PART 1:  Overall Topic, Authorial Background, the Opening Frame (Job 1-2)

 

It is widely known among biblical scholars that The Book of Job is an outlier among other biblical books in that it provides overt criticism of established Ancient Hebrew beliefs and doctrines. This part of Job’s message is still not widely understood or even known by Christian churchgoers primarily because Protestant and Catholic leaders, even those grounded in modern scholarship, may feel that some members of their congregations are not ready for study of dissenting voices, even within the Bible itself, that may push back against established doctrines and possibly confuse church members. This article is written, in part, for the general audience of churchgoers who may be ready to accept this possibility and push forward, as well as for anyone else who may want to explore an alternative view of The Book of Job.

This article deals with the ways in which the great poet who was the author of The Book of Job used his artistry to accomplish two major objectives: (1) to make a case that some of the views of God and the world held by the majority of this author’s potential Ancient Hebrew readers (as well as the majority of modern Christian readers 2500 years later), are either not accurate views at all or else are too limited in scope to be fully true, and (2) to point the way to possible change in the future of the Hebrew people by suggesting alternative views of God and greater possibilities for the world of the future. Convincing internal and external evidence clearly suggests that this author was a theological and social rebel who used this work to push back against some of the prevailing views of his culture and point the way forward.

I was inspired to write this article by reading Jewish scholar Robert Alter’s English translation of the Book of Job and related commentary for the general reader contained in the third volume of his three-volume edition of The Hebrew Bible published by Norton in 2019. I was especially inspired by the quality of the content of Alter’s full “Introduction” to the work and the thoroughness of the notes on individual verses (or blocks of verses) contained at the bottom of each page on which those verses appear.  In my view, this resource by Robert Alter is the very best place for the general reader to begin to achieve a full understanding of this complex work because of the quality of Alter’s introductory material, textual notes, and the translation itself. While I will leave expert discussions of Hebrew language poetry to Alter and his impressive body of scholarly work (including The Art of Biblical Poetry, Basic Books, revised 2011), as a retired English professor I can, with some confidence, bring to the discussion my own acquired experience in a career of teaching English language literature and literary analysis. Part of the way I will be using factual information or opinion from Alter and sometimes reacting to it as a way of bridging into my own analysis. Later, I will be offering more original thought. One of Robert Alter’s major contributions to modern discussion of the meaning of The Book of Job lies in the succinctness and clarity of  this summary passage at the very beginning of  Alter’s “Introduction” on page 457 of volume 3, where he states his overall conclusion about the Book of Job: “Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers—a dissent compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward.” To those two points I will add a third point with a discussion of the Job poet’s pushback on Hebrew law dealing with the accommodation of women in the inheritance of property.

 

The Author: A Genius Working Alone

Like Robert Alter in his “Introduction,” I firmly believe that the book is the work of a single author (p. 458) except for the Elihu section, chapters 32-37, believed by Alter and many others to be added later by someone else (p. 459).  As Alter observes throughout his introductory essay, the poet’s genius is evident in the careful coordination of all parts and ingredients of the complete poem and in the exceptionally high quality of the poetry itself.  This poet, who probably lived in the 5th or 6th century BCE, created a masterwork in this long, ambitious, and powerful narrative poem in which he portrays his main character, Job, as a good man who is trapped in a tragic situation that is made much worse by others who are also trapped by their limited perception and by their belief in what the poet believes to be the Hebrew majority’s inaccurate or incomplete view of God.   While it is often speculated that the author of Job may not actually be from Israel because all the human characters in the poem live outside Israel’s boundaries and within the work there are no attributed biblical references, the fact remains that this work was written by a master of the Hebrew language who clearly was writing with a Hebrew readership in mind, a readership that was so influential that its acceptance led to canonization of the work and inclusion into The Hebrew Bible. It stands to reason also that knowledge of the Torah (which Christians call the Pentateuch) can be assumed as well through internal evidence to be explored later in the strong connection with Deuteronomy 28 in the details of Job’s suffering as well as Job’s knowledge of the details of Hebrew law which is evident throughout the poem but especially in chapter 21. And there is an explicit connection between Genesis 1 itself and the response to the Genesis 1 creation story in God’s creation account spoken to Job in chapters 38-41.  

Alter concludes his introductory discussion of the Job poet with the following: “One should probably think of him . . . as a writer working alone—a bold, dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel that they couldn’t do without it, however vehement his swerve from the views of the biblical majority” (p. 458).

The Author’s Content Choices in the Opening Frame 

The poem is framed (at the beginning and the end) by a prose story from oral tradition that could have been familiar to readers and, as Alter indicates, that the Job poet either modified to complement his poem or else rewrote in its entirety to read and feel like the original story from another era (p. 458).  For our purposes, we will view the frame story in terms of its value from an author’s perspective. 

To set up the theological issues that will evolve later during the debate between Job and his three friends soon after the poem itself begins in chapter 3, the poet, I believe, needed to make several important choices related to the content of the first two chapters of Job. Among them was to keep and even enhance the sense of distance between the pre-historical time in which the opening frame story is set and the current time in the world of the poet and his audience where contemporary issues will be raised in the upcoming debate between Job and his friends. For the reading audience, this early background story provides a safe haven of reader immersion into a problem existing in “olden times,” in which the poet can let his readers feel safely settled into the older story during the early reading and then gradually shift the focus to a very real contemporary issue when the debate gets underway, perhaps without having his reading audience realize until well into the debate material that such a shift has occurred. At that point, readers will have shifted gradually from a council made up of God and his advisers, the origin of which most likely was in the Canaanite mythology of Hebrew prehistory (Alter, p. 459), to a group of full-blown humans engaged in heated discussion of very real issues of the current world. Perhaps the poet’s hope or plan is that the readers will gradually become so absorbed in this new world that they will barely notice that a shift to more contemporary issues has occurred and the older, more simplistic folktale view of God (as a deity who would be capable of permitting such suffering by Job just to win a wager) would fade away, never to be mentioned again (p. 459).

