Quarrel & Quandary (10 page)

So there is something to be said for novice readers who come to Job’s demands and plaints unaccoutered: we will perceive God’s world exactly as Job himself perceives it. Or put it that Job’s bewilderment will be ours, and our kinship to his travail fully unveiled, only if we are willing to absent ourselves from the accretion of centuries of metaphysics, exegesis, theological polemics. Of the classical Jewish and Christian theologians (Saadia Gaon, Rashi, ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Gersonides, Gregory, Aquinas, Calvin), each wrote from a viewpoint dictated by his particular religious perspective. But for us to be as (philosophically) naked as Job will mean to be naked of bias, dogma, tradition. It will mean to imagine Job solely as he is set forth by his own words in his own story.

His story, because it is mostly in dialogue, reads as a kind of drama. There is no proscenium; there is no scenery. But there is the dazzling spiral of words—extraordinary words, Shakespearean words; and there are the six players, who alternately cajole, console, contradict, contend, satirize, fulminate, remonstrate, accuse, deny, trumpet, succumb. Sometimes we are reminded of Antigone, sometimes of Oedipus (Greek plays that are contemporaneous with Job), sometimes of Othello. The subject is innocence and power; virtue and injustice; the Creator and His Creation; or what philosophy has long designated as theodicy, the Problem of Evil. And the more we throw off sectarian sophistries—the more we attend humbly to the drama as it plays itself out—the more clearly we will see Job as he emerges
from the venerable thicket of theodicy into the heat of our own urgency. Or call it our daily breath.

Job’s story—his fate, his sentence—begins in heaven, with Satan as prosecuting attorney. Job, Satan presses, must be put to trial. Look at him: a man of high estate, an aristocrat, robust and in his prime, the father of sons and daughters, respected, affluent, conscientious, charitable, virtuous, God-fearing. God-fearing? How effortless to be always praising God when you are living in such ease! Look at him: how he worries about his lucky children and their feasting, days at a time—was there too much wine, did they slide into blasphemy? On their account he brings sacred offerings in propitiation. His possessions are lordly, but he succors the poor and turns no one away; his hand is lavish. Yet look at him—how easy to be righteous when you are carefree and rich! Strip him of his wealth, wipe out his family, afflict him with disease, and
then
see what becomes of his virtue and his piety!

So God is persuaded to test Job. Invasion, fire, tornado, destruction, and the cruelest loss of all: the death of his children. Nothing is left. Odious lesions creep over every patch of Job’s skin. Tormented, he sits in the embers of what was once his domain and scratches himself with a bit of shattered bowl. His wife despairs: after all this, he still declines to curse God! She means for him to dismiss God as worthless to his life, and to dismiss his ruined life as worthless. But now a trio of gentlemen from neighboring lands arrives—a condolence call from Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, Job’s distinguished old friends. The three weep and are mute—Job’s broken figure appalls: pitiable, desolate, dusted with ash, scraped, torn.

All the foregoing is told in the plain prose of a folk tale: a blameless man’s undoing through the conniving of a mischievous sprite. A prose epilogue will ultimately restore Job to his good fortune, and, in the arbitrary style of a fable, will even double it; but between the two halves of this simple narrative of loss and restitution the coloration of legend falls away, and a majesty of outcry floods speech after speech. And then Job’s rage ascends—a rage against the loathsomeness of “wisdom.”

When the horrified visitors regain their voices, it is they who appear to embody reasonableness, logic, and prudence, while Job—introduced in the prologue as a man of steadfast faith who will never affront the Almighty—rails like a blasphemer against an unjust God. The three listen courteously as Job bewails the day he was born, a day that “did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.” In response to which, Eliphaz begins his first attempt at solace: “Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?… Behold, happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty.” Here is an early and not altogether brutal hint of what awaits Job in the severer discourse of his consolers: the logic of punishment, the dogma of requital. If a man suffers, it must be because of some impiety he has committed. Can Job claim that he is utterly without sin? And is not God a merciful God, “for He wounds, but binds up; He smites, but His hands heal”? In the end, Eliphaz reassures Job, all will be well.

