about justice and fairness, are not resolved, are not even
directly addressed. What answer does the story provide? What of all these
questions of the human spirit? A transcendent God is not concerned with
justice - justice is a human concept and is to be worked out by humans
in this world and in this life. This powerful urge, creative and
destructive, is life itself, confusing, inexplicable, powerful, unknowable
in detail, and not captured in words, but only imaged in whirlwind. The
images in the voice out of the whirlwind's speech at the conclusion of the
play resonate off the opening speech in Part I where Job says in the third
chapter of the King James transla- tion:
After this opened Job his mouth, and
cursed
his day.
2. And Job spake, and said,
3. Let the day perish wherein I was
born, and
the night in which it was said,
There is a man
child conceived.
4. Let that day be darkness; let not
God regard
it from above, neither let the light
shine upon it.
5. Let darkness and the shadow of death
stain
it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let
the blackness of
the day terrify it.
6. As for that night, let darkness
seize upon it;
let it not be joined unto the days
of the year, let
it not come into the number of the
months. (3.1-6)
This lament, filled with images of
darkness and death, is not so much suicidal as it is a cry for non-being.
Job wants to blot out of history the night he was conceived and the day he
was born. There is excess here - much
like the excess piety hinted at in
the prologue. To speak of changing history to blot out the day of one's
birth is still to insist upon one's importance in the scheme of things. `I
must have been important; just look at all of the worldly goods that I had
before my fall.' These are not the lines of a patient, long suffering
man. Try reading them aloud with patience and quiet resolve. Notice the
form of those poetic lines. They echo the opening passages of Genesis, the
creation story:
"Let there be light..." and "Let there be..." - a refrain
for the creation of everything in that story. Job uses a similar
imperative in his opening
speech, but his statement is negative, black and destructive. The
whirlwind will later refer to the creation also, and put Job in his place
as a finite limited being because he was not present at the beginning.
From the light of the creation story
to the darkness of Job's spiritual condition is the distance from rational creativity to irrational
destruction. Job's only sin is that before the whirlwind he believes that
the universe is rational and moral, attributes which he believes its first
cause shares. The Book of Job shows us
a deep truth: mortals are cut off from any god-authority as the
foundation for moral life. Justice, as King Lear also must discover, is
not in the heavens but in men and women. And this les- son comes as part
of a lesson in interpretation. Trying to read the world as
a one-dimensional playground where the good boys and girls are rewarded
with slices of cake and the bad boys and girls are punished is not a legitimate reading. Certainly
Job learns something in the course of
the play, and that lesson is about the nature of morality - morality is
not founded upon God. This new knowledge
is imaged in the motifs of "knowledge" - "wisdom" -
"teaching" presented in a series of images which cluster around
those words: "tell
the creatures that crawl to teach you", "to give you
instruction", "there is wisdom", and "long life brings
understanding", "uncovers mysteries" and so forth. But
as far as the key experience of the play - the voice from the whirlwind -
none of these cliches bears any fruit (to use another cliche). Job's
lesson comes in the form of a tempest, a powerful image of the irrational
forces that the writer sees at work in life. You cannot make sense out of
life any more than you can make cents out of life. "Who is this that
darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" questions the voice. And
the answer to the question is Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, for in the
epilogue God says to Eliphaz, "My wrath is kindled against thee, and
against thy two friends: for you have not spoken of me the thing that is
right, as my servant Job has."
The Lord admits here that Job has been
right, but right about what? His "comforters" are given a light
punishment for saying that which is not right, but what were they wrong
about? Clearly, on one level, Job is right because he did not follow his wife's
advice and "renounce God and die'. He continued to have faith beyond
all reason, continued to believe in a just universe based upon some
rational principles of fair play. His friends claim to know these
principles, and in that must lie their sin. Time after time they tell Job that
the righteous never suffer, only the evil suffer, and that therefore since
he is suffering he must be evil, and that to stop the suffering he must
correct his ways.[6] Job
can not and will not accept this simple-minded
"stimulus-response" theory of justice because he has seen too
often that, in fact, innocents suffer
and the corrupt prosper. He wants
to know why the innocent suffer, but he does not claim to have the answer.
He wants to plead his case in front of God in order to gain that knowledge
and to understand how it is that God has arranged the moral world. As we
have seen Job is to be disappointed for he never gets to have the kind of
discussion that he hopes will untangle forever the problems of moral
philosophy. Instead when God finally does appear to him as a voice out of
the whirlwind[7] Job learns
of God's power but not of justice as fairness or as the relationship
between punishment and crime. Job is rewarded, finally, for his blind
loyalty and for having faith beyond reason - and the point is: that
is exactly what the official line of the book of Job proclaims, blind faith is re- warded by revelation. Eliphaz
errs by claiming to understand the ways of God, as if mere and puny humans
could possibly understand the mysteries of this creator god. Dogmatic
explanation is punished; skepticism is rewarded. One can not read the
condition of man in the outward manifestations of wealth and property.