Importantly in chapters 1-2, the author needed to make two important changes in what was most likely the content of the original folk tale: (1) to present to the reader a clearly omniscient God (like the one currently worshipped in the post-Torah world, instead of an earlier mythological non-omniscient god) and (2) to use the authority of this omniscient God, to clearly establish Job’s innocence of any sin related to his suffering. In prehistory, as Alter indicates, the council itself probably functioned much as it does in the opening frame story (chapters 1 and 2), but the leader of the council, like the other members, would not have been omniscient (p. 459).

In all the regional mythologies of Hebrew pre-history, gods other than their leader could go off on their own and take action on their own initiative. But in this story, the author puts God clearly in charge of making final decisions. Other celestial beings simply carry out actions approved and ordered by God. The Adversary (hasatan in Hebrew), as Alter suggests in a note to Job 1:6, is the council member designated as the one to openly disagree with others as a part of the decision-making process, but he cannot take any action that has not been directed by God. (On this point, modern Christians may need to note that neither the author nor his ancient Hebrew readers would have had any concept of the being named Satan seen by Christians hundreds of years later as a powerful supernatural enemy of God on a cosmic scale.)  As a practical matter for the author, it is vitally important for the God of the frame story to have omniscient power and authority (unlike the mythological gods of prehistory on which the folk tale is based) if this God is to be accepted later, in the poem itself, as the God currently being worshipped in present time.  

It is even more essential that Job’s undisputed innocence be clearly established in the minds of the readers so they can comfortably sympathize, from the very beginning of the later debate, with Job’s position that he is innocent of committing the sin (disobedience of God’s law) for which he is charged. After all, readers of the debate section later in this work would know what the three friends do not know: that Job’s innocence had already had been established earlier by an omnipotent God who had confirmed Job’s indisputable innocence near the beginning of the opening frame section in the very first chapter, when God declares to his council members that “there is none like him on all the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil” (1:8). Without this strong, unambiguous statement in the frame story, and audience sympathy for the innocent Job already established, all the back and forth between Job and his friends in the long narrative poem to follow could become hopelessly tangled in the minds of readers struggling to understand the truth, and the author’s own theological points could be lost as well.

A final practical addition that the Job poet chose to make to the older story was the introduction of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, the three “friends” later to become major characters in the upcoming poem, an original creation of the Job poet himself.  These three characters, all from different geographical locations but adhering to the same post-Torah view of God are given names and backgrounds in chapter 2, so the reading audience will be ready to accept them in the main storyline as important characters who will represent, across geographic lines, the majority theological view that both Job and the author are opposing.

Kept intact is the core of the older story about a righteous man who is inflicted with major physical and psychological pain as a kind of test involving God’s need to prove to the Adversary that this good man will continue to be loyal to God in spite of the loss of the rewards (in property, wealth, and living and thriving children) that God originally had provided to Job as a reward for his exceptional obedience. It is the wager story, the bet between God and the Adversary and Job’s resultant suffering, that is the most important element of the larger frame story and thus the most important element for the Job poet to keep as a part of the frame narrative (and not to try to change) because it is the most vital element in fulfilling the Job poet’s larger purpose of getting audience sympathy for Job established at the beginning of the debate between Job and his three friends. Importantly, neither Job nor his accusers will know anything in the portion of the frame story that occurs in the heavens; only the readers will have the complete picture. The author also had to retain this folk-tale component of the story rather than violate the expectations of readers already familiar with the older folk tale by making a change of this magnitude. The author wanted to keep the readers with him rather than lose them before they get to his great narrative poem. Thus the Job poet is willing to take some risks in spite of inheriting in this folktale a rather weak version of God who allows Job to suffer unimaginable pain just so he can win the wager. But the upside of using the story is this: Through their advance knowledge of God’s affirmation of Job’s innocence, as well as the content of the wager story, the readers will clearly understand from the very beginning of the debate that the charge made by his accusers, that God’s anger over some sin committed by Job is the cause of his suffering, is false. And the visitation by a strong God much later in the narrative will be even more of a welcome surprise.

 

PART 2: PUSHBACK AGAINST DEUTERONOMIC LAW, Debate of Job and Accusers 

The Debate as Attack on the Deuteronomic View of God

From the very beginning of the debate portion of the poetry portion of The Book of Job  (vol. 3, chapters 4-33, following the impressive introductory “death wish” poem in chapter 3 and excluding the Elihu chapters), Job is portrayed as declaring his innocence and defending himself against unjust accusations of sinful violations of God’s laws that had been established as a part of Covenant Theology, a system of reward and punishment established in the Torah (which historically was, of course, developed much later than the prehistoric folktale recollected in the frame story of chapters 1-2). In the post-Torah time in which the poet lived, this Reward-Punishment theology was accepted by the great majority of the Hebrew-speaking people and was established as part of the Law that was believed by the masses of the people to be handed down to Moses directly by God. Defined most specifically and dramatically in Deuteronomy 28, this majority view pictures God as actively intervening in human affairs in the role of administrator of punishment for humans who violate God’s law and in the role of administrator of reward for those who are keepers of the covenant by their continuing obedience.

