Job and Postexilic Wisdom
THE BOOK OF JOB
Job and His Daughters by William Blake.
A SYMPTOM OF WISDOM’S NEW STANDING. PATIENCE AND PATIENTS. CHALLENGE OF THE SATAN. REFUSING TO BE COMFORTED. “BLESSED JOB.”
Job was put to the test by God, at Satan’s instigation. Did he pass the test, or fail?
The broad characteristics of the wisdom movement have already been examined: its international character, its favorite literary form (the mashal, or proverb), and its underlying ideology of self-restraint and moderation. When did this way of thinking begin to leave its mark on the books that were to make up the Hebrew Bible? Scholars have found traces of wisdom teachings in a number of pre-exilic books and passages,1 including chapters in the books of Amos,2 Hosea,3 Isaiah,4 as well as in some pre-exilic psalms,5 parts of Leviticus,6 and in Deuteronomy.7 Considered as a whole, however, the corpus of putatively pre-exilic writings does not indicate that wisdom was a particularly widespread pursuit. Rather, it was in the period after the return from Babylonian exile that the wisdom ideology truly began to emerge as a dominant stream in biblical texts.8
Perhaps the Jews’ half-century stay in Babylon had something to do with this change. Babylon was certainly home to its own, centuries-old wisdom traditions, and it had its own impressive cadre of professional sages and wisdom teachers. It is impossible to know if, and to what extent, the exiled Jews came into direct contact with Babylonian wisdom, but its role in shaping the overall cultural climate in which they lived can scarcely be doubted. What is more, the very fact of their living in exile as a conquered people may have drawn many Jews to question some of their old views—of themselves and of their place in the grand scheme of things. Suddenly they were merely one very small people in a world of mighty nations. It is easy to see how, under such circumstances, the wisdom outlook might exercise a certain appeal: universalist in character, it posited a great set of immutable rules underlying all of reality, whether that reality was west of the Jordan or east of the Euphrates.
Crucial as well were wisdom’s views on the subject of reward and punishment. Wisdom’s advocates posited an utterly just world, in which the righteous were ultimately rewarded and the wicked punished. But divine justice often took years to work itself out. This certainly corresponded to at least one explanation for the catastrophic fall of Jerusalem. The people had sinned and broken their covenant with God; it took a while, but ultimately they were punished, which was altogether right and proper. But by the same logic, the wicked Babylonians ought not to be rewarded for their depredations. That, too, took a while, but ultimately they were also punished, utterly routed by the Persian Empire. All this seemed to confirm the wisdom outlook.
And then there was the whole matter of patience. Since divine justice did take time, a crucial virtue in the world of wisdom was the ability to tough it out. “Just as the completion of a thing is better than its beginning, so is patience better than a haughty spirit” (Eccles. 7:8).9 The way of wisdom was thus one of waiting for God’s inevitable justice to work itself out. In Hebrew as in English, the idea of patience is related to suffering. (People in the doctor’s waiting room are called patients not because they are waiting, but because they are suffering [Latin patior] from some medical problem.) The key to survival and ultimate triumph was often the ability to endure pain. This was another side of the wisdom outlook that must have appealed to the Jerusalem exiles in Babylon, many of them enduring present suffering in the hope that eventually things would change.
Perhaps for all these reasons, the people of Judah, reestablished in their ancient homeland after the edict of Cyrus (538 BCE), were more inclined to the wisdom outlook than before the exile. This is the period in which, scholars say, large chunks of the book of Proverbs, as well as the entire book of Ecclesiastes, were written; most of the Psalter’s “wisdom psalms” are likewise dated to this period. Books like Tobit and the Wisdom of Ben Sira (Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon—all ultimately excluded from the Jewish canon but preserved by Christians—are also products of the postexilic age. Perhaps most significantly, this is the period when the sage interpreter of Scripture first emerged in full force and soon began to change utterly the way sacred texts from the ancient past would be read and understood.
