“And can you then impute a sinful deed/To babes who on their mothers’ bosoms bleed?”
—Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” (1755)
“God is a concept/By which we measure our pain.”
—John Lennon, “God” (1970)
The monks of the Convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel would have shortly finished their Terce morning prayers of the Canonical hours, when an earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal, on All Saints Day in 1755. A fantastic library was housed at the convent, more than 5,000 volumes of St. Augustin and St. Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus, all destroyed as the red-tiled roof of the building collapsed. From those authors there had been endless words produced addressing theodicy, the question of evil, and specifically how and why an omniscient and omnibenevolent God would allow such malevolent things to flourish. Both Augustin and Aquinas affirmed that evil had no positive existence in its own right, that it was merely the absence of good in the way that darkness is the absence of light. The ancient Church Father Irenaeus posited that evil is the result of human free will, and so even natural disaster was due to the affairs of women and men. By the 18th century, a philosopher like Gottfried Leibnitz (too Lutheran and too secular for the monks of Carmo) would optimistically claim that evil is an illusion, for everything that happens is in furtherance of a divine plan whereby ours is the “best of all possible worlds,” even in Lisbon on November 1, 1755. On that autumn day in the Portuguese capital, the supposedly pious of the Carmo Convent were faced with visceral manifestations of that question of theodicy in a city destroyed by tremor, water, and flame.
No more an issue of scholastic abstraction, of syllogistic aridness, for in Lisbon perhaps 100,000 of the monks’ fellow subjects would die in what was one of the most violent earthquakes ever recorded. Death marked the initial collapse of the houses, palaces, basilicas, and cathedrals, in the tsunami that pushed in from the Atlantic and up the Tagus River, in the fires that ironically resulted from the preponderance of votive candles lit to honor the holy day, and in the pestilence that broke out among the debris and filth of the once proud capital. Lisbon was the seat of a mighty Catholic empire, which had spread the faith as far as Goa, India, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; its inhabitants were adherents to stern Iberian Catholicism, and the clergy broached no heresy in the kingdom. Yet all of that faith and piety appeared to make no difference to the Lord; for the monks of the Carmo Convent who survived their home’s destruction, their plaintive cry might as well have been that of Christ’s final words upon the cross in the Book of Matthew: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Christ may have been the Son of God, but with his dying words he was also a master of intertextual allusion, for his concluding remarks are a quotation of another man, the righteous gentile from the land of Uz named Job. If theodicy is the one insoluble problem of monotheism, the viscerally felt and empirically verifiable reality of pain and suffering in a universe supposedly divine, then Job remains the great brief for those of us who feel like God has some explaining to do. Along with other biblical wisdom literature like Ecclesiastes or Song of Songs, Job is one of those scriptural books that can sometimes appear as if some divine renegade snuck it into the canon. What Job takes as its central concern is the reality described by journalist Peter Trachtenberg in his devastating The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering, when he writes that “Everybody suffers: War, sickness, poverty, hunger, oppression, prison, exile, bigotry, loss, madness, rape, addiction, age, loneliness.” Job is what happens when we ask about why those things are our lot with an honest but broken heart.
I’ve taught Job to undergraduates before, and I’ve sometimes been surprised by their lack of shock when it comes to what’s disturbing about the narrative. By way of synopsis, the book tells the story of a man whom the poem makes clear is unassailably righteous, and how Satan, in his first biblical appearance (and counted as a son of God to boot), challenges the Creator, maintaining that Job’s piety is only a result of his material and familiar well-being. The deity answers the devil’s charge by letting the latter physically and psychologically torture blameless Job, so as to demonstrate that the Lord’s human servant would never abjure Him. In Bar-Ilan University bible professor Edward Greenstein’s masterful Job: A New Translation, the central character is soberly informed that “Your sons and your daughters were eating and drinking wine in/the house of their brother, the firstborn,/When here: a great wind came from across the desert;/it affected the four corners of the house;/it fell on the young people and they died.”—and the final eight words of the last line convey in their simplicity the defeated and personal nature of the tragedy. Despite the decimation of Job’s livestock, the death of his children, the rejection of his wife, and finally the contraction of an unsightly and painful skin ailment (perhaps boils), “Job did not commit-a-sin – /he did not speak insult” against God.
