5 - Job: Second Thoughts in the Land of Uz

Job: Second Thoughts in the Land of Uz

By Thomas G. Long

"The Book of Job is, ultimately, not about what it means that humans suffer. It is about what it means to be human at all when God is seen truly to be God... This great text stands over against the prevalent religious impulse to fabricate a wishful picture of the world, to imagine the sort of God who would rule benignly over such a world, and then to bow down in worship before this projection of our own sense of moral order. "

ONE of the most intriguing aspects of the Book of Job is how devilishly difficult it is to tell what the book is about. "You have heard of the patience of Job," remarks the Epistle of James, and indeed we have. Anyone who is satisfied, however, that this little slogan adequately summarizes the book has evidently grown weary after reading only the first two chapters. Stephen Mitchell's exciting new translation of the story has Job breaking his silence at the beginning of chapter three with the words, "God damn the day I was born."¹ Those are words of a man whose patience, if he ever had any, has clearly worn thin.

Most of us know that patience was never really a serious contender as a summary meaning for Job. We are far more likely to see the book as a theological treatise on human suffering, especially the innocent variety. Innocent suffering is, for very good reasons, a crucial issue for twentieth century people, and it is no wonder that every bridge collapse, earthquake, viral epidemic, and other inexplicable misery has been loaded onto the scaffolding of Job. We are acquainted with innocent suffering, and if the Book of Job has a theological explanation for it, we are more than ready to hear it.

The problem with understanding Job this way is that we do not get from the story what we expect-or hope for. Rabbi Kushner's popular book had it right, in a way. We do want to know "why bad things happen to good people." Job is a good person, and bad things, terrible things,

Thomas G. Long is Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of Shepherds and Bathrobes: Sermons for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (1987) as well as two books forthcoming soon, The Senses of Preaching and Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible. A frequent contributor to THEOLOGY TODAY, he is a member of the Editorial Council.

¹Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987). Many of the quotations in this article from the Book of Job are from Mitchell's translation.

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happen to him. The story looks as if it may deliver something to feed our aching hunger to know why. When we summon the book to provide an answer, though, many readers are deeply dissatisfied, even aggrieved, with the result. The God who finally turns up near the end of the story appears to supply not an answer, but a swagger. God seems to thump the divine chest, demanding to know who this Job character thinks he is, anyway. Most teachers are aware that if a student asks an embarrassingly difficult question, one way to handle it is to raise your voice, act insulted, and make the student feel silly and presumptuous for having asked. Could it be that the God of the Book of Job has learned this technique?

David Robertson thinks so. He draws our attention to Job's speech in chapter 9, in which Job predicts what would happen if he summoned God to a face-to-face encounter.² "If it is a contest of strength, behold him!" says Job. "Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me." In short, Job predicts that, should God appear, Job will be muscled by the divine power into inauthentic self-condemnation. Sure enough, claims Robertson, when God finally does appear, Job's prediction comes true:

So God's rhetoric [in chapters 38-41], because Job has warned us against it, convinces us that he is a charlatan God, one who has the power and skill of god but is a fake at the truly divine task of governing with justice and love.³

The Book of Job is an enormously subtle and complex work, amenable to multiple readings. But a still different possibility for understanding its central subject matter is worth pursuing. The Book of Job is not ultimately about what it means that humans suffer, but rather about what it means to be human at all when God is seen truly to be God. Job's life situation constitutes a very powerful and evocative "test case" in a deeper dispute about the essential character of the human-divine relationship. This great text stands over against the prevalent religious impulse to fabricate a wishful picture of the world, to imagine the sort of God who would rule benignly over such a world, and then to bow down in worship before this projection of our own sense of moral order.

Because Job suffers so grievously and so irrationally, he is no longer permitted the luxury of an illusion. Every attempt at make-believe falls before the reality of empty places at his family table and the throbbing pain in his body. The only god Job can manufacture from his misery is a monster, and Job must decide whether to flee from this arbitrary and punitive god or to stand up boldly to see if there just might be another-a God not of his own making. Stephen Mitchell observed that William Blake, who created a series of engravings on Job, "is still the only interpreter to understand that the theme of this book is spiritual

²David Robertson, "The Book of Job: A Literary Study," Soundings 56 (1973), pp. 446-69.

³Ibid., p. 464.