In placing God’s role as punisher for disobedience ahead of God’s role as rewarder for obedience, I might be forgiven for using the priority placed by the author of Deuteronomy 28 which devotes only 15 verses to the potential types of rewards for obedience and 53 verses (more than three times as many) to the potential types of punishment for disobedience. In addition, the punishments are also substantially more detailed and even more graphically presented than the rewards, just as they are portrayed in The Book of Job itself.  For example, in Deuteronomy 28:27-29 we learn that “the LORD will strike you . . . with hemorrhoids and with boils and with scabs from which you will not be able to be healed. The LORD will strike you with madness and with blindness and with confounding of the heart. . . .” All of this and a great deal more is included in the catalog of horrors that makes up the Deuteronomic view of the effect of the available punishments on the guilty.  Ancient Hebrew readers of The Book of Job would, of course, knowing already that Job is innocent, find Job’s suffering to be doubly horrible and unjust when the three friends begin to falsely accuse this innocent man. 

In How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (HarperOne, 2015), Christian theologian John Dominic Crossan provides us with a remarkably clear explanation of how Covenant Theology would have been understood at the time. Focusing on the Sanction (or punishment) side of the reward-punishment continuum (but encompassing both), Crossan states: “The Deuteronomic vision of covenantal Sanction worked in two directions: First, from present to future: if you obey, you will be blessed; if you disobey, you will be cursed. And second, from present to past: you are blessed, therefore you obeyed; you are cursed, therefore you disobeyed” (p. 94). In Deuteronomy, for example, all of God’s or Moses’s speeches (with God communicating the Law to humans) operate from present to future (you will be rewarded if you obey or punished if you disobey). However, in the poem, it is clear that in the years since the composition of Deuteronomy the concept had undergone a natural expansion into the same issue as viewed from a different perspective, that of a human observer of fellow humans. Each one of the three companions, when they are judging Job, operates from present to past (Job’s present suffering is evidence of unforgiven disobedience of God’s law in some past action). To the accusers, Job’s excessive physical and psychological pain is clear evidence of some secret sin for which God is actively and aggressively punishing Job. Like the majority of Hebrews, Job’s accusers all accept this view without question.

Job Fights Back

Throughout the exchanges between Job and his accusers, Job gets more and more frustrated with his so-called friends when they repeatedly refuse to believe in his innocence. Along the way, they go back and forth, point and counterpoint, with the readers sympathizing with Job and recognizing the injustice of the accusations against Job because they know in advance that he is innocent of the charges against him, and with the accusers looking worse and worse in their eyes when they stubbornly insist that Job has to be guilty as charged and that justice has to be served. 

Perhaps the most important part of Job’s defense that relates to the Covenant Theology issue is in chapter 21 which establishes anecdotal but credible evidence in support of a premise that the poet, I am sure, believes would represent the experience of many or even most of the reading audience. Near the beginning of this chapter Job poses a question: “Why do the wicked live, / grow rich and gather wealth? ( 21:7). Job’s unstated suggestion here is that the wicked people among us may be especially susceptible to a driving need to acquire and maintain wealth and all the benefits it can bring, a process which would provide an abundance of temptations to sin against others. Then after experiencing their lives of abundance, they would feel comfortable in continuing their obsession with wealth and settle into rejection of God throughout their lives. The wicked are portrayed here as continuing their rejection of God even as they die and arrive in Sheol, where they boldly and aggressively tell God, “Turn away from us, / we have no desire to know your ways . . .” (21:14).  Job’s message is that these are the types of sinners who die without any closeness to God and, importantly, without punishment, contrary to the promise of Covenant Theology that all the wicked will be punished. (Christians might need to be reminded here that Sheol is not equivalent to a Christian heaven or hell but is a place where some of the ancient Hebrews believed that all the dead, the good and the evil alike, experience the same kind of unpleasant, drifting, meaningless kind of existence. According to Hebrew cosmology, the heavens are not accessible to humans. Thus there is no heavenly reward available for anyone. There was no concept of either hell or heaven as a destination for humans.)

The Job poet’s message is that the inadequacies of Covenant Theology already would be evident to many in the general population. Job himself tells us that some who are guilty of disobedience to God, especially those who are rich and powerful, are never punished for egregious sins of disobedience, they are never repentant because they are never publically exposed, and they carry these sins to their graves. It is more than possible that the sins may be known to others, but those who have gained wealth, power and authority exist in a world where they may have done things that they would like to keep covered up and are largely, but perhaps not entirely, able to do so. Still, the word may get around in spite of strong motives for public secrecy by the evil-doer and by others who are dependent on him, such as other family members or servants. According to Job, these sinful acts may be, in reality, open secrets that others already know about.  

To continue the discussion Job cites another example. In this scene an accuser, presumably Bildad (who was the speaker in the previous chapter), had asked a question about the location of a house inhabited by a wicked nobleman. (As Robert Alter suggests in a note to 21:19, this question may be designed to be accusatory because the house of Job himself, formerly a prosperous landowner, had just been destroyed.) Job has a confident reply: “Have you not asked the wayfarers / and their tokens you cannot mistake?” (21:20). In this passage the accuser is suggesting, perhaps again in a mocking way, that no evidence could ever be found to verify the existence of any unpunished sinners because God has promised to carry out the punishment, in this lifetime, to all such people. Job’s position, on the other hand, is something like the following: “You will remain blind to the truth if you just accept beliefs that are handed down and never take the initiative to ask questions about things that are not true to your own life experience. All you have to do to find out the truth is to ask the wayfaring travelers who can give you an honest answer.” In a note to 21:20, Robert Alter adds the following: “People who have traveled about and observed what actually happens in human affairs would be able to tell the three companions that, contrary to their complacent view, it is typically the wicked who thrive.”   

It is this section of the debate, comprehending the full text of chapter 2l, in which the Job poet is most likely to begin to convince readers who may still be skeptical that Covenant Theology is a flawed concept that must be held up to greater scrutiny and ultimately rejected. Because it is not true to the actual observations and life experiences of those who are aware of what is going on around them, Job suggests, it defies common sense. Please note also that what is considered common knowledge (that God sometimes does not punish secret sinners, especially wealthy ones, who often go to their graves without repentance) represents direct evidence of pushback by the author of The Book of Job against the validity of the promise made by Moses (speaking for God) in Deuteronomy 28:15, prior to the catalog of possible punishments: “And it shall be, if you do not heed the voice of the Lord your God to keep and do all His commands and His statutes that I charge you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you.”

