Let us remember Job who, having lost everything—his children, his friends, his possessions, and even his argument with God—still found the strength to begin again, to rebuild his life. . . . Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal concerns all humanity. . . . He demonstrated that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair. The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.
—Elie Wiesel, Nobel lecture, 1986
Often thought to be the Bible’s most pessimistic volume, the book of Job contains some two dozen explicit references to hope. Additionally, its frequent use of the root kof-vav-hey, as in tikvah, stands in stark contrast to the root’s appearance just once in the Torah in the context of hope.1
The reason for Job’s exceptional focus on hope may lie in its period of composition. Scholars date the book from the late sixth or early fifth centuries BCE—later than many other parts of the Bible—and classify it as Wisdom Literature, a genre in which philosophical questions about hope, and the language to discuss it, rose to a new level of prominence.
Recalling Gabriel Marcel’s formulation that hope is the individual’s response to a trial (see chapter 3), it’s also no wonder that the book of Job has so much to say about hope.2 The story opens with the Adversary (ha-Satan) asking God’s permission to test Job’s faith with a series of escalating blows—the loss of his property, his children, and finally, the affliction of his body with repulsive and painful sores. Job’s response to his trial wavers between deep despair and defiant hope. As such, Job provides a wealth of insights about the nature of hope and the struggle to maintain it under fire. Maybe that’s why a midrash says that “When they were enslaved in Egypt, Moses would bring the book of Job and show it to the elders of Israel so that they would listen and learn that there is hope for those who trust in God—that good can follow bad.”3
This chapter reframes the book of Job from a treatise on the theological significance of human suffering to a journey about finding and maintaining hope amid catastrophe—including the hope for vindication.4
Today, we don’t all share the theological assumptions prevalent in Job’s era. We don’t automatically see God’s punishment as the reason things go wrong or see divine reward as the reason things go well. We don’t all buy into the notion that a supernatural adversary (ha-Satan) tempting the Divine—as happens in Job—would test the faithfulness of human beings by visiting calamities on them. Nor do we all find the hand of God in every chance event or natural disaster.
In his classic When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Harold Kushner puts it this way:
A change of wind direction or the shifting of a tectonic plate can cause a hurricane or earthquake to move toward a populated area instead of out into an uninhabited stretch of land. Why? . . . A drunken driver steers his car over the center line of the highway and collides with the green Chevrolet instead of the red Ford fifty feet away. An engine bolt breaks on flight 205 instead of flight 209. There is no message in all of that. There is no reason for those particular people to be afflicted rather than others. These events do not reflect God’s choices.5
If we remove God’s hand from trial and tragedy, it is time that we reread Job in this light as well.
This reading of Job yields vital insights on the role of hope in the human capacity to endure suffering.
Job, a righteous, vigorous, powerful man, experiences one catastrophe after another: murderous criminal attacks on his livestock operations, the loss of sheep and shepherds in a lightning strike (“God’s fire”), the death of his ten children in a windstorm, and, finally, illness, “a severe inflammation on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (2:7). Understandably, Job’s hope begins to run out. He doubts if life is worth continuing. He rants to his friends about the fate that has befallen him, and they only add fuel to the fire by suggesting he deserves it. Eventually, Job marshals his hope and finds his way back to life. His health returns, he has more children, and he re-creates the flourishing enterprise that spawned his wealth and influence the first time around.
Read this way, Job becomes the story of a survivor who endures terrible tragedy and wanders between hope and despair, ultimately choosing hope and managing to begin a new life. His new offspring do not erase the pain of losing his first children. Indeed, the book of Job tells us that after Job’s fortunes are restored, his siblings and former friends “consoled and comforted him for all the misfortune that YHWH had brought upon him” (42:11). Job’s second family embodies his hope for the future: the affirmation of life by a man who lost everything but refuses to give up.
The book can also be read as Job’s persistent hope and ultimate triumph over a legal system that failed to render true justice. Primo Levi (1919–87) called Job the universal “just man oppressed by injustice.”6 Legal scholar Benjamin L. Berger puts it this way:
The fact that, in Job’s suffering, the God of Justice is revealed as unjust shakes Job’s world and challenges the friends in a way that other experiences of suffering cannot. It is for the same reason that wrongful convictions are such grave instances of injustice. This brand of injustice indicts the system. . . . If it inflicts suffering where none is due, the system has created senselessness instead of reason; it has become an agent of disorder.7
Job’s decision to sue God for justice makes him a hero to all victims of injustice and their allies, to all brave enough to pick up the flag of fairness when it has fallen. His message is this: Don’t give up hope on fixing the “system” that has denied you justice. Take the fight to the very top. You never know how the case will turn out. Job’s friends thought his plan was sinful or crazy—until the day God announced that Job had “spoken the truth about Me” (42:7). Job won his argument, even though he never succeeded in bringing God to court. Justice may be slow in coming, but we shouldn’t give up the hope of achieving it.
Many passages in Job that speak of hope and despair can deepen our understanding of how hope functions and evolves, in Job’s life and in our own.