Job is not comforted; he is made furious. He has been accused, however obliquely, of having sinned, and he knows with his whole soul that he has not. His friends show themselves to be as inconstant as a torrential river, icy in winter, vanishing away in the heat. Rather than condole, they defame. They root amelioration in besmirchment. But if Job’s friends are no friends, then
what of God? The poet, remembering the Psalm—“What is man that thou are mindful of him?”—has Job echo the very words. “What is man,” Job charges God, that “thou dost set thy mind upon him, dost visit him every morning, and test him every moment?… If I sin, what do I do to thee, thou watcher of men?” And he dreams of escaping God in death: “For now I shall lie in the earth; thou wilt seek me, but I shall not be.”

Three rounds of increasingly tumultuous debate follow, with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar each having a turn, and Job replying. Wilder and wilder grow the visitors’ accusations; wilder and wilder grow Job’s rebuttals, until they are pitched into an abyss of bitterness. Job’s would-be comforters have become his harriers; men of standing themselves, they reason from the conventional doctrines of orthodox religion, wherein conduct and consequence are morally linked: goodness rewarded, wickedness punished. No matter how hotly Job denies and protests, what greater proof of Job’s impiety can there be than his deadly ordeal? God is just; he metes out just deserts. Is this not the grand principle on which the world rests?

Job’s own experience refutes these arguments; and his feverish condemnation of God’s injustice refutes religion itself. “I am blameless!” he cries yet again, and grimly concludes: “It is all one: therefore I say, He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, He mocks the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the face of its judges.” Here Job, remarkably, is both believer and atheist. God’s presence is incontrovertible; God’s moral integrity is nil. And how strange: in the heart of Scripture, a righteous man impugning God! Genesis, to be sure, records what appears to be a precedent. “Wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham asks God when Sodom’s fate is at stake; but that is more plea than indictment, and anyhow
there is no innocence in Sodom. Yet how distant Job is from the Psalmist who sings “The Lord is upright … there is no unrighteousness in Him,” who pledges that “the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree,” and “the workers of iniquity shall be destroyed forever.” The Psalmist’s is the voice of faith. Job’s is the voice of a wounded lover, betrayed.

Like a wounded lover, he envisions, fleetingly, a forgiving afterlife, the way a tree, cut down to a stump, can send forth new shoots and live again—while man, by contrast, “lies down and rises not again.” Or he imagines the workings of true justice: on the one hand, he wishes he might bring God Himself to trial; on the other, he ponders man-made law and its courts, and declares that the transcript of his testimony ought to be inscribed permanently in stone, so that some future clansman might one day come as a vindicator, to proclaim the probity of Job’s case. (Our translation famously—and not disinterestedly—renders the latter as “I know that my Redeemer lives,” a phrase that has, of course, been fully integrated into Christian hermeneutics.) Throughout, there is a thundering of discord and clangor. “Miserable comforters are you all!” Job groans. “Surely there are mockers about me”—while Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar press on, from pious apologias to uncontrolled denunciation. You, Job, they accuse, you who stripped the naked of their clothing, gave no water to the weary, withheld bread from the hungry!

And Job sees how the tenets of rectitude, in the mouths of the zealous, are perverted to lies.

But now, abruptly, a new voice is heard: a fifth and so far undisclosed player strides onstage. He is young, intellectually ingenious, confident, a bit brash. Unlike the others, he bears a name with a Hebrew ring to it: Elihu. “I also will declare my opinion,” he announces. He arrives as a supplanter, to replace stale wisdom with fresh, and begins by rebuking Job’s haranguers
for their dogma of mechanical tit-for-tat. As for Job: in his recalcitrance, in his litanies of injured innocence, in his prideful denials, he has been blind to the
uses
of suffering; and doesn’t he recognize that God manifests Himself in night visions and dreams? Suffering educates and purifies; it humbles pride, tames the rebel, corrects the scoffer. “What man is like Job, who drinks up scoffing like water?” Elihu points out—but here the reader detects a logical snag. Job has become a scoffer only as a result of gratuitous suffering: then how is such suffering a “correction” of scoffing that never was? Determined though he is to shake Job’s obstinacy, Elihu is no wiser than his elders. Job’s refusal of meaningless chastisement stands.

So Elihu, too, fails as comforter—but as he leaves off suasion, his speech metamorphoses into a hymn in praise of God’s dominion. “Hear this, O Job,” Elihu calls, “stop and consider the wondrous work of God”—wind, cloud, sky, snow, lightning, ice! Elihu’s sumptuous limning of God’s power in nature is a fore-echo of the sublime climax to come.

