Contemporary drawing of John Wroe on a donkey At a recent Oldie literary luncheon Melvin Bragg discussed his latest book on the cultural influence of the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible. Seated between two unknown mature ladies, I asked them whether they read the Bible? Like most people these days they did not. Did I? they enquired. Yes, and I had been re-reading the book of Job, a great poetic drama, and entirely a work of fiction, I explained. One lady seemed surprised by this, and smiled hesitantly as if I were possibly joking or trying to shock.
I was entirely serious. To say something is fiction is not necessarily to demean or dismiss it. Fiction can be great, and much of the Bible, more than most people commonly suppose, is fiction. Job is great fiction.
There is nothing else like it in the Bible, except perhaps Psalm 104 with its vivid evocation of the wild creatures who share the Earth with men and women.
The Earth should be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons
In the story of Job, God and Satan are simply fictional characters.
Myths, for good or ill, may have a much longer life than many scientific theories. They cannot and should not be taken literally, but they can be hugely influential. They can offer a sense of meaning, of value, of direction; they can change our mood or outlook: enthuse, challenge, entertain, console, perplex, confound, inspire, enlighten, obfuscate, depress, poison, heal – and so on. Myths may be disabling, as in many ways messiah myths are, suggesting that only help from some supernatural ‘outside’ will be of any use. The role given to Jews in the story of the Passion of Jesus has poisoned subsequent centuries with its murderous consequences. On the other hand, the Genesis Creation myth pronounces life to be good, very good, and the story of Job is also ultimately encouraging.
It has a fairy-tale beginning and ending. In between is a long-running argument about suffering, injustice, and the difficulty – or impossibility – of knowing God. There follows a grand and passionate poem about the marvels of the universe uttered by ‘the Unnameable’ a mysterious Voice out of the Whirlwind.
All the actors in the drama, including God and Satan, as well as Job, his comforters and his wife, are fictitious characters. (I must confess to a sneaking admiration for Mrs Job who advises her stricken husband to ‘curse God and die.’ She strikes me as one of the most honest and sympathetic figures in the Bible).
God and Satan here are simply fictional characters.
Satan is in no way the Devil of medieval imagination.
In this story he lives with God and is a member of the heavenly court as the Counsel for the Prosecution.
The Bible’s Job is the re-working of a very ancient Middle Eastern folk-tale about the patient Job. None of the three central characters, God, Satan, or Job, is presented in a realistic or naturalistic manner. They are necessary elements in a plot designed to illuminate permanent aspects of the human situation. The implications of all this for the Bible as a whole have seldom been openly faced; Job with its so patently fictitious ‘God’ forces us to realise that every reference to ‘God’ in every other biblical book is also part of a story, and so the ‘God’ referred to is necessarily presented in a fictional way.
Such stories make us aware that God language is inherently fictitious and remind us that, as St Thomas Aquinas argued, all language about ‘God’ can be only analogical, and that of all the varieties of theology the apophatic is the best (or the least misleading). In attempting to speak of God, is it the case that ‘in much madness is divinest sense’? Must we inevitably tell it ‘slant’? If so, fiction is inescapable (and the analogical is only another mode of fiction). The most modern theologians, we are told (in Gavin Hyman’s A Short History of Atheism), ‘speak of a God beyond or without being, a God who bestows existence but who doesn’t himself exist, a God whose reality is far removed from what we understand to be reality in the physical world.’ If all this is more than unintelligible and paradoxical obfuscation, it may point to an A Perspective from the Whirlwind Job and the Package-Deal Frank Walker considers the biblical Book of Job, a re-working of a very ancient Middle Eastern folk tale about the patient Job. 17 Sofia 102 Christmas December 2011 unnameable mystery beyond our grasp such as Job confronts. But Job becomes silent. He does not theologise, and simply accepts his mortality.
The Unnameable who declaims his majestic poem at the end seems to me to be a different character from the cruel ‘God’ of the opening story who so nonchalantly allows such a monstrously dirty trick to be played on Job and his family .
Job is a mythical person – the completely honest and upright man who has done no wrong. He has to be such a one for the story to make its point.
Nowadays we do not expect men who amass vast wealth – and Job is the richest man in the East – to be guiltless.
Joseph Kennedy, for example, who became immensely rich, wealthy enough to bankroll his sons’ campaigns to become senators and President, had unsavoury connections with the Mafia and organised crime. He was not an innocent man. It is often claimed that Jesus was the only completely sin-free human being. This is to overlook the Bible’s claim for the innocence of Job.
Job, of course, is an imaginary character, and for the story’s purposes he has to be completely genuine and upright, for the point the writer is making is that, even if you are one hundred per cent pure and innocent, you will not because of that escape suffering. (The story of the Passion of Jesus makes a similar point.) Do not imagine that just because you are rational and honest you will find the world reasonable and just. (Though we may well reply that in that case it is up to us to make it as reasonable and just as we are able).
The nasty trick, engineered by Satan with God’s approval simply mimics in extravagant fashion the horrific bludgeonings of chance that afflict people totally indiscriminately and undeservedly. This reflects Job’s unflinching tragic realism. Do not suppose that however good you are you will escape suffering, even of the most extreme kind. You will not deserve it, nevertheless it will remorselessly come upon you.