The first mention of hope in the book of Job comes from the mouth of Job after he has sat for seven days in silence with his friends who have come to comfort him:
May those who cast spells upon the day damn it,
The ones who are skilled to rouse Leviathan;
May its twilight stars remain dark;
May it hope for light and have none;
May it not see the glimmerings of the dawn. (3:8–9)8
Job has just cursed the day of his birth and the night of his conception. Images of darkness, blackness, and gloom pile one upon the next as Job vents his conviction that his life is not worth the suffering he endures. Now he calls upon mighty magicians who can rouse the Leviathan, a mythological symbol of primordial chaos and disorder, to “cast spells upon the day, damn” the day of his birth.
“Given the mythological background of the stanza,” the contemporary Job commentator C. L. Seow reflects,
one wonders if there is not an allusion . . . to the sun’s struggle to get through the darkness of the netherworld; let it (the sun) hope. Presumably, then, with the rousing of the chaos monster, Job means that any hope for light would dissipate; the daily routine of the sun is broken and there will be no hope for it.9
Job’s words illustrate the archetypal association between hope and light, despair and darkness. In rapid succession, Satan’s blows knock Job from the pinnacle of happiness to the pit of misery—to the point he wishes to erase his very existence. He is overwhelmed by grief (and mental health professionals often observe expressions of hopelessness during the most acute phases of grief). Yet he is also angry and depressed (the second and third of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving).10 Job cannot see beyond a present steeped in pain. The despair of grief is an eternal night. The losses Job has suffered lead to what Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal calls a “detachment from reality.”11 Job no longer knows that no night is truly without end—that “the sun also rises” as Ecclesiastes (1:5) and, later, Ernest Hemmingway put it.
And still, there is a hint of something in this passage that offers an inkling of hope. In railing against his plight, Job invokes the rhythm and imagery of nature, which convey that time will pass. Night will give way to morning. Darkness may give way to light, and hopelessness to hope.
Guilt may also exacerbate Job’s sense of hopelessness. Perhaps guilt explains why Job cannot accept his friend Eliphaz’s assurances, posed as questions, that his righteousness ought to provide him with a measure of hope:
See, you have encouraged many;
You have strengthened failing hands.
Your words have kept [one] who stumbled from falling;
You have braced knees that gave way.
But now that it overtakes you, it is too much;
It reaches you and you are unnerved. (4:3–5)
Is not your piety your confidence,
Your integrity your hope?
Think now, what innocent [person] ever perished?
Where have the upright been destroyed? (4:6–7)
As I have seen, those who plow evil
And sow mischief reap them. (4:8)
As words of comfort, Eliphaz’s remarks fall short. In fact, the Talmud uses verses 4:6–7 as an example of what not to say to someone who is suffering, afflicted with illness, or has buried a child—all of which have befallen Job.12 But as veiled accusations, Eliphaz’s observations may well hit their mark in stirring up Job’s doubts about his own goodness.
The passage begins by recalling that Job’s reputation included dispensing comfort to the suffering. An early midrash recounts Job’s approach: To the blind, the deaf, or the lame he would say that God had created them that way, that they had no right to protest the Creator’s will, and that in time God would heal them.13 But as Eliphaz points out, Job is not so good at taking his own advice. More than that, having now truly experienced suffering himself, perhaps Job regrets the platitudes he so readily dispensed in the name of sympathy. Perhaps now he realizes the pain he inflicted on those who sought solace. Indeed, some commentators view Eliphaz’s reassurances as sarcastic, as if to say, “Your righteousness is so flawed, you shouldn’t have hope.”14
Pointing to another potential source of Job’s guilt, Job scholar Norman C. Habel observes that “as priest of a patriarchal household, Job is responsible for the welfare of his family.”15 In the beginning of the story, when Job’s sons completed their cycle of feasts, Job urged them to purify themselves, and he himself offered sacrifices on their behalf, “for Job thought, ‘Perhaps my children have sinned and blasphemed God in their thoughts.’ This is what Job always used to do” (1:5). Since Job felt responsible for his family’s welfare, the death of his ten children had to have weighed on him as a terrible failing. Shouldn’t he have done more to protect them? Further, if Job lived in fear that his children cloaked their private sinfulness in piety, from whom, if not Job, did they learn this?
Eliphaz’s asking Job to reflect on his piety—and, by implication, to examine his role in his own children’s deaths at the very time when his grief is still so raw—could only increase Job’s sense of guilt. The grieving process often includes a measure of guilt for not having done more to preserve the duration or quality of a lost loved one’s life. When excessive, guilt piled on loss makes a poor fertilizer for hope. From guilt the conviction may grow that one deserves to suffer forever in the pit. “As if Job’s suffering is not enough,” Halbertal observes, “[Job’s friends] would have him go to the grave with the conviction that he has sinned and thus brought evil upon his children.”16
I once asked a friend in her nineties what she hoped for at this point in her life. She’d been an outstanding golfer, successful lawyer, and a pillar of the community. Now she was challenged by difficult but non-life-threatening health issues that compromised her quality of life. She responded with a series of veiled allusions to how she had seriously wronged her deceased husband. She felt terrible, especially because there was no way to make it up to him, no way to meaningfully apologize. She had never allowed anyone even a glimpse of her guilt. Guilt had deprived her of any right to hope for improvements in her own situation. Guilt had imprisoned her hope.