In chapter 21, the author of Job is pushing back on the validity of the type of promise identified specifically by God in Deuteronomy 28 as the type that moves from present to future (if you disobey in real time at any point in your life, you surely will be punished), while the earlier pushback by the author  (after establishing Job’s actual innocence in the frame story) is directed at his accusers who are believers in the type of promise that moves from present to past (you are being punished now; therefore you must have disobeyed in the past). Thus the author of this work has now completed his full pushback directed at both ways to get (erroneously) to the same conclusion: Job is then fully established in the mind of the reader as an innocent man who is receiving the same kind of suffering God had established for the guilty, and he is presumed to be guilty by all of his accusers. The conclusion by most alert readers has to be that what happens to Job may not be consistent with the reward-punishment system described by the authors of Deuteronomy and accepted by the majority of the Hebrew people.

Just afterwards in subsequent chapters, Job moves away from focus on his three accusers and steps up the intensity of his anger toward God repetitively expressing a strong desire to be able to confront God so he could make his case for his innocence. This becomes clear when Job says, “Would that I knew how to find him / that I might come to where he dwells. / I would lay out my case before Him . . .” (23:3-4). 

Throughout the latter portion of the debate section of the poem, Job becomes so frustrated and angry over God’s perceived neglect of his situation that he increases the intensity of his appeal to God to intervene and provide him with justice.  Finally, Job begins to lash out against God with extreme anger and accuse him of multiple injustices that include abuse of power, extreme cruelty, and abandonment (30: 16-25). Above all, Job suggests that, from his perspective, the central problem that needs to be addressed is the issue of the absence of basic fairness in God’s treatment of him when he says: “Let him weigh me on fair scales, / that God knows my blamelessness” (31:5-6).

All of these complaints and accusations by Job set up the last part of the narrative with a visitation by God with his voice coming from a whirlwind to make his extended response to Job’s charges  (chapters 38 through 41) prior to Job’s response (in poetry) followed by the closing prose frame in chapter 42.

 

PART 3: PUSHBACK AGAINST ANTHROPOCENTRICISM, and the Closing Frame

 

The Job Poet’s Rejection of the Human-Centered View of Creation in Genesis 1

According to Jonathan Alter, as quoted at the beginning of this essay, the Job poet’s second major act of theological rebellion is in his pushback against the anthropocentric or human-centered view of creation as it is depicted in Genesis 1, especially in the concept that humans should “hold sway over” other forms of life on the earth (Genesis 1:28), especially with the use of non-human creatures for their food and the provision of other benefits.  As Alter reminds us, this concept was widely accepted and often reiterated “in biblical texts from Genesis onward” (vol. 3, “Introduction,” p. 457). (Note also that in Genesis 1:28, Alter’s translation uses “hold sway over” rather than the King James version’s  “have dominion over,” the translation more familiar to Christians.)

In contrast, the Job poet’s creation account (with God as the speaker) depicts a creation that is not human-centered in this way at all.  Rather the focus of God’s speech in Job 38-41 is on his creation of the larger world of nature alone, with exploitation of non-human creatures by humans seen as unnatural interference into God’s grand design of a world with all non-human creatures needing to be true to themselves as independent beings, free from human control. Thus we can call this view of creation the nature-centered view. (Note that the word anthropocentric fits the content of Genesis 1, but the word biocentric fits some of the content of Job 38-41 but has other meanings today that are not a full match.)       The Human-Centered View of Creation in Genesis 1

Let us look more precisely at how the anthropocentric view was established at the very beginning of the Torah in Genesis 1 (in Alter’s volume 1). Note that in the first 26 verses God has created almost everything in the natural world for the potential benefit of humans, seemingly anticipating human needs even before humans were created—establishing permanent light and water, plants and fruit trees that reproduce themselves, birds of the air, crawling things, and animals that live in the water and on land. 

Continuing into the chapter we learn that all the verses that preceded the last five verses (27-31) have been merely a prelude to the creation of the humans, “male and female,” the life form that enjoys the highest status among all the other creatures and prime positioning in the narrative that signals the climactic event in God’s creation of the world. It is also the highest honor imaginable to be the one creature who was created “in the image of God” (1:27). To the humans, God makes it clear that they and future humans should “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it, and hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth” (1:28). Finally, in verses 29-31, God makes it even clearer that in his created world this abundant life has been created primarily for the benefit of humans.

The Nature-Centered View of Creation in Job 38-41

In response to the human-centered view of creation established by the Genesis 1 creation story, the Job poet has created an account of the content covered in the first 26 verses of Genesis 1 in much more detail and with a totally different focus on the complexity and purposefulness of nature, with humans not at the center. To the reader, it gradually becomes clear, in fact, that the content of God’s speech to Job is never human-centered in a positive way at all; in contrast, the focus is on human deficiencies rather than strengths. With humanity represented by Job rather than the unnamed couple in Genesis 1 or by Adam and Eve in Genesis 2, the poet is free to focus primarily on two qualities of humans that are negative ones and also applicable to Job and to all of humanity, a deficiency in knowledge and a deficiency in power. 

Focus on Human Deficiencies

When God makes himself known to Job in his voice from the whirlwind in chapter 38 (Alter, volume 3), God makes it clear that his purpose is to answer the accusations Job had made against God earlier. In God’s question to Job, “Who is this who darkens council / in words without knowledge?” (38:2), God tells Job that in his demands from God and in his advice to him earlier Job had displayed his essential ignorance of all that God will be revealing to him in this visitation. 

