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The Two Voices of Job
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12050 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
5,338 Words |
| Author
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Lonnie D. Kliever
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Stephen Mitchell's The Book of Job is a welcome contribution to contemporary theological discussion. Though offered as a new English translation and poetic rendering of the Hebrew verse of Job, this thoughtful reading is a theological work through and through. Like any good theological interpretation of biblical materials, Mitchell treats the ancient text as a palimpsest, erasing here and rearranging there while fashioning a contemporary restatement of the biblical author's religious questions and answers. To be sure, Mitchell remains true to the literary structure and linguistic philology of the biblical text. But he offers a breathtaking version of Job that pulses with modern moral outrage and spiritual insight. Moreover, lest we misread his translation, Mitchell provides an introduction (see excerpt, p. 346) that adumbrates the theological subtext for his rendition of the biblical text.
Focusing the problem of human suffering in "a post-Holocaust age," Mitchell gives us a Job who undergoes Zen-like spiritual transformation. Following the best of recent biblical scholarship, Mitchell draws both a literary and a theological distinction between Job's lengthy poetic body and its brief prose prologue and epilogue. The Job of the prologue is an upright but servile believer whose faith is put to the test by a capricious and petulant Deity. But the Job of the poem is an anguished and angry questioner of his undeserved suffering. Rejecting the explanations and exhortations of his orthodox "comforters," Job turns his full outrage against God, who finally answers Job's passionate harangue by revealing a universe completely beyond good and evil. Comforted rather than crushed by this overwhelming vision of beauty and dread, Job surrenders himself in near silence to the eternal dance of life and death.
While greatly admiring the poetic beauty and spiritual power of Mitchell's The Book of Job, I find it a less challenging and less comforting theology than life in this post-Holocaust world requires. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding roughshod over the earth, and their destruction is too terrible to accept, as Mitchell suggests, as "the blissful play of the Supreme Lord." Purchasing the comfort of a serene world through a metaphysical sublimation that joins creativity and destructiveness on the same continuum is too high a price to pay. Escaping the challenge of a better world through a metaphysical evasion that accords good and evil equal standing in the universe - as Mitchell invites us to do - is too easy a life to buy. Being told by Mitchell that "the world of starving children and nuclear menace" is very good is no more acceptable than being told by John Calvin that God sends evil and death to punish sin and teach righteousness. Neither the God who sends suffering for human betterment nor the God who embraces suffering in divine contentment stands up to the Tyranny, War, Famine and Pestilence that stalk our modern world. Such religions of redemptive suffering do not take adequate account of both the tragedy and the grandeur of human existence.
I read and render the Book of Job in a very different way than does Mitchell. Though my theological palimpsest lacks his textual fidelity and lexical genius, I too strive to hear what Job has to say to a post-Holocaust world. That hearing is complicated by the fact that there are two voices of Job. The prosaic Job is a man who lives in a world controlled by God, though he learns through bitter experience that the redemptive ways of this God are not his ways and are beyond finding out. By contrast, the poetic Job is a man who discovers a
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