Job didn’t hesitate to speak against his own life, however. He bemoans his own birth, wishing the very circumstances that his life could be erased, declaring “Let the day disappear, the day I was born, /And the night that announced: A man’s been conceived!” Sublimely rendered in both their hypocrisy and idiocy are three “friends” (a later interpolation that is the basis of the canonical book adds a fourth) who come to console Job, but in the process they demonstrate the inadequacy of any traditional theodicy in confronting the nature of why awful things frequently happen to good people. Eliphaz informs Job that everything, even the seemingly evil, takes part in God’s greater and fully good plan, that the Lord “performs great things too deep to probe, /wondrous things, beyond number.” The sufferer’s interlocutor argues, as Job picks at his itchy boils with a bit of pottery, perhaps remembering the faces of his dead children when they were still infants, that God places “the lowly up high, /So the stooped attain relief.” Eliphaz, of whom we know nothing other than that he speaks like a man who has never experienced loss, is the friend whom counsels us that everything works out in the end even when we’re at our child’s funeral.
Bildad, on the other hand, takes a different tact, arguing that if Job’s sons “committed a sin against him, /He has dispatched them for their offense,” the victim-blaming logic that from time immemorial has preferred to ask what the raped was wearing rather than why the rapist rapes. Zophar angrily supports the other two, and the latecomer Elihu emphasizes God’s mystery and Job’s impudence to question it. To all of these defenses of the Lord, Job responds that even “were I in the right, his mouth would condemn me. /(Even) were I innocent, he would wrong me… It is all the same. /And so, I declare:/The innocent and the guilty he brings to (the same) end.” In an ancient world where it’s taken as a matter of simple retributive ethics that God will punish the wicked and reward the just, Job’s realism is both more world-weary and more humane than the clichés offered by his fair-weather friends. “Why do the wicked live on and live well,/Grow old and gain in power and wealth?” asks Job, and from 500 BCE unto 2019 that remains the central question of ethical theology. As concerns any legitimate, helpful, or moving answer from his supposed comforters, Greenstein informs us that “They have nothing to say.”
Finally, in the most dramatic and figuratively adept portion of the book, God Himself arrives from a whirlwind to answer the charges of Job’s “lawsuit” (as Greenstein renders the disputation). The Lord never answers Job’s demand to know why he has been forced to suffer, rather answering in non-sequitur about his own awesomeness, preferring to rhetorically answer the pain of a father who has buried his children by asking “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations?/Tell me – if you truly know wisdom!/Who set its dimensions? Do you know? /Who stretched the measuring line?… Have you ever reached the sources of Sea, /And walked on the bottom of Ocean?” God communicates in the rhetoric of sarcastic grandeur, mocking Job by saying “You must know… Your number of days is so many!” Of course, Job had never done any of those things, but an unempathetic God also can’t imagine what it would be like to have a Son die—at least not yet. That gets ahead of ourselves, and a reader can’t help but notice that for all of His poetry from the whirlwind, and all of His frustration at the intransigent questioning of Job, the Lord never actually answers why such misfortune has befallen this man. Rather God continually emphasizes His greatness to Job’s insignificance, His power to Job’s feebleness, His eternity to Job’s transience.
The anonymous author’s brilliance is deployed in its dramatic irony, for even if Job doesn’t know why he suffers, we know. Greenstein explains that readers “know from the prologue that Job’s afflictions derive from the deity’s pride, not from some moral calculus.” Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu can pontificate about the unknowability of God’s reasons while Job is uncertain as to if he’s done anything wrong that merits such treatment, but the two omniscient figures in the tale—God and the reader—know why the former did what He did. Because the Devil told him to. Finally, as if acknowledging His own culpability, God “added double to what Job had had,” which means double the livestock, and double the children. A cruelty in that, the grieving father expected to have simply replaced his dead family with a newer, shinier, fresher, and most of all alive brood. And so, both Job and God remain silent for the rest of the book. In the ordering of the Hebrew scriptures, God remains silent for the rest of the Bible, so that when “Job died old and sated with days” we might not wonder if it isn’t the deity Himself who has expired, perhaps from shame. The wisdom offered in the book of Job is the knowledge that justice is sacred, but not divine; so that justice must ours, meaning that our responsibility to each other is all the more important.