Then God makes it clear throughout the following chapters that Job’s ignorance is due, in part, to lack of knowledge and appreciation of God’s skillful artistry and purposeful energy that he had put into the creation of the world.  In God’s description of the ingredients of the created world one vivid, detailed image follows another in the extensive catalog of the components of the whole. In a note to 38:4, Alter outlines the narrative pattern of this entire section (beginning with chapter 38 and continuing through 41): “God’s speech moves in a narrative progression from cosmogony (verses 4-21) to meteorology (verses 22-38)—which is to say the play of natural forces across the created world invoked in the cosmogonic section—to zoology (38:39 to 39:40)—which is to say, the panorama of living creatures thriving in the play of the natural forces of creation—to zoology with a mythic heightening (40:15-41:26).” The fact that Job’s and all of humanity’s knowledge of the sweep of the universe pales in comparison to that of God is obvious. Job’s previous argumentative positions in the protest against God are clearly based on “words without knowledge” (38:2).

Getting almost equal attention in the narrative, especially in chapters 40-41, is the emphasis on Job’s and all of humanity’s deficiency in power. Humans are vastly inferior in their power, not only to God but even but to many larger animals as well. As it is in the Genesis 1 narrative, in the hierarchy of all the creatures depicted, the final creature in the narrative is the most important. In this narrative the most important creature is the Leviathan because it is the most impressive and most powerful. The Leviathan “has no match on earth” (41:25); “He is king over all proud beasts” (41:26). This is the last line of creatures depicted in God’s creation narrative. The Leviathan is at the top of the hierarchy on the scale of the natural world (of which humans are only a part), not Adam and Eve or other humans who will follow.

Midway through God’s speech, at the beginning of chapter 40, God pauses, asks Job if he should be reproved, and says, “Who argues with God, let him answer” (40:2).  Job then responds that he is “worthless” and can only keep silent (40:4). At this point it is evident that God’s intervention has had a powerful effect on Job. He has seen that he and other humans are only one of many creatures which have God’s full approval, and Job is beginning to understand that he and other humans are perhaps no more important to God than any one of the other creatures that have received all of God’s full attention and loving care to create.  

Other Creatures Not Created to Serve Humans

Overall, God’s message is a direct response in opposition to the biblical message, contained in Genesis 1:28, that humans should “hold sway over” or “have dominion over” all the other creatures created by God. Because each of the non-human species received the same high degree of divine attention in its creation that the human species received, and all non-human species should have the same degree of independence in pursuing their purpose in nature, free of control by humans. God makes it clear that remaining free in the wild is each creature’s natural condition and that humans should not violate the sanctity of the freedom of other creatures to live the purposeful lives for which they were created and should not be taken from their natural habitats in which God had placed them. In addition, human capture and control of animals is not only cruel physically but psychologically as well, and the controlled creatures naturally will want to resist and will attempt to escape back to the wild if they can. It goes without saying that humans should not destroy the habitats in which the wild creatures reside.

These points are made multiple times in God’s speech to Job, but just a couple of examples will have to suffice here. In describing the lives of the mountain goats in the wild, God describes the freedom and abundance of their lives with this echo of God’s admonition to the humans, in Genesis 1:28, to “be fruitful and multiply”: “They crouch, burst forth with their babes, / their babes they push out to the world. / Their offspring batten, grow big in the wild, / they go out and do not return” (Job 39: 3-4). In the wild, births come naturally and the little ones are healthy and get plenty to eat; in the process of growing up they thrive and prosper (“batten”); and when the time comes when they are ready, they freely go out on their own, away from their original family, and build their own lives, beginning another cycle. In this scenario, it is evident that God has created a species that was programmed to thrive, generation after generation, in the habitat that God had chosen. Perhaps Job, after this lesson, hopes that in the civilized world the typical human family will be able to do so as well.

In describing the ox, God begins with a question to Job and all other humans who have used or are considering the use of these animals for farm work: “Will the wild ox want to serve you, pass the night at your feeding trough? . . . / Can you rely on him with his great power / and leave your labor to him? / Can you trust him to bring back your seed, gather grain on your threshing floor?” (39:9-12). This passage puts emphasis on the central problem with the practice of capturing and using farm animals for human benefit: such a practice is pictured as cruel and unnatural when the animal’s perspective is considered. The human is taking a wild ox out of its natural habitat and putting it in captivity, depriving the animal of the joy of freedom to roam, security of family life in the wild, and even a natural healthy diet—all available in the original habitat that God had provided. The ox in this portrait is seen as a creature who would be unhappy in captivity and desperate to return to the wild, so much so that God, in his speech to Job, puts doubt in the mind of the human about the confidence he can have in the trustworthiness of the animal to be a reliable “slave.” With its great power, the ox could overwhelm the human and escape, and all the material value to the human could be lost while, in the process, the escape could restore all the substantial non-material value back to the ox which would have a more satisfying and productive natural life in the wild.

This emphasis in God’s speech completes the second and final pushback made by the author of The Book of Job to theological assumptions held by the majority of his contemporaries. In this pushback, the Job poet lets God do most of the talking, which helps him make his case and perhaps be more convincing to the readership than would have been the case if Job himself had initiated and continued focus on the anthropocentric view the way he did on Covenant Theology in the final pushback of the debate section. In addition, by invoking God’s authority here in the voice from the whirlwind section, the author is solidifying his case in the same way the authors of Deuteronomy 28 and Genesis 1 solidified their theological cases—by using quoted material attributed to God.