What does this experience mean? How can I read it? The meaning is in the
revelation of the master story teller.
Read the clever little masque called
"A Masque of Reason" by Robert Frost[8]
for an interesting take on the story of the relationship between Job
and God, and "Mrs. Job". For a more serious modern rendition
read the play JB by Archibald McLeish. Artists throughout the world and at
various times have found the Book of Job a rich source of inspiration with
its deep and problem- atic questions and its powerful figures of God, Satan
and their plaything Job, or everyman. It is hard not to respond to the
searing passages in the play, for the human conditon is oten found to be
just like it is portrayed here: irrational, unjust, and lying above or
beyond the reach of the human mind.
Why do the innocent suffer? Why do time
and chance function as they do? Why me? Where is order? Who is running
this show anyway? Why does evil exist? Where has the promised innocence of
the garden of Eden gone?
We can not fault the Hebrew writer for
not being able to sort out the problems of evil in the world. Several
centuries later we are still discussing these same problems. As
philosophers and theologians have known for thou- sands of years, it is
extremely difficult to explain the existence of evil in a world created by
a God who is both infinitely good and infinitely powerful.
Various attempts have been made: evil has been traced to the fall of Adam, or
God permits unmerited suffering as a means of purifying the soul for
eternal life. Some have tried to relieve God of the apparent
responsibility for evil by sup- posing he is finite in knowledge or power
or both. The god as revealed in the Book of Job simply asserts all of
these propositions as being true together:
1. I am.
2. Suffering is.
3. So what.
A god who reveals himself in time is a
part of many of the stories of the Old Testament. In the
beginning we learn of him through his revelation to the patriarchs and to
Moses. There is no
way to tell when and if he will reveal himself to any particular
character, for his ways are mysterious and the signs he provides are ambiguous.
What is his intent? What does it all mean?
These questions are asked of all texts; it is no different here.
For the Christian the answer to Job comes in the story of the man-god
Jesus, another comes
from Koheleth, in the book called Ecclesiastes.
THE WAYS OF GOD ARE
INSCRUTABLE
In the Hebrew Bible Ecclesiastes stands
alone in theology and in style. It probably never would have been included
in the canon except that it was believed to have been written by King
Solomon, and that
authority was sufficient to assure it a place in the collection of
"revealed" books. It is the most footnoted of books in the
collection. On occasions the "footnotes" have become a part of
the text as the redactor added a line here and there to try to force the
story into the official line. For example,
as the headnote to the book in the New English Bible puts it:
"Glosses which relieve the gloom (and, indeed, the impiety) of the
book seem to have been added in later times...." It has often been
read as a gloomy and impious book because it departs from the official
line in such a basic way. Right after the Speaker says "I saw under
the sun that, where justice ought to be, there was wickedness, and
where righteousness ought to be, there was wickedness," a gloss (at
3.17) is added which states that God's purpose is to test men
"to see what they truly are."
Or again at 7.18 after the Speaker suggests a balanced approach as the
best psychology to pursue ("Do not be over-righteous and do not be
over-wise") the "Explainer" adds, "for a man who fears
God will succeed both ways." And at 8.12-13, after the Speaker has
stated that wickedness is not punished, and goodness not rewarded the
Explainer adds, "A sinner may do wrong and live to an old age, yet I
know that it will be well with those who fear God..." and the "yet
I know" rings false in the overall story of skepticism that it presented
in the text. The dramatic question in both Job and Ecclesiastes arises
precisely because the human characters do not and cannot know what, if
any, plan surrounds and defines their lives. In the Speaker's response to
this question we see it makes no difference whether there is a plan or
not; it is not knowable in any case. "True, the living know that they
will die; but the dead know nothing."
Once in an evening class I had the
students listen to a recording of Ecclesiastes as read by Jame Mason and
asked them to jot down responses as they were listening.. I too kept notes
of what came into my mind while listening to the Mason interpretation of
the text. My "reader's response" notes follow:
The opening passage with its circular
images of cyclical activity
without purpose: eyes not satisfied
with seeing, appetite not filled,
rivers that flow to the sea but the
sea is never filled - all accurately
describe a mental state of despair and
weariness.
Obviously the speaker is a middle aged
man who has attempted to
live his life with some ideas and
beliefs that have proved to be false.