Eliphaz, however, may mean something different than “confidence” when he asks Job:
Is not your piety your confidence,
Your integrity your hope? (4:6)
The Hebrew word for “confidence,” kislatekha, comes from the root kaf-samech-lamed, which, in addition to “hope” (as in “confidence”), can mean “foolishness.” Rashi and a number of commentators who followed him understood it as “foolishness.”17 Rashi thus read the verse like this: “Your fear of heaven is due to foolishness (and not to full understanding), and so are your hope and the sincerity of your ways all foolishness.”18
Some scholars believe that the author of Job intentionally uses the ambiguous kislatekha (hope or foolishness) as a “double-edged word” to add another layer of meaning or irony to the passage.19 The author may be saying that some will inevitably see a given action as hopeful, while others castigate it as foolish. The goal of a particular hope or the means to achieve it may seem foolishly unrealistic—but to abandon that hope or the path toward it prematurely may be equally imprudent. As I see it, the author of Job wants us to understand that hope lies in the eyes of the beholder. We ought to be careful when we are inclined to call someone else’s hope foolish. This person may well see possibilities and paths to reach their goal that we don’t. They may also have more patience than we do.
As we saw, Job’s first mention of hope involved time. Job yearned to turn the clock back and erase the day of his birth. His next mention of hope connects in a different way with time: in relation to patience.
Eliphaz concludes his first speech:
You will know that all is well in your tent;
When you visit your wife you will never fail.
You will see that your offspring are many,
Your descendants like the grass of the earth.
You will come to the grave in ripe old age,
As shocks of grain are taken away in their season. (5:24–26)
Job responds:
Could my anguish but be weighed, and my disaster on the scales be borne,
they would be heavier now than the sand of the sea. (6:2–3)
If only my wish were fulfilled,
and my hope God might grant.
If God would deign to crush me,
loose His hand and tear me apart. (6:8–9)
What is my strength that I should hope?
How long have I to live that I should be patient? (6:11)20
Eliphaz essentially tells Job not to reject God’s reproof, as God will eventually restore Job’s family and fortune—exactly what happens at the end of the story. But rather than providing comfort, Eliphaz’s rosy prediction inflames Job’s pain.
That Eliphaz’s words of encouragement prove wanting likely comes as no surprise to those familiar with basic tenets of psychotherapy or grief counseling: Meet the client where he or she is. You can’t make the client’s pain magically disappear, so sit patiently with it and slowly try to understand it. The benefit to the client lies in their feeling understood and in sharing the depths of suffering with another human being who is strong enough to hear about misery without immediately trying to superimpose a happy ending. Suffice it to say, having sat with Job quietly for a week, Eliphaz’s patience has worn thin, and the proverbial “patience of Job” has run out as well.21 Job’s diminished capacity to hope goes hand in hand with his feeling that life’s horizon is too short to justify patience.22
Patience and hope: Each influences the transit from present to future. Patience reflects our equanimity during the journey. Hope embodies our vision of the destination and the sum of our efforts to reach it. Thus, “the main reason we abandon long-term hopes,” explains Donald Capps, author of Agents of Hope: A Pastoral Psychology, “is that we cannot endure the frustration involved. Patience is the assurance that the hoped-for outcome is worth the frustration and therefore keeps us steadfast in our hope.”23 Because patience and hope are both tied to the future, each demands waiting. In fact, Hebrew verbs meaning “to hope” can also mean “to wait” and are sometimes translated as “to wait patiently.”24
Although Job and Eliphaz share a degree of impatience, their experience of time differs. For Eliphaz, like most people in a state of reasonable mental and physical health, time stretches from the past, through the present, to the future. Hence he has no trouble forecasting a sunny future for his friend: With sufficient time, Job will rebuild his life. Job’s friends “configure time as open and ample,” comments Bible scholar Carole Newsom. “The future, which is always beckoning, is the space within which new things may happen, events that then confer meaning on what has come before.”25 For Job at this moment, however, time oscillates between memories of his halcyon days gone by and his present experience of suffering. Time in his psyche is warped like the clocks in Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory—the past and present eclipsing future possibilities.
Still, by raising the issue of patience, Job also demonstrates that he’s taken a small step in his journey from ultimate despair toward hope. Doubting his ability to endure such suffering or whether he’ll live long enough to get through it, Job now calls on God to strike him down, to put an end to his misery. Earlier Job wished he’d never been born because he could not imagine his pain diminishing. Now he can glimpse an end to his ordeal but doubts if he’ll be able to reach it.
Job uses metaphors of a journey through the desert and the inability to find water to accuse his visitors of being unreliable friends who fail to sustain his hope:26
My brethren are treacherous as a wadi,
Like a bed of wadis, they pass away— (6:15)
The caravans from Tema look;
The convoys from Sheba hope in them. (6:19)
Disappointed in what they had trusted,
They reached it and their hopes were dashed. (6:20)27
To Job, his friends are like a wadi, a dangerous torrent in the rainy season, or otherwise a parched riverbed, but never a secure, dependable source of life-giving water. They are like the oases of Tema and Sheba, but in this case they—the oases and the friends—have run dry.