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transformation."⁴ Perhaps Blake is among the few to see in Job what is involved in coming to live before the only God we cannot construct.

I

In order to see how this issue of spiritual transformation is developed, let us look at the book itself. In some ways this is easier said than done, since it is not entirely clear what we are looking at. Part folk tale, part epic poem, part Platonic-style dialogue, Job is a jumble of genres, and historical critics are quick to point out that the present form seems to have resulted from the work of a rather heavy set of editorial hands. Taken as a whole, however, Job seems more like an elaborately staged play than anything else. As Alonso Schokel has observed, reading Job as a drama appears to offer the best chance to view the entire work as we have it as "intelligible and comprehensible in its unity."⁵

The curtain opens to reveal the land of Uz. We see Uz, but we hear the voice of an unseen narrator: "There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job..." Efforts to locate Uz on the map are vain, for this is not a historical chronicle. The narrative effect of the opening lines, like the opening credits of the movie Star Wars, is to say this is a story which happened "long ago and far away."⁶ As the narrator speaks, the stage is gradually filled by the clan of Job, and the whole scene has a dream-like perfection. Job is "the richest man in the East" and possesses "perfect integrity." He "feared God and avoided evil." Job not only has sons, daughters, and animals, he has them in symmetrical numbers: seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred oxen, and five hundred donkeys.⁷ There is something a bit too perfect about all this, of course, and here at the very outset, the audience begins to sense what will become even more apparent later: they are watching not only a play, but a "profoundly serious" comedy.⁸

To this point, at least, the drama is a "tall tale," employing the classic comedic technique of exaggeration. Like Paul Bunyan, Job is the tallest and the strongest and the best, and thus does not evoke an existential connection with the plight of the human beings in the audience. He stands at some distance from the ordinary round of human life. At this point, Job is not "everyman," he is "superman." And the audience waits either for yet another tale of his unvanquished power-or for the banana

⁴Mitchell, p. XXIX. The plates reproduced and interspersed throughout this article are several of these engravings. They are, in sequence, engravings numbered 1, 3, 10, 13, 15, and 20 from The Book of Job: The Eighteenth Book of the Old Testament with the Twenty-Two Engravings of William Blake (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1927).

⁵Alonso Schokel, "Toward a Dramatic Reading of the Book of Job," Semeia 7 (1977), p. 46.

⁶J. Gerald Janzen, Job, Interpretation Commentaries (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), p. 34.

⁷William Whedbee, "The Comedy of Job," Semeia 7 (1977), p. 5.

⁸Ibid., p. 4.

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peel that will send him reeling, the snowball that will knock off his unstained silk hat.

The flawlessness of Job's life in Uz extends to the moral realm. The narrator tells us that every year Job's sons hold a gala family "progressive dinner," moving from house to house. This annual time of feasting would prompt Job to demand that his children submit to a ritual of purification, not because he knew they had done anything wrong, mind you, but because they might, in the midst of all this merriment, have harbored a sinful thought. Mitchell sees this as a depiction of Job as the "perfect moral businessman" who knows how to succeed at the reward game, with life and with God. But Job's world is inherently unstable, since the slightest transgression, the faintest crack in the moral surface, could bring it down, leading to moral and fiscal bankruptcy.⁹ Thus, Job is forced to live, as Calvin Trillin, in another context, wryly observed, in "the Era of Year-Round Yom Kippur."¹⁰

Suddenly, the stage lighting shifts, and the audience views not Uz, but the heavenly court. God is there. The angels are there. And, on this occasion, the Adversary is there also. The Adversary reports that he has been occupying his time "going to and fro on the earth," and, in a line that has to be interpreted as a throwing down of some kind of gauntlet, God says, "Did you notice my servant Job?" What follows, of course, is the picking up of the gauntlet by the Adversary and the famous wager: "Take away everything Job has, and I'll bet even 'your servant' will curse you."

⁹Mitchell, p. ix.

¹⁰Calvin Trillin, Third Helpings (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), p. 9.