.The Closing Frame: Confession, Penance, and Restoration 

Job’s Confession and Penance

In the opening verses of chapter 40, when God talks directly with Job and asks, for the first time, for a response and possible penance, Job can only say, “Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to you? / My hand I put over my mouth” (40:4). Even with God’s early emphasis in his speech on Job’s lack of knowledge and power, which clearly stood in contrast to Job’s bold criticism of God and accusations of injustice made earlier, he is still not ready for penance. God responds with something like the following: Only when you achieve my power and knowledge (which cannot happen) will you be worthy to put on the display of “pride and preeminence” (40:10) that you exhibited earlier. It becomes clear here that this pride in assuming that he could argue with God on equal footing and level charges against God in the same way he had leveled charges against his three accusers was his only offense that would require penance.

At the beginning of chapter 42, with God’s speech delivered from the whirlwind just completed, Job finally responds to God with a definitive answer to the major question about his ignorance (in 38:2) that God had asked him when he first appeared. It is at this point that Job confesses that he said all those things in criticism of God but “. . . did not understand / wonders beyond me that I did not know” (42:2). Job has become totally convinced of the absolute superiority of God’s omniscient power, knowledge, and abilities through experiencing God’s description of the sweeping yet detailed description of the accomplishment of the creation of the natural world. Then Job informs God that it was the experience of the direct encounter that led him to full repentance: “By the ear’s rumor I heard of You, / and now my eye has seen You. / Therefore do I recant, / and I repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6). In a note to this final line of the poem itself (prior to the closing prose frame), Robert Alter suggests that since Job had not literally seen God but had only heard his voice, Job had been able to “see” or imagine or envision God through the powerful poetry in God’s voice describing God’s handiwork in the magnificent creation oration that was just completed.

In the first prose segment of chapter 42, marking the beginning of the closing frame at verse 7, God confirms Job’s innocence of any sin related to his suffering when he expresses disapproval of Job’s three accusers because they “have not spoken rightly of Me as did my servant Job” (42:7). The accusers, as Alder says in a note to this verse, “were, in effect, corrupted witnesses on God’s behalf” because they “had repeatedly proffered lies—about Job and about the divine system of justice—in order to preserve their pat notion of reward and punishment.”  In contrast, God verifies in this passage that Job had been on the correct side in the debate and had, as we have seen in the discussion of chapter 21, substantially more understanding than his accusers did of the complexity of the realities both within the world and outside of human perception. Still, in the end, he graciously gives his former adversaries an opportunity for forgiveness, as does God. For the author, the pushback is made against the three adversaries who advocated a simplistic view of God as primarily a robotic punisher of what is perceived to be sin, regardless of the possibility of flawed perception in the humans passing initial judgment. 

The Restoration of Job to a New Life

Because of Job’s confession and penance, as well as his earlier life in a state of innocence and impeccable behavior, God “showed favor to Job” and was able to “increase twofold” all that he had possessed before his ordeal began (42:9-10).  Robert Alter (in a note to 42:10) makes the observation that the next step of replacing the children that he had before with the same number of each gender (“seven sons and three daughters”) does not seem to “countless readers . . . as adequate compensation for . . . the loss of the first ten lives,” causing Job grief and anguish far beyond any loss of material possessions. By way of explanation, Alter goes on to say that the original ancient-world readership, perhaps more clearly than the modern one, would recognize that the book is ending “in the folktale of the frame story, where everything is reduced to schematic patterns and formulaic numbers, and perhaps in this world such a question cannot properly be asked.”   Even so, there are still many questions that modern readers can indeed ask at the very end when The Book of Job breaks away from the formula and ends with a big surprise, to be discussed in the next and final section of this article.

 

PART 4: PUSHBACK AGAINST OPPRESSION OF WOMEN, Contrasting Views of God

 

The Author’s Final Pushback: Inheritance Law and the Treatment of Women 

Neither in the Torah nor in later biblical writings is there reference to a single approved law or practice that would permit any daughter to inherit property from her father as long as there was at least one living son. In such cases the son or sons would inherit all the property, and the daughter or daughters would not be permitted to inherit any part of the estate. Thus the final radical action taken by Job at the end of the final chapter is in dividing his estate in such a way (presumably equally) so that the three daughters and the seven sons all, equally and together, inherit individual estates created from the larger estate owned and controlled by their father. Following is the entire passage: “And he had seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first one Dove and the name of the second Cinnamon and the name of the third Horn of Eyeshade. And there were no women in the land so beautiful as Job’s daughters. And their father gave them an estate among their brothers” (42:13-15, Alter’s translation). In a note to this passage, Alter says that in using these unusual names for the daughters and emphasizing their great beauty, “the writer may have wanted to intimate that after all Job’s suffering, which included hideous disfigurement as well as violent loss, a principle of grace and beauty enters his life in the restoration of his fortunes. Thus the three daughters have names associated with feminine delicacy and the arts of attraction. . . .”

In this passage, Job’s motives for this action are suggested but not fully obvious, but the action itself, which requires Job’s violation of established Hebrew law as well as accepted social practice, is evidence enough that the author of Job was not only suggesting radical change but also overtly pushing back against established law as well as accepted social practice and advocating boldly for acceptance of gender equality in inheritance eligibility.  

Torah Law on Inheritance by Women 

In the Torah, the clearest expression of inheritance law as related to women is described as coming to the Israelites directly from God, like other law, and is found in The Book of Numbers, chapter 27, verse 8, when God is quoted as saying to Moses: “And to the Israelites you shall speak, saying, ‘Should a man die without having a son, you shall pass on his estate to his daughter’” (Alter’s translation, vol. 1). A supplement to God’s original order that could apply to Job’s daughters, also ordered by God to be carried out by the Israelites, is as follows: “And every daughter inheriting an estate from the tribes of the Israelites shall become wife to someone from the clan of his father’s tribe, so that the Israelites may inherit each man the estate of his fathers” (36:8). This should be read as an amendment to the original order from God so that the tribes would not lose their God-given property to someone outside the tribe.