Job, gargantuan figure in the human imagination that he is, is not counted among the prophets. He is not the first to be reluctant to accept God’s authority: Jonah rebelled against sailing to Nineveh in order to prophesy; yet he did go, and his going was salvational for a people not his own. But the true prophets are self-starters, spontaneous fulminators against social inequity, and far from reluctant. Job, then, has much in common with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Amos: he is wrathful that the wicked go unpunished, that the widow and the orphan go unsuccored, that the world is not clothed in righteousness. Like the noblest of
the prophets, he assails injustice; and still he is unlike them. They accuse the men and women who do evil; their targets are made of flesh and blood. It is human transgression they hope to mend. Job seeks to rectify God. His is an ambition higher, deeper, vaster, grander than theirs; he is possessed by a righteousness more frenzied than theirs; the scale of his justice-hunger exceeds all that precedes him, all that was ever conceived; he can be said to be the consummate prophet. And at the same time he is the consummate violator. If we are to understand him at all, if we are rightly to enter into his passions at their pinnacle, then we ought to name him prophet; but we may not. Call him, instead, anti-prophet—his teaching, after all, verges on atheism: the rejection of God’s power. His thesis is revolution.

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are silenced. Elihu will not strut these boards again. Job’s revolution may be vanity of vanities, but his adversaries have lost confidence and are scattered. Except for Job, the stage is emptied.

Then God enters—not in a dream, as Elihu theorized, not as a vision or incarnation, but as an irresistible Eloquence.

Here I am obliged to remark on the obvious. In recapitulating certain passages, I have reduced an exalted poem to ordinary spoken sentences. But the ideas that buttress Job are not merely “expressed in,” as we say, language of high beauty; they are inseparable from an artistry so far beyond the grasp of mind and tongue that one can hardly imagine their origin. We think of the Greek plays; we think of Shakespeare; and still that is not marvel enough. Is it that the poet is permitted to sojourn, for the poem’s brief life, in the magisterial Eye of God? Or is it God who allows Himself to peer through the poet’s glass, as through a gorgeously crafted kaleidoscope? The words of the poem are preternatural, unearthly. They may belong to a rhapsodic endowment so rare as to appear among mortals only once in three thousand
years. Or they may belong to the Voice that hurls itself from the whirlwind.

God has granted Job’s demand: “Let the Almighty answer me!” Now here at last is Job’s longed-for encounter with that Being he conceives to be his persecutor. What is most extraordinary in this visitation is that it appears to be set apart from everything that has gone before. What is the Book of Job
about
? It is about gratuitous affliction. It is about the wicked who escape whipping. It is about the suffering of the righteous. God addresses none of this. It is as if He has belatedly stepped into the drama without having consulted the script—none of it: not even so much as the prologue. He does not remember Satan’s mischief. He does not remember Job’s calamities. He does not remember Job’s righteousness.

As to the latter: Job will hardly appeal for an accounting from God without first offering one of his own. He has his own credibility to defend, his own probity. “Let me be weighed in a just balance,” he insists, “and let God know my integrity!” The case for his integrity takes the form of a bill of particulars that is unsurpassed as a compendium of compassionate human conduct: no conceivable ethical nuance is omitted. It is as if all the world’s moral fervor, distilled from all the world’s religions, and touching on all the world’s pain, is assembled in Job’s roster of lovingkindness. Job in his confession of integrity is both a protector and a lover of God’s world.

But God seems alarmingly impatient; His mind is elsewhere. Is this the Lord whom Job once defined as a “watcher of men”? God’s answer, a fiery challenge, roils out of the whirlwind. “Where were
you,
” the Almighty roars, in supernal
strophes that blaze through the millennia, “when I laid the foundation of the earth?” And what comes crashing and tumbling out of the gale is an exuberant ode to the grandeur of the elements, to the fecundity of nature: the sea and the stars, the rain and the dew, the constellations in their courses, the lightning, the lion, the raven, the ass, the goat, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk—and more, more, more! The lavishness, the extravagance, the infinitude! An infinitude of power; an infinitude of joy; an infinitude of love, even for the ugly hippopotamus, even for the crocodile with his terrifying teeth, even for creatures made mythical through ancient lore. Even for Leviathan! Nothing in the universe is left unpraised in these glorious stanzas—and one thinks: had the poet access to the electrons, had he an inkling of supernovas, had he parsed the chains of DNA, God’s ode to Creation could not be richer. Turn it and turn it —God’s ode: everything is in it.