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Back to Uz we go, and what happens is a scene of high tragi-comedy. Modern readers will miss the comic dimension unless we are willing to accept the deeply stylized character of the events. The actions are so hyperbolic that, while they serve to advance the plot, they cannot be taken as completely serious descriptions of what is possible in human life. They are, to borrow Mitchell's term, "puppet theater."¹¹ Wave upon wave of messengers arrive with news increasingly dire. They step all over each others' lines: "While he was yet speaking, there came

another..." Sabeans have attacked; lightning has struck; Chaldeans have raided; everything-the children, the livestock, everything-has been lost. The world that had been perfectly wonderful now becomes perfectly miserable. This is like one of those Allstate Insurance magazine ads in which a typical suburban home undergoes severe duress: a windstorm is ripping off roof shingles, a baseball is passing through the picture window, and a burglar is jimmying the sliding glass door, while,

¹¹Mitchell, p. xii.

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at the same moment and at the same house, a workman is tumbling off a ladder, a tree is falling across the garage, and flames are licking through a side wall. Here, as in Job, more tragedy is taking place in the space of thirty seconds than occurs in the entire span of King Lear.

Astoundingly, and yet, in a way, predictably, Job continues to walk the upright line. Even when a second round of betting in the heavenly court ups the ante and brings actual physical suffering to Job himself, he remains firm. "We have accepted good fortune from God," Job explains to his wife. "Surely we can accept bad fortune, too."

It seems the Adversary has lost his bet. Nothing can shake God's servant, Job. He stands there, banana peel on his shoe, silk hat askew and covered with snow, but unbowed, his "perfect integrity" intact. All that remains is for the narrator to "round out" the tale by telling us how the Adversary quit the wager in humiliation and defeat and how Job was rewarded for his steadfastness, riding off into the Gary Cooper kind of sunset prepared for those of his stature.

Indeed, it is widely held among Old Testament scholars that the original version of the story of Job ended precisely this way. The Adversary is embarrassed in the heavenly court, God wins the bet hands down, and Job has his fortunes restored-end of religious tall tale. If this truly is how the Job story once ended, then the original version was a theological "exemplary anecdote," an Aesop's fable with a moral tag line about the virtues of steadfastness. It's a sermon illustration, if you will.

Experienced preachers are aware, however, that sermon illustrations do not always work in the way we intend. They have a life of their own. While the preachers think they are telling a clear and simple story about something like prayer or stewardship, the hearers are being taken by the story in another direction. There can be a "surplus of meaning" in a story, unfinished business. And some hearers resist the preachers' attempts to aim the story toward the intended target, remaining unsatisfied until this other dimension of the story has been resolved.

II

The original version of Job was such a story; and the author of the present version was, evidently, such a hearer. The author of the canonical Book of Job no doubt knew that the original plot of the story-perfect world/disaster/perfect world restored-was logically impossible. There was a surplus of meaning. A piece of unfinished business was left unresolved by the original ending and intention. Job's "perfect world" was built upon the assumption that God plays by a set of moral rules that are widely publicized and known to humanity. As long as a person, like Job, obeys those rules, or engages in acts of purification when one of those rules may have inadvertently been broken, then God can be trusted to "play fair" and to preserve and protect. The problem was that the destruction and suffering experienced by Job came as the direct result of divine behavior, which, as far as these moral rules go, was

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definitely in foul territory. Job suffers not because he has violated some holy ordinance, but because God issued a seemingly capricious challenge to an Adversary, made a wager in the heavenly court, and enigmatically turned Job over to the power of a malicious opponent. In short, it makes no sense whatsoever to end the story of Job by restoring Job's world to the way it used to be. The plot of the story itself has destroyed the foundation upon which that world was built.

As a parallel, some ethicists maintain that the development of nuclear weapons constitutes not merely one more technological advance in warfare, but rather a redefinition of the nature of war itself, rendering it impossible to fit these weapons into previous understandings of "just warfare." Likewise, God's behavior in the Job story is a religious "atomic bomb" not only doing great damage, but also altering the theological landscape forever. Once this "bomb" has been dropped, we can no longer return to the world as it was before. Or again, a couple who have separated may speak hopefully of a reconciliation, but they know that such a reconciliation will not re-establish the marriage the way it used to be. The separation itself has obliterated that possibility, and they must now think of moving forward, not backward, toward a newly defined relationship. The unfinished business in the Job story is that Job's world has fractured and cannot be put back together again. Job has been forced out of his perfect and predictable paradise. The gates of the Jobian version of Eden are blocked, and, wherever Job may go, the one way he cannot go is back.