The law was formulated after the five daughters of Zelophehad, whose father had died without ever having a son, asked for a ruling on their request to inherit the family property. The points in their argument are about the specifics of their situation, such as in how their father had always been loyal to God and deserves that his name should not be lost but should be carried forward by his daughters (29:3). The amendment requiring daughters to marry within the tribe was put in place to prevent inheritance by future husbands who might be outsiders. Thus the full law, as it stands, states that the inheritance of property after the father dies could go to the daughters only if there are no sons and that those who choose to marry must marry a member of their tribe to remain eligible.

This text, which permits the inclusion of daughters as possible inheritors of property (but only if there are no sons), may very well have been the very text that the author of Job had in mind when he made the decision to have Job himself take action to amend and update this existing law. Thus he has Job implement this radical change to a law that already has been helpful to a minority of women who would qualify, but the author must have felt that this earlier accommodation which had helped a small minority of women did not go nearly far enough. To make a radical statement that is bound to be controversial, the Job author portrays his Job character as wanting his daughters to inherit their equal share (because of their equal worth) in a family that does have sons as well as daughters. Whether the author is reacting to this particular Torah text or not, the author still has Job himself take an action that is in violation of existing law and, in his family, replacing that law with an upgrade containing a bold new idea: full equality of sons and daughters in the inheritance of property, with no strings attached (or stated) involving the future lives and marital choices of the daughters.

The Larger Significance of the Ending: Job’s Alternative View of God

In the big picture, what The Book of Job is all about is the larger struggle of both Job himself as a character and the great man, in life, who is the author of this work. And they have been struggling mightily throughout this work to find for themselves a concept of God which is more accurate than the majority view and more acceptable to them than are the concepts they are arguing against. In my view, this third pushback by the author against the majority view at the end of the closing frame provides a clue to a possible resolution of the struggle. In approaching this topic, I will go, as we have before, to John Dominic Crossan, this time for terminology and concepts that will help us with the job of clarifying the overall pattern of The Book of Job and determining how the ending of this work fits that pattern.

Crossan, in How to Read the Bible . . ., referenced earlier, describes two, often contradictory, types of justice that are administered by God and which he calls retributive justice and distributive justice (pp. 16-18). If God were in the process of administering retributive justice, he would be angry and sometimes violent in using harsh punishment for retribution against offences against him, often in brutal ways (just as God is depicted in Deuteronomy 28, as we saw earlier, and, for Christians, throughout The Book of Revelation in The New Testament). This is the type of justice that Job’s three accusers believed in and expressed support for, regardless of the intense suffering of their “friend” Job to whom they expressed no compassion. The “friends” were so zealous in enforcement that they would not listen to rational argument or respond to emotional, anguish-driven pleas. No wonder Crossan declares them “Deuteronomic fundamentalists” (p. 98). 

On the other hand, if God is depicted as administering distributive justice, he would be administering the type of justice depicted in the Torah in Leviticus 25 and elsewhere. Crossan identifies both Genesis 1 and the related Leviticus depiction of what he calls Sabbath theology as major examples of the administration of this type of justice (pp. 75-80). In Leviticus 25, God tells Moses to speak for him in directing landowners to implement a system of Sabbath observance during Sabbath days (every 7th day), Sabbath years (every 7th year), and Jubilee years (every 50th year). These days and years would be devoted to fulfilling God’s commands to devote Sabbath days of rest for all (including indentured slaves), devoting Sabbath years to resting the land by not growing crops, providing food (previously saved in storage) regularly for everyone, and releasing indentured slaves from servitude as appropriate, and in the Jubilee year releasing all remaining slaves, freeing them from debt, and returning them to the property which was originally held by their families. In this system, a loving God provides support for willing or sometimes reluctant humans who have been asked by God to share their wealth and do what is right in helping the slaves and helping society at large to reset and restore the world to a better place. Punishment is not even a part of this endeavor and is never even mentioned. Instead, there is compassion, love, and a push toward equality in freeing the slaves so they can be restored to the land which God had originally ordained to their families.

In The Book of Job, the God who comes to Job as a voice from a whirlwind in chapter 37, and remains through the beginning portion of the closing frame in chapter 42, serves as a model for Job as an administrator of distributive justice. While God is initially pushing Job to recognize that he has less knowledge and less power than he thought when he was admonishing God earlier, the main pattern of God’s long speech in chapters 38-41 is really the same pattern used in Genesis 1, but minus any mention of the creation of humans. And in addition, Genesis 1 and Job 37-41 are both revelations of the character of God. In both works, God is portrayed as a caring, loving, administrator of all he created, but the God in chapters 38-41 of The Book of Job   is portrayed in much more detail. In the creation process, this God gives each component of the natural world equal care and attention, down to the last detail. He cares about all creatures and wants them to be able to remain in the wild in the environment where they can be free and unrestrained. He cares about Job (representing all of humanity) and wants him to recognize his limitations yet grow in understanding as he progresses in life. As it is in Genesis 1, there is nothing in this God’s creation story about punishment or retribution. The God here, as well as in Genesis 1, is the opposite of the Deuteronomic God that Job’s accusers supported.

Earlier, in chapter 2l, Job is beginning to come to a full understanding of the inadequacy, for him, of a God who would insist in Deuteronomy that he will inflict brutal punishment on those who do not follow the law and yet, as Job makes clear in chapter 21, he and others have seen and known such people who have lived outside the law and have gone to their graves without repentance and without punishment. Job, if not his accusers, has concluded that belief in this kind of God is not based on valid evidence, but he is still confused because he cannot yet see an alternative. His troubled confusion is resolved, however, when he comes “face to face” with what he can perceive as the actual God, much bigger in every way than the retributive God of Deuteronomy. That alternative is found in the God who comes to him in the whirlwind. This is a God who loves and cares for all of creation, including humans, and distributes to all creatures what they need, and he distributes justice fairly, without use of brutal punishment. This is the God that Job finally becomes ready to accept (at the beginning of the final chapter) and move on with his life.