Admittedly an idiosyncratic take on the work, and one that I don’t wish to project onto Greenstein. But the scholar does argue that a careful philological engagement with the original Hebrew renders the story far more radical than has normally been presented. Readers of Job have normally been on the side of his sanctimonious friends, and especially the Defendant who arrives out of His gassy whirlwind, but the author of Job is firmly on the side of the plaintiff. If everyone from medieval monks to the authors of Midrash, from Sunday school teachers to televangelists, have interpreted Job as being about the inscrutability of God’s plans and the requirement that we passively take our undeserved pain as part of providence, than Greenstein writes that “there is a very weak foundation in biblical parlance for the common rendering.” He argues that “much of what has passed as translation of Job is facile and fudged,” having been built upon the accumulated exegetical detritus of centuries rather than returning to the Aleph, Bet, and Gimmel of Job itself.
Readers of a more independent bent have perhaps detected sarcasm in Job’s response, or a dark irony in God’s restitution of new and better replacement children for the ones that He let Satan murder. For my fellow jaundiced and cynical heretics who long maintained that Job still has some fight in him even after God emerges from the whirlwind to chastise Him for daring to question the divine plan, Greenstein has good news. Greenstein writes that the “work is not mainly about what you thought it was; it is more subversive than you imagined; and it ends in a manner that glorifies the best in human values.” He compares a modern translation of Job 42:6, where Job speaks as a penitent before the Lord, exclaiming “Therefore I despise myself/and repent in dust and ashes.” Could be clearer–>Such a message seems straightforward—because he questions the divine plan, Job hates himself, and is appropriately humbled. Yet Greenstein contrasts the modern English with a more accurate version based in an Aramaic text found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the man of Uz more ambiguously says “Therefore I am poured out and boiled up, and I will become dust.” This isn’t a declaration of surrender; this is an acknowledgement of loss. Greenstein explains that while both the rabbis and the Church wished to see Job repentant and in surrender, that’s not what the original presupposes. Rather, “Job is parodying God, not showing him respect. If God is all about power and not morality and justice, Job will not condone it through acceptance.” Thus, when we write that the book’s subject is judging God, we should read the noun as the object and not the subject of that sentence.
As a work, the moral universe of Job is complex; when compared to other ancient near Eastern works that are older, even exemplary ones like Gilgamesh, its ambiguities mark it as a work of poetic sophistication. Traditionally dated from the period about a half-millennium before the Common Era, Job is identified with the literature of the Babylonian Exile, when the Jews had been conquered and forcibly extricated to the land of the Euphrates. Such historical context is crucial in understanding Job’s significance, for the story of a righteous man who suffered for no understandable reason mirrored the experience of the Jews themselves, while Job’s status as a gentile underscored a dawning understanding that God was not merely a deity for the Israelites, but that indeed his status was singular and universal. When the other gods are completely banished from heaven, however, and the problem of evil rears its horned head, for when the Lord is One, who then must be responsible for our unearned pain?
Either the most subversive or the most truthful of scriptural books (maybe both), Job has had the power to move atheist and faithful alike, evidence for those who hate God and anxious warning for those that love Him. Former Jesuit Jack Miles enthuses in God: A Biography, that “exegetes have often seen the Book of Job as the self-refutation of the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.” Nothing in the canon of Western literature, be it Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex or William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, quite achieves the dramatic pathos of Job. Consider its terrors, its ambiguities, its sense of injustice, and its impartation that “our days on earth are a shadow.” Nothing written has ever achieved such a sense of universal tragedy. After all, the radicalism of the narrative announces itself, for Job concerns itself with the time that God proverbially sold his soul to Satan in the service of torturing not just an innocent man, but a righteous one. And that when questioned on His justification for doing such a thing, the Lord was only able to respond by reiterating His own power in admittedly sublime but ultimately empty poetry. For God’s answer of theodicy to Job is not an explanation of how, but not an explanation of why—and when you’re left to scrape boils off your self with a pottery shard after your 10 children have died in a collapsing house, that’s no explanation at all.