The author of the "revised" story of Job discerns the unfinished issue in the folk tale and bravely leaves the confines of the old story in quest of a deeper resolution. The crucial question that demands working out is not why Job has suffered so, but what kind of God and what kind of creation allow for such a jagged piece of morally irrational experience. Job's suffering is not itself the question in focus, but the event that raises the crucial question. In the theological economy of Job's former world, the suffering of a genuinely righteous person was mathematically impossible. But it happened. And because it happened, what is now "impossible" is Job's former world itself. So, the plot of the Job story lurches forward on a quest to discover the "new world," if there is one, or at least to answer the question, How do we live when our experience causes our theological universe to collapse?

III

The author pursues this quest by way of a new linguistic style. The drama of Job shifts from the pattern of folk tale to that of poetry and dialogue. An anguished, deeply perplexed, and outraged Job engages in conversation with three friends, a youthful bystander, and finally with God. The purpose of the dialogues is profoundly serious, but the author retains some of the comic motifs of the earlier narrative. In light of what the audience knows about Job's situation and God's involvement, many of the speeches of Job's companions border upon the absurd and are, at

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times, even laughable. They are also, ironically, often persuasive and beautiful. In constructing the speeches of the friends, the author "has acted with the instinctive generosity of all great poets, endowing the friends with a life and passion almost as intense as Job's." ¹²

The basic design of this dialogical section involves Job's three friends giving three rounds of speeches, each speech generally followed by a reply from Job. Theatrically, this section is exhausting, since there is plenty of talk but no movement in the plot. The friends constantly repeat themselves, and each other, looping through the same arguments and scoring the same points over and over.¹³ In my view, this lack of dramatic movement is not the product of authorial clumsiness; it is the point of this section. Job's friends state and re-state their cases, and nothing happens. For all their efforts, the friends get us nowhere.

In the tiresome redundancy of their speeches, however, the audience does get to know the personalities and viewpoints of the friends. In effect, the friends become personifications of various non-answers to the crucial question of the drama. Indeed, if we will allow ourselves to listen to them and to become acquainted with them, we can recognize in them the familiar characters who even today hang around the church, stalling and sidetracking honest religious questing:

Eliphaz. This, the first of Job's friends, is the embodiment of a mushy brand of self-serving piety. "Job, will it bother you if I speak?" Eliphaz

¹² Ibid., p. xiv.

¹³ Robert Gordis, The Book of God and Man: A Study of Job (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 4.

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oozes in his opening line, just before attempting to shame Job for his lost faith. "Beware of people who go around talking about loving and caring," Walker Percy once warned.¹⁴ Eliphaz is one of those folks who slithers up to people in anguish, his lips pursed with unctuous murmurs of concern while his pockets are lined with tracts spelling out the " spiritual laws." Eliphaz is the sort of person who begins his prayers, "Lord, I just want to ask..."; when you listen carefully, you realize that what he "just" wants to ask is that the Lord rearrange the entire material universe to suit his convenience.

Eliphaz surveys Job's situation and then gazes heavenward, telling himself and Job that it is all an illusion. "Sin has seduced your mind," he intones. "You are lucky that God has scolded you," he soothes. His advice? "If I were you I would pray... Make peace with God, you will not be sorry." The result? "Everything you do will succeed and light will shine on your path."

The maddening thing about Eliphaz is that he has turned some of faith's strongest affirmations into cross-stitched slogans suitable for hanging on the wall. For Eliphaz, the power of prayer is a bargaining chip, peace with God a negotiating device. He does not have faith; he has a religion machine.

Eliphaz's response to the question "how do we live when our experience causes our theological universe to collapse?" is to deny our experience. His system of piety allows him to manipulate the strings of divine providence, and any experience that challenges those pious formulations must be quickly filtered out as a threat. Eliphaz is so busy painting the "Get Back to God" sign beside the old road, he has failed to notice that a new highway has been built and the old road abandoned.

Bildad. The second of Job's companions is a religious authoritarian. He has a bumper sticker on his car that reads, "God said it, I believe it, and that's that." Bildad views human nature as a bowl of spoiled mayonnaise, describing humanity as "that worm, that vile, stinking maggot." He has never been there himself, but Bildad can confidently tell us what goes on in college dormitories, denominational headquarters, the house next door, and every other cesspool of iniquity, because the man knows human nature and can sniff its foul odor through closed doors. Bildad is convinced that horrors, like AIDS, are well-deserved punishments for transgression, and what's more, such devastation makes him feel justified, even glad. "It is true," he proclaims with a casual shrug of his shoulders, "the sinner is snuffed out... This is what happens to the godless."