Job’s Protest
It would be wrong, however, to say that the Jews were entirely won over by the wisdom outlook. We have already seen that the book of Ecclesiastes is profoundly divided on the subject. On the one hand it endorses the wisdom way of life: “I saw that wisdom’s advantage over folly is like that of light over darkness: the sage’s eyes are in his head, but the fool walks about in the dark” (Eccles. 3:13–14). On the other hand, this author cannot help but tack onto the last sentence a further observation: “but I also realized that everyone meets the same end.” No matter what the sages say, Ecclesiastes opines, the world really isn’t fair: the righteous and wicked both die; indeed, “It happens that a righteous man perishes in his righteousness, while a wicked one lives on despite his wickedness” (Eccles. 7:15). This, and all the other injustices of the world, are hebel—elusive, baffling, and if you dare say it, perhaps just plain wrong.
The book of Job adopts a somewhat similar stance. Its opening scene takes place in Heaven. An accuser, the “Satan,”117 comes before God and challenges Him concerning someone whom God considers to be an exemplary person, a sage of blameless virtue, Job:
One day the sons of God [= angels, heavenly beings] came to stand before the LORD, and among them was the Satan [that is, the Accusing Angel]. The LORD said to the Satan, “Where are you coming from?” The Satan answered the LORD, “From wandering about the earth and walking all around it.” The LORD said to the Satan, “Then you must have noticed my servant Job. Truly, there is no one like him on earth, so blameless and upright a man, who fears God and avoids any wrongdoing.” The Satan answered the LORD, “Is Job God-fearing for no reason? Haven’t You been protecting him and his house and everything that he possesses on all sides? You have blessed his holdings, and his earthly assets have only increased. But stretch out Your hand and hurt everything he has, and then see if he does not curse You to Your face.” The LORD said to the Satan, “All right; whatever he owns is now in your power. Just make sure that you do not lay a hand on him!” So the Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.
The Satan sets to work at once, arranging for everything that is Job’s—including even his children—to be destroyed. But Job, a champion of wisdom, takes it all with equanimity. What is wealth, or even family? “I was naked when I came out of my mother’s womb,” he says, “and naked will I return [that is, without any possessions or kin]. Whether the LORD gives or the LORD takes, blessed be the name of the LORD” (1:21).
Frustrated, the Satan returns to God and says that the test was not really fair: if Job himself were physically afflicted, then he surely would be a little less philosophical! God agrees to up the ante—“Just don’t kill him!” He says (2:6). The Satan then arranges for Job’s body to be afflicted “with loathsome sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head” (2:7). But Job knows how to take it. “Should we accept only the good from God and not accept the bad?” he asks (2:10).
Refusing to Be Comforted
All this is the frame story that leads to the heart of the book, Job’s discussions with his comforters. There was a certain ritual practiced in the ancient Near East by anyone who had endured a severe loss—for example, the death of a parent or other close relative. The person would be visited by friends and family, who would seek to reconcile him or her to what had happened. But the normal, expected posture of the sufferer in such circumstances was to “refuse to be comforted,” at least for a time. This ritual of mourning called for sufferers to reject all such efforts for a while and remain plunged in grief, tearing their clothes, putting ashes on their heads, and wearing sackcloth (very scratchy and uncomfortable). So, for example, when Jacob’s sons come to him with the (false, as it turned out) evidence that his son Joseph had been killed by a wild animal,
He recognized it [Joseph’s tunic], and said, “My son’s robe! A wild animal must have eaten him; Joseph has been mauled to death!” Then Jacob tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and daughters tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “No,” he said, “I will go down in mourning to my son in Sheol.” Thus his father bewailed him.
The people who come to perform this ritual for Job are not, it turns out, family members but fellow sages—professors of wisdom, one might say. The heart of the book thus consists of a series of learned exchanges between these exponents of orthodox wisdom and Job, who, in “refusing to be comforted,” ultimately calls into question the most hallowed doctrines of the wisdom outlook.