With Greenstein’s translation, we’re able to hear Job’s cry not in his native Babylonian, or the Hebrew of the anonymous poet who wrote his tale, or the Aramaic of Christ crucified on Golgotha, or even the stately if antiquated early modern English of the King James Version, but rather in a fresh, contemporary, immediate vernacular that makes the tile character’s tribulations our own. Our Job is one who can declare “I am fed up,” and something about the immediacy of that declaration makes him our contemporary in ways that underscore the fact that billions are his proverbial sisters and brothers. Greenstein’s accomplishment makes clear a contention that is literary, philosophical, and religious: that the Book of Job is the most sublime masterpiece of monotheistic faith, because what its author says is so exquisitely rendered and so painfully true. Central to Greenstein’s mission is a sense of restoration. This line needs to be clearer: Job is often taught and preached as simply being about humanity’s required humility before the divine, and the need to prostrate ourselves before a magnificent God whose reasons are inscrutable.
By restoring Job its status as a subversive classic, Greenstein does service to the worshiper and not the worshiped, to humanity and not our oppressors. Any work of translation exists in an uneasy stasis between the original and the
adaptation, a one-sided negotiation across millennia where the original author has no say. My knowledge of biblical Hebrew is middling at best, so I’m not suited to speak towards the transgressive power of whomever the anonymous poet of Job was, but regardless of what those words chosen by her or him were, I can speak to Greenstein’s exemplary poetic sense. At its core, part of what makes this version of Job so powerful is how it exists in contrast to those English versions we’ve encountered before, from the sublime plain style of King James to the bubblegum of the Good News Bible. Unlike those traditional translations, the words “God” and “Lord,” with their associations of goodness, appear nowhere in this translation. Rather Greenstein keeps the original “Elohim” (which I should point out is plural), or the unpronounceable,
vowelless tetragrammaton, rendered as “YHWH.” Job is made new through the deft use of the literary technique known as defamiliarization, making that which is familiar once again strange (and thus all the more radical and powerful).
Resurrecting the lightning bolt that is Job’s poetry does due service to the original. Job’s subject is not just theodicy, but the failures of poetry itself. When Job defends himself against the castigation of Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu, it’s not just a theological issue, but a literary critical one as well. The suffering man condemns their comforts and callousness, but also their clichés. That so much of what his supposed comforters draw from are biblical books like Psalms and Proverbs testifies to Job’s transgressive knack for scriptural self-reflection. As a poet, the author is able to carefully display exactly what she or he wishes to depict, an interplay between the presented and hidden that has an uncanny magic. When the poet writes that despite all of Job’s tribulations, “Job did not commit-a-sin with his lips,” it forces us to ask if he committed sin in his heart and his head, if his soul understandably screamed out at God’s injustice while his countenance remained pious. This conflict between inner and outer appearance is the logic of the novelist, a type of interiority that we associate more with Gustave Flaubert or Henry James than we do with the Bible.
When it comes to physical detail, the book is characteristically minimalist. Like most biblical writing, the author doesn’t present much of a description of either God or Satan, though that makes their presentation all the more eerie and disturbing. When God asks Satan where he has been, the arch-adversary responds “From roving the earth and going all about it.” Satan’s first introduction in all of Western literature, for never before was that word used for the singular character, thus brings with it those connotations of ranging, stalking, and creeping that have so often accrued about the reptilian creature who is always barely visible out of the corner of our eyes. Had we been given more serpentine exposition on the character, cloven hooves and forked tales, it would lack the unsettling nature of what’s actually presented. But when the author wants to be visceral, she or he certainly can be. Few images are as enduring in their immediacy than how Job “took a potsherd with which to scratch himself as he sits in/the ash-heap.” His degradation, his tribulation, his shame still resonates 2,500 years later.