It is no surprise, then, to hear Bildad telling Job, "Your children must have sinned against God, and so he punished them as they deserved." As for Job himself, "If you are pure and righteous," Bildad informs him, perhaps sarcastically, "and pray to God for mercy, surely he will answer

¹⁴Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 187.

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your prayer." As the audience hears Bildad speak, their response will doubtless be a mixture of irritation and mirth. Bildad stands there like an iron rod, his shoes spit-shined and every hair carefully combed, insisting that it never rains on the righteous, even while his three-piece suit is getting drenched by the downpour.

Zophar. Zophar is a Bildad who has gone to seminary. He shares Bildad's rigid view of sin and punishment, but has learned to intellectualize it. Zophar sucks on his pipe and tells Job, who is at the moment scratching a boil with a piece of pottery, that this whole matter is complex, very complex, and that "there are many sides to wisdom." Zophar has decided that Job's whole problem is a lack of clarity: Job doesn't understand that he is a sinner. Zophar slaps his forehead, wondering, "Job, how can you be so blind?" He lectures Job on the doctrine of evil, but he is pessimistic about Job's chances to pass the class. "A stupid man will be wise," he mutters, "when a cow gives birth to a zebra."

The audience knows, of course, that Zophar, for all his dissection of the pertinent issues, has also missed the point: Job is a truly righteous man. What is more important, the audience knows something the erudite Zophar does not know: Job's plight has been caused by a bet in heaven and not by some as-yet-undisclosed tragic flaw.

The speeches of Job in response to his friends are at times moving, occasionally hilarious, and always passionate and wildly beautiful. He fluctuates between bitterly opposing his friends and agreeing with them, if only sarcastically: "Yes, you are the voice of the people. When you die, wisdom will die with you." What he says to them is fascinating and revealing. He acknowledges that he used to believe and say everything they are claiming, but his experience no longer permits this. Job was the model of orthodoxy; he could spout proverbs with the best. But his own experience of innocent suffering is the one situation that this orthodoxy could not have anticipated and that its world view cannot contain. Job admits that he was once a constant winner in the game of "Proverbs," but undeserved suffering turned out to be an unexpected Joker in the orthodox deck. Now that Job has drawn this card, he can no longer play his hand. The rules have changed; the game has changed.

IV

Even as Job addresses his friends, his speech spills over the bounds of human conversation. Job is talking to his friends, but also beyond them. He is not exactly speaking to God, but rather to the empty space which God may choose to fill. "I want to speak before God," he cries, "to present my case in God's court." He hurls into the Void a mockery of Psalm 8, "What is man, that you notice him, turn your glare upon him?" He shakes his fist at God, and then unfolds his fingers and begs for God's embrace. He knows he cannot return to the safe harbor of his former life, so he turns to face the storm. "I am ready to risk my life," he shouts into

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the howling wind. "So what if God kills me? I'm going to state my case to him. It may even be that my boldness will save me."

As we witness this drama, it gradually dawns upon us that what separates Job from his friends is that Job loves God. Unlike them, Job is willing, if he must, to give up his theology, but he will not give up his God. In the dark terror of his nightmare, Job cries out to the One who must surely be as close as the next room, "You would call me-I would answer; you would come to me and rejoice, delighting in my smallest step like a father watching his child." As Mitchell says:

All this bewilderment and outrage couldn't be so intense if Job didn't truly love God. He senses that in spite of appearances there is somewhere an ultimate justice, but he doesn't know where. He is like a nobler Othello who has been brought conclusive evidence that his wife has betrayed him: his honesty won't allow him to disbelieve it, but his love won't allow him to believe it.¹⁵

As Job's words become more and more directed to the absent God, the friends become less and less pertinent to the drama. Everything is gathering itself for the inevitable divine appearance. But the author of Job has yet one more comedic surprise to spring. Job begs for the dark side of the stage to be filled with the light of God's presence. A timpani begins to roll in the orchestra pit. The string section vibrates excitedly. All eyes are directed with expectation toward the darkness. Suddenly, a spotlight snaps on, and there bathed in its light is...Elihu.