The metaphors of journey and water are both significant with respect to hope.
Job’s allusion to a journey—to movement—signifies another step beyond unremitting despair. Initially Job could only hope for death. Then he began to wonder if he’d live long enough to recover from his grief and bodily illness. Now Job is comparing himself to a parched desert traveler searching for water. We are witnessing Job’s nascent understanding of recovery as a journey—albeit a tortuous one—toward hope.
The connection between hope and journey is rooted in the Hebrew language. Rashi points out that the word for hope in Job 6:19 (kivu) can refer to an extended line as well. Seow notes that, in ancient times, caravans followed dry wadis—like lines through the desert—“ever hopeful that they would discover” new routes.28 In the above passage from Job, the wadi leads to dashed hopes. Even so, hope serves as a slender line or track of sorts that can guide us through hostile environments and keep us going despite inevitable disappointments.
The unavailability of water speaks to Job’s friends’ general incapacity to provide him with emotional support and specifically to their inability to sustain his hope. Again, the Hebrew language draws the connection between water and hope. In the Bible the word mikveh can refer to “hope” or to a “pool of water.” Jeremiah calls God Mikveh Yisrael, the “Hope of Israel,” and the “Fount of living waters” (Jer. 17:13). Commenting on kivu, Rashi also notes that this word is connected with water in the Creation story: “Let the water below the sky be gathered (yikavu)” (Gen. 1:9). Water sustains the body, hope the soul. When we hope we must pool our inner spiritual resources, gather our strength, so we can get through a trying situation.
Not long after the above passage, Job reverts to the theme of time, and with it life’s futility and evanescence:
Truly [humankind] has a term of service on earth;
[One’s] days are like those of a hireling—
Like a slave who longs for [evening’s] shadows,
Like a hireling who hopes for [the day’s] . . . wage.
So have I been allotted months of futility . . . . (7:1–3)
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle;
they end when the thread of hope gives out.
Remember: My life is just a breath;
my eye will never again see pleasure. (7:6–7)29
Hardly upbeat, the passage nonetheless reveals a development in Job’s thinking. Initially Job compares himself to a day laborer, hoping, but never sure of, receiving his wages. Job depicts an arduous life, but it is no longer the life of one singled out by God for torture. The duration of his ordeal has also lost its eternal quality. Job now speaks of “months of futility,” which Job translator Edward Greenstein understands as suggesting that “Job has not been suffering all that long a time.”30
Next Job compares life and hope to a thread. Translator Raymond Scheindlin elegantly captures tikvah’s dual meanings: “hope” and “thread.” Hope is fragile: It is no more than a slender thread of finite length and limited strength. And yet, Seow observes, “The routine activity of weaving cannot go on without tikvah (thread). So it is with life. When tikvah (hope) is gone, life for all intents and purposes is finished.”31
Weaving requires thread; living fully demands hope. The poet Moshe Ibn Ezra (c. 1060–1135, Spain) put it this way: “Man in the world is like a weaver. He weaves his days like thread/hope. But one day it will be completed. He will run out of the hope/thread of life.”32
Interestingly, at this point, Job compares his life to the weaver’s shuttle and thread, but he is not the weaver. The thread and shuttle remain in the hand of the weaver, likely God (later, in 10:11, Job will speak of God as having woven together his body). Job has lost what psychologists call a sense of agency, the capacity that enables us to imagine ourselves making progress toward a goal. Agency constitutes a key ingredient of hope.33 As theologian Michael Marmur explains: “Hope is a thread, however elusive, that links us to a possible future. It demands that we take hold of it; otherwise, it is just a loose thread.”34 Job’s losses have overwhelmed his capacity to envision a brighter future. He has neither reason nor capacity to grasp the thread of hope. Indeed, he sees the thread—his life—as being solely in God’s hands.
With time, Job’s capacity for taking matters into his own hands—for picking up the thread of hope—will return.
As Job’s dialogues with his friends continue, something new begins to emerge within him: a dream of divine redress.
He is not a man, like me, that I can answer Him,35
That we can go to law together.
No arbiter is between us
To lay his hands on us both.
If He would only take His rod away from me
And not let His terror frighten me,
Then I would speak without fear of Him;
For that is not the way I am. (9:32–35)36
Indeed, I would speak to the Almighty;
I insist on arguing with God. (13:3)
Though He slay me, yet I will trust [or hope] in Him,
Yet I will argue my case before Him. (13:15)
Yet know that God has wronged me;
He has thrown up siege works around me.
I cry, “Violence!” but am not answered;
I shout, but can get no justice. (19:6–7)
Would that I knew how to reach Him,
How to get to His dwelling-place.
I would set out my case before Him
And fill my mouth with arguments.
I would learn what answers He had for me
And know how He would reply to me.