The trio (and later the quartet) of Job’s judgmental colleagues render theodicy as a poetry of triteness, while Job’s poetics of misery is commensurate with the enormity of his fate. “So why did you take me out of the womb?” he demands of God, “Would I had died, with no eye seeing me!/Would I had been as though I had been;/Would I had been carried from womb to tomb”—here Greenstein borrowing a favored rhyming congruence from the arsenal of English’s Renaissance metaphysical poets. Eliphaz and Elihu offer maudlin bromides, but Job can describe those final things with a proficiency that shows how superficial his friends are. Job fantasizes about death as a place “I go and do not return, /To a land of darkness and deep-shade;/A land whose brightness is like pitch-black, /Deep-shade and disorder;/That shines like pitch-black.” That contradictory image, of something shining in pitch-black, is an apt definition of God Himself, who while He may be master of an ordered, fair, and just universe in most of the Bible, in Job He is creator of a “fundamentally amoral world,” as Greenstein writes.
If God from the whirlwind provides better poetry than his defenders could, His theology is just as empty and callous. Greenstein writes that “God barely touches on anything connected to justice or the providential care of humanity,” and it’s precisely the case that for all of His literary power, the Lord dodges the main question. God offers description of the universe’s creation, and the maintenance of all things that order reality, he conjures the enormities of size and time, and even provides strangely loving description of his personal pets, the fearsome hippopotamus Behemoth and the terrifying whale/alligator Leviathan. Yet for all of that detail, exquisitely rendered, God never actually answers Job. Bildad or Elihu would say that God has no duty to explain himself to a mere mortal like Job, that the man of Uz deserves no justification for his punishment in a life that none of us ever chose to begin. That, however, obscures the reality that even if Job doesn’t know the reasons behind what happened, we certainly know.
Greenstein’s greatest contribution is making clear that not only does God not answer Job’s pained query, but that the victim knows that fact. And he rejects it. Job answers God with “I have spoken once and I will not repeat…I will (speak) no more.” If God answers with hot air from the whirlwind, the soon-to-be-restored Job understands that silent witness is a more capable defense against injustice, that quiet is the answer to the whims of a capricious and cruel Creator. God justifies Himself by bragging about His powers, but Job tells him “I have known you are able to do all;/That you cannot be blocked from any scheme.” Job has never doubted that God has it within his power to do the things that have been done, rather he wishes to understand why they’ve been done, and all of the beautiful poetry marshaled from that whirlwind can’t do that. The Creator spins lines and stanzas as completely as He once separated the night from the day, but Job covered in his boils could care less. “As a hearing by ear I have heard you,” the angry penitent says, “And now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up.”
Traditional translations render the last bit so as to imply that a repentant Job has taken up dust and ashes in a pose of contrition, but the language isn’t true to the original. More correct, Greenstein writes, to see Job as saying “I take pity on ‘dust and ashes,’” that Job’s sympathy lay with humanity, that Job stands not with God but with us. Job hated not God, but rather His injustice. Such a position is the love of everybody else. Miles puts great significance in the fact that the last time the deity speaks (at least according to the ordering of books in the Hebrew Scriptures) is from the whirlwind. According to Miles, when the reality of Job’s suffering is confronted by the empty beauty of the Lord’s poetry, a conclusion can be drawn: “Job has won. The Lord has lost.” That God never speaks to man again (at least in the ordering of the Hebrew Scriptures) is a type of embarrassed silence, and for Miles the entirety of the Bible is the story of how humanity was able to overcome God, to overcome our need of God. Job is, in part, about the failure of beautiful poetry when confronted with loss, with pain, with horror, with terror, with evil. After Job there can be no poetry. But if Job implies that there can be no poetry, it paradoxically still allows for prayer. Job in his defiance of God teaches us a potent form of power, that dissent is the highest form of prayer, for what could possibly take the deity more seriously? In challenging, castigating, and criticizing the Creator, Job fulfills the highest form of reverence that there possibly can be.
Image credit: Unsplash/Aaron Burden.
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