A sigh of disappointment goes up from the audience, and it is well-placed. Elihu is wearing a pair of stone-washed jeans and his dock shoes are so worn it is at first difficult to recognize that they are from L. L. Bean. His beard is a failed attempt to disguise his youth. He knows this, and so he begins, "I am young and you are old, so I was afraid to tell you what I think, but now that these three so-called sages have utterly failed, someone from my generation is just going to have to step in to straighten out this mess."

Mustering all possible authority into his cracking voice, Elihu continues, "I will not take sides in this debate; I am not going to flatter anyone... All my words are sincere, and I am speaking the truth." It takes him six windy chapters to speak this truth, and when all is said and done, Elibu has merely repeated the same theological mello-bits we have already heard from the three friends. They are spoken, however, with all the self-congratulation of a person who has stumbled across a well-worn truism and believes that he is its first discoverer. As William Whedbee says, "Though there may be 'no fool like an old fool,' Elihu, as a young fool, comes close."¹⁶

After this false denouement, then, the drama moves to its proper climax: the voice of God speaking out of the whirlwind. It is God's voice that is given, but the images are so powerful that Job sees God acting

¹⁵ Mitchell, p. xvii.

¹⁶ Whedbee, p. 20.

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across the expanse of eternity as much as he hears God speaking in the moment. "Where were you when I planned the earth," challenges God. "Do you know who took its dimensions, measuring its length with a cord?" "Where were you when I stopped the waters?" "Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Do you deck the ostrich with wings?" Job is awestruck: "I am speechless: what can I answer? I have said too much already."

God is not finished, however: "Stand up now like a human being. I have more to say." What God says, taken as rational discourse, reduces, as Mitchell has observed, to something like, "How dare you question the creator of the world? Shut up now, and submit." And if this is the proper summation of the divine speech, then Job's response becomes, "Yes sir, Boss. Anything you say."¹⁷ But God's speech is not rational discourse; it is poetic, visionary address, and as such it gathers us up into an experiential encounter that resists all reduction, all explanation.

V

Job's former world was a world of order, and this very order is what made talk of justice possible. Ideas of "right" and "wrong" were the rules of this ordered world, and Job understood God to be both the original rulemaker and the divine rulekeeper, the cosmic "umpire." But the unthinkable has happened. The umpire has violated the rules and, in Job's tormented view, has been unjust. Now the Voice from the

¹⁷ Mitchell, p. xviii.

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whirlwind speaks, and it says that Job's system of order and rules was never God's to begin with. It was a human scheme of justice, projected from earth onto heaven. Job's cry of injustice turns out, at root, to be an attempt to impose the human notion of moral order upon God. In E. M. Good's translation of a key verse, God demands of Job, "Would you even annul my order, treat me as wicked so you can be innocent?"¹⁸

Yet, if that is all the Voice has to say, the end of the matter is very unsatisfying: "Job, you've got your order of justice and I have mine. The only difference is that I'm stronger than you are." But there is more. The Voice pursues Job through ironical questions, asking, in effect:

Do you really want this moral sense of yours projected onto the universe?... Do you want a god who is only a larger version of a righteous judge.... If that's the kind of justice you're looking for, you'll have to create it yourself, because that is not my justice.¹⁹

Do we really want our own moral sense projected onto the universe? Well, that depends. What are the other choices? If the only alternative is chaos, I would prefer, frankly, to join my friends and go back to the way things were in Uz. But watch what happens now. The Voice summons forth the two most feared monsters of chaos in the ancient world: Behemoth and Leviathan. These twin ministers of unbridled destruction were the most powerful symbols of ultimate disorder the ancient Near East possessed. About the best the mythology of that world could hope for was that one day the gods, after pitched battle, would defeat them. But the news about this from God is quite different. "Look at Behemoth," says the Voice. "I created him, and I created you." As for Leviathan, "Can you play with him like a pet sparrow?"