Would He contend with me overbearingly?
Surely He would not accuse me!
There the upright would be cleared by Him,
And I would escape forever from my judge. (23:3–7)
O that I had someone to give me a hearing;
O that Shaddai would reply to my writ,
Or my accuser draw up a true bill! (31:35)37
Over several chapters, Job’s dream develops into a goal: to take God to court and demand justice. At first Job surfaces the idea as if it were a foolhardy fantasy doomed to fail. God showing up in court? And if God did, how could Job possibly contend directly with God when the Bible warns that no one can see God’s face and live (Exod. 33:20)? Beyond this, who would serve as a neutral arbiter in court? God can’t be both judge and defendant! And without an arbitrator, God’s terror might strike him mute.
Eventually, Job casts these doubts aside. Slowly, the dream becomes his raison d’être, his ultimate goal. He sets his sights on bringing God to court.
The very existence of this goal represents an important step toward hope. A goal implies a desired outcome that lies in the future. Hope is another name for the positive feelings a goal inspires—and for one’s ability to pursue it. “Hope is the sum of the mental willpower and waypower [capacity] that you have for your goals,” writes Charles R. Snyder, a pioneering researcher in the psychology of hope.38 Without a goal, for what can you hope? As Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “Hope without an object cannot live.”39
Still, at first blush, Job’s notion seems to overflow with haughty impertinence. Who is Job, or any human being, to shake his fist and call God to court? The psychoanalytically oriented scholar C. Fred Alford concludes that this very desire reveals Job’s sinful nature:
We learn . . . that Job only appeared to be God’s humble servant. In reality, Job was filled with pride—indeed, hubris—imagining that he could put God on the witness stand almost as though God were another earthly power.40
Yet the story of Job emerges from a tradition that not only permits, but celebrates challenging God. Job’s plan to call God to account puts him in the company of biblical heroes—Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. Abraham thunders in protest to God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah: “Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Gen. 18:25). Jacob’s name becomes Israel because he has successfully striven with God (Gen. 32:29). Moses twice challenges God’s angry vows to destroy the Israelites, his appeal following what has been called a “near-perfect law-court structure.”41 Elijah accuses the God of Israel of turning the hearts of the people “backward” and demands an immediate demonstration of divine power to restore their faith (1 Kings 18:37). Confronting God for making him a “constant laughingstock,” the object of “constant disgrace and contempt,” Jeremiah calls for divine retribution against Israel’s enemies, concluding his argument with, “For I lay my case before You” (Jer. 20:12).42 According to one study (aptly titled Arguing with God), the book of Job embodies the biblical apex of law-court-style arguments with God, raising the genre to a new level.43
Job draws hope from his spiritual antecedents, who not only chose the same strategy but model the hope inherent in doing so. Their arguments bent God’s actions toward justice, and so might his.
The development of Job’s plan to take God to court is both an indication of his capacity for hope and a source of energy to bring that hope to fruition. The fact that Job builds his approach upon those of his chutzpadik biblical forebears adds a measure of plausibility to his hope. At the point when Job fully commits himself to the plan—telling his friends to “keep quiet” and saying “I will take my life in my hands” (13:13, 14)—he utters one of the truly immortal lines in the book:
Though He slay me, yet I will trust [or hope] in Him.
Yet I will argue my case before Him. (13:15)44
As translated here, the verse seems to cement the link between Job’s audacious challenge to God and his hope for divine vindication. Alas, this memorable verse is also among the Bible’s most enigmatic. Let’s compare two Jewish Publication Society translations of the first part of the verse: the first from 1917 (Old Jewish Publication Society translation, OJPS), the second published in 1999 (New Jewish Publication Society translation, NJPS):
Though He slay me, yet I will trust [or hope] in Him.
He may well slay me; I may have no hope.
Two opposite translations. Hope versus no hope.
This is one of many places in the Bible where ancient Masoretic notes (eighth through tenth centuries and earlier) indicate a difference between how a particular word should be written and how it should be read and understood. The first, OJPS, translation follows how the verse should be read; the second, NJPS, translation reflects how it is written.
The crux of the problem revolves around the Hebrew word lo, which can be spelled two ways. When spelled lamed alef, as written in this verse, it means “not” or “no.” Thus, as written, the verse means, “I will not hope.” When spelled lamed vav, as the Masoretic note to the verse says it should be read and understood, it means “in him” or “to him.” Thus the Masoretic note creates the opposite reading: “I will hope in him.” To make matters more confusing, many translations render the Hebrew word for hope (in this verse, ayacheil) as “trust” or “wait.”
Considering the history of Masoretic notes on the matter does not in itself shed additional light on the meaning. There are eighteen cases in the Bible, three in Job, where the text reads lamed alef (no or not), but Masoretic notes require them to be read lamed vav (in him or to him). In this case, it’s not completely clear what motivated the Masoretes to amend the text. Possibly, versions of the text existed with different renderings: In the Dead Sea Scrolls, a combined Aramaic translation and commentary (a targum) reads lamed vav;45 and the Mishnah, perhaps the earliest Jewish source to take up the ambiguity (c. 200 CE), quotes the verse as reading lamed vav (though it remained ambiguous because it could be read declaratively “in him I will hope” or sarcastically, “in him I will hope?”).46 Maimonides concluded that there was no way of arriving at a definitive interpretation of the verse.47 Sometimes, he said, lamed alef can mean “not,” and sometimes it can mean “in him”; and the same for lamed vav, which can sometimes mean “in him” and sometimes “not.”