This is a bleak message, but the writer does not flinch from it. The good news is that you are not guilty, you are innocent, you do not deserve many of the miseries that afflict you. So you need not become like the victims of some Stalinist show-trial who were brainwashed into confessing to crimes which they had not committed and could not possibly have done. The cynical extraction of such false confessions marks a very low point in human degradation. Job’s comforters constantly try to brainwash him into confessing his guilt, but he will have none of it.
Satan persuades God to allow him to play an appalling trick on Job in order to test his loyalty and devotion. Suddenly, everything that makes life bearable and worth living is stripped from Job: his children are all killed, he loses all his wealth and possessions, and his health is totally destroyed. He has become unaccommodated man, a bare forked animal. (Shakespeare’s King Lear was later destined to re-enact much in Job’s story). His comforters preach to him the theology and philosophy of the day, hoping to drag some sort of confession from him, but all to no avail.
They convince neither Job nor the reader. In the face of the ocean of human suffering and the insolent proud prevalence of injustice there is no adequate answer. Theology and philosophy avail nothing.
Even God is forced to admit that Job’s comforters, so keen to support and defend accepted views of God, have not said what is right, whereas Job has told the truth. Not for a moment would Job have accepted St Paul’s argument in Romans 5 that death entered the world as a result of human sin. Although he himself has not sinned, Job is bold enough to stand up to God on behalf of humanity and say, ‘If I have sinned what do I with thee, O thou watcher of men?’ Job, though keenly aware of human evil, injustice and wickedness, and intensely realistic about them, nevertheless does not espouse Augustinian notions of original sin and of total human depravity. The story insists that Job’s afflictions are undeserved. It reveals God’s complicity in a heartless trick, and so even God himself cannot be seen as blameless.
The answer from out of the Whirlwind is no direct answer, because there cannot be an answer in the Job’s Comforters by William Blake sense of some fully satisfying explanation. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Suffering is a brute fact of existence.
Apart from the beautiful image, ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’, the revelation from the Whirlwind is utterly naturalistic and not at all supernaturalist. The Unnameable, the Voice from the Whirlwind, simply describes the beauty and terror, the awesomeness, the weirdness, the sheer otherness, the magnificence of the universe, which human beings have not created and can never control. They can never ‘bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion.’ Yet they have all this as a gift. On Earth they are surrounded by a vast diversity of creatures, who go their way with their own amazing lives to live, displaying a blessedly non-human wisdom, serenely and refreshingly indifferent to humanity – ranging from the simple wild goats to the incredible Behemoth and Leviathan.
The shabby trickster ‘God’, who so shamefully colluded with Satan, would have no moral right to declaim the poem that celebrates the wonders of the universe. The Voice from the Whirlwind is therefore what? The voice of utter unnameable mystery? The voice of That Which Is? It is more the voice of the Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) of Spinoza than of any more conventionally conceived deity.
The Hebrew text of Job is notoriously disjointed and corrupt, often almost impossible to translate. No wonder that the 1611 translation is sometimes inaccurate, misleading, or unintelligible. The most serious mistranslation occurs when the seventeenth century divines try to make Job speak like an Augustinian or Calvinist Christian. At the end they make Job say, responding to the Voice from the Whirlwind, ‘I abhor my words and repent in dust and ashes.’ This is wrong and goes completely against the whole argument of the book. It makes Job become someone like the pathetic victim of a Stalinist showtrial, falsely ‘confessing’ to a guilt that is not his. We need a more accurate and unbiased translation. In Stephen Mitchell’s version Job says, ‘I am content that I am dust.’ Wonderful words! Words of the simplest deepest wisdom. How we could all wish to become so content – a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Truly it is the supreme wisdom – a contentment that may finally come to all, however unlearned and unlettered, wise or foolish, good or bad, of every religion and of none.
Nothing has changed, but now Job sees everything differently. In the face of the vision Job becomes silent, awe-struck before overwhelming beauty, strangeness and dread. He acknowledges the experience but gives no theological explanation; he simply accepts his mortality. Because he has achieved this moment of insight, his misery is at an end. The fairy-tale conclusion restores Job’s health and prosperity, gives him back his beautiful children, allows him to see many generations of his family, and to die fulfilled, full of years.
The Voice from the Whirlwind, the Unnameable, the Unsearchable, offers us life alongside a fantastic diversity of fellow-creatures, so hearteningly different from us, in an extraordinary, marvellous, weird, terrible, magnificent universe. All this goes together, though, with suffering, chance, accident, tragedy, disease and death. We cannot have the magnificence without the suffering. Job, who had been near to rejecting life completely, now accepts the package-deal, and free from resentment, is content to be but dust.
Some modern popularisers of science such as Brian Cox enthusing over the wonders of the physical universe, and David Attenborough delighting in the vast diversity of living creatures, are implicitly sharing the perspective of the Voice from the Whirlwind, even in their atheism.
The Book of Job subverts traditional theism and the customary theology of both Judaism and Christianity, seeing no need for messiahs or for personal immortality. It is profound, subversive, deeply religious, and life-affirmingly humanistic. In another great story, Ivan Karamazov, understandably and entirely honourably, gives God back the ticket; Job, in spite of everything, on behalf of suffering humanity, equally honourably, says Yes.
Frank Walker is a retired Unitarian minister. 19 Sofia 102 Christmas December 2011 Sofia welcomes comment and debate.