The path he has followed has been a
long one with many attempts
to make life meaningful by aiming at
particular external goals. He
has tried wisdom, madness, folly,
pleasure, great works, money,
sex, mirth, and found them all to be
empty, because always was the
reality of his own mortality.
The text is like a huge symphony with
separate and identifiable
movements. It opens with an emptiness
of spirit that is palpable to
the
senses, but then it starts to move to a different level of ac-
ceptance and resignation and finally to an amazing finale of
optimism, acceptance and joy. (Herb is
asleep now; his head
leaning further and further toward
Cathy. He may be faking it just
to lay his sleeping head on her shoulder.
He wakes and looks at
me, ah, did the instructor see me sleeping? Emptiness, all is
emptiness.) Is it boring? Well, yes I
suppose the beginning parts
are boring to a twenty year old who
still believes he is immortal.
(How many people will drop off to
sleep? The room is hot, the
reading accurate but monotonous - oh,
how right Mason is to read
it just that way - David's book falls
off his lap as he too drops off.
What difference does it make?
"One event happeneth to all." No
one will remember or care tomorrow
what happened today.)
The poem which The Byrds stole to make
"Turn, turn, turn" is the
first move towards life and
acceptance. There is a time for every-
thing has a comforting sound to it.
There is a time to sleep and a
time to study. I think again of the
large number of literary texts that
are rooted in Ecclesiastes: The Sun
Also Rises, King
Lear, Waiting for Godot ("two are
better than one"- see
Beckett's clowns acting out that
cosmic connection that holds
people together; we need someone to
help us up when we fall
down. "He couldn't remember where
his home is. But he wanted to
go there anyway.") "So I
hated life." Why? Because it didn't yield to
my hopes and plans; it went on not
paying attention to me, not
caring about me. What is missing? Why
this despair and hatred of
life? An entire inventory of goals is
given and none have produced
the feeling of life, of value. Are
there more goals that haven't been
considered? Will it become clearer
when I am older? Will Herb
wake up? What is missing? Why is
everything stale and flat?
And finally - and finally an answer:
"The light of day is sweet, and
pleasant to the eye is the sight of the
sun; if a man lives for many years, he
should rejoice in all of them."
(11.7)
Everyone should write her own response to
this book. Read it; listen to it; write about it. It suggests to me these
themes: Get rid of goals and life begins to flow, have goals and you get
tied up in knots. This does not mean that you should not save for a rainy
day. These are life-goals that the Speaker talks about. If you set out to find wisdom, labor,
pleasure as ends in them- selves, and expect these ends to deliver results
as an investment might, then you are doomed to emptiness, for happiness is
always a by-product of doing something and not a thing to be sought out
like a coin lost on the floor. Life, says the Speaker, is an attitude not
a program, a scene and not a plot. With divine justice in human affairs an
illusion, and truth unattainable, the Speaker is left with
little upon which to build. All that is certain for man\woman is
that there is a desire for happiness. Thus, the basic theme of the book is
an insistence upon the enjoyment of life, of all the things in this world
since it is the only world we can know.
Live capriciously, do not calculate like Job did; joy is our
categorical imperative and we must taste of life's joys
without self-deception. The Speaker reminds us that the realities of life
do not correspond to the yearnings of the heart. Often our deepest desires
are thwarted by the hard facts of experience, and our timeless yearnings
are frustrated by our time-restricted days.
The Speaker answers Job. The Speaker
says: "Do not be over-righteous and do not be over-wise. And above all do
not try to be God."
[1] John Milton’s Paradise Lost has this notion embedded in th efall of Satan from grace. Dante’s Divine Comedy is the literary high point of mystical Christianity.
[2] Paul Weiss, “God, Job, and Evil,” Commentary, Volume VI, (1948).
[3] This understanding of metaphysical evil and its logical problems comes from Dale Beyerstein.
[4] Arthur Weiser, The Old Testament: Its Formation and Development, D. M. Bartn, tr. New York: Association Press, 1961, page 288.
[5] See, for example, James King West, Introduction to the Old Testament, pages 391ff, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1971.
[6] Often one runs into this argument:
1. If we are evil then we will suffer.
2. We are suffering.
3. Therefore we are evil.
But this is not a valid argument. It would make the following parallel argument valid, which it clearly is not:
4. If I am Superman then I am a man.
5. I am a man.
6. Therefore I am Superman.
The fallacy here is called “affirming the consequent.”
[7] Consider the image of the whirlwind: a whirlwind is capricious, powerful, inarticulate, a natural force.
[8] The poem can be found in The Poetry of Robert Frost, op.cit., page 484, 485.