Modern translators, meanwhile, passionately disagree about how to render the verse. Some readers and translators conclude that Job sees God as his principal adversary, the cause of his suffering, the destroyer of his hope. Scheindlin translates the verse as “Let Him kill me!—I will not flinch,” commenting:
The familiar translation, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him” . . . is based on a variant of the Hebrew text. Its moving expression of God’s beneficence is completely at variance with Job’s attitude in this chapter and in the rest of the poem.48
Others, including myself, maintain that the context of the verse—Job just having vowed to take God to court—infuses it with hope. Who initiates a suit without hope of benefit?
Seow suggests that the verse’s ambiguity may well be deliberate.49 Just when Job has chosen his path toward restoration—taking God to court and demanding justice—we’re left with the conundrum: Does he hope or not? It’s a universal question. We all face trials; some of us respond with hope, others do not. Or, is there a third option? Does Job—and sometimes do we—stand in a place where we feel both hope and despair? “Job,” says French Bible scholar and philosopher André Neher, “pronounces two words which signify simultaneously hope and hopelessness.”50
Ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, Jewish tradition has historically interpreted the verse in favor of Job’s hope—and, all the more so, as a testament invoked to inspire hope in us when we face times of trial. One of many examples is the Eleh Ezkerah, the martyrology recited on Yom Kippur that recounts the martyrdom of ten leading rabbinic sages during Israel’s revolt against Rome in 132–35 CE. Before the executions begin, the hero of the narrative ascends to Heaven to argue with God, unsuccessfully, against the decree. The Roman official conducting the executions then asks Rabbi Yishmael, about to face death, “Do you still trust [or hope] in your God?,” to which, with his last breath, Rabbi Yishmael answers, “Though He may slay me, yet I will trust [or hope] in Him.”51
We may never know the original intent of this verse. What matters is how we understand it. Over the ages, Jewish interpreters have read it as a statement—for us as individuals and as a people—of defiant hope in a god who often no longer seems to deserve it. If God is that to which we attach ultimate reality and importance, then to hope in God may mean something different to each of us. The crux of the matter is whether we are willing to invest our ultimate convictions with hope. “Job did,” says Jewish tradition, “and so should we.”
How does the proclamation “Though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him” (13:15) square with what happens next in Job? We might expect that by now, having defined his goal, Job would proceed toward it without despair—that confronting God in the tradition of Abraham and Moses would infuse his struggle with implacable hope. But that’s not what happens:
Even a tree has hope:
If you cut it, it sprouts again.
Its suckers never fail. (14:7)
But mortals languish and die . . . (14:10)
They will not rise from their sleep. (14:12)52
No sooner does Job embrace his plan than he falls back into doubt and misery. He may not live long enough to reach his goal. His health has diminished; he doesn’t know how much time he’s got left. And unlike a tree that’s been felled, but then sends forth new sprouts, when Job dies, it will be the end.
Or will it? We’ve seen that hope demands creativity because it requires envisioning an alternative to the present. Here Job begins to think completely out of the box:
If You would only hide me in Sheol,
conceal me till Your anger passes,
set me a term and then remember me
(but if a person dies, how can he live?),
I could endure my term in hope,
until my time came round to sprout again.
Then You would call, and I would answer,
when You longed to see Your handiwork. (14:13–15)53
Job wonders about resurrection of the dead, a notion that would become a central pillar of Judaism, but only centuries after his story was written. In his imagination, after he dies, God will send him down to Sheol where the dead reside, but only “until my time came round to sprout again.” The hypothetical resurrection allows him to pursue his challenge to God, even after death. But, his vision expresses a hope that lies even deeper than that of personal vindication. Job looks to a time when his relationship with God will be restored. Then, the Divine will no longer view Job as one who deserves torture, but will treat him once again as a piece of “Your handiwork.”
And yet, however full of hope that vision may be, it lies far in the future. In the here and now, immediately after those last lines of promise, Job still experiences God as an overwhelming flood of pain:
Yes, the mountain collapses and wears away;
the cliff is dislodged from its place;
stones are scoured by water into dust,
torrents wash away earth’s soil—
and You destroy man’s hopes. (14:18–19)54
Like the mountain that collapses after unrelenting exposure to the elements, Job feels God is destroying his hope—and in the process, his life.
