Mitchell - The Book of Job

One of the milder paradoxes that shape this greatest Jewish work of art is that its hero is a Gentile. Its author may have been as well. We know nothing about him, nothing about his world; he is even more anonymous than Homer. With Homer, at least, we can picture a society of competing principalities, each with its warriors and court and ceremonial feasts where the bard recites his ancient songs to the accompaniment of the lyre, like blind Demodocus in the Odyssey. But there is not the slightest bit of evidence about the author of Job: not when or where he wrote, or for what kind of audience. When we try to imagine him, we are left with a blank, or with one of those patriarchal figures dressed in bright monochrome robes who suddenly appear, devout and straight-nosed, between the pages of illustrated Bibles.

Yet however foreign the poet originally was, his theme is the great Jewish one, the theme of the victim. Someone must have slandered J., because one morning he was arrested, even though he had done nothing wrong. That is what makes Job the central parable of our post-Holocaust age, and gives such urgency to its deep spiritual power.

TAO TE CHING

To introduce his poem, the author retells a legend that was already ancient centuries before he was born. It concerns a righteous man who for no reason has been deprived of all the rewards of his righteousness; in the midst of great suffering he remains steadfast and perfectly pious, still blessing the Lord as before. You have heard of the patience of Job, the Epistle of James says, and it is this legendary, patient Jobnot the desperate and ferociously impatient Job of the poem who, ironically enough, became proverbial in Western culture.

We can respect the legend on its own naive terms, and can appreciate the skill with which the author retells it: the chilling conversations in heaven; the climax where Job submits, as if he were a calmer, more insightful Adam who has just eaten the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and, eyes opened, sees that he is naked. But if we read the prologue more seriously, less objectively, we may be slightly repulsed by its heros piety. There is something so servile about him that we may find our-selves siding with his impatient wife, wanting to shout, Come on, Job; stand up like a man; curse this god, and die! The character called the Lord can do anything to himhave his daughters raped and mutilated, send his sons to Auschwitz and he will turn the other cheek. This is not a matter of spiritual acquiescence, but of mere capitulation to an unjust, superior force.

When we look at the world of the legendary Job with a probing, disinterestedly satanic eye, we notice that it is suffused with anxiety. Job is afraid of God, as well he might be. He avoids evil because he realizes the penalties. He is a perfect moral businessman: wealth, he knows, comes as a reward for playing by the rules, and goodness is like money in the bank. But, as he suspects, this world is thoroughly unstable. At any moment the currency can change, and the Lord, by handing Job over to the power of evil, can declare him bankrupt. No wonder his mind is so uneasy. He worries about making the slightest mistake; when he has his children come for their annual purification, it is not even because they may have committed any sins, but may have had blasphemous thoughts. The superego is riding high. And in fact, at the climax of his first speech in the poem, Job confesses that his worst fears have happened; / [his] nightmares have come to life. This is not a casual statement, added as a poetic flourish. Anxieties have a habit of projecting them-selves from psychological into physical reality. Jobs pre-monition turned out to be accurate; somewhere he knew that he was precariously balanced on his goodness, like a triangle on its apex, just waiting to be toppled over. There is even a perverse sense of relief, as if that heavy, responsible patriarch-world had been groaning toward deliverance. For any transformation to occur, Job has to be willing to let his hidden anxieties become manifest. He must enter the whirlwind of his own psychic chaos before he can hear the Voice.

As Maimonides was the first to point out, Job is a good man, not a wise one. The ascription of perfect integrity, which both the narrator and the Lord make, seems valid only in a limited sense. The Hebrew says tam v-yashar, which literally means whole (blameless) and upright. Well, yes: Job has never committed even the most venial sin, in action or in thought. (For that very reason, his later agony and bewilderment are more terrible than Josef K.s in The Trial.) In a broader sense, though, Job is not whole. He is as far from spiritual maturity as he is from rebellion. Rebelliousness the passionate refusal to submit is, in fact, one of the qualities we admire in the Job of the poem:

If we compare the legendary figure with the later Job, especially in the great summation that concludes the central dialogue, we can recognize that even his virtue lacks a certain generosity and wholeheartedness. That is why the bet doesnt prove much. Job is too terrorized, from within his squalor, to do anything but bless the Lord: for all he knows, there might be an even more horrible con-sequence in store. The real test will come later, in the poem, when he feels free to speak with all of himself, to say anything.

There is a further irony about tam v-yashar. When Job is handed over to the good graces of the Accuser, he is turned into the opposite of what the words mean in their most physical sense. He becomes not-whole: broken in body and heart. He becomes not-upright: pulled down into the dust by the gravity of his anguish.

The author moves us to heaven after the prologues first scene, and we may be tempted to admire his boldness. But heaven, it turns out, is only the court of some ancient King of Kings, complete with annual meetings of the royal council and a Satan (or Accusing Angel). As below, so above. Jung, in his Answer to Job, makes the point that, psychologically, the Accuser is the embodiment of the Lords doubt. In a more naive version of the legend, the god in his divine myopia would himself doubt the disinterestedness of his obedient human and would decide to administer the test on his own. Here, though the Accuser ostensibly plays the role of the villain, it is the Lord who provokes him. Did you notice my servant Job? How can the Accuser not take up the challenge? After all, thats his job.

As Jung also points out, this god is morally much inferior to the prologues hero. We would have to be in-sensitive or prejudiced not to be nauseated by the very awareness of the Lords second statement to the Accuser: He is holding on to his wholeness, even after you made me torment him for no reason, and by the calm cruelty of All right: he is in your power. Just dont kill him.

Nevertheless, if we want to be serious about the poem, we mustnt take the legend too seriously. There is a profound shift when the verse dialogue begins; the change in language is a change in reality. Compared to Jobs laments (not to mention the Voice from the Whirl-wind), the world of the prologue is two-dimensional, and its divinities are very small potatoes. It is like a puppet show. The author first brings out the patient Job, his untrusting god, and the chief spy/prosecutor, and has the figurines enact the ancient story in the puppet theater of his prose. Then, behind them, the larger curtain rises, and flesh-and-blood actors begin to voice their passions on a life-sized stage. Finally, the vast, unnamable God appears. How could the author have returned to the reality of the prologue for an answer to the hero of the poem? That would have meant the Lord descending from the sky to say, Well, you see, Job, it all happened because I made this bet