Thus Job’s decision to distribute his inheritance equally to his daughters as well as his sons can be seen as action that is worthy of the prime position at the closing of the narrative, as a kind of mini-climax. Far from being an afterthought, it can be seen as the logical culmination of Job’s story. This action marks the reset of his new life following the old life that he had lived before his ordeal, before he had come to an understanding of the true God whom he fully accepts in his confessional at the beginning of the last chapter, immediately following God’s whirlwind speech, when he says that before this experience with God, “I told but did not understand, / wonders beyond me that I did not know” (42:3). Before, he was limited and confused; now he can expand his perception to knowledge of the true God, the God of distributive justice, love, and sharing, with a push toward equality among humans. And he can be an administrator of this kind of justice in the parts of the world that he can influence.

In addition he can more clearly see the inadequacy of the God of his accusers, the God of retributive justice through punishment, violence, and a push toward the exclusion of others. Job’s new understanding is confirmed when God says to the three accusers at the beginning of the closing frame, “. . . you have not spoken rightly of me, as did my servant Job,” a judgment that has multiple meanings and great significance.

It is God’s unqualified approval of Job and Job’s new view of God whom he now represents and wants to emulate, along with God’s clear rejection of the three accusers and their view of God that makes Job ready to reset his life. Job is now like a slave during the year of Jubilee, and can begin his new life with new efforts to please his God and do what he can to help others who are deserving and make his own push toward equality in improving the world in which he lives. Thus Job, in the smaller world of his family several years later, takes his first step by implementing the meaningful action of changing the lives of his daughters for the better by distributing to them the gift of equal treatment as an act of distributive justice.

 

Final Thoughts on the Author and His Motives for Pushback against the Majority

For the author of The Book of Job, Job’s gift of equal treatment for the daughters marks the author’s third pushback against what he considers to be beliefs that are based on existing laws and practices that are wrongheaded and inconsistent with the alternative view of God that he clearly has come to hold. Being a gifted writer and a storyteller himself, it must have been evident to him that one author, Moses, so long ago in Hebrew history, could not have written, by himself, the five books of the Torah and that the text of the Torah had to have been written and edited by a multitude of writers and editors sometimes with differing views of God. This best writer in the language could see how differing styles of writing are used from section to section of the books of the Torah and how one section of the Torah might differ so markedly from another with presumably the same God being quoted at the beginning of each passage and authorizing a new law that could contradict another in a different location in the Torah, with both somehow using direct quotations from God. Note the differences, for example, between the God who ordered the Sabbath day, month, and year plan in Leviticus 25 (which became a minority view in the Job poet’s day) and the God who ordered the plan for harsh and violent punishments for lawbreakers in Deuteronomy 28 (which became the majority view in the Job poet’s day). One possible answer that he could have considered is that the quoted speeches of God in all the Torah texts are not the exact words of God but the products of the imaginations of the writers, just like the quoted speeches of God came from his own imagination in his work, The Book of Job. Thus he, in his view, must have felt free to criticize some laws with which he had disagreement and still be loyal to his God. Some of the writers simply could be mistaken. 

In writing The Book of Job, and pushing back against what he considered to be erroneous, the author also could have been responding positively to a minority view of God, like that expressed in locations like Leviticus 25 or Genesis 1, that was compelling to him. It is possible and even likely that he had found an alternate theology within the Torah itself which spoke to him so powerfully that he was willing to take all the risks involved in writing and publishing The Book of Job. This genius, this best ancient poet in the Hebrew language, with his probable acquaintance with other writers and knowledge of information from the past that they might have acquired, was likely aware of at least some of the compelling evidence brought to the full light of day in the modern world by Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible (Simon & Schuster, 1987) with his comprehensive and compelling assessment of the complex process by which the Torah, the first five books of The Hebrew Bible, were written and edited by different groups of writers in different locations.

It is evident to me also that in addition to producing a great work of literature, the author of The Book of Job was using this product of his own creation to push back on views with which he disagreed and to provide his readers with an opportunity to consider the validity of alternate perspectives. In doing so, he simply lets his characters do the talking and uses them to push back against three possibly false assumptions of the readership: (1) that the Deuteronomy 28 account of reward-punishment theology presents the view of God that humans must accept; (2) that the Genesis 1 account, as great as it is, is the final word on the rights of humans to use and abuse animals and other components of the natural world for their own benefit; and (3) that the Numbers 27 account is the final word on the rights of women in the inheritance process. In accomplishing these pushbacks, he took great risks in losing the acceptance of his contemporaries and jeopardizing his reputation to such a degree that he could be condemned as a heretic and lose any hope he might have for the survival of his influence on future audiences. As Robert Alter suggests, the later acceptance of The Book of Job into The Hebrew Bible most likely resulted from a final judgment that the sheer greatness of this writer and his work should carry the day (Alter, “Introduction,” pp. 457-58).  Almost miraculously, The Book of Job was enabled to continue to be influential, even today, on the reading audiences of the modern world and remain widely appreciated as an important biblical book and a great work of literature.

End

About the Author

Dan C. Jones, PhD is a retired Professor of English and Division Chair at Wytheville Community College in Virginia and currently lives in Jefferson City, Tennessee, his wife’s hometown. His lifelong interest in issues related to religion was enhanced by reading, over many years, most of the books produced by progressive writers such as John Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and others.

In recent years, he has been writing articles for community college journals on the challenges of teaching biblical texts in the college world literature course. The article he is most proud of is titled “The Adam and Eve Story: Transition from Innocence to Experience” that was published in the Community College Humanities Review in the spring 2020 issue. The 7000-word article includes a new interpretation and a full analysis of Genesis 2-3.