Perhaps Job’s hope proves ephemeral because Job now doubts its realism. Drawing the distinction between magical and realistic hope, psychoanalyst Ernest G. Schachtel (1903–75, Germany and United States) explains that magical hope centers on the idea that external sources (rather than one’s own hard effort) will, like magic, bring about the desired change in circumstances. “Such hope may even be relegated to an imagined world after death.”55
Judged by this standard, Job’s earlier hope that the night of his conception can somehow be stricken from the calendar has the ring of magic; indeed, Job calls upon magicians to bring this about. That his hope to be resurrected from the dead so quickly gives rise to images of hopelessness suggests that this too may strike him as a magical solution.56 Magical hope can lift the spirit but prove flimsy, highly susceptible to disappointment, and easily replaced by despair.
In the course of his struggles, Job concludes that he did nothing to warrant the suffering visited upon him, and his hope shifts from trying to convince his friends of this to obtaining vindication directly from God. But Job also comes to realize that he can’t fulfill this hope alone. He needs someone to help him.
By the time the first of Job’s visitors finishes speaking for the second time, it becomes clear that these friends don’t have much empathic support to offer. Instead of standing with Job in solidarity, his friends have tried to convince him that he deserves his fate. Even Job’s wife, the first to address him after tragedy strikes, has denied him any shred of sympathy. Urging him to “curse God and die,” she implies that Job has no future. The empathic vacuum leads Job to seek support elsewhere:
Surely now my witness is in heaven;
He who can testify for me is on high. (16:19)
Let Him arbitrate between a man and God
As between a man and his fellow. (16:21)
My spirit is crushed . . . (17:1)
Where, then, is my hope?
Who can see hope for me?
Will it descend to Sheol?
Shall we go down together to the dust? (17:15–16)
He [God] tears down every part of me; I perish;
He uproots my hope like a tree. (19:10)
Pity me, pity me! You are my friends;
For the hand of God has struck me!
Why do you pursue me like God,
Maligning me insatiably?
O that my words were written down;
Would they were inscribed in a record,
Incised on a rock forever
With iron stylus and lead!
But I know that my Vindicator lives;
In the end He will testify on earth— (19:21–25)
Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1902–94, Germany and United States) argued that the capacity for hope emerges from early childhood experiences with parents and other caretakers that build basic trust. The Hebrew language likewise points to the connection between hope and trust: Many words that signify hope are often translated as “trust.”57 When life experiences undermine that foundation of basic trust, and hopelessness ensues, we turn to others to help rebuild trust—to family, to religion, to a therapist, to friends, and/or to God. Researchers refer to this relational aspect of hope as its affiliative dimension, or its social matrix.58
Yet Job’s capacity to maintain his innocence and to envision taking God to court despite having no social support testifies to a growing inner strength. Thinking this through, Job recognizes that he can’t succeed alone. O chevruta, o mituta, as the Talmud put it, “Either companionship or death.”59 God is simply too powerful to confront alone—and so Job casts about for an ally to testify on his behalf.
Again, the idea evolves slowly. First Job surfaces the idea of an arbiter (9:32–33), then a witness (16:19), and finally a vindicator (19:25)—a “redeemer” or “avenger,” according to other translations.60 Charting the evolution of these “imaginary companions,” Job scholars William Long and Glandion Carney note how far Job has come: “Hope has become real to him through the instrument of the imaginary companion. The imaginary companion has opened Job’s unknown, shaped his hope, given specificity to his longings.”61 The precise identity of these companions remains open to debate, but they seem to embody a figure (or figures, or perhaps even God) who will ultimately stick by Job and successfully advocate on his behalf—if necessary, even after he has died. Literary theorists have called such a figure a superaddressee, “a possible listener whose judgement would really count or whose advice would really help us. . . . The superaddressee embodies a principle of hope.”62
“The foundation of all hope is and remains Job’s own good conscience, with its rebellious quest for an avenger,” wrote the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977, Germany).63 Securing an avenger/advocate embodies both a source and an expression of hope. One element of that hope revolves around finding such an advocate, another around guaranteeing the advocate’s access to the records of his case. Thus Job yearns for his words to be written down, “incised on a rock forever with iron stylus and lead!” This makes Job what Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit calls a “moral witness,” one who has suffered at the hands of an unfair regime and insists on bearing witness against it. Margalit credits the moral witness with a “rather sober hope: that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony.”64
Job understood what the Talmud taught long ago: “A captive cannot release himself from prison.”65 Had he lived today, perhaps Job would have founded an organization like the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted or the House of Renewed Hope, created by a group of exonerees dedicated to helping vindicate other wrongfully convicted prisoners. He likely would have applauded lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who successfully defended Walter McMillian, a Black man framed and sentenced to death for the murder of a white woman in Alabama in 1986. Instilling hope in those whose reluctant testimony eventually exonerated McMillian proved to be a critical part of Stevenson’s work. “Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists,” Stevenson explained.
