Ep 59 - The Book of Job (Reading the Bible as Great Literature)

Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club. Deep dives into the greatest books ever written, provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them. Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me your host, Benjamin McAvoy. On the reading adventure of a lifetime with Hardcore Literature. Today we are discussing the book of Job. And before we dive in, I wanted to take a moment to say a huge thank you for listening. And if you're enjoying the podcast and would like more bookish content, then you may like to check out the Hardcore Literature book club at Patreon.com/HardcoreLiterture. At time of recording, we are reading Tolstoy's War and Peace and we are making our way through the plays of William Shakespeare. This year we will also be reading great writers like Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Pinchin, Alexander Dumar, Charlotte Bronte, Alice Monroe, Ralph Ellison, John Milton, Charles Dickens and many more. Join the conversation and read along with us at Patreon.com/HardcoreLiterture. Now, let's talk about the book of Job. If a benevolent God exists, why do bad things happen to good people? This is the main question at the heart of the book of Job. One of the most difficult books in the Bible, most likely written around the 6th century BC, either critics remain unsure of the exact date and with roots in folklore. The book of Job is a grand drama, intensely poetic, densely profound and a sublime parable that is open to endless interpretation. The exegy-tical books dedicated to this story alone would easily fill an entire library and so we must, out of necessity, be selective with what we choose to explicate today. The book of Job, along with Ecclesiastes and the Proverbs, forms a body of work in the Hebrew Bible that we refer to as wisdom literature. Read them together or in isolation and you will feel the healing power of Scripture, whilst also enjoying great cognitive challenge and relishing in their aesthetic splendor. There are three types of wisdom literature. There's family, wisdom, literature or common sense aphorisms. There's court, wisdom and there is reflective, existential probing. Job is the latter. The advice of wisdom literature is traditional but we ignore it at our peril. Wisdom literature seeks an understanding of the ways of the world, but not necessarily the ways of God which ultimately remain a mystery to us. The book of Job wouldn't be the first instance in the Bible that finds an individual coming up against the incomprehensible Leviathan-like majesty of God. In Exodus, Moses asks God to show his ways so that he might know God better. This is the same book in which God has already made it clear that he will justify his ways to no man. I am that I am. Tell them I am, have sent me unto you. Essentially I will be. I will create what I will create and when Moses asks God to show him his ways in a roundabout way, he is broaching the problem of theodicy. Theodicy being the vindication of God or the issue of divine justice. He is asking why God permits bad things to happen to good people. Talmudic tradition teaches that there are 50 levels to understanding God. Moses reached the highest level of understanding of all people, but even he did not reach the highest level. It was theodicy that stood in the way of Moses attaining the highest level of understanding God. Why do bad things happen to good people? The book of Job is that universal question housed in the individual. Job is something of every man figure. Though few could hope to have Job's level of piety, Job's name derives from the Arabic which means one who returns to God. The Aramaic etymology reveals the meaning of one who repents. So repentance and return are inextricably linked in the name of Job. In addition to the age old question, why do bad things happen to good people? The book of Job explores a few related questions. Will people be righteous even when they are suffering? It's all well and good to be just, upstanding and blameless when everything is going well for us. But when we find ourselves in the pits of hell, bearing almost every affliction begging for death, will we continue to remain righteous? We also have the question of why we are righteous when we are righteous. Are we moral? Are we good? Because we expect God's reward? Or are we good for its own sake? This is a question that all the great wisdom writers explore. Shakespeare, Emerson, Plato, Socrates in Plato's Republic ends up creating an entire hypothetical community with his friends to attempt to answer these difficult questions of morality. The book of Job is a work that I came to significantly during a dark time in my life. One of those periods where the very notion of happiness seems an impossibility, a fiction, and one finds themselves questioning whether they ever truly were happy, and if they could ever be happy again. Opening the book of Job and reading through the dire afflictions that the hero of the tale had to bear unfortunately did not help me. The lessons of the story are best appreciated when times aren't tough, when the going is good. When one is in the belly of the whale, however, the wisdom of the book of Job may just feel like a further plunging into the darkness, which exemplifies the arguments and assumptions central to the book. It's so easy to accept the notion that everything happens for a reason, and even though bad things happen to good people, a just God rules over us, it's easy to accept that when life is good. But when life doesn't go the way we want it to, we often end up feeling as though we are personally being targeted. One either thinks that there is no God