Their exchanges start off slowly. At first, Job simply bemoans his fate, and his colleagues politely suggest that he is not following the very dictates of wisdom that he has long taught. “Your words have saved many from falling; the weak-kneed you’ve kept on their feet. But now that it’s your turn, you falter; when it comes to yourself, you give way” (4:4–5). But Job refuses to toe the wisdom line. “This can’t be right!” he says again and again, and eventually he turns the argument to divine justice itself. God, he says, is supposed to reward the just and punish the wicked—but anyone with eyes to see knows that this is simply not the case.
Why do the wicked live on? Growing older, they only get richer.
They multiply, smile on descendants, while they themselves live securely—no rod of God’s ever strikes them.
The bulls in their fields rut on demand and their cows give birth without fail.
Their offspring gambol like sheep, their children dance in a round,
playing on harp and timbrel, singing to the sound of the pipe.
They live out their days in comfort, then peacefully go to Sheol.
To God they say, “Let me be. I have no desire to revere You.
What is God, after all, that we serve Him? What good does it do to pray?”
Yet all that they have didn’t come from themselves—the fate of the wicked is too much for me.
How often is their light snuffed out, as their downfall at last overtakes them?
Let God, in His anger, repay them! Send them off like straw in the wind, like the chaff that the storm bears away.
“God visits the sins on the children”? Let Him punish the sinner himself!
Let his own eyes behold his destruction! Let him taste the Almighty’s displeasure!
Will he see when his family is stricken, when their lives are severed in half?
Meanwhile, he seems to best God, as if he were the heavenly judge!
Oh, one man dies in perfect condition; how tranquil he was, at his ease.
His haunches were full and plump, his bone marrow rich and moist.
Another man dies with gullet unfilled—never once did he taste a good meal.
Now the two lie together in dirt, as the worms of the grave eat away.
The conversation seesaws back and forth: at times it sounds as if the “wisdom side” has a point, but Job parries every argument. Finally comes the dramatic denouement, when God Himself intervenes, speaking to Job “out of a whirlwind” (38:1). What He says, in effect, is: “Job, you don’t begin to understand. You have no real idea of the great rules underlying existence.”
Where were you when I made earth’s foundations? Tell me, if you are so smart.
Who fixed its size—you must know!—or measured its breadth with a cord?
In what were its bases contained, and who laid its cornerstone down,
as the morning stars droned in chorus, and the sons of God all gave voice? . . .
Have your eyes seen the gateway to Death, or gazed at the entrance to blackness?
Have you surveyed the earth as a whole? (Tell Me as soon as you have.)
How does one get to light’s source? And where is the home of all darkness?
Can you take it back to its mountain, or follow the path to its house?
You were born back then—you must know! Your life has gone on for so long!
Confronted with this (rather cloyingly sarcastic) evidence of his own ignorance, Job crumbles. “I am too small to give answer. I cover my mouth with my hands,” he says (40:4). What else could he say? At this juncture, God restores Job to his former state of well-being:
The LORD blessed Job’s latter years more than his beginning. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters . . . In the whole land, no women were as beautiful as Job’s daughters; their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. Job went on to live [to the age of] one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, four generations. And Job died, old and full of days.
Some scholars have questioned the significance of the book’s ending, suggesting that it may ultimately be intended ironically, even comically—but that hardly seems likely. The author’s message is not so elusive. Job’s questioning of divine justice may not have conformed to the dictates of orthodox wisdom, but that was precisely the author’s point. Like Ecclesiastes, this writer could not quite make his peace with what the “sages of the East” said about suffering. Sometimes, he says, suffering seems to be utterly undeserved and unjustifiable; we accomplish nothing by pretending that it is otherwise. At the same time, however, human knowledge is limited: we were not there when God was setting up the rules of our game. In the end—as with many a book of dialogues—the author of Job is playing both sides with his whole heart. His answer is neither Job’s nor the comforters’ nor, for that matter, even God’s, but all three together—which is to say, his answer is the back-and-forth of the book itself.