I think hope is our superpower. Hope is the thing that gets you to stand up, when others say, “Sit down.” It’s the thing that gets you to speak, when others say, “Be quiet.” . . . I get worried when I meet hopeless teachers or hopeless lawyers or hopeless politicians or hopeless advocates. Those are people who are not going to help us advance justice in the world.66
In the end, Job does get his day in court with God. But after an overwhelming demonstration of God’s creation and structuring of the cosmos, Job comes to see his complaint in a different perspective: “I knew You, but only by rumor; my eye has beheld You today. I retract. I even take comfort for dust and ashes” (42:5–6).67 God immediately turns to Job’s friends, saying, “You have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job” (42:7). God instructs them to make sacrificial offerings, and Job to pray for his friends. Then, we learn, God “restored Job’s fortunes after he prayed for his friends, doubling everything Job had” (42:10).68 What is more, Job the survivor fathers ten more children. Sociologist William B. Helmreich (1945–2020, United States), who studied the successful adaptation of Holocaust survivors in America, noted that after the war, the birthrate of Jews in displaced persons camps was higher than in any other Jewish community in the world. As one survivor explained, “I have five children to fill the world with hope.”69
Job’s ability to pray for his friends embodies the last step in his journey from yearning for death as an escape from grief’s bitter bite to experiencing a renewed appetite for life. That Job can pray for his cruelly unsympathetic friends attests to his capacity for re-engagement and forgiveness. In fact, his willingness to pray at all shows how far he’s come. After all, earlier in the book Job rejected prayer, scornfully asking, “What do we get out of praying to Him?” (21:15).70 “The trajectory of Job’s spiritual and existential path as a mourner,” Halbertal explains, “is the move from the isolated seclusion of the mourner and . . . disinterest in the world, to the caring concern and attentiveness to the needs and pains of others.”71
Halbertal’s conclusion brings to mind the words of Marcel, who defined hope as a response to a trial experienced as a “form of captivity” during which one is “deprived for an indefinite period of a certain light for which” one longs.72
Yemimah, the name Job gives his first daughter, supplies poetic confirmation of Marcel’s observation. The name comes from yamamah, the Arabic word for dove,73 a bird that makes its biblical debut near the end of the Flood, when Noah sends forth a dove from the ark. When it returns bearing an olive leaf in its beak, Noah knows the waters are receding and it will soon be safe to leave the ark.74 The dove points both to the end of captivity within the ark and to the hope of starting life anew.75 In Hebrew, Yemimah is connected to the word for “day,” yom, which leads Rashi to interpret the name as “bright and white as the sun” [or day].
By the end of his journey, Job has broken through his captivity, traveling from darkness to light. He has passed through an excruciating trial, emerging healed and hopeful enough to give life another try.
The story of Job takes its place beside that of Abraham and Sarah and the Exodus as a third depiction of an epic trial and the response of hope it evokes. Stricken with grief over the loss of his children; pained by the sores that cover his body; angered by his “friends” who vie to ferret out the sins for which his suffering must constitute deserved divine punishment; railing against an unjust God and despairing of life to the point that he cries out for his very existence to be nullified, Job is the consummate example of a human being overwhelmed by hopelessness.
And yet, several desires ultimately fuel Job’s hope. He wants his day in court to argue his case before God. He also wants his story told, and he yearns for an advocate to prove his innocence—even if it comes after his death.
It would be satisfying, but unrealistic, if Job’s plan to bring God to court and his hope for an advocate permanently elevated his spirits. Paul Pruyser (1916–87, Holland and United States), one of first to write seriously about the psychology of hope, noted that when faced with adversity, people “do not make up their minds once and for all for or against hoping, but go through phases that may entail denial, anger, despair, flimsy illusions, rebelliousness, anxiousness, or hope in various sequences.”76
Job reminds us that hope is not a piece of armor that, once donned, offers unfailing protection against despair. The imagery about hope in this tale tells a different story. Hope is a thin thread that can tear or escape our grip, but there is no weaving, or living, without it. Like a wadi, hope may run dry. Hope and despair are never far from one another and may in fact exist simultaneously.
Nonetheless, with Job’s affirmation—“But I know that my Vindicator lives” (19:25)—Job, more than not, wants to live, wants to look ahead to a future in which the struggle for vindication will pay off. His unwillingness to confess to crimes he didn’t commit and his stubborn hope for exoneration make him an inspiration for anyone accused or punished unjustly—and, further, for anyone who fights for worthy principles that have yet to gain respect.77
While the story’s conclusion raises thorny theological questions, as a ray of hope to the wrongly accused, it’s one of the brightest around. God says to Job’s so-called friends, “I am incensed . . . for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job. . . . [And] YHWH restored Job’s fortunes” (42:7, 10).
In her autobiography, Elizabeth Keckley (1818–1907), a former slave who became the dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, related an event she witnessed in the White House. It was 1863, about a year after the death of the Lincolns’ son, when “the confederates were flushed with victory.” The president, who had just returned from a War Department meeting, told his wife and Keckley that there was “plenty of news, but no good news. It is dark everywhere.” He took a “small Bible from a stand by the head of the sofa” and read intently. After fifteen minutes Keckley noticed that “the dejected look was gone, and the countenance was lighted up with new resolution and hope.” Pretending to look for something she’d misplaced, Keckley walked behind the sofa to see what the president had been reading: “I discovered that Mr. Lincoln was reading that divine comforter, Job.”78
Two years later, Abraham Lincoln’s funeral service included this verse from Job:79
But I know that my Vindicator lives;
In the end He will testify on earth (19:25).