at all, at least no benign divine being, because how could a benevolent creator allow war and disease to lay waste to the undeserving? And how can the unjust prosper? We either think God is absent, or that we are being punished because we either did something wrong, and perhaps we don't quite know what, or because as Gloucester in King Lear says, "As flies to want and boys, are we to the gods? They kill us for their sport." We have these faulty underlying assumptions that do not serve, especially when life doesn't go the way we'd hoped. One faulty assumption is that God is making decisions based on bringing justice into the world. Now if that's one's belief, and if the belief is underlying, it often means we can't apprehend it on a conscious level, so we may dispute, we even hold this belief, if that's one's belief, then unfavorable beliefs about the world, God and ourselves will of course follow. Another faulty assumption is the idea that God can be manipulated. We do good, because we want good, rather than doing good, because it's good in and of itself. In days gone by, we would make sacrifices to the gods, and chalk the money paid up to a religious loss, a tax for the gods to leave us alone, or we would attend church and expect a good deed. that to be enough to secure our good fortune. If life were that simple, however, the churches would be constantly at full capacity. The sky would be clogged with sacrificial smoke. Crime stats would plunge to zero. Evil would be eradicated, and consequently it's binary. Good would go along with it too. Milton begins his paradise lost with the aim to justify the ways of God to man. This is an age-old preoccupation, the odyssey, justifying the ways of God to man. As we see in the book of Job, however, we cannot justify the ways of God to man. When we meet Job, we are told that he was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and assured evil. The book begins in typical folkloric fashion, once upon a time, or in a distant land far away and long ago. There was a man in the land of us whose name was Job. Job is not and is relight, and the tale is set in Idon, the land of us. The story begins with a prose frame, and then from the third verse onwards, the story becomes sublime poetry. At the start, Job's blameless nature is established and life is good for Job. His business is prospering. He has a big, happy, healthy family. He's the kind of man many would envy. He has it all. And it seems like he's God's favourite, but Job is going to be put to the test. He won't know he's being tested, and what we are given in overwhelming degrees in the book of Job is intense, dramatic irony. This is the only time we will be privy to the ways of God. Where we are, who knows? We the reader exist in this outside plain, beyond time and space, where we are allowed to peek into the inner workings of the heavenly court. We see the Lord is bragging to Satan about this man, Job. Now this is a startling, rather disorienting opening, particularly to Christian or non-religious readers today. Hang on a minute, we might ask, why are God and the devil seemingly such good buddies in this story? Well, Hebrew scholarship would teach us that this is not Satan as we know him today. This is not the fallen angel Lucifer, but rather Hassatan, the Satan or the adversary. The name of Satan also contains the meaning of accuser, but here in this grand drama, this antagonist, does a great job of playing the adversary. But Hassatan is not the devil, rather a member of the divine council. His job is to investigate the affairs on earth for God, to find evil doers and bring them to justice. So when we are told that Satan is going to and fro in the earth, we might leap forward to the new Testament and think of Christ in the desert and the devil who is roaming around seeking to tempt him. We might leap forward even further in the history of literature and think of the ubiquity of Kormik McCarthy's judge Holden, but this is not the devil as we know him. This figure has the job of making sure the evil doers are punished. He is the prosecutor in the court of heavenly angels and a respectable member of the heavenly judicial system. And in response to Yahweh's Braga Dottio, Hassatan inquires, "Hast not thou made a hedge about him." Essentially he's saying, "Well, of course this man is good. It's easy to be good when one's life is perfect. Are you not playing favourites? Should we not put this man to the test, put him through some hardship and after we tighten the vice, see if his morality continues. Now it's certainly not just some hardship that Job has put through. Job, quite frankly, is put through hell. And whilst we are supposed to identify with this every man figure, he's a figure of aspiration beyond our reach because who could honestly say they could suffer one fraction of the pain and trauma heaped upon Job and stay good all the way through. So God agrees to Hassatan's plan and tells him to do whatever he likes to Job. Just don't kill him. The irony here is that killing him would have been a mercy because Job has everything taken away from him. His farm animals all die. All of his family, except for his wife, dies and he loses everything. From the end of the first verse, we recognise Job's famous lamentation. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. And still Job does not sin. So God in heaven gives Hassatan another go ahead. Turn the punishment up a notch. He is in thine hand, he says, but save his life. Now Job finds himself afflicted with painful boils from head to toe and his wife says, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die." Now you will see the wife's words as "Bless God and die" in many versions of the Bible. "Bless being a euphemism for curse because the scribes did not want to write, curse God, even as reported speech. Women get a bad deal in the Bible. To be fair, so do children and so do men. But here we see an emanation of the adversary in Job's wife in trying times. It could have been the other way around. Job, given less fortitude, could have been the one cursing God and his wife could have been the one who was trying to stick it out for both of them. And when we find ourselves wondering why we are being punished, we often come to one of two conclusions. Either God is not benevolent, at least to us, or there isn't a God at all. But Job doesn't curse God. Instead he curses his existence. Three friends arrive to comfort Job and these three friends have been dealt a bad hand themselves, both in the book of Job and in their history of biblical commentary in the years following. But these friends could well be us too. The friends are called Elifaz, Bill Dad and Zofar. And for seven days they sit with Job in silence. This is known as sitting Shiva. If your close friend has lost his family, is in the depths of grief, you don't initiate the conversation. The mourner only wants comfort, not words. And what words can one offer to their friend in the week after such a tragedy? After a week, the mourner is supposed to be the one to initiate conversation. And so that's what we see. And Job kicks off a cycle of poetic call and response lamentations. We are given three cycles of speeches with Job opening and Elifaz, Bill Dad and Zofar taking it in turns to offer Job their words. And then Job responds to them and has the last word, the concluding summation speech of the cycle. Later in the book we also meet Elihu, who plays the critic of Job and his three friends giving four speeches of his own. We don't hear from God himself excepting being privy to his and has satan's heavenly machinations until the end of the book in which a dialogue between God and Job opens up two long speeches by Yahweh and two short ones to follow from Job. After Job breaks his morning silence, he curses his existence and asks, why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? One of the lessons I take away from the book of Job is the idea of return, repentance and the cycleicality of life, the ebbs and flows between good and and bad, fortune, and what seems to be punishment. It really is no wonder why Herman Melville chose a verse from Job as one of the first epigraphs along with Jonah and Genesis for Moby Dick. Perhaps the most cyclical of all novels in which we follow the Peequod on its world-wondering, while hunting voyage, darkness, death and despair. Is often a return to the womb and a necessity that prefaces rebirth. So asking why we did not die in the womb serves us not when we find ourselves returned to the womb and on the cusp of new life. But first we must push on and ride through hell. There is no turning back. Why is light given to a man whose weight is hid and whom God hath hedged in? Job asks, "For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety. Neither had I wreaths. Neither was I quiet, yet trouble came." There are many lines that send a shiver up my spine in the book of Job, and this is one of them. We extend our sympathies to Job, don't we? And of course, keep in mind the etymology of sympathy gives us the meaning of suffering. We suffer with Job here because his cry is our cry, historically and in the future. I did everything right. Why is this happening to me? It's one of the first things we learn as children, life's not fair, even when we're good. And many children extend the lesson erroneously to the conclusion, "Well, might as well be bad then." Job's friends come to the conclusion that Job is being punished because he has done wrong. He has been wicked. Perhaps not the hottest take, and we might say that Job's three friends fail to comfort this grieving man. But we might be merciful to these three men ourselves because if one truly believed what they believed, God punishes the wicked, then their viewpoints are tuned in to help Job find the cause, so as to express his remorse, repent and find salvation. Unfortunately, they are looking the wrong way and their faulty assumption does not serve. That's not what God is doing here. Iliphaz says to Job, "Remember, I pray thee, whoever perished being innocent, or where were the righteous cut off. Happy is the man Job is told whom God correcteth. Therefore, despise not thou the chasening of the Almighty." How easy to say when one is not on the receiving end of such punishment themselves. If only the silence of sitting Shiva had been extended indefinitely. Then again, we might have found ourselves. If not expressing this sentiment to another verbally, we might have found ourselves thinking it. Well, everything is going wrong for that person, so if so fact thou, they must in some way deserve it. It's a coping mechanism and a cognitive bias that helps us sleep easily at night until the day of destruction comes to us and we're left wondering, what have I done wrong? What have I done to deserve this? Job responds grandly, poetically, with painful lamentation, "Oh, that my grief were thoroughly weighed and my calamity laid in the balances together. For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea. Therefore my words are swallowed up. For the arrows of the Almighty are within me. The poison whereof drinketh up my spirit. The terrors of God do set themselves in array against me. The sand in the sea, the arrows of the Almighty and the poison coursing through one system. It is no comfort in times like this to hear the age-old wisdom that God gives the greatest challenges to those who can bear it. But even that wisdom is not what's being dispensed by Job's so-called friends. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit. I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I a sea or a whale that thou setest a watch over me? If you spoke in the anguish of your spirit, if you complained in the bitterness of your soul, what would you say? What would you have said in the past? What have you felt in the past? Job goes on to say, "My days are vanity and we cannot help but think of ecclesiastes that work of wisdom literature which begins vanity of vanities, all is vanity." What profit hath a man of all his labor which he takeeth under the sun? One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideseth forever. In ecclesiastes we hear that to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Job has planted and plucked. He has built up and laughed and danced, and now he has broken down. Now he weeps and mourns. Job asks the Lord, "Why dost thou not pardon my transgression and take away mine iniquity? For now shall I sleep in the dust, and thou shall seek me in the morning, but I shall not be." There is something in our psychic makeup that surfaces during existential crisis, something that convinces us that it would be better if we return to dust. If there's a central image in the tragedy of Hamlet, I would contend that it's not the skull of Paul Jorick, but rather the dust to which we all someday return and from which we were all fashioned. Job's friends implore him to search for where his wrongdoing lay and Job begs God to show him why he is punishing him. God made him out of clay, and will he bring him to dust again? Indeed, why was Job brought out of the womb at all? Well, those they are in pain when they question why they were even born. It's a question common to us all. One that has arisen even from those with the most positive of temperaments and outlooks. "Are not my days few?" Job asks, "See's then, and let me alone that I may take comfort a little before I go once I shall not return." Even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death, a land of darkness as darkness itself and of the shadow of death without any order and where the light is as darkness. So far contests that Job must be wicked. And he wonders how he can understand God's wisdom. Indeed, we might wonder how any of us can understand the Almighty whose measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. We cannot measure God, and we're left with that feeling in abundance after immersing ourselves in Herman Melville's magnum opus. Ishmael cannot manhandle the Leviathan. The whale cannot be compressed. And all that we can hope is that in our vain efforts to comprehend the incomprehensible, to measure the immeasurable, the infinite and eternal, we find ourselves connected to that which is beyond ourselves. We hope to use Melville's words in Ishmael's ink that we are by a flood born back to that wondrous period. Air time itself can be said to have begun. Job quite rightly calls his friends miserable comforters. It's easy to be in their position, but if their souls were swapped, he would try to comfort them and strengthen them, strengthen them through words. The problem here, and this is an issue, interrelated to the issue of the Odyssey, is that words are often without knowledge. Words, words, words, Hamlet says, that which we can find words for adds nature is something already long dead in our hearts. Our reading of wisdom literature however is supposed to help us get closer to true wisdom. It's supposed to help us connect the knowledge of the intellect to a knowledge of our emotions and who we are. We are seeking unity, which is really a rather complex thing when we get down to it. Build that, the vain comforter. It gives his name to the retired Quaker wailing captain of the Piquad in Moby Dick, asks how long it will be until Job ends his words. Job's reply, how long will you vex his soul with words? Everything has been taken from him. Surely there is no justice in the world. The Hebrew word for justice, by the way, is Mishpat, which contains the meaning of law. We know that there is a heavenly court overlooking Job, but how is Job supposed to come to that conclusion? The conclusion he does come to is much more understandable. God has withheld justice, with held Mishpat from him. Why do ye persecute me as God? Job asks his friends, and are not satisfied with my flesh, O that my words were now written, O that they were printed in a book, that they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever. Again, we have likely all found ourselves in this position, seeking comfort, crying out for comfort, and our companions only heaping on further judgment. Ironically, his words are printed in a book, and we today treat them as low written with iron pen and lead in the rock forever, because the words of the eternal cry for justice, that is common to us all. In verse 28, we get this marvellous rhetorical question from Job. Perhaps not as sublime as the rhetorical questions Yahweh will shortly launch at his most pious subject, but marvellous because this question, if asked fervently enough, across the years, will lead us river-like out of the heart of darkness and into the light. But where shall wisdom be found? That's the question. Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? The sea says, it is not with me. One cannot pay for wisdom, and wisdom cannot be weighed with the value of gold or precious onyx or sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls. For the price of wisdom is above rubies. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it. Neither shall it be valued with pure gold. God, looketh to the ends of the earth and seeeth under the whole heaven to make the weight for the winds, and he waited the waters by measure. And unto man he said, behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding. Nature would tell us that only that which we find intensely painful is remembered, one impresses a memory upon the man animal through pain. Memory, meaning, morality, and pain are inextricably bound up. We never learn anything the easy way. Wisdom is found through fear and suffering. Understanding is found through hardship. Find a wise man or discover a woman of great understanding, and you have met with one who has suffered. The greater the suffering, the greater the pain, the greater the fear, the more we have cursed the very day of our birth, the more we have wondered whether there truly is justice in the world, the more wisdom we attain. We do not know we're paying the price when we're paying it, but we are. We may send out a heartbreaking lament in which we long for the days before when God and goodness once walked with us as a light through the darkness. And in those moments of darkest despair, we find ourselves on the cusp of understanding. The most powerful part of the book of Job comes when God finally breaks his silence. The speeches of Yahweh are all the more grand and sublime, for the fact that he has been a conspicuous absence in the universe. We, of course, know he is there. He's there watching with his heavenly court and has satan at his side. But Job and friends know not this. And exist in a tormented state, sans wisdom, knowledge and understanding. God breaks his silence with a speech that is all the more poignant for coming after the procession of lamentations from Job and the implorations of his vain comfortors. The speech seems pompous, but also understandable. Did you create the world? That's the question we're given. How dare we all speak without wisdom? How can we dain to justify the ways of God to men when we don't even know how little we know? God answers Job out of the whirlwind, tells him to gird up his loins like a man and demands to know where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth. The questions that issue fourth are unanswerable. Have the reign of Father gave us thou the goodly wings unto the peacock? Where is the way that light dwelleth? We then receive a resplendent description of the elements and the creatures, all of creation, that takes on a rather different tone from that of Genesis. Here we are impressed with the idea that man is not at the centre of the universe and that creation wasn't ordered around him. Moshe Greenberg tells us that here man is incidental, mainly an impotent foil to God. When we're enjoying good fortune, we pride ourselves on being good people, just individuals because we're far removed from trying times and we have this pernicious background assumption that we would refute on a conscious level but it's there, this assumption that the world was created for us and that's when we need to be most careful. When the sun is shining on us and we're enjoying the rewards of this world without a thought to the darkness, we are in danger of being humbled. No, the world is not ordered around us. No, just because bad things happen to us, even though we're good, doesn't mean we're being punished specifically and it certainly doesn't mean that God hates us or does not exist. One might protest that these are rather egocentric conclusions to arrive at and of course we all arrive at them when we find our lives destroyed. In verse 41 we get one of the most sublime, rhetorical questions in all of biblical wisdom literature. "Cance thou draw out Leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou let us down. Canst thou put a hook into his nose or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? Will they'll take him for a servant forever?" God says that whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine and of the Leviathan he make us a path to shine after him. One would think the deep to be horry. Upon earth there is not his like who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things he's like a king over all the children of pride. And this is a question you might want to contemplate when next you find yourself suffering like Job. Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook? The answer which is beyond words is where wisdom is found. And the book of Job ends with our central protagonist being restored to a state of good fortune. The Lord chastises his friends, his vain comforters who dispensed words without wisdom and sees that Job once again has a large family. He sees that he is prosperous again. And Job, we're told, lives to the ripe old age of 140. And it may seem bit a sweet. It may still seem unfair. But the high court of heaven has enacted its justice. And Job has passed a test he didn't even know he was taking. And we're all passing off failing tests. We don't even know we're taking. It's bit a sweet because the destruction, the tragedy, the utter torment has still taken place. But in a metaphorical sense there has been a returning to the womb, a journey to hell and back. And Job has made it through the darkness. And we live many lives in one. We have seasons in our lives. And when the worst is upon us, we feel as though it's never going to end. We feel as though it's unjust. And of course, by our earthly standards, it is unjust. And we question everything. Why we were born? Why we must endure this pain? Why have we done wrong? Whether there is a God? And if there is, does he care? And where are we supposed to go from here? The seasons change. But the truly just, the truly righteous, hold fast through the pain and the suffering, because that's where wisdom will be found.