The images here are so incredible we resist them. We are witnessing the claim that the alternative to our moral scheme of order and disorder is not chaos. It is not even a new and divine scheme of order and disorder. It is rather a vision of only order, of everything--even that which we are now forced to call evil--gathered into the hand of a just God. It is a vision that comes to us from outside the plane of human time, and yet one which serves to give radical hope in the present. As Mitchell expresses it, the Voice is saying, "What is all this foolish chatter about good and evil,... about battles between a hero-god and some cosmic opponent? Don't you understand that there is no one else in here?"²⁰

By this affirmation, the Book of Job anticipates the Christian witness. The New Testament does not claim that suffering is an illusion or that death is a friend. Jesus' own life was marked by suffering with "loud cries and tears," and death is named as a very real and powerful "last enemy." At the same time, the New Testament can affirm that "in Christ all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities-

¹⁸ E. M. Good, "Job and the Literary Task: A Response," Soundings 56 (1973), p. 479.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. xxiii.

²⁰ Ibid., p. xxiv.

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all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Col. 1:15-17). The New Testament does not deny the presence of the painful "no" at work in human life. Nor does it attempt to balance this "no" with a countervailing " yes," saying, in effect, that, all things considered, human suffering is not all that terrible. Instead, like Job, it underscores the inescapable reality of that "no," and then offers the death and resurrection of Jesus as the promise that the ambiguous interplay between "no" and "yes" in human experience will finally be absorbed into the "Yes" of Christ, who is all in all.

The critics of the Book of Job are right, of course. It never does answer Job's aching question, "Why me, Lord?" Indeed, not even the New Testament resolves the urgent question of suffering beyond the bounds of moral justice. ²¹ Instead, Job poses a deeper and finally more searching

²¹Cf. J. Christiaan Beker, Suffering and Hope (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 87.

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question: Do we ultimately want to offer our own scheme of moral order, the very one we employ to determine that some human suffering is unjust, as a replacement for God? Do we want, in other words, to be God, or are we willing to move toward being the kind of human being who, even in the midst of inexplicable pain, trusts the One who is God?" It is a Gethsemane-sized decision.

Job's final reply becomes crucial. Many commentators have objected that the RSV translation, while possible, is not the best sense of the Hebrew. "I... repent in dust and ashes" (meaning "I quit in shame; I want to be neither God nor human") misses the point. Mitchell's rendering surely comes closer to the truth: "I had heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust." Janzen, whose own translation is similar, maintains that Job's affirmation of himself as "dust" can be seen as

an act in which the royal vocation of humanity--the royal vocation to become humanity--is accepted and embraced with all its vulnerability to innocent suffering. To be dust in God's image is to enjoy and to be responsible for the order manifest in creation; it is to enjoy and be responsible for the freedom which is also manifest in the events of the world and which resides by God's gift in the human soul.²²

What is striking here is that Job is not reduced to nothing. He has become instead what he truly is, a human being, a creature made of dust, living before God in a real world that no longer needs to be sustained by a fantasy. And he takes comfort in that.

VI

The final scene of the play is not the one we would have expected in the beginning. The language of the old folk tale is reintroduced, but the outline of the tale has been stretched to the breaking point and a new reality emerges in the gap. This is not "paradise regained," but a new creation altogether.

We expected the Adversary to be shamed for his foolish wager, but the Adversary is never mentioned. He has completely disappeared. He is a character suitable only to the old world, which has passed away. The friends of Job are scolded by God for lying, and, according to the old-world theology they so vigorously defended, they should have been punished without mercy. By God's grace, and Job's prayer on their behalf, however, they are in fact forgiven.

Job's family and fortunes are not merely restored, they are increased. And an intriguing surprise awaits us here. In the old world, Job's sons are the actors, holding feasts and thoughtfully inviting the sisters along. In the ending, the daughters are on center stage. They are described as the most beautiful women in all the world. They, not the sons, are given names (Dove, Cinnamon, and Eye-Shadow!), and Job performs the

²² Janzen, pp. 257-59.

20 - Job: Second Thoughts in the Land of Uz

unusual act of endowing them, as well as the sons, with a share of his inheritance.

There is something enormously satisfying about this prominence of the feminine at the end of Job.... It is as if, once Job has learned to surrender, his world too gives up the male compulsion to control. The daughters almost have the last word... We can't quite figure out why they are so important, but we know that they are.²³

Finally, there comes the closing of the curtain and the final comments of the narrator. They are an epitaph that expresses all that a man like Job could hope for. Job is one who has learned to trust the God he loves and love the God he trusts. He is a person who has, in the deepest way, learned how to see who he is before the true God and find comfort in that. So, "Job lived to see his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren. And Job died, an old man, and full of days."

²³ Mitchell, p. xxx.