No one knows for sure when the book of Job was written. Some modern scholars have claimed on the basis of its language that it is a very ancient work, indeed, one of non-Israelite origin, but there is little in the book itself to support such a view. The language is, to put it impolitely, phony baloney, a language no real person ever spoke. The reason is that, while the book is written basically in Hebrew, the author has stuffed it with loan words from Aramaic, Akkadian, and other foreign tongues. This was done in an attempt to give the work a foreign flavor—rather the way Tolstoy liked to insert long passages of French into his Russian novels so that readers would feel they were peering into the aristocratic circles of the dvorjanstvo. The loan words in Job are similarly meant to suggest the slightly foreign, highbrow world of wisdom sages. For the same reason, neither Job nor any of the other characters is described as an Israelite: they are all from lands to the southeast of Israel, in or near the region of northwest Arabia, a traditional home of Semitic wisdom. But peering beyond this patina of foreignness, one can see words or turns of phrase found elsewhere only in the book of Jeremiah or the latter part of the book of Isaiah; that might suggest that the book’s true genesis was in the time of the Babylonian exile or shortly thereafter. That was also a period when, for the first time, a Jewish writer might expect his learned readership to recognize many or all of the learned Aramaisms in his composition. Such a date, scholars say, would also fit the content. It would make the most sense for this book to have been composed at a time when the wisdom philosophy was well known, and yet not quite acceptable to Judean sensibilities. Both Job and Ecclesiastes attest to the growing power of wisdom in postexilic times—and to the lovers’ quarrel that the returning exiles had with its view of divine justice and human suffering.
For some ancient interpreters, it is worth noting, the book of Job was a problem—for precisely the same reason that biblical figures like Esau or Balaam were a problem: “Is he good or bad?” There was one biblical suggestion that Job was altogether good: the prophet Ezekiel had mentioned a certain “Job,” presumably the same one as in our book, who, along with Noah and Dan[i]el, was distinguished by his righteousness (Ezek. 14:14, 20). But in the book of Job itself, Job says some potentially blasphemous things, and he ends up being reproved by God—certainly not a good sign. Once the Bible had become a great book of lessons, the question “What am I to learn from this?” had to have a straightforward answer: the sort of nuanced, highly sophisticated, both-sides-against-the-middle stance of Job’s author did not provide one. Jewish interpreters were thus deeply divided, and the controversy surrounding him continued throughout the Middle Ages.10
For Christians, on the other hand, the matter was rather simple. To begin with, the fact that Job was apparently not an Israelite but someone from “the land of Uz” (1:1) might serve as proof that one did not have to be a genetic Israelite in order to be altogether righteous and good—so Christian interpreters tended to highlight Job’s virtue.11 A New Testament epistle singles out Job as the outstanding model of faithful endurance:
As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Indeed, we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
Job’s fundamental righteousness continued to be a favorite Christian theme thereafter:
Think again, I ask you, upon the holy Job. He was covered all over with sores, afflicted in all his limbs, and filled with pain over his entire body. [Yet] he was not swayed in his affliction, nor did he falter even in the mass of his own words, but “in all those things he did not sin with his lips” [Job 2:10], as Scripture testifies. Rather, he found strength in his affliction, through which he was strengthened in Christ.
Ambrose of Milan, The Prayer of Job12
As a result of the New Testament passage cited above, Job’s standard epithet in Western Christianity became “the blessed Job” (beatus Iob). Along with his blessedness was the fact that Job’s suffering seemed to have presaged that of Christ on the cross. Job could thus join other Old Testament figures (Adam, Abel, Enoch, and so forth) as a typological foreshadowing of Jesus. This approach found its most eloquent expression in Milton’s minor epic, Paradise Regained.13